Parental Alienation is Gender Neutral

Children suffer the most from parental alienation, and in general, "boys and girls are equally like to suffer emotional abuse." [Kaplan and Labruna 1998]

Furthermore, mothers and fathers are approximately equally likely to alienate children:

- "the [gender] difference [of alienators] was only marginally significant" (Harman 2016) . Dr. Harman has clarified that it means that gender differences are not "statistically significant".
- it is a fallacy that "Children Never Unreasonably Reject Mothers" (Warshak 2015, published in an APA Journal)
- "A Canadian survey reported that courts identified the father as the alienating parent in about one third of cases (Bala et al., 2010), in (Warshak 2015)"
- '"the alienating parent was the father in more than one third of cases." (Kopetski et al., 2006) in (Warshak 2015)
- "An analysis of unreported judgments in Australia over a 5-year period found approximately equal numbers of male and female alienators" (Berns, 2001), in (Warshak 2015)
- "In a small but nonrandom sample of parents who participated in an intervention to overcome children’s alienation, 58% of the rejected parents were mothers" (Warshak, 2010b), in (Warshak 2015)"
- Men and women engage in domestic violence in approximately equal numbers, according to a peer reviewed study by the CDC. As an aside, the numbers seem quite believable, because in a study of hetrosexual couples, yes, when the violence is reciprocal, I think that means that yes, equal numbers of men and women are involved. So the numbers for non-reciprocal violence seem to be more useful, and again, the numbers are approximately equal.
- Brian Ludmer: "One thing to point out in terms of the political debate, women suffer in every single one of these cases. If it is a dad, there is a grandmother and aunts suffering", "The female children themselves suffer. Women suffer in every single case and at least half of my clients are women. It is a power dynamic, not a gender dynamic."

- Karen Woodall has an excellent, balancing essay about "The Gendered Reality of Parental Alienation and Coercive Control." She points out that "Parental alienation IS gendered. That means that how it is enacted by mothers and father is different depending on the gender roles those mothers and fathers play in their children’s lives. Thus mothers who alienate do so most often in the subjective world and fathers who alienate do so most often in the objective world. This means that children who become alienated by a mother against a father will often have become that way because the mother has manipulated the child in the subjective relationship through enmeshment (mother’s inability to tell the difference between her own and her child’s experience) and through the playing out of the mother’s unfulfilled needs using the child as an extension of her own psychological self. Children who are alienated by fathers against their mothers are most often those who turn their objective controlling behaviours towards their children when the mother leaves the relationship."
- See also Jennifer Harman's TED talk about how alienators use sexual stereotypes.
- Here is one anecdotal account of a father who was found to be an alienator (Alex Jones).
- See also the CDC's report that finds the men and women abuse children in very equal numbers.
- See also Leona Kopetski's observations (that came even before Gardner coined the phrase parental alienation) that "Alienating parents enforce their agenda by aligning with intrinsically sound theories or causes, then accusing the parent to be alienated of behavior that violates the tenets of those theories or causes. Social causes and movements contain particularly powerful resources that can be exploited. Emotional and ideational content from any social causes, however well-intended or intrinsically sound, can be appropriated and used for the pathological purpose of alienating a child from the other parent. The potential usefulness of a cause is not determined by its content, but by the amount of emotion and action that can be generated when there is an accusation that the tenets or taboos of the cause have been violated. The emotional climate attendant to the cause helps blur boundaries so that questions that need to be raised in a particular case are treated as though the validity of the cause itself is being questioned. However, in parent alienation cases, exclusion of the other parent from the life of the child is not desired for the altruistic reasons that generated the social cause with which the alienating parent hopes to be identified, but for personal reasons that are rooted in complicated emotional and psychological dynamics."