Custody Disputes Often Ignore Evidence of Child Abuse
By Marie Tessier, Women’s eNews
Posted on July 11, 2007, Printed on July 12, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/56525/
Numerous psychological assessments have been developed to measure trauma in children, theoretically providing a tool for family courts and child protective workers to help determine where custody should be granted or where the child’s best interests lay. But advocates for mothers who lose custody to men they accuse of abuse say courts and social workers often fail to use those tests, or ignore results once they’re complete.
“It’s very common for people to make recommendations in child protective cases and child custody litigation without ever looking at clinical evidence of child abuse, spouse abuse or trauma,” says Robert A. Geffner, who directs the Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma in San Diego’s Alliant International University.
This reality, combined with the complex interplay of law, science and culture, has led advocates for women and for abused children to call for reforms in the nation’s family courts in order to achieve justice for victims involved in the most contentious custody fights. Advocates for reform say it’s the women involved who most often find themselves on the losing end.
A landmark report from the Washington-based American Psychological Association in 1996 showed that abusers seek sole custody more often than nonviolent parents. And other research indicates that abusers succeed in gaining custody about 70 percent of the time when they try, according to judicial training materials from the National Center for State Courts, a legal education and court service organization based in Williamsburg, Va.
Psychologists and psychiatrists involved in case assessments say part of the reason that trauma assessments are not used is because they are costly and time-consuming, and they don’t always come out with conclusive results.
“You have to do interviews with all the parties, look at the medical records and the criminal records, talk to the school therapists and teachers. Look at all the data and then put together all the pieces of the puzzle,” says Geffner, who is a leader in the Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence. The group is a nonprofit with an office in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., that promotes the ethical use of medical and psychological science in policy debates on violence.
Disputed Sides, Dueling Experts
By the time a typical case comes before a judge, psychologists and advocates for battered women say, both sides in a custody dispute have developed a body of evidence — and have often engaged dueling teams of experts — to support their claims.
If the family has already been involved with child protective services or the police, routine investigative errors can complicate the picture for a trial judge, says Frances S. Waters, an authority on child abuse who practices in Marquette, Mich., and serves as an expert witness in child custody proceedings.
“There are a lot of problems with procedures that have a profound impact on the outcome of an investigation, and that often means that truthful allegations of child abuse are not found to be credible,” says Waters, who is also involved with the Leadership Council. If the perpetrator is the one who brings a child to an interview with an investigator or an evaluator, she adds as an example, the child is not going to feel safe to divulge her experience.
Among the perils facing protective mothers seeking custody is the widely discredited — yet widely used — theory called the “parental alienation syndrome.”
It is heralded by some fathers’ rights groups and used by alleged abusers, as well as some custody evaluators and judges, to cast battered women and protective parents as having “brainwashed” or “alienated” a child from the parent accused of abuse. The concept received a new public airing in April when actor Alec Baldwin accused his ex-wife, Kim Basinger, of alienating him from his 11-year-old daughter. The remark came to light after a taped phone call in which he berated the girl as a “thoughtless little pig” was posted on the Internet. Baldwin and Basinger have been involved in a contentious custody dispute since 2002.
However, research published in several psychology journals indicates that divorce or custody disputes do not give rise to an increased number of false allegations and untrue claims most often come from fathers, not mothers. The proposed syndrome is not a recognized diagnosis by the American Psychological Association, which says the theory lacks clinical data to support it and cautions against using the term.
Tools to Assess Violence
One of the clinical measures that provide evidence when victim statements and other evidence of abuse fail to persuade evaluators and judges is the UCLA Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Index, developed at the University of California, Los Angeles. It is a 48-item interview about physical, sexual and emotional trauma that is used for adults and children. It assesses 19 symptoms, such as whether someone re-experiences a trauma, avoids talking or thinking about it, has trouble concentrating or startles easily, according to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, a project of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Other assessments include the Child Trauma Symptom Inventory, evaluations for depression and anxiety, the Dissociative Experiences Scale and the Child Sexual Behavior Inventory, according to scholars who specialize in trauma.
Access to these tests is controlled to prevent cheating and coaching. The results are just one piece of a full evaluation, according to test distributors and scholars.
