My new co-authored column, In this Turf War, Kids Are the Prize (Tallahassee Democrat, 6/13/07), defends the concept of Parental Alienation against recent attacks from the National Organization for Women, the Family Violence Prevention Fund, and numerous other misguided women’s groups.
The column, which appears below, was written primarily as a response to NOW president Kim Gandy’s recent anti-father editorial Sick Joke or Sick Reality?
To write a Letter to the Editor of the Tallahassee Democrat regarding the column, write to letters@tallahassee.com.
In this Turf War, Kids Are the Prize
By Jeffery M. Leving and Glenn Sacks
Tallahassee Democrat, 6/13/07
In part because of the Alec Baldwin-Kim Basinger custody battle, the controversial concept of Parental Alienation is now being debated extensively in the media. Parental Alienation often arises after a divorce or separation, as one parent turns the children against the other parent, often employing false allegations to do so. Baldwin claims that he is the target parent of PA.
Misguided women’s advocates assert that PA is a myth used by abusive fathers to blame their ex-wives when their children are hostile to them. Recently, Kim Gandy, President of the National Organization for Women, condemned PA as “junk science, junk justice.†NOW, the Family Violence Prevention Fund, and a dozen other women’s groups signed on to a complaint filed against the United States this month with the Inter American Commission on Human Rights. The complaint claims that American courts victimize abused mothers by “frequently awarding child custody to abusers.â€Â
In reality, when domestic violence allegations are made, judges take them very seriously, preferring to ”err on the side of caution” even when evidence is lacking. By contrast, fathers who are targets of false accusations and parental alienation can only protect their relationships with their children by financing expensive legal battles.
Despite the controversy, PA is a common phenomenon which has been well-documented and widely supported in the mental health community. For example, a longitudinal study published by the American Bar Association in 2003 followed 700 “high conflict” divorce cases over a 12 year period and found that elements of PA were present in the vast majority of the cases studied.
The pain that alienating mothers (or, in some cases, alienating fathers) visit upon their children would be hard to understate. In a new Psychology Today article devoted to this controversy, Michelle Martin, who was a victim of PA as a child, recalls:
“You were either on my mother’s side or against her, and if you were on her side, you had to be against my father. She was so angry at him…you couldn’t possibly have a relationship with him if you wanted one with her.”
Martin describes her late father as a gentle, caring man who refused to criticize her mother. She says that she was so afraid of losing her mother’s approval that she bought into her alienation campaign against her father, including her mother’s systematic attempts to convince her that her father had been abusive. (more…)
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