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Kids benefit from having two healthy parents who can focus on the children’s developmental needs and a healthy family life. Too often, the courts and government set up situations in which parents are encouraged to pursue sole custody and cut the other parent out of the children’s life. That parent is then forced into traumatic battles over just being able to see the children.

Sometimes one or both parents in such a battle degenerate into horrible monsters because of how their child custody disputes are being mishandled. Courts and government agencies fan the flames and encourage bad behaviors which often lead to years of continuing or even escalating conflict.

Often parents who refuse to share their kids with the other parent abduct or even kill the children when they do not get their way. Sometimes, they enrage the other parent with abuse causing him or her to eventually crack and to start using the kids as weapons of revenge just like the originally selfish parent.

Father Murdered Child To Get Revenge On Mother For Child Access Blocking

As an example of parental custody disputes leading to child murders, here’s a story about Ramazon Acar of Australia.

Acar was often prevented from seeing his daughter by her mother. After some time, he was fortunate enough to occasionally get to see his 2 year old daughter Yazmina Acar. Reportedly this was an unusual occurrence. He said he was going to take the child to what has been variously described as a nearby “candy shop” or “milk bar”.

Instead, he kept the child with him as he proceeded to taunt her mother, Rachelle D’Argent, over Facebook about how he was going to kill the girl. This wasn’t just an unfortunate choice of words or even an evil joke. He stabbed the child to death and then continued to write on Facebook about what he had just done.

Why would he do this? He says it was to get revenge on D’Argent, with the intention of making her feel like she had made him feel when she blocked him from seeing their child.

Like so many parents who murder their kids, he says he also wanted to kill himself but could not do it.

This man didn’t just kill a baby and break a mother’s heart. He hurt a lot of other people in the process.

He stabbed in the back the many fathers who merely want to have reasonable time with their kids and would never do anything remotely like his crime.

He slashed at the hopes of the many children who are suffering from being deprived of time with one parent or who are forced to endure an abusive childhood because of an irate parent who has sole or primary custody and refuses to treat the kids and the ex reasonably.

Acar also has encouraged the paranoid fears of many mentally ill mothers who are already acting horribly in regards to their children and ex, encouraging them to act even worse than they already do. You see these people often spouting off about how “all fathers” are bad evil people who should never see their children again. What Acar did pushes even more people into supporting these abusive nutcases.
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Family law courts habitually fail to recognize that women can be sociopaths that are dangerous to the children. Even when they show strong signs of a sociopathic personality disorders such as Borderline Personality Disorder, the courts and government agencies like CPS often ignore warning signs and fail to act to protect the children when there is clear reason to believe they are in danger from their disturbed mothers. They make orders that indicate a belief the children are somehow better off living with a female sociopath who breaks the law and court orders than with a safe and sane father who is repeatedly falsely accused of things he did not do and is following the law and court orders.

This pattern is exactly what we are seeing play out in the case of Gordon Smith and Tiffany Smith of Delaware. Tiffany Smith has executed a distortion and harassment campaign against Gordon for more than three years. He has been repeatedly arrested based upon false accusations. Reports from late August 2012 were 8 arrests for 14 false allegations.

The exact numbers of the moment, which have changed rapidly in the past few months as many more false allegations were made by Tiffany Smith, is not particularly important. What matters is that the cost to Gordon has been the loss of his time with the children, severe harm to his career, major financial damages, and repeated suffering from false arrests and incarcerations. All this happened despite him having not been convicted of a crime and the police being in possession of solid evidence that many of the accusations were outright lies.

The Smith children suffer from lack of their father and living with a mother for whom two of her foremost goals in life is to prevent them from seeing their father and to put their father in prison using malicious false allegations. Tiffany Smith clearly isn’t thinking of the best interests of the children, but the courts continue to leave the children in the custody of a monster.