During the past 15 years, a number of legal and professional groups seeking to prevent family violence have published guidelines and model procedures for courts to use when evaluating and deciding custody cases.
Those include the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, based in Reno, Nev.; the American Psychological Association; the American Law Institute, based in Philadelphia; and the National Center for State Courts.
Domestic Violence Skeptics
On the other side of the issue, fathers’ rights groups and advocates for noncustodial parents are skeptical of the growing body of research on domestic violence, much of which has provided the rationale seeking to standardize the process for identifying abuse. They say that family courts are often too quick to make findings of abuse.
The American Coalition for Fathers and Children, based in Washington, D.C., says that a small portion of divorce and custody disputes are driving false allegations and that too many fit parents are losing custody of their children.
“When there’s any allegation of domestic abuse in the context of a custody proceeding, the accused should be afforded the same protections of those who are accused in the criminal justice system,” said Michael McCormick, executive director of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children.
That means all parents would be presumed innocent and entitled to parental rights until abuse is proved beyond a reasonable doubt, McCormick says.
Meanwhile, psychologists who advocate for battered women say their own credentials, thorough adherence to protocol and solid evidence can carry little weight in a courtroom, especially when they are hired by one side in a dispute.
“In the end, if protective services doesn’t find an allegation to be credible, the court is going to make a finding and the defense is going to have its own expert,” Waters says. “It becomes a battle of the experts.”
Marie Tessier writes frequently about violence against women and legal affairs.
4 Comments
July 17, 2007 at 11:18 pm
You do children a great disservice by stating or implying that Parental Alienation does not exist. It is a fact of life and even common sense. The fact that it is not yet recognized in the psychiatric manuals (DSM-IV) is true and just a function of a slow process mainly. There is little to support your stronger comment that it has been discredited – this is just propaganda, not reporting the truth and you must check your sources for this. Statistics clearly show that over 40% of children will lose contact with the non-custodial parent within two years of divorce. The cause of this spearation can be overt, covert or even unintentional but it seems in most cases the custodial parent is driven to get the other parent out of the child’s life. The research and statistics on fatherless children are so clear they are very scary. Social pathologies increase by a FACTOR of 6 to 24 in fatherless homes! These include crime, teen pregnancy, school drop outs and mental illness problems. They all skyrocket when a father is not in the home to provide a balanced upbringing with a male form of parenting. It is basically now scientific fact that “Equal PArenting” is far superior for children and people preaching otherwise are misinformed or just plain peddling a disingenuoes agenda. Unformtunately our divorce system has been corrupted by profits and the “best interest of the child” standard is reall “the best interests of the lawyers, judges and governement jobs” created by this $100 billion plus induustry which was to keep sole-custody as a standard to keep $50 billion in legal fees for custody battle flowing. Yes it is ethically revolting. Feminists must admit that a balanced upbringing involving both parents is far better for children or they are damaging their own children. Over 200 research studies have made this clear. A parent who tries to drive the other parent out of the children’s lives, except in extreme and rare circumstances of physical abuse, is commiting their own children to repeat the cycle of divorce. This will become a crime in the future as the judicial system catches up with reality. The chances of divorce in a child brought up in a sole-custody arrangement is 93%! It is now agreed by most experts that sole custody is a serious form of child abuse and we must work togehter to save our children by instituting equal parenting arrangements as a default by law. Child support means love, learning, nurturing and much more, not just money. Many, if not most, men want to step up to do this for their children and be part of their lives. Men and women do not appreciate each others’s parenting style differences, but science proves that two parent are always better than one for those lacking a grasp of good common sense.
July 18, 2007 at 4:33 am
Have you watched this clip->
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWctoP7BAx4
If you missed it the first time around take a look. Sounds to me like Parental Alienation Syndrome is very real and destroying our children!
Stop using the fact that you feel PAS is discredited to allow the alienator to continue to alienate, stop being so selfish show you can be a good parent and understand these children suffering from PAS are being abused!
