Karen and Nick Woodall believe that feminists encourage mothers to make false allegations of child abuse to the family courts, and that the whole family court system is set up to believe mothers and disbelieve fathers. They believe that when a child discloses sexual abuse, this is frequently a sign of parental alienation, of an emotionally abusive mother coaching the child to lie about and fear the innocent father. They argue that children who are asked by professionals for their wishes and feelings are placed in an impossible position - they are forced to back the abusive mother’s false allegations through their confused allegiances. For this reason, they urge, family court professionals must not believe children who allege abuse in cases where the accused parent claims to be a victim of parental alienation.
Karen and Nick Woodall work in the family courts. They are close to Sir Paul Coleridge, the retired High Court family judge, Centre for Social Justice collaborator, founder of the Marriage Foundation, and key member of the British Religious Right.
Sir Paul Coleridge is a firm believer in parental alienation. He was the headline speaker at the second annual conference of the European Association of Parental Alienation Practitioners.
Leading up to the 2018 conference, Karen Woodall blogged that “Sir Paul Coleridge, was a High Court Judge, he transferred residence of children and invented the suspended residence transfer as a method of concentrating the mind of alienating parents…”
The extraordinary relationship between Sir Paul Coleridge and the Woodalls is perhaps the clearest example of the alliance between fundamentalist right wing Christians and secular fathers’ rights extremists.
For several years, Karen and Nick Woodall have presented at conferences with American colleague and parental alienation specialist, William Bernet. Together with a number of other individuals, such as the Canadian Brian Ludmer, and the British Sue Whitcombe, they are doggedly working to increase acceptance of the concept and existence of parental alienation in the public mind, the media and the family courts.
Karen Woodall is convinced that I, her “obsessive stalker”, must be an alienating parent she has worked with. However, I have never met Karen or Nick Woodall and I have never had any dealings with the family court system. My interest in them arose from their involvement in the sabotage of the British child support system, also known as “child maintenance reform”.
So briefly, my own position on parental alienation is that I believe it can and does happen, that it is rare, that the truth in individual cases must be extremely difficult to unpick, and that there is the potential for catastrophic harm to children if it is diagnosed incorrectly. I accept that occasionally mothers may succeed in coaching or alienating children from fathers, and vice versa. But the last people I would want diagnosing parental alienation are this pair of shameless fraudsters.
Domestic violence specialists in the United States believe that some children are being removed from justifiably protective mothers and placed with abusive fathers under mistaken or false diagnoses of “parental alienation”. Karen Woodall often collaborates with Dr William Bernet, an American, who featured in this 2016 Salon article, “Custody in crisis: How family courts nationwide put children in danger”.
On 10 April 2017 Karen Woodall blogged:
“The Clinic has undertaken residence transfer for seven children so far this year, the intervention in each of these cases has conformed to international standards of practice and all have been successful. In doing so, the Clinic provides assessment, formulation and a work plan and is cross examined on this before judgement.
After judgement the clinic staff carry out the residence transfer and then provide a twelve week therapeutic post residence transfer care package to the children concerned.
After the twelve week care package is complete, testing of the children’s resilience to contact with the parent they have been removed from is undertaken to ensure that counter rejecting stances do not develop.
All of the children who have been cared for by the Family Separation Clinic in residence transfer have successful made the transition to the rejected parent and have recovered from the alienation reaction.
Severe or pure alienation is indicated by the child’s phobic and fearful response and refusal to countenance any contact, coupled with the aligned parent’s lack of insight and a ‘good enough’ parenting style in the rejecting parent.
It is also indicated by the child’s inability to emerge fully from the alienated state due to the continued influence of the aligned parent and the child being stuck in the double bind or encapsulated delusion that the rejected parent is dangerous.
Further indicated by the aligned parent showing lack of insight and continued interference in arrangements. Additionally indicated where personality disorders are present and there is no opportunity to ameliorate the impact of parental behaviours upon the child.
The international research indicates that the most suitable intervention is likely to be a transfer of residence with a 90 day cessation of contact with the alienating parent, leading into a structured testing of the capacity of the aligned or alienating parent to show insight and behavioural change, and the capacity of child to withstand contact.”
This is truly terrifying. A mother trying to protect her child could herself be diagnosed as an abuser, and the child forcibly transferred to the abusive father, with no contact permitted with the mother for ninety days, and thereafter only if both acquiesce to any ongoing abuse.
