PETITION SPEECH | Children as the Pathway of Post-Separation Coercive Control
Link to VIDEO
One of the most serious gaps in Australia’s response to post-separation family violence is the failure to recognise when children are drawn into the abuse itself.
In many post-separation matters, control continues through the child and the systems around them: litigation, parenting arrangements, child support, financial and legal pressure, breaches of orders, obstruction of contact, and misuse of legal or protective processes. The child can be drawn into adult abuse as a messenger, informant, ally, or weapon against a safe parent or family member.
Protection orders are essential where there is real risk. However, when protective systems are misused, they can also obstruct safe relationships, reinforce fabricated narratives, and entrench a child’s fear of a safe parent or family member.
Child coercive control describes the pressure placed on the child. It may involve fear, reward, punishment, emotional burdening, interrogation, selective information, distorted narratives, or loyalty demands that shape the child’s beliefs, emotions, and behaviour toward another parent, caregiver, sibling, grandparent, or family member.
Alienating behaviours describe the broader pattern of conduct used to undermine, obstruct, damage, or sever a child’s relationship with a safe, emotionally available, and capable parent or family member. These behaviours may involve the child directly, but they may also operate through the arrangements, narratives, decisions, and systems around the child. In these cases, the child is subjected to coercive influence, while the targeted parent or family relationship is progressively weakened, devalued, or cut off.
Over time, the child may learn the emotional rules of the environment. Rejecting one parent or family member may bring approval, while showing affection, curiosity, or warmth toward that person may create tension, guilt, withdrawal, anger, or disapproval. The rejection may then appear self-directed, even when it has developed within a coercive emotional environment.
Children are vulnerable to this because they trust their parents and caregivers. They rely on adults to help them understand their family, their relationships, and their own history. Most children, and many adolescents, are not equipped to critically examine repeated denigration, selective information, cognitive distortions, emotional pressure, loyalty demands, or the gradual rewriting of family history.
At its core, this is psychological harm occurring during critical stages of development. Children are still forming their identity, attachment patterns, emotional regulation, memory, and understanding of trust and safety. When an adult places a child under loyalty pressure, distorts their family narrative, or makes affection feel unsafe, the child is not simply choosing a side. They are adapting psychologically to the emotional conditions created around them. Over time, this can shape their mental health, relationships, identity, and ability to make sense of their own family history.
By the time these matters reach professionals or a court, the child may present with a firm or absolute refusal to see the parent or family member. The child’s voice must be heard, but refusal is not, by itself, evidence that the position was independently formed. A child may genuinely feel fear, anger, or rejection while still having been shaped by repeated denigration, loyalty pressure, misinformation, adult distress, or consequences for showing affection. The task is to examine how the child came to that position, what has reinforced it, and whether the rejection reflects their own experience of harm or the effects of coercive influence over time.
In these cases, a child may experience loyalty conflict, confusion, emotional burdening, fear, guilt, shame, and attachment disruption. They may feel that affection for one parent is a betrayal of the other. They may learn to monitor adult emotions, reject safe contact, suppress positive memories, and align themselves with one adult in order to preserve emotional security.
Rather than reflecting genuine autonomy, this response can emerge as an adaptation to an unsafe emotional environment during critical stages of psychological, social, and emotional development.
The harm can extend far beyond the loss of time with a parent. Children can lose siblings, grandparents, cousins, friends, culture, language, family stories, routines, traditions, identity, and belonging. They may grow up with a distorted or incomplete account of their own life.
Later, when that account begins to unravel, many are left with grief, confusion, anger, shame, and the painful realisation that important relationships were damaged or lost while they were too young to understand what was happening.
The rejected parent, caregiver, or family member also carries profound harm. Many are told to stay calm, keep records, follow orders, avoid reacting, keep reaching out, and wait for the child to come around. Many do exactly that while the relationship continues to deteriorate.
