Children Are Not Weapons: DAD Launches National Campaign Against Legal and Administrative Abuse
Today, DAD is launching Children Are Not Weapons, a national campaign to expose and end the practice of legal and administrative abuse in the family justice system, a form of coercive control in which children are used as leverage, contact is severed as punishment, and fathers are pushed toward a mental health crisis that is currently killing them at nine times the rate of divorced women. This campaign exists because a child's love for their father should never be a bargaining chip, a weapon, or collateral damage in an adult dispute, and because the evidence is now overwhelming that this is exactly what is happening to hundreds of thousands of families across Britain.
Why We Are Launching This Campaign
Legal and administrative abuse is not a fringe theory. It is a documented form of coercive control identified in Home Office-commissioned research conducted by NatCen Social Research in 2021, in which stakeholders across the criminal justice system, therapeutic services, and third sector support described how false allegations, fabricated safeguarding referrals, and threats to restrict access to children are used by some parents specifically because they know the system will believe them. One professional interviewed for that research put it plainly: perpetrators exploit the knowledge that "societally and institutionally, systems tend to be on their side as mothers when children are involved." That same research documented how male victims seeking help are frequently arrested as the primary aggressor, disbelieved by police and social workers, and referred to programmes designed for perpetrators rather than victims, a pattern researchers linked directly to a professional culture trained to view domestic abuse through a gendered lens that struggles to accommodate the reality of female perpetrators and male victims.
The instrument through which this abuse most often does its damage is the child. Parental alienation, the deliberate or persistent undermining of a child's relationship with the other parent, is not rare. Recent UK research found that when adults were asked directly whether they had experienced alienating behaviours as children, 39.2% said yes, but that figure rose to 59.1% when they were asked about specific behaviours instead of the label, and a further study using a comprehensive behavioural checklist found that 98.3% of young adults surveyed had experienced at least one such behaviour during childhood. This is not a handful of exceptionally bitter divorces. It is a pattern embedded, to some degree, across a very large proportion of separated families in this country, and it constitutes a form of emotional abuse of children that our courts and safeguarding systems are still not equipped to recognise or act on quickly enough.
The Human Cost Is Not Abstract
Dr Amy Baker's landmark 2005 study of adults who lived through parental alienation as children found that 70% suffered significant depression, roughly a third battled serious drug or alcohol problems they linked directly to that childhood pain, and many carried a lifelong inability to trust that anyone could truly love them, having learned as children that even a parent's love could be withdrawn without warning or reason. Most devastating of all, of those who went on to become parents themselves, half became alienated from their own children in turn, repeating a cycle of loss they were once powerless to stop. This is what happens when we allow children to become instruments in adult conflict: we do not simply damage one generation, we manufacture the conditions for the next one to suffer the same fate.
For the fathers on the receiving end of contact denial and legal and administrative abuse, the consequences are measured in a currency far more serious than statistics on a page. Divorced men face a suicide risk estimated at nine times higher than divorced women. Separated fathers accessing mental health support report suicidal thoughts at crisis levels, 37.3% before they even reach a charity for help, nearly double the estimated rate among men generally, and that figure climbs to 53.7% among fathers also navigating domestic abuse trauma. A twelve-month UK study tracking separated fathers found their mental wellbeing remained at clinically low levels for the entire year, and identified a strong, statistically significant correlation between deteriorating mental health and both child access problems and the stress of family court proceedings. This is not simply grief at a relationship ending. It is a chronic, quantifiable injury inflicted by a process that currently carries no obligation to screen for it, no mandatory clinical support, and no defined endpoint.
And the damage does not stop at the family's edge. Seventy-six percent of young men in UK prisons grew up without a father present in their lives. Family breakdown is estimated to cost the UK taxpayer £51 billion every year. When we allow children to be systematically cut off from a loving parent, we are not protecting anyone; we are quietly constructing the conditions for the next generation's mental health crisis, addiction crisis, and criminal justice burden, and asking the public to pay for it twice over.
What Children Are Not Weapons Stands For
This campaign exists to give this issue a name, a public voice, and a demand for accountability. We are calling for legal and administrative abuse to be formally recognised within domestic abuse policy and professional training as a distinct and serious tactic of coercive control, one that can be perpetrated by either parent, so that fathers who report it are met with belief rather than suspicion. We are calling for parental alienating behaviours to be treated by Cafcass and the family courts with the same urgency as any other form of child abuse, backed by fast-tracked intervention rather than the slow, inconsistent process currently in place. We are calling for mandatory mental health screening and funded therapeutic support for any parent caught in contested proceedings beyond six months, because no father should have to reach crisis point before the system notices he is in danger. And we are calling for judicial and professional training that makes clear, unambiguously, that a father seeking help deserves exactly the same presumption of credibility as anyone else who walks through the door.
Join Us
Children Are Not Weapons will be sharing the evidence, the research, and the stories of the families living through this crisis over the coming weeks. We are asking journalists, MPs, family law practitioners, mental health charities, and above all the public to look honestly at what the evidence shows and to help us change it. A child's bond with a loving parent should never be something either parent has the power to weaponise, and a father in crisis should never be met with disbelief instead of help. This is the moment to say so, clearly and together.
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