Tiffany Smith Finally Arrested

Until recently, Tiffany Marie Smith got away with her abuse of Gordon Smith with zero consequences to herself. On August 31 or September 1, 2012, Dover Police Department finally arrested Tiffany Smith for recent false allegations and reports to police because they had clear cut evidence that she lied to them which had caused them to falsely arrest Gordon Smith. The official police department statement is:
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If you’ve read books or other publications on parental alienation, you may have the impression that divorced parents who are alienators are unlikely to stop this form of abuse for any reason. There are a couple of common misconceptions here. First of all, even though parental alienation is usually discussed in the context of divorce, the fact is that parental alienation often starts long before a divorce or separation as the psychological factors that drive the most severe alienators include life-long personality disorders that were present long before the children were born. Secondly, it turns out that not all alienating parents are incurable. This is particularly true of mildly alienating parents who are angry but are not personality disordered. Often these mild alienators are prone to nasty verbal remarks about the target parent but do not engage in false abuse allegations and extreme interference in contact with the kids. If this is the pattern you see in your situation, there is some reason for hope. With appropriate teaching and enforcement of rules and boundaries, you can help your kids resist alienation. In mild cases of alienation, you may even be able to help your ex stop his or her behaviors. Even if you cannot get the ex to stop, taking appropriate steps early with your kids can often inoculate them sufficiently to prevent their alienation from becoming severe even in the face of a very nasty ex who is constantly badmouthing you.

Douglas Darnall, Ph.D., is a psychologist who works with many children suffering from parental alienation and is the author of Divorce Casualties: Understanding Parental Alienation. His analysis is that there are three types of alienating parents:

1. Naive alienators
2. Active alienators
3. Obsessed alienators

Darnall contends that all parents occasionally are naive alienators who carelessly drop a remark here or there that puts down the other parent. Some may inadvertently slip into using alienating language as they struggle to counteract the badmouthing the children are hearing about them and behaviors the children have engaged in to support the alienating parent. These alienators generally do not cause extensive damage to kids because their alienation behaviors are sporadic and the kids continue to have enough contact with both parents that they can see for themselves what each parent is really like. Some of them, particularly those who are target parents trying to cope with difficult problems who just don’t have the skills and practice needed to stay completely away from judgmental language, they don’t really qualify as alienators in my view. However, Darnall tends to categorize this group more by words than by intent or context.

Active alienators know what they are doing and may know what they are doing is wrong, but do it anyway because of how angry they are. Darnall claims some of them may even feel guilty about it later. The children suffering from an active alienator generally show signs of harm, but it may not be obvious what that harm is at a casual glance. Often these kids miss some of their time with the target parent because of interference by the alienating parent. This makes them more susceptible to the distorting influence of what is an active alienation campaign.

Obsessed alienators are another matter entirely. These parents are focused on destroying the other parent and giving the children no choice but to hate that parent. They don’t care if what they are doing is wrong, and frankly they generally mistakenly believe it is right. Often these obsessed alienators are suffering from a personality disorder that results in them showing behaviors across the board that indicate they believe they are above the rules and the law. The children of obsessed alienators often show marked harm with behavioral problems, insecurities, eating disorders, substance abuse problems, poor performance in school, and other obvious signs. Frequently they echo the alienating parent’s complaints about the target parent and may actually believe what they are saying, in part because they are often denied much of their time with the target parent and therefore are highly influenced by the streams of badmouthing and distortions coming from the alienator.

Mild Alienators May Be Helped By Appealing To Their Self-Interest

I would clump most of the naive and and some of the active alienators into the category of “mild alienators” who are sometimes upset enough to trash the other parent but in general are not engaging in extreme forms of alienation including false child sexual abuse allegations, extensive community-wide distortion campaigns, frequent malicious violations of court orders, and other severe behaviors that you see nearly all of the obsessed alientors use in their alienation campaigns.

Some of these mild alienators can be helped to realize that their behaviors are harmful not only to their children, but to themselves, as well. Children who are subjected to parental alienation often become adults who avoid or turn against the alienating parent. When a angry but mildly alienating parent is confronted with information like this and shown there are better alternatives, many of them are capable of change. The book The Co-Parenting Survival Guide: Letting Go of Conflict After a Difficult Divorce by psychologists Elizabeth Thayer and Jeffrey Zimmerman has practical advice on how to restructure the relationship between the parents to be business-like contact that is about simple logistics (schedules, school events, medical and therapy appointments, etc.) and what is best for the kids. If you read this book or another title like it and can get your mildly alienating ex to read it, too, there’s a chance that she or he will turn around and start to behave more reasonably.

If your divorce has resulted in nasty words and a mild lack of cooperation that is affecting the kids but has not involved false criminal and abuse allegations, extensive perjury, and systematic harassment against you and your family, this strategy of using a good book to help bridge the communications gap and reduce the conflict may be useful to you.
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Parental alienation is a form of emotional child abuse that occurs when one parent teaches the children to fear, disrespect, and/or avoid the other parent. It’s a common problem in divorces, but unknown to many alienation often gets started in marriages well before a divorce.

