I experience no joy on Father’s Day. I can’t even call my young daughter, so I spend the day in quiet mourning. My predicament is that, despite my former centrality and involvement as a parent, our relationship has been reduced to a couple of hours’ contact every week in the presence of a minder. And in the absence of my daughter, not even the chance to hear her chirpy and innocent voice on Father’s Day, I shall descend into fantasy and superstition: I speak to her in my mind; I pray for her during Mass; and I think of her during my swim (she loves swimming). I like to imagine that I can project my thoughts and they could touch her, that I can telepathically protect her.

There are many other men like me, unable to see their children through no fault of their own, spending a joyless Father’s Day. It’s an agony that is caused by a parent who manages to separate the child from the other parent after marital separation. It’s called parental alienation, it’s a worldwide phenomenon, and although it afflicts both sexes – perpetrators can be women or men – women are twice as likely to alienate children. Statistically, about 70 per cent of alienated children are estranged from their fathers.

Parental alienation has come to symbolise men’s struggle for shared parenting after separation. It seems that, as the concept of shared parenting after separation gains traction in law and in practice, a significant percentage of women (as well as men to a smaller extent) resort to alienation attempts in a desperate bid to maintain a clutch on the children.

Alienators often employ deviousness, in­doctrination and psychological abuse of the child to sever the relationship between the other parent and child. The child is held hostage by the alienating parent.

This phenomenon was comprehensively described as Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) more than 30 years ago by the psychiatrist Richard Gardner. In Gardner’s enunciation, PAS could only occur once the child adopted and internalised the disparagement of the other parent as the child’s own reasoning. In this psychological alignment between alienator and child, the child would then spurn the other parent vehemently and unjustifiably. PAS has not been accepted as a diagnosable condition in psychiatry; many psychiatrists reject its validity.

There are many other men like me, unable to see their children through no fault of their own, spending a joyless Father’s Day

But the existence of parental alienation as an empirical phenomenon is not in doubt – it has generated many studies, books, articles, documentaries, and campaigns – the consensus in psychology is that it causes insidious psychological damage that can run through the child’s lifetime.

Alienators employ a similar set of strategies. The child is subjected to a constant campaign of denigration of the other parent; all signs of the other parent are banished – the child is not allowed to have pictures of him, or to call him – and any affectionate talk about that parent is met by denunciation. The alienating parent belittles, even throws out, things given by the other parent; and activities to which the child is taken by the other parents are disdained as inappropriate or dangerous.

Whether the alienation works or not depends on a range of susceptibilities. These include the age of the child (children of between nine and 15 are most susceptible to alienation), the cognitive capacity of the child, the individuation between alienating parent and child (children more psychologically independent from parents are less likely to be alienated), and other complex factors in the child’s personality. Moreover, not all parents rejected by children are due to the other parent’s alienation: the child could be contemptuous of a parent due to that parent’s own parenting deficiencies or dysfunction, as well as abuse. And sometimes the child turns against the alienator.

Obsessed alienators will stop at nothing. If the campaign of denigration doesn’t work, they resort to more drastic ploys: they concoct allegations of child abuse, especially sex abuse. And that works like magic: an investigation is launched, contact between child and targeted parent is either suspended or limited to a modicum of supervised contact, and the alienator, with one fell swoop, grasps total control of the child. The child is effectively separated from everything associated with that targeted parent – extended family, friends, pets and so on – the alienator sometimes even isolates the child from community.

This process of isolation generates emotional dependence between child and alienating parent, the child becomes a (psychological) hostage of the alienator, and this gives rise to a cult-like induction: the child is brainwashed, the allegations concocted by the alienator are implanted into the child’s mind.

So why would a parent subject one’s own child to such psychological abuse? In most cases the parent would have emotional problems, sometimes arising from abuse in his or her own childhood (many of the alienators suffer from personality disorders). In other cases the motive would be an intertwined set of reasons, including vindictiveness and financial considerations.

In several countries, most notably the US, parental alienation is considered a form of child abuse (American family courts tend to give custody of the child to the other parent in cases of unreformed alienation). In some countries it’s a criminal offence.

Social workers and psychologists in Malta are painfully aware of the perniciousness of alienation on the child’s mental health; courts less so (psychological abuse is underapprecia­ted in Family Courts). Yet more consequential are infamous delays: the delays in conducting investigations (in alleged abuse) and any ensuing prosecutions give ample time to the alienator to complete his or her handiwork.

In this sense the delays unwittingly encourage allegations of abuse; the system, due to its inefficiencies and tardiness, plays into the hands of the alienators. And the lost time before normality is restored means that the relationship between targeted parent and child may never be rebuilt to its full extent. The targeted parent is left scarred and embittered, the child comprehensively damaged psychologically, and the alienator hardly ever held to account for eviscerating a family.

Victor Borg is documenting for a media project cases in which parents were falsely accused of abuse. Make contact on sharedparenting@victorborg.com (Confidentiality is assured).