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STJ, 3ª Turma, REsp 2.108.750/GO – alienação parental e abuso sexual: anulação por insuficiência probatória (2024)

Court: Superior Tribunal de Justiça (STJ – Brazilian Superior Court of Justice), Terceira Turma (Third Panel) Case reference: Recurso Especial nº 2.108.750/GO Date of judgment: 2024 (the exact data do julgamento and DJe publication date are not publicly confirmed in the secondary sources used here and would need to be confirmed from the STJ jurisprudence portal at scon.stj.jus.br directly) Relator (Reporting Justice): not publicly confirmed in the secondary sources surveyed; the case is reported in practitioner commentary as a Terceira Turma decision but the named Ministro Relator is not given in those sources Lower courts: Brazilian first-instance vara de família (Goiás) and Tribunal de Justiça do Estado de Goiás (TJGO); file numbers below STJ are not publicly confirmed Statute interpreted: Lei nº 12.318, de 26 de agosto de 2010 (Lei da Alienação Parental), in particular arts. 5º (perícia psicológica ou biopsicossocial) and 6º (catalogue of remedies); read together with the Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente (ECA – Lei nº 8.069/1990) and the Convenção sobre os Direitos da Criança (ratified by Brazil in 1990) Reported at / primary sources: Conjur – "Saiba o que o STJ tem decidido sobre perícia e alteração de guarda em casos de alienação parental", 2 January 2026 | Parental – Dossiê "Alienação Parental: Jurisprudências Essenciais"

Parties

  • Recorrente / recorrido: anonymised in line with Brazilian privacy convention for family-court and child-protection matters; the parents' names and the child's name are not publicly confirmed in the available secondary sources.
  • Minor child: anonymised; the child's age and sex are not publicly confirmed in the available secondary sources.
  • Ministério Público estadual (Goiás): intervenes in the proceedings under art. 5º of Lei 12.318/2010 and under art. 201 of the Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente; the named promotor de justiça is not publicly confirmed.
  • Panel composition (Terceira Turma): not publicly confirmed in the secondary sources surveyed; the practitioner press identifies the panel as the Terceira Turma but does not name the Ministros sitting on the day.

Background

REsp 2.108.750/GO is one of the most-cited 2024 illustrations of the Terceira Turma of the STJ confronting the central interpretive tension in Brazilian alienação parental jurisprudence: what does a family-court judge do when the case file contains both an allegation of alienating conduct by one parent and an allegation of sexual abuse against the other parent?

That tension is at the centre of the Brazilian political debate over Lei nº 12.318/2010. The argument for full statutory revocation – embodied in Projeto de Lei nº 1.372/2023, approved by the Chamber's Comissão de Constituição e Justiça on 3 December 2025 by 37 to 28 votes – is that the alienação parental framework has been used in lower-court practice to discount or override allegations of intra-family violence, particularly sexual abuse of children, when those allegations come through the parent (usually the mother) who is then accused of alienation (Câmara dos Deputados – "Revogação da Lei de Alienação Parental tem apoio de parlamentares de espectros políticos opostos"; Brasil de Fato – "Comissão da Câmara aprova projeto que derruba lei da alienação parental", 3 December 2025; Agência Brasil – "CCJ da Câmara aprova fim da lei de alienação parental"; Migalhas – Parecer jurídico sobre o PL 1372/23).

The Conselho Nacional de Direitos Humanos, the Conselho Nacional de Saúde and the United Nations have all recommended revocation on substantially the same ground (Câmara dos Deputados news).

It is in this contested landscape that the Terceira Turma of the STJ, in REsp 2.108.750/GO, addressed the procedural treatment of reciprocal allegations: one parent accusing the other of alienação parental under Lei 12.318/2010, the other parent (or the relevant child-protection authority) alleging sexual abuse against the first. The Court was asked, in substance, whether a custody-modification remedy under art. 6º of Lei 12.318/2010 could be applied without the full evidentiary investigation that the gravity of the sexual-abuse allegation independently required.

Key facts

  • The proceedings involved reciprocal accusations: alienação parental alleged by one parent under Lei 12.318/2010 and abuso sexual alleged by the other parent or by a child-protection authority (Conjur, 2 January 2026).
  • The first-instance vara de família and the TJGO took procedural decisions that – in the view of the STJ – did not exhaust the "ampla instrução probatória" (full evidentiary investigation) that the gravity of the case required.
  • The Terceira Turma was asked to set aside those procedural acts on the recurso especial.
  • The exact lower-court decisions, the substance of the parents' submissions, and the role of the Ministério Público at first instance are not publicly confirmed in the available secondary sources.

Procedural posture

A recurso especial under art. 105, III of the Federal Constitution, decided by the Terceira Turma of the STJ. The Third Panel has subject-matter jurisdiction over family-law special appeals.

The decision

The Terceira Turma annulled procedural acts in the proceedings below to ensure full evidentiary investigation. The Court's reasoning, as summarised by the Brazilian practitioner press, was as follows:

"A cautela probatória do STJ se intensifica quando o debate envolve a aplicação das sanções previstas na Lei de Alienação Parental, especialmente a alteração de guarda."

(in English: "The STJ's evidentiary caution intensifies when the debate involves the application of the sanctions provided for in the Parental Alienation Law, especially the change of custody.")

(Conjur, 2 January 2026)

And:

"Embora a corte reconheça que o exame pericial não é prova absoluta, a jurisprudência indica que a sua dispensa só se justifica quando o conjunto probatório é excepcionalmente robusto."

(in English: "Although the Court recognises that expert examination is not absolute proof, the jurisprudence indicates that its waiver is only justified when the body of evidence is exceptionally robust.")

