Abusers gaining custody in family courts: A case series of over turned decisions

Ideology and Rhetoric Replace Science and Reason in Some Parental Alienation Literature and Advocacy: A Critique

“…Some research has identified such misclassified cases, in which courts themselves recognized that previous decisions mislabeling protective efforts as alienation strategies subjected children to years of ongoing abuse (Silberg & Dallam, ). Other research has documented courts' tendency to adopt alienation labels even though supporting evidence for alienation is lacking (Milchman, ).…”

“…The behavioral descriptions contained in custody evaluations must be interpreted within the frameworks provided by the robust science that exists in the fields of attachment, trauma, child development, family psychology, and diagnostic assessment. Decisions must rely on behavioral descriptions that provide enough specific evidence pertaining to each possible cause of parent rejection in individual cases to reduce the risk that children will be removed from protective, loving and loved parents, and placed with parents they have legitimate reason to fear, resist or reject (Meier, ; Mercer, 2019; Silberg & Dallam, ).…”

“…In short, in our view, labeling a behavior problem as if it were a scientifically validated diagnosis, with specific implications for children, families, and their treatment, in the absence of the necessary empirical research, is premature at best and destructively misleading at worst (see Mercer (2019) for a discussion of negative consequences of specialized treatment programs, and Warshak () for the evolution of some programs to reduce the risk of negative consequences from erroneous labels). It encourages the legal system to ignore the risk that legitimate abuse cases are being misinterpreted and misclassified as PAS/PAD/PA cases (Meier, , ; Milchman, ; Silberg & Dallam, ; Warshak, ). This can be to the enormous detriment of children and protective parents, many of whom we have seen sadly watch their children continue to be abused after a court ignores legitimate abuse reports and adopts the alienation label.…”

“…Nevertheless, none of this agreement has reduced the misuse of alienation allegations to mask abuse or other parenting deficits in practice (Meier, , ; Milchman, , ; Silberg & Dallam, ). Despite their acknowledgement of child abuse and parenting deficits as reasonable causes of parent rejection, some alienation theorists still appear to propound a single‐factor explanation of children's rejection of a parent because they do not give weight to causes other than alienation in their approach to practice (Lorandos, Bernet, & Sauber, ).…”

“…The expert opinions and recommendations that those labels encourage are based more on ideological assumptions than on rigorous assessment and critical analysis of observable behaviors. This is not scientifically acceptable; it does not serve as accurate case identification, and worse, is often severely harmful to children and parents (Silberg & Dallam, ).…”