Bill to Make It Harder to Protect Children from Parental Alienation Passes Committee

2007-04-12
By

AB 612, a bill which will make it harder to protect children from Parental Alienation, passed the California Assembly Judiciary Committee yesterday on an 8-1 vote.

The bill would discourage mental health professionals from issuing findings of Parental Alienation in divorce/custody cases. It would also make it more difficult for target parents to get courts to order psychological evaluations as part of child custody investigations. To learn more about the bill, see my co-authored column AB 612 Will Make It Harder to Protect Children from Parental Alienation (Riverside Press-Enterprise, 4/2/07).

On a positive note, while it’s still a bad bill, the worst language from the bill was struck, largely (though not completely) weakening the bill. Originally the bill read:

“Controversial, nonscientific labels, such as parental alienation syndrome, parental alienation, or alienated child, are specifically excluded as allowable diagnoses and for court use.”

The Family Law Executive Committee of the California State Bar opposed this language, and Michael Robinson of the California Alliance for Families and Children worked with mental health professionals to get this language removed.

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4 views

  • wls1

    The deletion of specific reference to parental alienation will almost certainly have minimal salutary effect if this bill continues to move through the Legislature and becomes law.

    The broad but incisive exclusionary language included in the bill, in the form in which it passed the committee, would enable a parent or her attorney to challenge all consideration of parental alienation by the court in connection with a custody evaluation. The discussion of proponents’ statements on parental alienation as satisfying the proposed statute’s criterion for exclusion in the committee counsel’s Analysis of AB 612 can moreover be validly cited as indicating legislative intent that the concept be disallowed as evidence. A higher court precedent to similar effect, establishing case law affecting all courts, is likely to follow enactment in fairly short order.

    The bill will be voted upon by the whole Assembly fairly soon, and if it passes there, further debated and voted on in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    It’s a transparently dishonest, malicious measure which Californians ought to rise up over and defeat.

  • tonysprout

    Why can’t these pricks stop stripping God given rights away from parents? Assholes, I can’t wait for the Chinese to take over Calif. (By that time thee rest of America will be so broke, the Chi will not be interested)

  • wls1

    “[T]hese pricks” keep making it tougher for parents because NO ONE BOTHERS OR HAS THE BALLS TO OPPOSE THEM, for most practical purposes. Fathers wear a `kick me’ sign in Sacramento.






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