Studies of parental alienation show that alienators are almost exclusively parents with sole custody of the children. Statistics on child custody arrangements show that around 80% to 85% of children of divorce in the US end up in the sole custody of their mothers and that this has been the case for multiple decades despite changes in family law and society. These two observations combined mean that parental alienators are predominantly mothers and the parents they are teaching the children to hate are primarily fathers.

Alienators are emotional child abusers, often in more ways than just by teaching the kids to hate the other parent. Many alienators suffer personality disorders and also engage in emotional parentification (also known as emotional incest) by inappropriately using their children as emotional crutches for themselves.

To deny the culpability of these mothers who are child abusers, feminists belonging to groups such as the National Organization of Women (NOW) deny the very existence of parental alienation. They usually offer statements that there is “no scientific evidence that parental alienation is real” and “parental alienation is an excuse for why children do not like child abusing fathers.” Richard Gardner, a psychiatrist who was among those early in describing and defining Parental Alienation Syndrome (commonly abbreviated as PAS, it is a severe form of parental alienation in which the child aligns completely with the alienating parent), made it clear that alienation was not at work if the child disliked a parent who was truly being abusive to the child. But the feminists, in their zeal to treat all women as victims and trash all men as abusers, completely overlook that fact.

There are a growing number of alienated moms in which the child abuser in the family is the father. Typically this occurs in families in which the father has a narcissistic personality and has some advantages such as:

• He is more wealthy.
• He has more education.
• He has professional certification such as a doctor, lawyer, judge, or law enforcement officer.
• He is more politically connected.
• He is a native operating in his own culture and the mother is an immigrant.

These advantages for a narcissistic man often aid him in reversing the usual anti-father bias in family courts, generally producing an anti-mother bias in these cases. Although anti-father bias is clearly wrong, it is disgustingly ironic that often when the bias becomes anti-mother it is happening in cases in which the fathers actually are behaving abusively.
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Brian Banks was a 16 year old high school football star in Long Beach, California, when a lying girl and the government collaborated to ruin his life. He was falsely accused of rape by classmate Wanetta Gibson after the two had kissed in a stairwell. Gibson concocted an elaborate story claiming that Banks dragged her across campus and raped her. Even though Banks did not commit the crime and in fact there had been no rape at all, his attorney advised him to seek a plea bargain to get a lighter sentence as the government was threatening him with 41 years to life in prison. Choosing what he saw as the lesser of two bad options after his lawyer suggested he would be convicted because he is black, Banks plead “no contest” and was imprisoned for over five years was then put on probation. Upon release, he was forced to wear a GPS monitor, register as a violent sex offender, and was restricted from living near or going near schools.

False accuser Wanetta Gibson is the real rapist (as in financial rape) in this story. She and her family got a large settlement (variously reported as either being $750,000 or $1.5 million) from the Long Beach School District on the basis of her lies and claims that lax school security contributed to causing her “rape”.

Gibson this year admitted Banks did not rape her, but was worried she might have to repay the fraudulently obtained settlement. Students, investigators, and attorneys associated with the California Innocence Project helped to obtain evidence that Gibson had falsely accused Banks which resulted in the overturning of his conviction on May 24, 2012.

As the California Innocence Project web page on the Banks case explains:

Banks was faced with an impossible decision at the time – either fight the charges and risk spending 41 years-to-life in prison, or take a plea deal and spend a little over 5 years of actual prison confinement. Although it would mean destroying his chance to go to college and play football, a lengthy probationary period, and a lifetime of registration as a sex offender, Banks chose the lesser of two evils when he pleaded no contest to the charges.

Teri Stoddard of SAVE (Stop Abusive and Violent Environments) is calling for the prosecution of Wanetta Gibson as part of their effort to quash the epidemic of false allegations of crime and violence that are ruining the lives of many innocent people. She reports that roughly ten percent of Americans have been falsely accused of child abuse, domestic violence, or sexual assault and there are very few protections for such people.

Gibson should be prosecuted for perjury. But that doesn’t go far enough. She should also be prosecuted for criminal fraud that cost taxpayers and insurers an enormous settlement plus legal fees in this case featuring a lying girl and an irresponsible government that encourages more liars to level false allegations by failing to prosecute such crimes.

Significant financial restitution and assistance to Brian Banks and his family is also warranted. It should be paid by the LA County District Attorney, the State of California, and Gibson to Banks and his family.

This boy was placed into prison at the age of 16 years old for 5 years for a rape that did not occur simply because a girl lied against him and the government failed to do its job to determine the truth, instead preferring to bully an innocent child into letting himself be steamrolled by the government because he was male and black and therefore was assumed to be guilty based merely upon a disputed accusation and his race and gender.