Louise
July 18, 2007 at 7:34 am
You’ve really got to wonder … the anti-Parental Alienation People claim that parental alienation is only used in order to cover up child abuse. As child abuse is such a lightening rod topic – i.e. everybody is sickened by the abuse of a child – then you’d think that with claims of Parental Alienation not only exploding across the nation and around the world (claims that seem to tie into the status of custody disputes quite nicely) but also being accepted by courts, psychiatrists and to be considered for DSM-V, that the entire country has just closed their eyes. In short, for the argument line of ‘there is no Parental Alienation, it’s just covering up child abuse’ to work, there’d have to be child abuse of such epidemic proportions that the country would be falling apart. People aren’t that stupid. Unless of course they believe you, but we know that that’s a minority.
July 18, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Whether a syndrome or not, parental alienation is quite simply another word for child abuse and the abuse of a child’s parent. It does exist and is at epidemic proportions.
I am one of many, and of the MALE gender, that does not have to question its existence or how insidious are its effects. Neither does my daughter of twenty one years who even now cannot in even the slightest manner of description reconnect with me after being completely cut off from me for the past fifteen years due to the behaviors of her deeply confused, narcissistic, vicious, unhealed, diabolical mother, the DIRECT actions of a delusional, advocacy group, Justice for Children, the Victim’s Assistance Centre, Inc. Houston, Texas that threw me out of “supervised” visitation and permanently terminated my daughter’s access to me when I complained about a blanket, outdoor pesticide spraying taking place while my daughter was in thier care, in a swim pool breahting it all in, and inept attornies and judges too stupid to recognize vicious child abuse when it is right in front of their faces.
Parental Alienation is rampant in America today.
Here is a critical question for some of the causal reasons for its existence and its epidemic proportion:
How can a system recognize abuse when it abuses? Our largest systems function with the same symptomologies as an addict in a progressed state of addiction. [Read: When Society Becomes An Addict, Anne Wilson Schaef, Harper and Row, 1986],(which by the way is the same year Richard Gardner came forth with his estimations about PAS). Federal laws are shining examples of the government’s progressed and deeply diseased state of addiction. The federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity and Reconciliation Act(PRWORA), otherwise known as the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, is one such example. This law sets up a system where the Fed pays states to turn one parent usually the father ( since 85% of custody decisions result in the mother as head of household) into a wage slave and visitor, at best, with his child. States, similarly addicted, have every interest to make this father into a billfold to gain dedicated federal kickback monies. States do not even have to account for how this is spent within the state bureaucractic machinery. One of the most insidious effects of this situation is that many mothers learn to and subsequently subvert, undermine any remaining relationship a father might have with his child, and these mothers do this with impunity! No law exists to safeguard the little remaining relationship. A father must find oceans of dollars, hire lawyers, file motions, and wait to hope to coerce this mother to abide by the first set of orders. So you see the system actually teaches and indoctrinates mothers ( in this scenario) to alienate!
As an aside, groups like Justice for Children and Stop Family Violence are continuing to busily build and fuel fires of hatred of men by women (gender war) because they too are similarly addicted. Among their diseased symptomology is grandiosity, dualism, control, hypervigilance, lack of objectivity, and hence cannot see or function clearly. With a recent lawsuit filed by Justice for Children, Stop Family Violence, and even the National Organization of Women to the Interamerican Commission of Human Rights, they claiming that men are sexual abusers and these men go for custody in the family courts and do so by claiming parental alienation by the mother. Sadly for them, their addicted and delusional status prevents them from seeing clearly that if for example, they had just left GENDER ASSIGNMENTS out of their presumed equasion, that only fathers commit child sexual abuse, with attendant omissions, like the fact that fathers seldom sexually abuse thier own children, and that such abuse comes far more often from a step father or a divorced mother’s boyfriend, or other omissions like the fact that percentage of false allegations of sexual abuse is very high, these groups and thier affiliates would actually be trodding on a roadway with health and functinoality under thier feet, hence using thier energies and resources to advance truth and justice and be working to do it for EVERYONE.
For those of you who are newer to this discussion may I suggest you avail yourselves of http://www.paawareness.com , http://www.parental-alienation-awareness.com , http://www.paskids.com , and http://www.rgardner.com, and other similar sites.
Robert Gartner