Rome – “For 2025, we have decided to launch an awareness campaign against the use of PAS in Italy as a tool to conceal violence against women and minors, to protect women from secondary victimization in civil courts.
In the coming months we will launch a series of events involving both institutions and non-governmental associations to obtain the application of the ban in courts on the use of PAS and the forced treatment of reconnecting minors with a rejected parent in cases of custody of minor children, when women report violence from their partners”.
This is what the experts from the study and research center Protocollo Napoli – psychologists Caterina Arcidiacono, Antonella Bozzaotra, Gabriella Ferrari Bravo, Elvira Reale, Ester Ricciardelli – said today at the press conference, at the headquarters of the Dire press agency, where the campaign against the use of PAS/parental alienation in the courts was presented, promoted by Protocollo Napoli and which received the endorsement of Reem Alsalem, United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women.
The experts, together with a group of scholars at a national level, have launched in Italy the anti-PAS campaign, against the use of the construct of parental alienation, which throughout the Western world is considered the most widespread instrument in courts to deny value to complaints of violence by women, accused in turn of wanting to separate children from their fathers.
The campaign's promoting committee, without mincing words, identifies the Pas/Ap constructs, everywhere inserted in judicial proceedings, as the main obstacle to policies to combat gender-based violence against women, children and girls.
The meeting was opened by the introduction of Caterina Arcidiacono, member of the technical-scientific committee of Protocollo Napoli, and Elvira Reale, consultant of the parliamentary commission of inquiry on Femicide.
The works, moderated by the journalist of the Dire agency Silvia Mari, continued with the interventions of Elisa Ercoli, president of the association Differenza Donna, Simona Lanzoni, vice president of Pangea, former vice president of GREVIO, and Vittoria Tola, national Udi manager. The conclusions were entrusted to Valeria Valente, senator Pd, parliamentary commission of inquiry on Femminicidio.
“In the reform of the civil process – Valente underlines – we have inserted for the first time a very rigorous statement, that is, that in the courts theories that are not recognized by the international scientific community cannot exist or be used by judges or technical consultants.
This applies to the PAS. We have written it, it is black on white in the code of civil procedure. And we as a parliamentary commission of inquiry on Femicide, with a group within the Commission coordinated by me and which also sees the collaboration of some components of the Naples protocol that I sincerely thank for this type of campaign, we are verifying that this rule actually lives as it was conceived in the courts, that it is applied correctly and that no formulas are found in some way that bring back through the window what we have let out through the door”.
In many cases, in Italian courts, if a child rejects the father, the responsibility is automatically attributed to the mother, conditioning and dysfunctional, without evaluating one of the most widespread occurrences: the presence of domestic violence and the consequent violence witnessed by the children.
It would have been right for all courts to have rejected prejudicial constructions against women, of a misogynistic nature, preventing the use of an unscientific theory. But this has not happened. From an unscientific theory today comes the tendency to force the will of children by taking them away ex abrupto from the parent with whom they want to live in order to bring them closer to the other parent.
Against all this, the Istanbul Convention intervened in 2013, GREVIO, the body monitoring the application of the Convention, in 2019, the European Parliament in 2022, the United Nations in 2023 and in 2024 experts from 18 countries.
"Differenza Donna – explains Ercoli – has always been committed to supporting women in freeing themselves from male violence. Scientifically falsified constructs such as parental alienation and its derivatives are one of the most powerful weapons used in the last 20 years to counteract such liberation.
We need an alliance between institutions and women's associations that can increasingly affirm the absolute inviolability of women and girls and the importance of their protagonism in trials as people who have suffered violations of human rights. Only in this way can we guarantee justice for all. We must systematize models that cannot remain patchy".
"The infamous Pas - Lanzoni highlights - is now finally out of the courts. As reported by GREVIO, in Italy too often the courts continue not to recognize the violence suffered by women in separation and custody cases. On the contrary, the concept that the abusive man can still be a good father is too often passed off.
GREVIO, in its recommendations to Italy, has repeatedly underlined how the high recourse to parental alienation, rather than protecting women and their children, backfires on mothers and exposes them to secondary victimisation, since the violence against them is not recognised”.
"This initiative is important - Tola points out - because PAS, in its various meanings, is an extremely controversial and dangerous issue, as demonstrated by the tragedy of Federico Barakat, killed in a protected environment by his father. Both information and training on the subject are necessary, aimed not only at specialists, the judiciary and the media, but at the wider world that deals with rights.
On women and against male violence, despite the fact that in recent years there has been a greater social and media sensitivity, the real distance between words and facts is measured and how far we are from producing all the expected benefits on the necessary social and collective awareness".
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