Parental Alienation: A New Form of Gender-Based Violence Against Women and Children in Latin America and the Caribbean is a groundbreaking collective work that challenges one of the most insidious and under examined legal strategies used in family courts today.
Since the 1980s, the concept of parental alienation — and in particular its misuse as a false “syndrome” (PAS) — has been deployed in custody disputes to discredit women’s testimonies, delegitimize reports of domestic and sexual violence, and punish mothers who seek to protect their children from abusive fathers.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, this strategy has been instrumentalised to strip women of custody, perpetuate gender stereotypes, and silence survivors under the guise of “family unity.”
This publication marks a turning point in the regional debate as it frames parental alienation allegations accepted by family courts as gender-based violence. It is the result of a collaboration between CLADEM, Equality Now, the Global Campaign for Equality in Family Law, and the Faculty of Law at the University of São Paulo – Ribeirão Preto.
Bringing together feminist scholars, legal experts, human rights advocates, and mothers directly affected by false allegations of parental alienation, the book exposes how gender-blind legal frameworks — including the application of the 1980 Hague Convention — continue to reproduce institutional violence against women and children.
The analysis goes beyond legal critique: it documents a coordinated regional pattern in which compulsory shared custody laws and parental alienation statutes are promoted by anti-rights movements as a backlash against decades of feminist progress. It shows how these legal tools are weaponised to suppress legitimate allegations of abuse and reassert patriarchal control over family law.
A call to action
Through interdisciplinary and intersectional perspectives, the chapters trace the political, judicial, and social dimensions of this phenomenon across Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, revealing how similar legislative trends and courtroom dynamics emerge throughout the region.
At its core, this book is a call to action. It amplifies the voices of women and mothers who have resisted these injustices and places their experiences at the centre of the struggle for justice. By reframing parental alienation as a form of gender-based and institutional violence, the volume not only contributes to academic and legal debates but also offers critical tools for advocacy, litigation, and policy change.
Above all, it reminds us that the fight for women’s and children’s rights is inseparable from the fight for truth, dignity, and equality in the heart of family law.
Read more here.
