Domestic abuse, parental alienation, and the family court system — the full picture
by Mike, founder, SoulForge Community
Most of what I write here is personal — drawn from my own experience, told in my own voice, aimed at the man who is going through something similar and needs to know he isn’t alone. This piece is a bit different. It’s more about the wider picture: what the problem actually is, how it works, and why SoulForge Community exists to address it.
I’ve been wanting to write this for a while. Not because the personal posts aren’t useful — I think they are — but because there’s a version of this that steps further back and tries to describe the full shape of what many men in this community are facing. If you’re new to the site, this is probably the best place to start. If you’ve been here a while, it might help to see it all laid out in one place.
It starts with a number most people don’t know
Around 1.5 million men experience domestic abuse in England and Wales every year. That’s approximately 41% of all domestic abuse victims — according to the Office for National Statistics, the government’s own data. One in five men in the UK will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime.
Before going any further, I want to say something clearly: SoulForge Community fully supports the work that exists to help women and girls who are victims of abuse. That work is vital. It has taken decades to build, it addresses a real and serious need, and it deserves continued support. Our focus on male victims is not a challenge to it. It’s a recognition that the equivalent provision for men is almost entirely absent — and that gap is causing serious, preventable harm. That’s the gap SoulForge Community is trying to address.
The abuse men experience often looks different from the public image of domestic violence. For many male victims, the harm is primarily psychological, emotional, coercive, and financial rather than physical — though physical and sexual abuse do also occur. Coercive control works gradually and invisibly: eroding confidence, isolating a man from the people who might support him, establishing an environment where certain things are simply understood to be unacceptable, without those rules ever being stated explicitly. Men often don’t recognise what they’re living inside as abuse. The cultural script for male victimhood doesn’t exist in the same way it does for female victimhood — which means many men go years without language for what’s happening to them.
The barriers to seeking help are significant. Shame. Cultural expectations of male self-sufficiency. Fear of not being believed. Fear that reporting the abuse will result in losing their children. The ManKind Initiative reports that 21% of male victims tell absolutely nobody — not their GP, not their friends, not the police — about what is happening to them. When men do reach out, the support available is overwhelmingly designed for female victims. When I started looking into this, the numbers were stark. There are 59 organisations with 429 refuge spaces for men across the whole of England and Wales.
Then there’s parental alienation
Parental alienation is a term many people haven’t heard — and even those who have often don’t fully understand what it involves. It describes a pattern of behaviour by one parent that systematically distances a child from the other parent: undermining the relationship, influencing the child’s feelings and perceptions, and in serious cases engineering the complete breakdown of the parent-child bond. It is a recognised form of emotional abuse, and it harms both the targeted parent and, critically, the children themselves.
It can be subtle — a consistent drip of negative messages about the other parent, contact arrangements made reliably difficult, children coached on what to say to professionals. Or it can be overt: relocation without consent, deliberate refusal to comply with court orders, the systematic removal of the targeted parent from the child’s world. Either way, the effect accumulates.
I want to be honest about something here, because intellectual honesty matters to SoulForge Community. Parental alienation as a concept is sometimes misused. There are cases where a parent invokes it not because it’s genuinely occurring, but as a counter-tactic — a way of deflecting attention from their own behaviour or resisting contact arrangements that have been appropriately restricted. That misuse is real and harmful. SoulForge Community exists to support men who have genuinely been targeted — not to provide cover for those who haven’t. The distinction matters, and we take it seriously.
The family courts are meant to be the arena where these situations are resolved. But the family court system in England and Wales is severely under-resourced. Cafcass — the body responsible for advising courts on children’s welfare — carries caseloads that don’t allow for the kind of thorough, sustained assessment that genuinely complex cases require. Courts frequently don’t have the time or the tools to properly investigate what’s actually happening within a family, or to distinguish between a parent who is genuinely trying to protect their children and one who is using those children as a weapon. This creates a vulnerability that some parents are able to exploit — and the consequences are serious.
Where it gets worse: when the abuse doesn’t end with the relationship
For many men, domestic abuse doesn’t end when the relationship does. It continues — in different form, through different mechanisms — into the post-separation period.
