Contesting Parent-Child Contact Problems: Parental Alienation, Gendered Domestic Abuse, and the Discourse Politics of Post-Separation Harm

Parent-child contact problems (PCCP) are a recurrent and contested presentation in family law, child protection, and domestic-abuse (DA) contexts. This article argues that PCCP is increasingly organised through a binary conflict between parental alienation (PA) and gendered DA, and that this binary is not simply discovered in the field but produced, stabilised, and politically mobilised through discourse. Gendered DA paradigms foreground structural patriarchy, male violence, survivor testimony, safety-first reasoning, and institutional minimisation. PA paradigms foreground relational power, child psychological abuse, induced rejection, loyalty conflict, and the possibility that children’s expressed wishes may be shaped by coercive family dynamics. These frameworks are not inherently incompatible. They become functionally incompatible when translated into exclusive explanatory regimes that require one framework to disqualify the other. Drawing on conceptual critical discourse analysis, the article identifies six mechanisms through which PA is made more contestable than DA: category collapse, genealogical tainting, moral asymmetry, asymmetric scepticism, case-horror evocation, and forensic translation. It concludes that PCCP requires evidentiary governance capable of testing competing explanations without allowing either DA or PA to monopolise post-separation harm.