They may also face financial depletion, reputational damage, repeated legal proceedings, and the psychological strain of being treated as suspect while trying to preserve a relationship with their child.
Too often, professionals and decision-makers then treat the child’s rejection as evidence that the rejected parent or family member must have caused it. That is a serious failure of assessment.
A child’s rejection, resistance, or refusal of contact with a parent with whom they previously had a positive relationship should be carefully examined, not accepted at face value. Proper assessment considers the child’s direct experience, the information they have received, the narratives repeatedly presented to them, whether contact is actively supported, whether affection is permitted, and whether the child experiences guilt, anxiety, or disapproval for showing warmth toward the rejected parent or family member.
Systems need far better capacity to distinguish genuine protective concerns from fabricated, exaggerated, misleading, or strategically timed claims. When real abuse is missed, children are left unsafe. When the coercive misuse of protective claims is missed, children are also left unsafe.
Australian workplace law already recognises that repeated unreasonable behaviour, exclusion, pressure, intimidation, and conduct that creates a risk to psychological health require a serious response. It is unconscionable that comparable patterns can still be minimised when they occur inside a family and are directed through a child to cut off a safe parent, sibling, grandparent, or caregiver.
These patterns of abusive behaviour are not confined to mothers or fathers, or to one family structure. They can affect mothers, fathers, same-sex parents, siblings, grandparents, kinship carers, stepfamilies, and extended family systems.
The response must include legislative reform, nationwide psychoeducation, early identification, specialist training, and differential assessment. The law must recognise child coercive control and alienating behaviours as forms of post-separation family violence and, in serious cases, child psychological abuse. Families, professionals, and the wider community need to understand how these behaviours present, how they affect children, and why early intervention matters. Assessments must examine patterns of behaviour over time, rather than relying on limited time with each family member or accepting a child’s stated rejection without properly examining how that rejection developed.
There must also be timely intervention and real consequences when adults repeatedly obstruct safe relationships, manipulate children, misuse systems, or breach orders in ways that cause psychological or emotional harm to the child and the targeted parent or family member.
Too often, evidence-informed pathways are not properly explored. When a child presents as hostile, fearful, or dysregulated, that presentation may be treated as a reason to leave current arrangements in place, rather than as a warning sign requiring careful assessment, protective decision-making, and appropriate therapeutic intervention. The result is that children can remain exposed to the very environment that is shaping their fear, hostility, or rejection.
Family courts and the professionals who advise them make decisions about where children live, who they lose, and who they are left with. Those decisions must be subject to serious outcome scrutiny, especially where a child remains exposed to the conditions that may be causing their fear, hostility, or rejection. In those cases, protection may require evidence-informed intervention, restrictions on harmful conduct or unsafe contact for as long as the risk remains, meaningful penalties for breaches and obstruction, and, where necessary, reconsideration of care arrangements.
Children need protection from unsafe people. They also need protection from being coerced into rejecting… safe ones.
When a child is pressured, manipulated, or emotionally burdened into rejecting a safe parent or family member, it should not be dismissed as ordinary post-separation conflict. It should be recognised as psychological harm to the child, and in serious cases, as child psychological abuse. No child should be left to carry into adulthood the consequences of adult coercion, emotional manipulation, fabricated claims, psychological abuse, or the misuse of protective systems.
Australia carries the devastating history of the forced removal of First Nations children from their families, kin, Country, culture, language, identity, and belonging. This was not only a separation of children from parents; it fractured family lines, disrupted culture and community, damaged trust, severed identity, and caused grief and trauma that has echoed across generations.
A country with this devastating history should be especially alert to the lifelong harm caused when children are cut off from safe family relationships. The Eeny Meeny Miney Mo Foundation petition asks Parliament to recognise child coercive control and alienating behaviours as serious forms of post-separation family violence and child psychological abuse, and to ensure early identification, proper assessment, timely intervention, and protection before the harm becomes entrenched.