Note: Parental alienation in the news again. That anyone would seriously argue that this doesn’t happen is truly amazing. I often wonder if it will ever happen that we will apply intelligence and wisdom to our national policies with respect to bringing children into the world and nurturing them. It almost seems as if we have created a system specifically designed to place almost all of our parents and children in a living hell.

Bill addresses theory used in custody cases – Whittier Daily News

A state bill that would set guidelines for child custody cases has highlighted a nearly 20-year-old dispute over a theory used by psychological evaluators.

The bill, AB 612, which failed to pass into law in 2007, targeted the controversial theory, called Parental Alienation Syndrome. The syndrome describes behavior where one parent turns a child against the other, convincing the child the parent has treated him or her badly, even when they have not.

Dr. Philip Stahl, a California evaluator and member of the state’s Association of Family & Conciliation Courts, says evaluators are split in their beliefs about whether children can be alienated.

“You have evaluators who really don’t understand alienation, and people who want to apply it in every case,” said Stahl.

Evaluators are not the only ones with differing views on the issue: there are stalwart advocates who believe that hundreds of people have suffered because of parental alienation, and those who believe just as many have suffered from false charges of the syndrome.

Women’s group advocates say the theory has been used by courts to place children with abusive fathers, and strip mothers of their custodial rights.

“It’s junk science used to target women and take their custody rights away,” said Karen Anderson, a spokesperson for the California Protective Parent’s Association. “It’s a problem in courts all over the country.”

Julia Cotton, a mother from Los Angeles County, said that a custody evaluation in her divorce case accused her of alienation and led to her young daughter being placed with her husband full time.”Her recommendation led to me only getting my daughter for supervised visits,” said Cotton. “When I saw her she acted traumatized and seemed totally out of it.”

Cotton said she suspected that her ex-husband was abusing her daughter in some way, but didn’t know what to do about it.

“I knew that the more I tried to do something about it, the more I would be accused of alienation,” she said.

While woman’s groups tout Cotton’s story as a typical one throughout California, father’s rights group have a polar-opposite view of custody courts and alienation.

“Ninety-eight percent of the time that you see abuse charges that have not been verified by police, those allegations are coached,” said J. Michael Kelly, a Los Angeles County lawyer, and member of the United Fathers of California law group.

One father from the San Gabriel Valley in the middle of a custody battle who asked to be called Norm said his two teenage daughters say they don’t want to have anything to do with him, and he can’t figure out why.

“They call me a violent man, they say I am aggravating,” said Norm. “I had a bad custody evaluator and now I barely see them.”

Norm said he believes his wife is genuinely convinced that he does not treat their kids well.

“I don’t think she is trying to be vindictive,” he said. “I just think in her mind, there is some deeper mental problem that is convincing her I’d be bad for the kids.”

The text of the 2007 version of AB 612 was drafted by the CPPA and explicitly banned the use of Parental Alienation Syndrome, or just the term alienation from use in evaluations. It also aimed to minimize the use of custody evaluations.

The family law section of the state bar and several psychologists groups banded together to oppose the bill.

The 2008 version of the bill is much vaguer than its predecessor, stating evaluators will be forced to conform to “standards generally accepted by the medical, psychiatric, legal, and psychological communities.” The bill does not specifically mention Parental Alienation Syndrome.

“The thinking was that if you mentioned specific syndromes or disorders, people who would use them in evaluations would just start calling them by a different name,” said Ira Ruskin, D-Redwood City, who introduced the bill.

But, Karen Anderson, who helped draft the original bill, said the new version, labeled AB 2587, is not strong enough.

“It’s not an unusual process for a bill,” said Anderson. “It starts out strong and then it gets watered down and a lot of the great stuff gets thrown out.”

Stahl says that while the bill provides more guidelines for judges in what to expect from evaluators, the judges themselves still bring their own expectations about alienation into the courtroom.

“Courts are ruling in favor of people unfairly accused of alienation, and they are ruling against people who have been alienated ” said Stahl. “Problems described by advocates on both sides on the issue are happening.”

