Foster care and invisible violence: how mothers fear losing their children

Years of domestic violence, without ever uttering a word, without finding the strength to denounce. And not out of resignation, but out of fear, even of losing custody of her daughter. It happened in Bolzano, where a woman was saved by the courageous intervention of her 11-year-old daughter, who called 112 during her father's umpteenth assault.

A story that, unfortunately, is not an exception. There are too many women who remain trapped in violence for fear of seeing the bond with their children broken. This is the epilogue on which separation proceedings often derail when the violence is not seen by the civil judge, who interprets the child's refusal to meet the father not as an understandable fear but as the result of manipulation by the mother. A cruel short-circuit that triggers a series of chain reactions and can lead to a reversal of responsibility: the perpetrator becomes the victim and vice versa.

This is clearly explained in a recent government document: the White Paper for training against violence against women, presented in November by Minister Eugenia Roccella and the result of the work of the technical-scientific committee of the Observatory set up at the Equal Opportunities Department of the Council Presidency. In the guidelines addressed to the judiciary, the text recalls that the European Court of Human Rights, in its sentence of 10 November 2022 in which it condemned Italy, "stigmatises the practice, found in some civil and juvenile courts, of deeming women who report acts of violence to be 'uncooperative' and 'unfit mothers', who refuse to attend their children's meetings with their ex-spouse and who oppose sharing custody, to the point of sanctioning them by suspending parental responsibility, placing their children in a community, and reporting them for various offences with the consequent secondary victimisation of both the mother and the minors".

A phenomenon that is far from residual. So much so that the White Paper recommends a long list of actions, such as 'to avoid any recourse to mediation or conciliation in the presence even of the fumus of violence', 'not to delegate judge's own evaluations to professionals conditioned by a-legal and a-scientific theories such as the so-called parental alienation or similar formulas', 'to appoint counsellors who have specific training in family violence and violence against women and who systematically apply in their work the principles, modalities and objectives of the Istanbul Convention'. It is precisely in the direction of stopping the use of Pas and its derivatives, such as 'parental refusal', and the forced treatment of minors to a rejected parent in cases of custody of children under 18 'as an instrument of concealment of violence against women and minors' that the awareness campaign launched in January by the experts of the Protocollo Napoli study and research centre: the psychologists Caterina Arcidiacono, Antonella Bozzaotra, Gabriella Ferrari Bravo, Elvira Reale and Ester Ricciardelli, continues.

Also speaking out against the spread of unfounded theories in the courts was the Garante per l'infanzia Marina Terragni, who in a recent hearing in the Senate recalled how the construct of parental alienation had been 'stigmatised several times by the Supreme Court of Cassation as unscientific' and 'also forbidden by the recommendations of the United Nations'. But, he added, 'it continues to guide outcomes of proceedings in a whirlwind of new definitions that do not change the substance'. Terragni also announced his intention to renew the protocol with the police and social workers to limit the forced removal of children to cases of serious danger to their safety.