Pehr Granqvist

I discuss our “Attachment goes to court” consensus statement (Forslund et al., 2022) on the use of attachment theory and research in child protection and custody contexts. Attachment theory is often drawn upon in such contexts, but misunderstandings are widespread and can result in serious misapplications that run counter to a child’s best interests. 

Robert A. Simon, Ph.d

Advocates of Parental Alienation strongly believe that alienation presents a very real risk to children, they feel that they’ve learned how to identify it and how to intervene.  Yet, PA advocates are frustrated and even puzzled by why their viewpoint, methods and science has not been broadly adopted by the family law community. 

Alan D. Blotcky, PhD

This presentation will focus on many issues for experts who testify in parental alienation cases in court. I will address how to conceptualize your role as an expert, how to use documentation and a timeline to put together a case, how to interact and navigate a case with attorneys, how to confront false claims about parental alienation by opposing attorneys, how to handle opinions from therapists and children’s attorneys, how to anticipate and minimize roadblocks as an expert, and how to testify at trial.

Geir Kjell Andersland

Child rights lawyer Geir Kjell Andersland has particular expertise in children's rights, child protection cases and parental disputes, and undertakes assignments as a speaker alongside his writing activities. Andersland was previously state secretary in the Ministry of Social Affairs. He has also for periods worked as a lawyer.

William Bernet

Education and advocacy regarding parental alienation takes many forms: research that supports parental alienation theory; instruction of mental health and legal professionals; interventions for each level of alienation; support networks for alienated children, parents, and grandparents; education of policymakers; and refuting widespread misinformation.

Ashish S Joshi

Family Courts in the United States are intimately familiar with parental alienation. While the debate continues to rage over the "theory" of parental alienation, there is an overwhelming consensus over the "phenomenon" of alienation. American family judges have accepted, acknowledged, and endorsed the phenomenon of parental alienation.

Bryan Sauders

Over ten years, Bryan Sauders flew back and forth between Los Angeles and Sweden more than fifty times. On every visit, social authority interviews, court dates, and harassment pulled him further from his children. After being completely alienated from his children, a Swedish social secretary told him they feared him and didn't love him anymore. During three meetings, the same social secretary told him to stop trying, go away, and wait for his children to call him one day years in the future. Bryan audibly recorded all three meetings. He collected all of the evidence, but for what?

Hanne Ramsdal

Hanne Ramsdal´s work "FA(R)EN" ("DA(MNE)D") is based on interviews with men who has not been allowed to spend as much time as they wish with their children after break-ups. She has a personal history, as she did almost spend no time with her dad after her parents divorced. As a grown-up and mother of two children, she is left with questions concerning parenthood and child-sharing, questions that she wants to discuss in a dialogue with Lena Hellblom Sjögren at the Friday morning session.

Teresa Silva and Stan Korosi.

In this dialogue, we will discuss aspects of institutional response to PA and how it minimises its adverse impact on children and targeted parents. In particular, we will debate the consequences of not considering PA a psycho-social emergency for children and remediation as a child-protective action.

Paulo Chavarria

Paradox in the land of equality.

After seeing how his own father in Costa Rica lost contact with his two sons from a previous marriage, father and director Paulo Chavarria sets out to try to find some answers. Now living in Norway -the land of equality- and after his own divorce, Paulo asks: Why do children still lose most contact with their fathers? Is it the best for children? And is it potentially a violation of human rights?

Edward Kruk

The concept of the “best interests of the child from the perspective of the child,” based on an enumeration of children’s essential needs and corresponding parental responsibilities to those needs, and the responsibilities of social institutions to support parents in that regard, provides a more child- and responsibility-focused approach to policy and practice in the arena of parental alienation.

Camilla Bernt

Determining custody and contact is primarily a matter of private law, and parents have full autonomy. There is a free mediation service available, but there is no administrative body with power to make decisions on custody and contact when parents are not able to agree, thus leaving the parents with a lawsuit as the only option in such cases.