On May the 23rd, journalist Cristina Bazán from EFeminista interviewed Leila Linhares Barsted about the Parental Alienation Laws that proliferate in Latin America. EFeminista is a digital magazine of Agencia EFE, the main news agency in Spanish, which supplies more than 2,000 media outlets around the world every day.
In this interview Leila informed about the Brazilian Parental Alienation Law and its recent modification that excludes the loss of custody of minor children and about the efforts of various institutions and, in particular, of feminist movements and women’s groups for the total repeal of this law. As a member of the Committee of Experts (CEVI) of the Follow-Up Mechanism of the Convention of Belém do Pará (MESECVI), Leila emphasized the position of the CEVI against this Law, which it considers yet another violence against women, as well as the decisions of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that call for the repeal of the Law. For Leila, SAP, political violence, family violence and various other forms of gender violence are part of the same strategy of the extreme right and religious conservative forces to remove from women their hard-won rights and make them submissive to patriarchal power.