“Services will rely on selective research to inform their safeguarding procedures, something which puts children at risk of more harm if one were to follow the theoretical reasons for using such research through to conclusion. In our own safeguarding procedures at CSF we use as much research from as many different sources to inform our thinking and our understanding and we routinely ensure that we take samples from our case work to inform our approach to building strong safeguarding procedures.
In my experience, much of what is put out as independent research is anything but in this field. Take Joan Hunt and Mavis Mclean who regularly write about family separation, both do so under the umbrella of Gingerbread with whom they share funding and develop research programmes. How can any research coming out of that be considered to give an independent view?”
“There is a very serious issue that arises during family separation which is often completely ignored by evaluators, mediators and others who work with the separated family. This is that coercive control patterns which were present before the separation happened, can be played out after separation using the children of the family as conduits for that control. The incidence of false allegations made by a child against a parent is one such pattern and as such it is deeply damaging to both children and parent as it involves the child in a pattern of intimate partner violence. In the field of family separation in the UK at least, the deeply held beliefs about separating families which have been forced upon our society by the women’s rights lobby groups over the years, have created a stereotyped picture that looks like bad fathers hurting good mothers and their children. So deep is this belief that children who are caught in the coercive controlling grip of a parent after separation and forced into making false allegations to uphold the power that this parent has over the other, are often simply invisible to practitioners. Couple that with the focus on children’s wishes and feelings and add in a dash of child abuse hysteria which is currently running up and down our land again and you have the perfect ingredients for the controlling parent to use the child to make the allegations that will prevent the other parent from seeing the child again. Or at least for long enough to ensure that the child can be completely alienated from the other parent’s life by deepening inculcated fears and phobias of that parent.”
"False allegations are a feature of family separation, especially when that separation is accompanied by high levels of conflict… Although feminism is a political ideology, and as such should not be found within a hundred metres of any such professional, it is routinely THE ideology of choice for professionals working with the family… as much of our current legislation around the separated family was created and is maintained by feminist academics who are heavily interlinked with organisations such as Gingerbread and Women’s aid, both of whom are outspokenly feminist, the family separation field is already far less than level for those who venture onto it. Into this hotbed of political ideology enters the child who makes false or fabricated allegations and the parent with whom they are aligned, most often the mother and very often supported by groups of women from feminist organisations. Within which there is an unshakeable belief that all women must be believed without question and that children do not lie. But children do lie and they lie regularly and they lie especially when the circumstances they find themselves in encourage them to lie and especially when there is little possibility their lies will be found out… And to deny that is tantamount in my view, to colluding with a system which enables the scrambling of young minds and emotional torture."
Karen Woodall urges a father who is reluctant to go to court to seek a transfer of residence for his children:
“You can have them removed from her if you work hard enough at it… Anytime you want to take that step, we will be here.”
12 July 2015
A discussion below the line on Karen Woodall’s blog, again including Vincent McGovern of Families Need Fathers, came to an abrupt halt when a woman posted a comment pointing out the uncomfortable truth that sometimes allegations of abuse are genuine and not symptoms of parental alienation:
“I thought it was terrible how my husband’s ex wives discouraged his relationship with his/their daughters. Then, after I, too, separated from him, CHILD PORN was found on his personal business computer that only he had access too. And then there were other things I cannot disclose here. However, his business partner’s son-in-law is the assistant DA. The evidence and all traces “disappeared.” Consider there can be much more to the story than a survey tells.”
Conversations below the line on Karen Woodall’s blog frequently descend into extremism, not least from Karen Woodall herself. Below this particular blog post, there was an unusually balanced and well reasoned debate about the proportions of mothers alienated by fathers and vice versa, between Karen Woodall, Nick Woodall, Vincent McGovern (Chair of the Central and North London branches of Families Need Fathers) and others. But, tellingly, Karen Woodall abruptly shut the discussion down when she received this comment from a mother called Kate:
“While you discuss parental alienation as though it is always real, what about the many mothers accused falsely of alienating when in fact she is trying to protect the children who are refusing to see a father because of his abusive behaviour? This is the shocking and sinister fact, that the term ‘parental alienation’, these days called ‘implacable hostility’, is used as a tactic by barristers to win their case. Children are being forced into contact with an abuser father and if the distressed and worried mother doesn’t change, the children are taken from her and forced to live with the abusive father. The mother and children are then trapped, no-one will believe anything they say about abuse, the children are traumatised and learn to shut up and try to cope with the life of abuse, control and loneliness they have been thrown into. Many mothers, reacting naturally to having their children take in a high state of anxiety, distress and trauma are then ‘mind-messed’ further and their natural behaviour used against them, with fingers pointing..’See we told you she was mad/bad/insane/alienating/hysterical…’. The ‘professionals’ can go home to their comfortable houses and lives while leaving a trail of destruction, pain and damaged children in their wake.”
Karen Woodall describes the process of removing an alienated child, which could just as easily be the description of removing an abused child from the protective parent:
“The alienated child protests hugely about the impending removal and creates a great deal of emotional and physical drama about it. Some children have called the police when I have been working on a removal and I have had to call the police to assist with others. The scenes of removal are rarely easy for anyone but if one has the experience of seeing a child who is alienated come out of that state of mind, it allows one to do the work and know that it is being done for the best interests of the child.
Somewhere in the process of the removal the child understands that their will is not longer the driving force in the family drama and they give up the fight. This is not the same as giving up because they are being forced to do something that they do not want to do (though at first they behave as though they do not want to do it). When the child gives up the fight, the process is immediately easier and more peaceful. The child knows at the subconscious level that they are no longer in charge.”
A blog post outlining the “working methods of the Family Separation Clinic states:
“In the past eighteen months we have reunited 27 children with a formerly rejected parent and in residence transfer cases, worked with lead Clinicians in teams and in cases where we have acted as experts advising the court. We have additionally rebuilt relationships between children and their parents without residence change and we have successfully supported residence change children to maintain relationships with both parents after transfer.”
“I am a practitioner who removes such children from the alienating parent, I’ve moved seven children this year.”
“When I do reunification work with children I am aiming to put them back into a relationship with a rejected parent in a normal and healthy manner as quickly as I possibly can. This may take some time at the outset because in achieving the right dynamic for swift liberation, one has to have the right dynamic configured around the child. I will not attempt the reunification until I have the right conditions, which in pure and severe alienation means that the child is removed from the care of the alienating parent and placed directly (where it is at all possible) with the targeted parent. During the removal and placement, I undertake the dynamic intervention which shifts the child from split state of mind to integration. It is this which causes the immediate disappearance of the alienation and which returns the child to warm and normal relationship with the once targeted parent. I have done this with eleven children this year, last year I worked with twenty seven children in this way.”
“Only by remembering that this is MUM or DAD not some weird pervert who needs to be watched in case they whip off the mask and appear like the wolf in sheeps clothing do we stay sane in the midst of all of this. And remembering this. CHILDREN TELL LIES. They lie all the time in cases like this. Not because they are bad or doing it deliberately but because they have to tell lies to survive.”
“Sometimes we use force to remove a child, I have used what I suppose would be called extreme force by some (using the police to physically remove a child), it is not ideal but it works and actually, the police are really really good at this work, they instinctively know that what we are doing is restoring authority and hierarchy to the child’s life. On several occasions, once when the children I was moving called the police and said they were being abducted and on the second when a child was lying on the floor refusing to move, the police have intervened, doing the job of reintegration for me!”
“…giving children more of a ‘voice’ in family separation, (a phrase that makes me shudder with horror…)”
“The lack of understanding in this country, of what happens to children during and beyond family separation both saddens and angers me at the same time. Sometimes I see alienated children whose faces are frozen with fear, in similar ways to those children who are being physically or sexually abused. These children are often those that CAFCASS throw up their hands in horror over, when I suggest that they are suffering abuse. The notion that a mother could be abusing her child by enmeshing her with her own hatred/dislike of the child’s other parent or acting out her own childhood upbringing, is not a palatable explanation to too many of these practitioners. Easier for them to tolerate it seems, is the idea that a child is refusing to see a father because that parent has done something bad. As one officer stated to me recently, ‘culturally this child is expected to respect his father and do as he says, that he will not even see him is a measure of how badly this father has behaved towards this child.’ I resisted the urge to slap this person and attempted to explain (yet again) that children who reject a parent in this way are not doing so because of the badness of a parent, but because they are being placed in a double bind by the parent they are aligned with, often their mother but also, in some cases their father. And it is this parent, the aligned parent, with whom we should be concentrating our efforts to understand what is happening and why, because it is this parent who is often the one who is responsible for the child being trapped by intolerable emotional pressure.”
