“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”
— Jeremiah 17:9 (ESV)
Scripture spoke about this long before psychology mapped it. The capacity of a human heart to deceive is not a modern discovery. What is done to children in parental alienation, what is done to partners in coercive control, what is done to families through narcissistic abuse – these are not new problems. They are ancient, dressed in the language of family law and safeguarding, and talks of wolves in sheep’s clothing.
The heart deceives not only others, but ourselves also. You have possibly spent months, maybe years, trying to get someone to understand what is happening. Maybe you have attended hearings. Perhaps submitted evidence. Watched CAFCASS interviews produce reports that have almost no resemblance to what you’ve experienced. Perhaps you’ve been told the children don’t want to see you. They have been told to give it time. You have no doubt watched someone who caused harm walk out of every process looking like the reasonable one, regardless of their gender.
The framework that exists already – the Power And Control Wheel
The Power and Control Wheel was developed in Duluth, Minnesota in 1984 by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project. It maps the behaviours used by an abusive person to maintain control over another person. Eight spokes. Each one identifies a category of behaviour. The wheel is embedded in CAFCASS practice, referenced in the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, and used across police, social work and family court services in the UK.
Look at those eight spokes with parental alienation in mind:
Using children — making the other parent feel guilty about the children, using children to carry messages, using contact arrangements to harass, coaching children in statements. That is not adjacent to parental alienation. That is parental alienation.
Coercion and threats — making threats about the children, using legal proceedings as a weapon, filing new allegations whenever the targeted parent pushes back. New court documents timed to coincide with contact requests. That is coercion.
Emotional abuse — gaslighting the targeted parent’s account of their own family history. Rewriting what happened. Ensuring that every institutional record reflects a version of events they did not recognise. That is emotional abuse.
Isolation — removing a parent’s access to their children. Controlling what the children know, remember and believe about the targeted parent. That is the most complete form of isolation this wheel describes.
Minimising, denying and blaming — DARVO. Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Every concern the targeted parent raises is minimised. Every piece of evidence they submit is reframed as evidence of their own problem. The harm is denied. The responsibility is reversed. The targeted parent is named as the source of the children’s distress, not the subject of a campaign designed to produce exactly that distress.
Parental alienation is not one spoke on the Power and Control Wheel. It is within most of them, combined. That is why it is so effective, so hard to fight, so insidious. It is why fighting it as a parental alienation case, using parental alienation language, in a system that uses domestic abuse language, keeps producing the result it keeps producing.
What the law says — and where the gap is
The Serious Crime Act 2015, Section 76, introduced coercive and controlling behaviour as a criminal offence in England and Wales. It carries a maximum sentence of five years imprisonment. It requires a pattern of behaviour i.e. repeated acts, conducted in an intimate or familial relationship, that have a serious effect on the victim.
MORE in the Law and Your Rights section
Parental alienation is not named in Section 76. The family court system operates under different frameworks: the Children Act 1989, Practice Direction 12J, the welfare checklist. These frameworks engage with the behaviours. They call them alienating behaviours, but they do not consistently join the dots back to coercive control. This gap is where targeted parents exist, and nobody sees them.
The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 extended the definition of domestic abuse to include children as victims in their own right where they see, hear or experience its effects. It included economic abuse, psychological abuse and emotional abuse. It did not name parental alienation.
What this means practically: the targeted parent who presents their case as a parental alienation case is using a different vocabulary from the institution they are asking for help. CAFCASS uses domestic abuse frameworks. The family court uses the welfare checklist. The police, when contacted, use coercive control criteria. To access the frameworks that already exist and that already cover most of what is being done, the language needs to change.
Gaslighting is not lying, and knowing this is important.
The video below makes a precise distinction about lying and gaslighting. Lying is telling someone something false. Gaslighting is making someone believe their own reality is different from what they know it to be.
A liar says something untrue. A gaslighter makes you doubt that you know what is true.
That distinction is not semantic. It explains why targeted parents are consistently disbelieved. Their account of what has happened is accurate. But they are presenting it into a system where the other party has already constructed an alternative account, and has been constructing it consistently and in advance, in every document, in every school communication, in everything the children have been taught to report. By the time the targeted parent sits in front of a CAFCASS officer, the counter-narrative is already embedded. Their accurate account sounds, by comparison, less coherent. They are the one who sounds like they are misremembering.
It is not an accident or a mis-communication. It does not get better if you show them you’re hurt, or demonstrate how you want to be treated, or even if you area person of faith. What you’re dealing with is a recognised mechanism – a ‘playbook’ – that is as we know it to be, narcissistic abuse.
Why this is so common and so hidden
It is common because the capacity for this kind of harm is not exceptional. Jeremiah understood that. The heart capable of weaponising children, of rewriting family history, of standing in a court room and presenting a fabricated account with complete confidence, that does happen – and history shows this. It is a product of what human nature, unaccountable to the Lord and unchecked, is capable of.
It is hidden because that is how it works. Coercive control operates by making itself invisible. The abusive person does not behave this way in public. They do not behave this way in court. They do not behave this way in front of professionals. The abusive person has no moral compass and will lie, cheat and steal their way to avoid any measure of accountability, at your detriment. The targeted parent is the only one who sees it consistently, and the targeted parent is the one who appears, by the time they reach any institution, to be the destabilised one.
They look like the crazy person because that is what happens when the body senses danger, when the brain cannot make sense of nonsense.
It is also hidden because targeted parents are often told by well-meaning people that what they are experiencing is a parental conflict, a difficult separation, a communication breakdown. These framings minimise what is happening. They raise the problem in the relationship rather than in the behaviour of one party. They suggest that better communication, more mediation, or more patience would help. Love them more. Forgive. Give them a chance. They had a difficult childhood. None of those things help coercive control. They enable it.
What changes when you identify it
Naming this as domestic abuse does not guarantee a different outcome in court. The family justice system has significant, documented limitations in identifying and responding to parental alienation even when it is named correctly. The presumption of parental involvement was repealed in October 2025 precisely because the existing pro-contact culture had been producing harmful outcomes. The system is in transition.
More information on the FAQ page — Parental Alienation section
What identifying it correctly and calling it out does do:
It gives the targeted parent access to a recognised framework with established terminology, documented research and legal weight behind it. The Power and Control Wheel is embedded in CAFCASS training. It is within Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act, which is enforceable. The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 is the operative legislation. A targeted parent who understands that they are dealing with domestic abuse, and who presents their experience through that framework, is working within the system’s own language rather than outside it.
It also has an internal impact, which is where the change needs to be. The targeted parent who has spent years trying to explain what parental alienation is to solicitors, to CAFCASS officers, to schools and anyone willing to listen, often finds that they are spending most of their energy arguing for the legitimacy of the problem rather than addressing it. Domestic abuse is not contested territory. The behaviours that constitute it are mapped, named and legally recognised on this Wheel.
Kevin R Webb (MEd.L, BEd., BA Found., QTS)
Somatic Trauma Informed Narcissistic Abuse Coach
For further reading
The Power and Control Wheel — how each spoke shows up across every context
Frequently Asked Questions — law, your rights, CAFCASS, the Coercive Control Act, and parental alienation evidence
The Serious Crime Act 2015, Section 76