(Conjur, 2 January 2026)

Three propositions are extracted from the decision by Brazilian commentators:

  1. Procedural acts must be annulled where the evidentiary investigation is insufficient. In a case of reciprocal alienação parental and abuso sexual allegations, the STJ will annul lower-court decisions that proceeded without the perícia psicológica or biopsicossocial mandated by art. 5º of Lei 12.318/2010 or without the equivalent technical examination required by the sexual-abuse allegation (Conjur, 2 January 2026).
  2. Evidentiary caution intensifies with the severity of the proposed remedy. The Terceira Turma's "cautela probatória" is intensified – not merely maintained – where the sanction sought under Lei 12.318/2010 is custody inversion (art. 6º, V). The implication is that the more disruptive the proposed remedy, the more demanding the evidentiary threshold (Conjur, 2 January 2026).
  3. A label cannot substitute for fact-finding. The Court rejects the proposition that the alienação parental label – or, symmetrically, the abuse label – can be applied as if it dispenses with the duty of evidentiary inquiry. Hasty decisions without sufficient technical support can generate irreversible damage to child development (Conjur, 2 January 2026).

The decision sits alongside, and reinforces, the Terceira Turma's "no-automaticity" doctrine articulated in REsp 1.859.228/SP (Rel. Min. Nancy Andrighi) – see separate case-study file.

Who else was involved

  • Tribunal de Justiça do Estado de Goiás (TJGO) – the intermediate-appellate court whose decision was set aside.
  • Ministério Público estadual – mandatory intervener under art. 5º of Lei 12.318/2010 and art. 201 of the Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente.
  • Conselho Tutelar (Goiás) – the Brazilian child-protection authority of first contact, which in cases of alleged child sexual abuse must take and forward the initial report under art. 13 of the ECA. Its involvement in this specific case is not publicly confirmed.
  • Conselho Nacional de Justiça (CNJ) – on 3 October 2024, on the proposal of a working group coordinated by Ministra Nancy Andrighi, the CNJ approved Recomendação CNJ nº 157/2024, the Protocol for Especial Hearing of Children and Adolescents in family-court proceedings discussing alienação parental (Recomendação CNJ nº 157/2024 – PDF; STJ news item, 19 September 2024; Conjur – "CNJ aprova protocolo de escuta especializada"). The Protocol is the procedural counterpart of the substantive doctrine elaborated in REsp 2.108.750/GO.

Reactions and commentary

  • Conjur treats REsp 2.108.750/GO as the operative 2024 illustration of the Terceira Turma's evidentiary discipline in alienação-parental cases involving abuse allegations: it stands, with REsp 1.859.228/SP, at the centre of the Court's contemporary doctrine (Conjur, 2 January 2026).
  • The case is included in the Dossiê PARENTAL compilation of "Jurisprudências Essenciais" on alienação parental (Parental – Dossiê).
  • The Brazilian feminist civil-society organisations that have driven Projeto de Lei nº 1.372/2023 read the case as confirming, in part, the political case for revocation: if the STJ itself feels compelled to annul lower-court decisions because the alienação parental framework was applied without proper evidentiary investigation of abuse allegations, the framework is operationally unsafe. The opposing reading – that the case shows the system self-corrects – is articulated in the Migalhas legal opinion against PL 1.372/23 (Migalhas – Parecer jurídico sobre o PL 1372/23).

Why this case matters

REsp 2.108.750/GO is the Brazilian Supreme Court of Justice confronting, in 2024, the exact problem that has been at the centre of the Western parental-alienation debate for two decades: the interaction between alienating-conduct findings and child-safeguarding evidence.

The STJ's answer was procedural rather than ideological. It did not declare alienação parental as a concept to be "pseudo-scientific" (as the Italian Court of Cassation did in Cass. 9691/2022). It did not deploy fundamental-rights review (as the German BVerfG 1 BvR 1076/23). It used the ordinary tools of civil procedure: annul the lower-court acts, require full evidentiary investigation, and intensify evidentiary caution in proportion to the gravity of the proposed remedy.

For comparative purposes three features stand out:

  1. It is a procedural-discipline answer to a substantive concern. Where Italian and German jurisprudence have moved against the substantive PA framework, the Brazilian Terceira Turma has retained the framework while disciplining its application through the evidentiary law of recurso especial. This is the kind of incrementalist, procedural answer that civilian and common-law systems can both adopt without taking sides on the underlying clinical debate.
  2. It is reciprocal. The decision is genuinely symmetrical: it does not privilege the alienação-parental finding over the abuse finding, or vice versa. Both labels must be evidentially established. This is the procedural-symmetry move that has been argued for by Joan Meier and the WCJC in the United States, by Adrienne Barnett in England, and by the EU PROCHILD network in continental Europe.
  3. It is embedded in a political contest about the underlying statute. REsp 2.108.750/GO is being decided in the very year (and in the very Court) whose interpretation of Lei 12.318/2010 will determine whether the statute is operationally needed, or whether Projeto de Lei nº 1.372/2023 should proceed to revoke it. The Terceira Turma's procedural-discipline answer is the implicit case for keeping the statute on the books, applied with evidentiary rigour.

For the parental-alienation discourse, REsp 2.108.750/GO is important because it demonstrates that a supreme court can hold the alienação parental concept and the child-protection concept in evidentiary balance without taking sides on the clinical dispute. The Court demands proof – on both sides – before the most disruptive remedies are applied.

For honest PA advocacy, the case is also a caution. It shows that the highest Brazilian civil court found enough lower-court applications of Lei 12.318/2010 problematic, in cases involving safeguarding allegations, that it has had to develop a doctrine of procedural annulment to address them. The legitimate concerns of the proponents of statutory revocation are not invented; they have led the Terceira Turma to annul proceedings in cases like REsp 2.108.750/GO.

Sources