In 2011 the American Joan Dawson wrote about Parental alienation and domestic violence on HuffPost (where, coincidentally, Karen Woodall also blogs):
“Parental alienation can mask domestic violence, child abuse and child sexual abuse. What is the difference between fearful or uncooperative battered women and alienating," vindictive" mothers? If parents try to withhold access to children, are they alienators or protectors? If they try to provide evidence of abuse - interviews with psychologists, medical examinations or discussions with the child - are they gathering proof or further alienating the ex? What is the difference between alienated children and abused children? The behaviors can be indistinguishable.”
“In fabricated allegations, where no abuse has taken place but the children have been primed and persuaded to tell stories about what has happened to them, mind scrambling is a very good way of describing what is done to a child in order to get them to make the allegations in the first place. Imagine, a child who has absolutely no understanding of sex, no concept of what sex means and no way of comprehending the act, but who is persuaded and encouraged to make such allegations against a loved parent. Unknowing of the implications of what they are saying, such children are often enmeshed by a parent who cannot see that their behaviour is damaging to the child. What kind of ‘torture’ of the mind and emotions must a child endure in order to be brought to that point? What kind of person manipulates a child to do such a thing?”
“All of this is, to my mind, part of the cultural imperatives which our family courts and particularly our family services are influenced by. Although feminism is a political ideology, and as such should not be found within a hundred metres of any such professional, it is routinely THE ideology of choice for professionals working with the family. Feminism, which in the last forty years has come to be synonymous with the word equality, has an overarching driver, to ensure that the needs of women are put first within an assumption that men are always priviliged within a patriarchal society. Practitioners around the family, who freely proclaim their feminist identity, are therefore always going to be biased in terms of whose needs they recognise and meet, it being an anathema to feminist doctrine that men’s needs are considered equally to those of women.
Additionally, as much of our current legislation around the separated family was created and is maintained by feminist academics who are heavily interlinked with organisations such as Gingerbread and Women’s Aid, both of whom are outspokenly feminist, the family separation playing field is already far less than level for those who venture onto it. Into this hotbed of political ideology enters the child who makes false or fabricated allegations and the parent with whom they are aligned, most often the mother and very often supported by groups of workers from feminist organisations. Within which there is an unshakeable belief that all women must be believed without question and that children do not lie.
But children do lie and they lie regularly and often and they lie especially when the circumstances they find themselves in encourage them to lie and especially when there is little possibility their lies will be found out.”
“I have long been interested in cases where social workers have failed to recognise that the child who is alienated is being abused by the parent to whom they are aligned. In such cases, even where there is a clear judgement of emotional harm and the case has passed into public law, social workers have been seen to resist the notion that a child should be removed from the alienating parent and have continued to see the problem as a ‘he said/she said’ situation. In repeated cases over the past five years I have found myself to be at odds with social workers who, in public law cases, hold what I consider to be disproportionate amounts of power in that they are able to determine the use of resources in a case, whether a child is removed into foster care for example, and how a child should be helped and who by. In this situation, where it is clear that the understanding of alienation by a social worker is severely limited AND they are being manipulated by unwell parents, the lack of social worker self awareness becomes starkly apparent.
As therapist practitioners we must fulfil a range of criteria in order to safely practice in this field, one of which is a deep self knowledge. Having been consistently in therapy and supervision for the years I have been doing this work, I am aware that without this personal and professional work, the path through the woods would be peppered with my own projections and my own counter transferential material. Working with social workers, who do not have to be in therapy and who receive supervision delivered in a political ideological framework (families are analysed using the traditional feminist model of patriarchal power and control), it is easy to see how they fall into the traps of confirmation bias and counter transference reactions in alienation cases.
In September 2019 Judge Stephen Wildblood, himself an ardent believer in the concept of parental alienation, published a judgement - [2019] EWFC B56 - which showed Karen Woodall in a very poor light:
17. However, as I stated at the hearing today, I do think that there are four points that need to be made. I heard submissions from all counsel in relation to them (including counsel for Ms Woodall) and no party (including Ms Woodall) wished for there to be any further hearings or any further evidence produced before me. The points are these:
i) In written advice to the court two years ago Ms Woodall had said this: ‘I have absolutely no doubt, based my extensive experience working with the children should these children be moved to live father, they would emerge from the alienated state of mind within a matter of minutes.’ I did not accept view at the hearing when I considered it. Today Ms Woodall acknowledged that she was being over-confident when expressing that opinion.
