Alienated Parent Suicide may be Death by Family Violence (Amended)

Are Alienating Parents Implicated in Family Violence by Suicide?

* Amended article: Suicide is a major public health issue. It has not been considered a crime for some time. Targeted-alienated parents, or other people dying by suicide associated with alienation, family violence or mental health distress are not involved in a crime or wrong behaviour. Alienating parents and family violence perpetrators who induce or coerce suicide or engage in murder-suicide with themselves, their former panthers and their children may be involved in criminal acts.

The Coroner should reopen cases of suicide-attributed deaths of alienated parents to reclassify them as the result of family violence by alienation. The precedent for this reclassification is the call from the Police here in Victoria, Australia, reported in The Age newspaper on 27 April 2024, to consider Family Violence as the cause of the deaths of women by suicide (Tuohy & Sakkal, 2024).

Parental alienating behaviours are a special form of Family and Domestic Violence using coercion and control over a child to reject their parent without due cause (Harman, Kruk, & Hines, 2018). Alienating parents, those parents engaging in psychosocially harmful and abusive parental alienating behaviours may be responsible for suicide in targeted-alienated parents. We have known for some time how dangerous, even fatal, parental alienating behaviour is to both targeted-alienated parents and their children. We also know who is responsible for those behaviours and the harm they cause.

Suicide as an Act of Power in Violent, Alienating Relationships

The recent article in the Australian newspaper, The Age, on 27 April (Tuohy & Sakkal, 2024) provides an example of how male-perpetrated family violence may result in a female victim’s suicide: “The state coroner is being lobbied by Victoria Police and a key family crisis service to reclassify the deaths of three women by suicide this year as being caused by family violence”.

This article gives accounts of women who have contemplated suicide at the prospect of their abusive male ex-partner’s impending release from prison. There is an account of a woman dying by suicide as a final act of power; she would rather die by her own hand than have her violent ex-partner kill her on release from prison.

Targeted-alienated parents thinking about or attempting suicide may have similar motivations. They may also have motivations related directly to how parental alienating behaviours vilify them, stigmatise them as parents, and disempower them from helping their children while falsely making them accountable for harming their children. The general suicide literature and research find that more men die by suicide than women. Alienating parents have also been implicated in murder-suicide, killing their children and then dying by suicide.

Parental Alienating Behaviours are Associated with Alienated Parent Suicide

A recent study from the University of West London (Hine, Harman, Leder-Elder, & Bates, 2024) found that targeted-alienated parents (those reporting exposure to parental alienating behaviours) also reported significantly higher lifetime levels of suicide ideation than separated or divorced parents who did not report such behaviours. The published results did not differentiate by gender or sexuality.

The results of this study support the association between exposure to parental alienating behaviours, not reciprocating in those behaviours and lifetime suicide risk above the general population of separated-divorced parents not exposed to parental alienating behaviours. There is a substantial evidence base supporting the view that parental alienating behaviours are psychologically harmful, and can have far-reaching and lifetime consequences on mental health  (Lee-Maturana, Matthewson, & Dwan, 2020).

That is, alienated parents continue to think about suicide more than non-alienated, separated-divorced parents. Alienated parents continue to suffer more serious mental health distress, such as PTSD symptoms, depression, and thoughts of suicide than other, non-alienated, separated-divorced parents.

And let us not forget that their alienated children continue to suffer for the rest of their lives. We can only imagine their suffering when they realise the behaviour into which their alienating parent coerced them led their rejected parent to die by suicide.

A Call for Violent, Alienating Perpetrator Responsibility and Accountability

The fields of parental alienation and family or domestic violence are similar in that they demand perpetrators take responsibility for their behaviour and be accountable for changing it. Gendered family violence theory is especially strident in demanding male responsibility and accountability. Targeted-alienated mothers, fathers and extended family members can draw on the study by Hine et al. 2024 to demand alienating parents take responsibility and accountability for the psychological and social harm that results from their behaviour.

The same call for reclassifying alienated parent suicide as family violence-related death applies. The implications are that alienating mothers could be responsible and accountable for the psychological and social distress suicide ideation causes alienated fathers if not for the actual suicide attempt or death by suicide. The same applies to alienating fathers.

The University of West London Study Context and Details.

The University of West London study investigated the prevalence of parental alienating behaviours in a sample population of 1005 UK residents aged over 18 years old and who had separated or divorced from a partner with whom they had at least one child. The sample population represented mothers and fathers more-or-less equally, with 43.4% identifying as male.

No information on gender-sexuality differences and suicidality was available at this time. The sample population is representative of the UK population based on available national figures for gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity distributions (Hine et al. 2024). In the sample population, an average of 12 years had passed since the relationship with the ex-partner with whom they had children had ended. The average age of the first child at the time of separation was just over 7 years old (Hine et al. 2024).

References

Harman, J. J., Kruk, E., & Hines, D. A. (2018). Parental alienating behaviors: An unacknowledged form of family violence. Psychological Bulletin, 144(12), 1275-1299. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000175

Hine, B., Harman, J., Leder-Elder, S., & Bates, E. (2024). Alienating behaviours in separated mothers and fathers in the UK. UK: University of West London Retrieved from https://www.uwl.ac.uk/sites/uwl/files/2024-04/Alienating%20behaviours_v3.pdf

Lee-Maturana, S., Matthewson, M. L., & Dwan, C. (2020). Targeted parents surviving parental alienation: Consequences of the alienation and coping strategies. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 29, 2268-2280. 

Tuohy, W., & Sakkal, P. (2024). Police Urge Rethink Over Deaths of Three Women. The Age. https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/suicides-or-victims-of-family-violence-police-urge-rethink-over-deaths-of-three-women-20240426-p5fmtx.html

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