An additional problem, evaluators say, is that even with the right training, it is not always possible for them to tell when talking to a child, whether the abuse the child describes is really happening or not.

“There are real cases of abuse and false allegations,” said Dr. Mitch Eisen, a Cal State Los Angeles psychologist and professional evaluator. “Both happen, and it is often impossible to differentiate between the two.”

Stahl says that in some cases, the children themselves aren’t even sure if what they are saying is true.

“You’ve got kids who don’t know what to believe,” said Stahl. “It’s hard to tell what is and isn’t real.”

In a custody case involving the three grandchildren of Rep. Gary Miller, R-Brea, custody evaluators struggled to determine whether alleged abuse by Miller’s son occurred or not, according to court records.

A court decision giving temporary partial-custody to Gary Miller and his wife led to the mother of children, Jennifer DeJongh of Diamond Bar, to take the children and leave town, violating the court order and turning her into a fugitive.

It was an unfortunate end to a nasty year-and-a-half custody case between DeJongh and Brian Miller, the son of the congressman, with DeJongh accusing Miller of abuse and violence, and Miller countering that Dejongh had coached the kids to say he was abusive.

Despite three different psychological evaluations, no doctor was able to reach a clear conclusion either that DeJongh had coached the children to lie about being abused by their father, Brian Miller, or that Miller had actually abused them.

To mothers’ advocates, the Miller case is another example of a mother treated unfairly by the courts.

But in the world of father advocates, the case was seized on as another example of alienation, with one group, the Children’s Rights Initiative for Sharing Parents Equally, describing the congressman as a “victim of grandfather alienation.”

Divisions over cases with alienation and abuse are not easily mended, says Stahl, because they are usually gender-based.

That problem, says Stahl, dates back to the founder of the Parental Alienation Syndrome theory, Dr. Richard Gardner, who described the syndrome as a strategy for women to strip father’s of their parental rights.

“I believe alienation does exist, but not in the Gardner model, which was presented with clear gender-bias,” said Stahl.

Dr. Amy Baker, a psychiatrist and believer in Parental Alienation Syndrome who wrote a book on the experiences of adult children who claim to have suffered alienation, says the gender issue is overshadowing the problems victims are facing.

“It is unfortunate that women’s groups have taken a stance against the issue, because many women have suffered because of the actions of alienators,” said Baker, who added that both men and women alienate their children from the other parent.

A 2005 study of 125 high-conflict divorce cases by San Jose State University researcher Janet Johnstone indicated that Baker might be right. The study found that 50 percent of women in the cases showed signs of alienating their children, and 45 percent of men.

Gardner’s papers on the subject, written in the late 1980s, sold the behavior as primarily occurring in women, and formed the basis for the fathers’ rights advocates to use alienation as an argument in custody court. Gardner himself often acted as an expert witness on behalf of men.

But Gardner’s theories have never been endorsed by the American Psychological Association, and many evaluators reject them.

Several evaluators interviewed agreed that it is not unusual for one parent to turn a child against the other, but that the behavior shouldn’t be described as a psychological disorder, the way Gardner intended.

“The syndrome describes a typical pattern of behavior, but calling it a syndrome makes it sound medical, and it’s not,” said Eisen.

“The dispute over whether Gardner’s ideas hold merit or not is not limited to advocates alone,” says Stahl.

The dispute sometimes means making strategic court decisions: some lawyers will recommend to clients to keep abuse allegations quiet to avoid trouble in court.

One mother, who asked that her name not be used, had her custody of the kids challenged by her husband and said her lawyer suggested she not bring in allegations of sexual abuse.

“There were so many other things we felt we could prove that I didn’t want to bring in allegations I had suspicions about, but couldn’t prove,” she said.

She ultimately was able to make the case to keep primary custody without the charges.

“Judges are pretty cautious about abuse charges in a custody case,” said Thomas Lyon, a USC law professor and psychologist who has investigated custody cases for the county and argued as a lawyer in family courts. “Making allegations can make the accuser look vindictive, and lead to judicial backlash.”