ii) In her evidence at the final hearing Ms Woodall stated that she thought that the children had a ‘strong but suppressed attachment’ to their father which, when re-awakened, would lead to a successful transfer. Dr Blagg and the Guardian gave evidence to the contrary, saying that the passage of time and the reaction of the children to their father demonstrated that their attachment to him was weak. At the hearing when they gave evidence I accepted the opinions of Dr Blagg and the Guardian. I consider events have shown Dr Blagg and the guardian to be right - the fragility of the children’s attachment to their father has been demonstrated very plainly. Ms Woodall retains her opinion and, I have to recognise, this is an issue of differing professional opinions and case dependent.
iii) I think that the plans for the transfer of the children to the father involved an underestimation of the likely reaction of the children. Although other experts commented upon those plans, they were devised, principally, by Ms Woodall. I do think that her opinion about the nature of the attachment between the children and the father must have influenced the plans that she devised. I recognise, however, that the plans that she created were available for scrutiny by the court and by the other witnesses. Further, it is important to note that the Family Separation Clinic revised its protocol shortly after the transfer was attempted; although one advocate suggested that I should attach the new protocol to this judgment I consider that it would be inappropriate for me to do so since I neither disapprove of nor endorse it. This case has been a steep learning curve for many. A matter of concern to me, and learning (since I was the judge in charge), was the absence of full and careful discussion with the children’s schools notwithstanding that the transfers took place there.
iv) Following on from the above I think that the extent and depth of the children’s alienation from their father and resistance to him were under estimated. That, however, is said with the benefit of hindsight and it could not possibly be right to suggest that the responsibility for that lies with one person. Three experts recommended immediate transfer of residence. Ms Woodall recommended that the transfer should be ‘permanent’ (meaning long-term) whereas the other two experts supported a short-term transfer with a review – the guardian proposed only a transfer of only two weeks with a review. In any event as matters transpired, I did not follow the advice of Ms Woodall and even so the transfer and period of residence with the father proved to be deeply traumatic.
18. In making the above comments I do wish to record that Ms Woodall was a court appointed expert in this case and, although she may not be registered with a specific professional body and does not practise in an area that is subject to statutory regulation (as I understand it), she does have supervision from a highly respected consultant child psychiatrist, lectures on issues relating to parental alienation and gives evidence frequently before courts. All that is important, no doubt, when considering her role as an expert in accordance with the annex to PD 25B of The Family Procedure Rules 2010.”
The “highly respected consultant child psychiatrist” who supervises Karen Woodall is Hamish Cameron, one of the first British proponents of parental alienation and a Patron of Families Need Fathers.
Judge Stephen Wildblood, though a buddhist, is connected to the Christian Right, enthusiastically referring families in his court to parenting courses run by the secular-sounding National Parenting Initiative, run by a core group of fundamentalist evangelical Christians, including Rob Parsons, founder of the Care for the Family.
On 10 January 2020 two evidently distressed mothers, one in Britain, one in the US, warned on Karen Woodall’s blog:
“This is the the most dangerous article I have read in a very long time about PA! Firstly there seems to be a huge shift in blaming the parent who the child lives with as PA is the NEW terminology to use, and yes I’ll openly say it as that as it takes more then just an observation on the parent who the child lives with to decide that, that child is being abused. It now paves way for the opposite parent to use in court and can lead and has lead to some serious conciquences upon children…”
“Child rape is out of control. The biggest population of them are given to their rapists after the defendant attorneys use the parental alienation as a basis for allegations that the child is lying about the rape because the other parent is “jealous”.”
To both mothers, Karen Woodall snarkily commented, “Mmmmmm”.
I am not sure whether this counts as trivia, but perhaps it’s relevant. In 2010 footballer Gary Bailey and Nick Woodall co-wrote a book called “Gary Bailey’s Divorce for Dads”.
Gary Bailey had divorced the mother of his three children, and “Divorce for Dads” discussed how to co parent following a marital split.
The book has no reviews whatsoever on Amazon and appears to be out of print, so it was not a roaring success.
In 2013 Gary Bailey married second wife, Michelle McLean, who was fourteen years younger and a blonde, white former beauty queen who had been crowned Miss Namibia in 1991 before winning Miss Universe in 1992.
Gary Bailey associated with two prolific paedophiles, Crewe football coach, Barry Bennell and care worker, Bruce McLean (no relation to his future wife, Michelle McLean).Goalkeeper Gary Bailey played 375 first team games for Manchester United from 1979 to 1986.
Daily Record, 15 February 2018
“Now aged 45, a former player told the Mirror: "Bennell took us to Man Utd training ground to meet Gary Bailey, the then keeper, to get soccer skills certificates. "He made sure you knew it was down to him and he would be looking for a reward afterwards.””