When a male victim of domestic abuse decides to leave, the abusive partner frequently responds by repositioning herself as the victim. False allegations — sometimes criminal in nature — are made. Relationships are established with domestic abuse support organisations, local authorities, children’s services, and the police, who, operating on a policy of believing the person who comes forward first, treat those allegations as established fact before any investigation has taken place. By the time the father understands what’s happening, an institutional picture has been built around him — without his knowledge, without his input, without any of the allegations having been tested against evidence.
The family courts inherit that picture. And they are also, for most men, an arena of immediate and severe financial disadvantage. Legal representation in family law matters is extraordinarily expensive — specialist solicitors routinely charge £300 to £500 an hour, and contested proceedings run for years. Legal aid has been almost entirely removed from private family law cases since 2012. Most men go through these proceedings unrepresented, while the other parent — who may have secured legal aid through a domestic abuse support organisation on the basis of untested allegations — is professionally represented from the start. The structural disadvantage is profound, and it compounds the original harm.
The result is that men who have been victims of abuse find themselves not only unrecognised as victims, but actively positioned as perpetrators — defending allegations they know to be false, sometimes facing criminal investigations, and simultaneously losing contact with their children over months and years while proceedings drag on. Each year that passes entrenches the new normal.
The children — the most innocent victims
What often gets lost in this picture is what it does to the children.
When a father is removed from the picture — through relocation, through court orders obtained on the basis of false allegations, or through a pattern of contact being progressively reduced — the children don’t simply lose their father. They lose him into circumstances they can’t understand and didn’t choose. And the controlling behaviour that was previously directed at the father doesn’t stop. With the father removed or diminished, that control often redirects onto the children themselves.
Children living with a controlling parent — unguarded by the other parent — may be coached on what to say to professionals. They may be discouraged, explicitly or implicitly, from expressing positive feelings toward their father. They may come to believe, genuinely, a version of events that has been constructed for them. The harm this does is often invisible from the outside. That’s part of what makes it so difficult for courts and professionals to identify.
I find this the hardest part to write, and the hardest to read back. The research on what the loss of a meaningful father-child relationship does to children is serious. Disrupted attachment. Poorer educational outcomes. Higher rates of anxiety and depression. Greater vulnerability in their own future relationships. These aren’t inevitable, and many children in these situations show remarkable resilience. But the risks are real and they compound over time.
Children in these situations often carry a grief they can’t name. Their father is alive, but not there. Present in some limited form, but not in the form of an ordinary daily relationship. The long-term work of processing that loss — often not begun until adulthood — can be serious.
The human cost — and why SoulForge Community exists
The men at the centre of these situations carry something that has no cultural name and almost no social recognition. They have survived abuse. They are navigating a legal system that doesn’t understand them, doesn’t believe them, and places them at financial disadvantage from the outset. They are losing — or have lost — their children, sometimes completely, sometimes in slow increments that feel like a prolonged bereavement with no endpoint.
The grief is real, sustained, and largely invisible. There is no funeral, no casserole on the doorstep, no ritual through which the people around them can acknowledge what’s been lost. Suicide rates among men in these situations are disproportionately high. These are not men who have failed. These are men who have been failed.
SoulForge Community exists because this is happening, it is happening at scale, and it is not being adequately addressed. We offer information and resources written from lived experience, peer support and community through meetups and online spaces, practical guidance on navigating the legal and emotional landscape, and — in time — direct connections to therapeutic and legal support.
We are a small organisation, run entirely by volunteers, funded by the commitment of the people who built it. We are not primarily campaigners — though we believe things need to change, and we’ll say so. We are primarily builders: trying to create somewhere that men going through this can come when they need it, find something useful, and feel a little less alone.
If any of what I’ve described sounds like your situation — or like someone you know — you’re in the right place. The full range of resources is at soulforge.org.uk. The domestic abuse section is at soulforge.org.uk/domestic-abuse-overview. The parental alienation section is at soulforge.org.uk/parental-alienation-overview. And if you want to understand what we’re building and why, the Goals page at soulforge.org.uk/goals sets it out.
You don’t have to figure this out alone.
Mike, founder, SoulForge Community
SoulForge Community exists to support men navigating domestic abuse, parental alienation, and the family court system — and the longer work of rebuilding. Visit soulforge.org.uk.