Parental alienation expert sanctioned by UK body now advising Irish family courts
She lacked ‘the moral qualities of sincerity, integrity, competence and wisdom to which ALL practitioners are strongly urged to aspire,’ yet...
AN EXPERT who worked in a recent family law case in the High Court was sanctioned in the UK after the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) found the service she provided ‘fell below the standard that would reasonably be expected of a practitioner exercising reasonable care and skill’.
Karen Woodall, a self-proclaimed ‘parental alienation’ expert, was sanctioned in 2015. She posted on her blog in 2016 that the complaint ‘was made by a client in an out-ofcourt case’ and was ‘only partly upheld’.
Proponents believe that parental alienation – a highly contested concept – is where a child becomes estranged from one parent as a result of manipulation by the other parent.
The Irish Mail on Sunday has spoken with several parents who say that they have wrongly lost custody or have been forced to share custody with an abusive parent because the concept of parental alienation has been used in their family law court cases.
Ms Woodall confirmed to the MoS this week that she has since worked in the Irish courts, including the High Court.
In July 2015, a BACP panel was unanimous in its decision that its findings in an inquiry amounted to ‘professional malpractice on the grounds of recklessness and the provision of inadequate professional services in that the service for which Ms Woodall provided fell below the standard that would reasonably be expected of a practitioner exercising reasonable care and skill’.
The panel also found that ‘Ms Woodall lacked the personal moral qualities of sincerity, integrity, competence and wisdom to which all practitioners are strongly urged to aspire’.
Parts of the partially upheld complaint related to Ms Woodall’s provision of a written assessment of a family, including the opinion that the child ‘is suffering from…’ and ‘I make this diagnosis…’ when she had not in fact met the child at that time.
Other findings relate to a lack of clarity in respect of fees and the nature of services offered.
When it was put to her that the UK’s largest professional body – representing 40,000 counsellors and therapists – had previously sanctioned her, she replied: ‘Yes, the sanction wasn’t fitness to practise. I’m a psychotherapist; psychotherapy is not a regulated profession’.
‘The [Irish] High Court judge in the case that I worked in is well aware of all these issues which were raised by every disgruntled [inaudible] I have worked with.’
Asked if the judge had any issue with her having been sanctioned ,she said, ‘Absolutely not and neither do the High Court judges here [UK]’.
‘BACP is one of 74 regulating bodies for counselling and psychotherapy. My work is regulated by the High Court and the judge in each case has oversight of the work that is done.’
Asked about her work on parental alienation and if she had any reply to the UN, which criticised it as an ‘unfounded and unscientific concept’ last year, Ms Woodall said she had ‘nothing to say’. She added: ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you or any other journalist.’
In a blog post on her website in 2015, Ms Woodall said the publication of the complaint against her by the BACP ‘has been seized upon, not by the opponents of work with parental alienation, but by people in the UK who purport to work for families’.
She told how she was ‘found to have contravened the voluntary code of ethics laid down by BACP and thus lacked personal moral values of sincerity and honesty’ and she added that this news was ‘tweeted with what appeared to me to be salacious-like glee’.
‘I was sanctioned on the basis that my contract with the complainant was implicit and that I carried out an assessment of a family dynamic without seeing the child,’ she wrote.
‘In my court work with families, I carry out such assessments regularly, the issue of implacable hostility residing in the dynamics around the child and not in the child per se is accepted by the family court.
‘It is not accepted by the BACP. Thus the dissonance between the work that I do in the court process and the view of that by BACP, renders any therapist undergoing the same work vulnerable.’
In another blog post in May 2016, Ms Woodall wrote how she received news that the BACP sanction had been ‘lifted and the case closed’. ‘This comes after I complied with the requirements of BACP although I chose not to rejoin the voluntary governing body after the length of time taken to hear the complaint against me (31 months),’ she wrote.
She added that although she is no longer a member of the BACP she had ‘learned’ from her experience. ‘Some of it positive, such as the training day I attended in contracting with difficult people, and some of it negative such as the actions of those clearly determined to use the sanction to ill-effect.’
On her website, Ms Woodall says she is ‘known around the world’ for her work with children who ‘suffer’ from parental alienation. She adds: ‘Causing a child to suffer alienation is a serious form of child abuse…’
However in June 2023, a UN human rights expert criticised what she described as the ‘unfounded and unscientific concept of parental alienation’, which she said is ‘highly gendered’.
Reem Alsalem, UN special rapporteur on violence against women, said family court systems worldwide are being affected by ‘deeply embedded gender bias’ which is leaving women and children vulnerable to violence and ‘immense suffering’.
She wrote in a report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva: ‘The tendency of family courts to dismiss the history of domestic violence and abuse in custody cases, especially where mothers and/or children have brought forward credible allegations of domestic abuse, including coercive control, physical or sexual abuse, is unacceptable.’
Ms Alsalem’s report criticised the ‘unfounded and unscientific concept of parental alienation’, stating, ‘While it is invoked against fathers and mothers, it is predominantly used against mothers’.
‘High Court judge is well aware of all these issues’