Mother-blame by design: patriarchy, epistemic practices, and parental alienation in family courts

Journal article

This article develops and applies a four-part patriarchal framework to explain how family courts translate normative ideals into outcomes in domestic-abuse cases. It links: (1) the juridical construction of intensive, facilitative motherhood alongside a thin yet symbolically central fatherhood; (2) an institutional field oriented to settlement and the preservation of contact; (3) epistemic practices that generate testimonial deficits and hermeneutic gaps; and (4) parental alienation (PA) as an epistemic technology that reinterprets children’s fear and mothers’ protective conduct as manipulation. Conceptually, the article reconceives PA as a circulating repertoire of inferences and tools that stabilise mother-blame in family-court decision-making, even where the label is avoided or formally condemned.

Empirically, the framework is applied to multi-site qualitative data from England & Wales, France, Italy, Spain, and Bosnia & Herzegovina, drawing on interviews and focus groups with survivors, judges, lawyers, and court-appointed experts, and situated against each jurisdiction’s legal and policy context. Common patterns emerge: PA persists ‘in all but name’; abuse is historicised or reframed as conflict; contact-first managerialism dominates risk assessment; expert evidence is highly influential despite uneven regulation; and children’s participation is delayed, discounted, or instrumentalised. These dynamics converge to produce secondary victimisation and institutional betrayal, with predictable consequences for the safety of women and children.

By connecting maternal ideology, institutional logics, epistemic injustice, and PA within a single explanatory framework, the article demonstrates how patriarchal norms shape incentives, credibility judgments, and outcomes in family courts, and why reforms that target labels without addressing underlying logics have limited effect.

Authors: Choudhry, S

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: UCL Press
• Journal: Current Legal Problems
• Acceptance date: 2026-03-09
• EISSN: 0070-1998
• ISSN: 2044-8422
• Language: English
• Keywords: family courts; domestic abuse; parental alienation; coercive control; epistemic injustice