Highlights
- a mother found to have alienated her child(ren) was not more likely to get a decrease in parenting time, lose custody of her children, and lose her case than a father who was found to have alienated his children.
- 25 “abusive” alienated parents were mothers (71.4% of 35), and 10 were fathers (28.6% of 35), so the presumption that “abusive” alienated parents are mostly fathers is not reflected in these data.
- alienating mothers’ claims of abuse against known “abusive” alienated fathers were not being discredited more often than they were for alienating fathers.
- alienating mothers were not more likely than chance to lose custody than alienating fathers when the third party who found PA was a custody assessor or GAL.
- alienating fathers made fewer allegations of abuse against alienated mothers (n = 112), but the percentage of substantiated allegations was similar (7.1%) to those of alienating mothers.
- gender of the alienating parent, the number of unsubstantiated allegations of abuse, and an interaction of the variables were not predictors of whether an alienated parent lost custody of their children.
Abstract
There have been legislative efforts to control how child custody decisions are handled in family courts where allegations of abuse and of parental alienation (PA) are levied. The “findings” reported to support such legislation have been based on one unreviewed study with identified methodological issues (Harman & Lorandos, 2021). We tested six pre-registered hypotheses to determine whether there is empirical support for the “research findings” used to support these laws. Five-hundred PA cases were sequentially selected from 4,889 Canadian trial court decisions. Independent coders who were blind to the hypotheses coded all cases for details about custody and allegations of abuse. We failed to find support for the “findings” that have been used to support legislative changes. For example, this study focused only upon cases where PA was determined to actually have occurred in at least one of the children in the family. It differs from Harman & Lorandos (2021) in that this study found that alienating mothers’ claims of abuse against known “abusive” alienated fathers were not being discredited more often than they were for alienating fathers. The negative impact of failing to base legislation on a comprehensive consideration of the full scope of scientific evidence available (e.g., Kayden’s Law in the reauthorized Violence Against Women’s Act, 2022) is discussed.
Introduction
Trial courts in English-speaking jurisdictions have been dealing with parents alienating their children from their other parent for more than two hundred years (Lorandos, 2020a; Joshi, 2021). Despite the qualitative and quantitative scientific evidence that has been accumulating on parental alienation (PA) over the last 77 years (Harman, Warshak, et al., 2022), some scholars have claimed there is controversy regarding the scientific validity and reliability of the PA construct (Meier, 2013, Mercer and Drew, 2022; Saini et. al, 2016). A number of nonscientists and parent advocates have also insisted across various non-scholarly publications that PA is not admissible as a scientifically accepted construct in court under Frye (U.S.), Daubert (U. S.), and Mohan (Canada) standards; for examples see Bruch, 2002, Dalton et al., 2006, Hoult, 2006; and Milchman, 2019. The reiteration of such “conclusions” conflates the actual scientific findings of peer-reviewed studies, 40% of which have been generated since 2016 (Harman, Warshak, Lorandos & Florian (2022). Yet, a review of over 3,500 American appellate cases tested this “inadmissibility hypothesis,” finding that in 1,181 appellate decisions published through 2018, PA was determined to be “material to the proceedings, probative of important facts, relevant to the court’s deliberations, admissible, and worthy of discussion” (Lorandos, 2020b, p. 3).
Another recent debate regarding PA is related to the strategic use of abuse allegations by a parent to alienate children from their other parent. The new claim is that courts have failed families because they consistently “discredit” mothers’ (e.g., Death et al., 2019, Meier et al., 2019, Sheehy and Boyd, 2020) or parents’ (Webb et al., 2021) claims of abuse, and that trial court judges have struggled with claims that abuse allegations should always be believed when made by a parent who asserts they are trying to “protect” their children (Dallam & Silberg, 2016). Underlying these arguments are assumptions that there are pervasive gender biases in the court that are harming mothers and children (e.g., Zaccour, 2022), as reflected in claims that PA was only invented as a legal defense for abusive fathers to evade abuse allegations made against them (e.g., Meier et al., 2019). And there is no mention of fathers as potential victims of abuse in either Zaccour (2022) or Meier et al. (2019). Written reports and public presentations by individuals who assert these arguments have influenced law and public policy. For example, in the March 2022 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, in TITLE XV—KEEPING CHILDREN SAFE FROM FAMILY VIOLENCE, also called ‘‘Kayden’s Law’’, U.S. Senate Bill S 3623, Section 1502 described “FINDINGS” which contained three illustrative paragraphs:
PP (6). Empirical research indicates that courts regularly discount allegations of child physical and sexual abuse when those allegations are raised in child custody cases. Courts believed less than 1⁄4 of claims that a father has committed child physical or sexual abuse. With respect to cases in which an allegedly abusive parent claimed the mother ‘‘alienated’’ the child, courts believed only 1 out of 51 claims of sexual molestation by a father.
PP (7). Empirical research shows that alleged or known abusive parents are often granted custody or unprotected parenting time by courts. Approximately 1⁄3 of parents alleged to have committed child abuse took primary custody from the protective parent reporting the abuse, placing children at ongoing risk.
PP (9). Scientifically unsound theories that treat abuse allegations of mothers as likely false attempts to undermine fathers are frequently applied in family court to minimize or deny reports of abuse of parents and children. (Violence Against Women’s Act, 2022, pp. 306-307).
The conclusory “findings” in these three paragraphs can be traced directly to Meier et al. (2019), an unreviewed study without a literature review that was published in an internet-archived university paper series. Several scientifically peer-reviewed studies, however, have failed to find support for the findings reported in the Meier et al. (2019) paper. For example, Bala et al. (2010) did not find statistically significant gender differences in loss of custody between alienating mothers and fathers in Canadian court decisions. Likewise, a randomly selected sample of divorcing mothers in a U.S. county found it more likely for mothers to receive sole custody of their children if they made an allegation of abuse against the father than if no allegations were made (Ogolsky et al., 2022). Another study of over 1,000 U.S. appellate court cases did not identify any case that lent support to the statement that “courts regularly discount allegations of child physical and sexual abuse when those allegations are raised in child custody cases” (Violence Against Women Act, 2022, p. 306), or that alleged or known abusive parents were often granted custody or unprotected parenting time by courts (Lorandos, 2020b).
Harman & Lorandos (2021) conducted a thorough review of the Meier et al. (2019) study, and noted over 30 methodological and statistical issues, many of which were due to a lack of details about how the authors conducted their study. Although Harman & Lorandos (2021) were unable to assess the scientific merits of the Meier et al. (2019) study due this lack of transparency, they tested six pre-registered hypotheses based on the conclusions reported in Meier et al. (2019) using open science research practices. They failed to replicate any of Meier et al.’s conclusions. There were no statistically significant gender differences in whether alienating parents lost custody or parenting time, and contrary to what Meier et. al. (2019) reported, parents who had findings of abuse against them were not likely to get custody of their children when they claimed to have been alienated by the other parent. What is of great concern is that Meier et al.’s (2019) conclusions and the empirically unsupported opinions of other critics of PA scholarship described above are foundational to the “findings” in Kayden’s Law (Violence Against Women’s Act, 2022, p. 304), while other scientific evidence is entirely omitted.