Family Focused Law and Mediation Pty Ltd

Family Focused Law & Mediation is a comprehensive law & mediation consultancy established in October 2019 which operates from the East Rand of Johannesburg, South Africa, and currently deals with local, national as well as International Family law disputes.

The firm’s director, Charl Botha state, “We are not the contemporary adversarial family law consultancy; philosophically we have redrawn the map so that we see ourselves first and foremost as conflict managers and problem solvers for families in disputes or high conflict separations or divorces.”

The standard adversarial family system has failed many families, parents, and minor children. In South Africa, family law is changing towards a non-adversarial dispute resolution process. Therefore, children’s well-being and safety following parental breakup is dependent on their parents conduct throughout and after the separation and divorce process which we manage and lead the dispute resolution to ensure the most cost effective, less traumatic and future focused solutions.

Family law consists of a unique crossroad of emotional, financial, and legal challenges for parents separating or divorcing each other.  It entails the rights presented by law – compensation for sacrifices made for the family unite, entitlement to benefit from the increase in net family wealth, and financial and parental plan agreements to support the ongoing care of children. It furthermore deals with the rights that are people oriented, rather than act-oriented, such as continued care and contact of children.

The arena of parental alienation is fraught with controversy particularly surrounding the pathogenic parents’ psychological seduction of the child, as a form of child abuse and gender-based violence. Problems relating to distinguishing among abuse, estrangement, gatekeeping and alienation to legal reforms, and therapeutic interventions needed to address AB-PA (Attachment Based – Parental Alienation), pose considerable challenges for practitioners and justice reform in South Africa.

When it comes to the empirical study of pathogenic parents, the state of knowledge has advanced considerably. There has been an explosion of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research on pathogenic parent over the past decade. The research may be considered robust regarding definition and characterics of parental alienation, incidences, and prevalence rates, and most importantly, the effects of pathogenic parenting on children and parents’ relationships. Abundant research suggests that pathogenic parenting is a serious form of psychological child abuse and even calls that Parental Alienation be included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR)