Parental Alienation Syndrome in Italian legal judgments: An exploratory study

Divorce has become a significant social phenomenon in Italy since the end of the 1980s and early 1990s; it has gradually increased to the same proportions observed in other parts of the Western world. There has been a 60% increase in the number of divorces since the beginning of the 1990s, from 50,000 cases in 1990 to 86,000 cases in 2009. Almost 50% of the cases from 2009 involved a child. Twenty percent of the cases were judicial divorces, and the judicial dispute usually concerned child custody. One of the greatest challenges facing forensic psychologists, lawyers and judges relates to cases in which children reject a parent after the divorce. In these cases, the court’s decisions are often ineffective both because of the complexity of the situation and because there is no agreement between the two parties. Considering these difficulties,Gardner’s th…