About 7,700 Maltese parents were denied seeing their children at some point over the past few years, a study has revealed.

The survey, conducted by statistician Vince Marmarà last September and October, was given to the government’s technical committee on parental alienation.

It reveals that 2.9 per cent of the population confirmed that they have been denied seeing their children.

Marmarà said that if extrapolated into real numbers based on an approximate population of 355,000, and assuming that 75 per cent of the population were parents, 2.9 per cent would translate into 7,700 parents.

Parental alienation refers to situations in families where one parent engages in a deceptive campaign to keep their children away from the other parent. It is most common during and following separation and divorce proceedings.

Thousands of parents around the world, most of whom are men, claim that, during separation, their partners engage in a ruse to turn their children against them, manipulating them into testifying against them in court and slowly connive them into growing more resentful and further apart from their father.

Consequently, the fathers complain of having to live apart from their children.

There is an increasingly heated global debate among professionals on how often these cases occur and how many of them indeed constitute parental alienation but there seems to be a growing consensus in the West that the problem is increasingly alarming.

When asked what the term ‘parental alienation’ means, more than 80 per cent of Maltese respondents in the study said they did not know and only 3.4 per cent gave the right definition straight away.

But when prompted with its definition and asked if they ever heard of similar cases, a whopping 58 per cent said they did.

Twenty-five per cent said they met people who are going through similar cases and almost eight per cent confessed that they are living the experience in their own family.

The study also asked respondents whether they currently feel at risk of being denied seeing their children.

Almost all of them – 98 per cent – said they did not feel they were at risk and the 0.6 per cent who admitted they might be at risk blamed problems in their relationship.

In the wake of increasing claims in court, the government set up the technical committee on parental alienation in January last year. It includes professionals, representatives from the Children’s Commission, the Commission against Domestic Violence, the Foundation for Social Welfare Services and a representative from the leading NGO on parental alienation – Happy Parenting Malta.

The committee was chaired by lawyer Andy Ellul. He is now a parliamentary secretary.