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Child and Mother Sabotage (CAMS) is when an abusive father/parent intentionally undermines the other parent’s relationship with the children.
CAMS is a new term (based on research published in October 2023) to describe Coercively controlling male abusers that sabotage the children’s relationship with their mother in order to
Enforce their belief that the mother and children should be obedient to them and their authority in the family. (For such abusers, children are considered a possession, beneath the mother who is also seen by the abuser as a possession.)
Abuse the mother by indirectly hurting her relationship with her children. One Australian study reported an abuser said:
‘Why [attack] her mothering? It was just to assert power over her … attacking something … that probably means the most to her’ – perpetrator quoted in Heward-Belle, 2017, pp. 8–9).
Examples of this are available globally, such as in this study from South Africa:
‘He’d tell me I’m a crap mother, that someone else should be looking after my children, that I don’t know what I’m doing. He would undermine me and say this in front of my children’ (Dekel and Abrahams, 2023, p. 6).
Recognition of CAMS can also help professionals to see how male abusers exploit the family courts in order to succeed in their post-separation abuse of the mother, including sabotage of mother–child relationships.
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