A child should never be made to carry the lifelong consequences of an adult’s coercive control, fabricated claims, emotional manipulation, or misuse of protective systems. When these behaviours turn a child against a safe parent or family member, the harm reaches far beyond lost time. It can sever family bonds, distort the child’s sense of safety, damage trust, fracture identity, and leave them grieving relationships, memories, belonging, and a family history that was taken from them before they were old enough to question it.

We are calling for Australian law to recognise and respond to child coercive control and alienating behaviours as serious forms of psychological abuse and family violence, particularly where children are manipulated into rejecting safe relationships or where legal and protective systems are misused to intensify that harm.

These behaviours occur when a parent, caregiver, or influential adult repeatedly interferes with a child’s relationship with another safe parent or family member, or acts in ways that damage or destroy that relationship over time. The pattern may include denigration, fear-based narratives, emotional pressure, adultification, obstruction of time, blocked communication, controlled information, rewarded rejection, punished affection, manufactured fear, loyalty binds, fabricated, exaggerated, misleading, or strategically timed claims of harm, or the misuse of police, child protection, schools, health services, lawyers, courts, protection orders, restraining orders, intervention orders, domestic and family violence orders, or family law processes to isolate a child from a safe relationship.

This petition does not seek to minimise genuine abuse, neglect, family violence, sexual violence, stalking, coercive control, or unsafe parenting. Children must be protected from real harm, and allegations must be assessed with rigour, fairness, and urgency. Protection is undermined when genuine abuse is missed, and when fabricated, exaggerated, or strategically weaponised claims are allowed to sever a child’s relationship with a safe parent or family member.

Child coercive control and alienating behaviours go beyond ordinary post-separation conflict because they involve a pattern of coercive influence that can place a child under emotional and psychological pressure to align with one adult against another. A child may be encouraged to fear, distrust, reject, shame, monitor, report on, or emotionally punish the other parent or family member. Over time, the child may come to believe the rejection is entirely their own choice, when their attachment system has been shaped by fear, guilt, dependency, approval-seeking, adult emotional pressure, and survival-based rejection.

As the pattern continues, some children are drawn into coerced alignment with one adult while being pressured to deactivate attachment to another. They may be praised for rejection, punished for affection, rewarded for loyalty, interrogated after contact, exposed to adult allegations, used as messengers, made responsible for an adult’s distress, or placed in the impossible position of proving love to one parent by rejecting the other. A child should not have to manage adult emotions, carry adult allegations, perform loyalty, reject half of their family, or surrender a safe relationship to preserve peace with the parent or adult who holds power over their daily life.

Because the harm reaches into identity, attachment, belonging, and development, children can lose far more than time with one parent. They can lose siblings, grandparents, extended family, culture, history, financial security, inheritance, community connection, and the ordinary developmental protection that comes from being safely loved by more than one side of their family. Many carry grief, shame, confusion, anxiety, helplessness, anger, mistrust, and identity disruption into adolescence and adulthood. Some only understand years later that a relationship was taken from them before they had the maturity, information, language, or emotional freedom to question what they were being told.

Targeted parents and family members may also be isolated from the children they love, falsely characterised as unsafe, excluded from schools and health information, driven into prolonged litigation, financially depleted, and forced to defend themselves against claims that can permanently damage their reputation, employment, mental health, and family life. Grandparents, siblings, stepparents, kinship carers, and extended family members can also be cut off, sometimes for years and sometimes permanently.

When fabricated claims and the misuse of restraining, protection, intervention, and family law processes become part of the coercive pattern, children can be frightened, safe relationships can be severed, and services designed for protection can be drawn into the abuse. These tactics can contaminate a child’s memories and perceptions, isolate them from safe family members, delay meaningful intervention, exhaust the falsely accused parent, and divert protective systems away from children and adults who are in genuine danger. The weaponisation of systems also undermines public trust, weakens procedural fairness, and makes it harder for genuine victim-survivors to be heard, assessed, and protected.

The pattern is not confined to one gender, sexuality, culture, or family structure. Mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, kinship carers, stepfamilies, same-sex parents, blended families, culturally diverse families, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, migrant families, and families of every structure can be affected. The focus must remain on the pattern of behaviour and its impact on the child, including coercion, control, manipulation, obstruction, fear-based influence, and the destruction of safe family relationships.

Current responses are often slow, fragmented, inconsistent, or poorly informed, leaving children and safe family members without effective protection until the damage is already entrenched. By the time the pattern is recognised, the child’s relationship with a safe parent or family member may already be severely damaged. Childhood cannot be paused while systems avoid difficult evidence, treat every case as ordinary conflict, or fail to distinguish genuine safety concerns from coercive relational harm.

We call on Australian governments to legislate against child coercive control and alienating behaviours by:

• recognising these behaviours as serious forms of psychological abuse, family violence, coercive control, and misuse of legal and protective systems when they harm, or risk harming, a child’s relationship with a safe parent, caregiver, sibling, grandparent, or family member
• requiring early identification, proper assessment, and timely intervention where a child is being pressured, coached, frightened, rewarded, punished, adultified, isolated, or manipulated into rejecting a safe relationship
• treating fabricated, exaggerated, misleading, or strategically weaponised claims as serious conduct when they are knowingly made, encouraged, or used to obstruct a child’s relationship with a safe family member
• strengthening consequences for repeated obstruction of court orders, parenting arrangements, communication, school or medical information, therapeutic support, professional intervention, or safe reunification
• improving training across courts, child protection, police, schools, lawyers, family report writers, contact services, domestic and family violence services, and mental health professionals
• ensuring children receive developmentally appropriate support that protects them from adult conflict, loyalty binds, fear-based narratives, false allegations, adult emotional dependence, and decisions they are not developmentally equipped to carry
• protecting genuine victim-survivors while also recognising that the misuse of protective systems can become part of the coercive pattern used to isolate a child from safe family relationships.

Although these behaviours are often minimised as private family conflict, they are patterns of harm that can alter a child’s development, identity, attachment relationships, mental health, family belonging, and future parenting trajectory. When legal and protective systems are misused to intensify that harm, the law must be capable of protecting both genuine victims and those harmed by fabricated claims, procedural abuse, and relational destruction.

Every child deserves protection from coercion and the freedom to love and be loved by safe family members. Every safe parent, caregiver, sibling, grandparent, and family member deserves protection from conduct designed to sever, obstruct, or destroy that relationship.

Please sign this petition to call for legislative reform that recognises, prevents, and responds to child coercive control, alienating behaviours, fabricated claims, misuse of restraining and protection systems, and procedural abuse in Australia.