Brian Banks is a poster case for the injustices against men and African-American men in particular. If his accuser had been of some other racial group (she is African-American, too), you can get her crime would be the fuse in a powder keg of a potential racial uprising in Los Angeles. There is no doubt that racial bias played a part in the success of the State of California coercing Banks into pleading no contest.
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You’ve probably heard the term “Psycho Ex Wife” if you’ve talked with a man who has suffered from the atrocities of the family law courts manipulated by a truly malevolent ex. It was popularized in part by the illegally banned website The Psycho Ex Wife. Malicious moms are deservingly labeled as psychos quite often, hence the widespread recognition of the phrase. The reality is that both men and women can behave horribly and abusively using the children as pawns in a struggle with the other parent. Often this abusiveness starts even before the filing for a divorce.

It’s hard to find a widely accepted term for referring to the kind of maliciously manipulative parents that interfere with their children’s time with the other parent. Some call them “high conflict personalities” (HCPs), others “parental alienators”, still others “sociopaths” or “psychopaths.” Many refer to Borderlines, Narcissists, Histrionics, Antisocials, Paranoids, or other personality disorder diagnoses to explain the behaviors and label the abusers. The problem is huge and really encompasses multiple groups of people with severely messed up behaviors as parents. For this article, I’ll simply be referring to them as “psycho parents” and not try to more precisely label them.

In this article, I’ll be describing some of the tactics that psycho parents use to manipulate kids to participate in resisting child custody exchanges. This is part of the overall problem of parental alienation. The psycho parent is often successful at causing children to resist custody exchanges even in cases in which the children do not actually hate the parent being attacked and still enjoy spending time with that parent.

Anybody faced with a psycho parent is likely to benefit from reading about Borderlines and Narcissists and their interactions with children. However, don’t let this mislead you into trying to diagnose one of these people and use such as a diagnosis in court. Even if you are absolutely correct in your assessment, judges almost uniformly lack the understanding of what it means and will attack you for putting a reasonable label on the bizarre and destructive behaviors because you’re not a licensed psychologist. Unfortunately, many if not most licensed psychologists are not capable of diagnosing these kinds of disorders accurately because they lack the time with the person and also, in some cases, have their own agendas and biases that make them easy targets for a psycho parent to manipulate.

Motivations of the Psycho Parent

If there’s anything truly common to all psycho parents, it’s hard to find. Although many of them were abused by one or both parents as kids, not all were. And not all abused kids grow up to be psycho parents. Many psycho parents are Borderlines or Narcissists, but not all are. Even if they do meet the criteria for BPD, NPD, or some other personality disorder, few are formally diagnosed and fewer still ever voluntarily seek treatment or honestly work on fixing their problems. So the formal name for whatever ails them is somewhat besides the point, although it is sometimes handy as an abbreviation for describing their overall behavior patterns.

What I find to be reasonably frequent features of psycho parents are the following:

• A history of insecurity during childhood. This often stems from child abuse or neglect in the home, but can also arise from other situations such as severe poverty or living in a unsafe environment such as a neighborhood with frequent violence from crime or war.
• Pervading sense of insecurity about one’s self as an adult. This flows from the childhood insecurities that were never resolved. Some might say that Narcissists don’t act like this, often touting their own superiority. But when you think about it, they really do have intense insecurities and their Narcissitic behaviors are the means to make themselves feel better or to hide their self-doubts.
• Extreme focus on self. Inside their adult bodies they are still hurt little insecure children. Consequently, they are usually unable to focus on anybody but themselves because they are so badly damaged they never learned how to do so. This shows up via narcissistic traits such as selfishness, even if the person does not meet the criteria for NPD.
• Little or no empathy for others. These people are usually unable to put themselves in another’s shoes, or to consider how their words and actions harm others. They probably don’t care. Sometimes you may see them pretend to care, but usually this is a means to manipulate others. Other times, it is simply they are following behavior patterns they have seen other more healthy people follow often without actually having any genuine empathy themselves.
• Frequent manipulations of others as a means to meet their emotional needs. Often such manipulations involve lying and distorting about the actions of others, particular the ex or the kids, in an attempt to win allies or sympathy or battles in court. But these people also play at being victims in many other venues. In a workplace, for instance, you may see them pretend to be loaded up with unfair amounts of work, that other people are taking credit for their work, or that they are being sexually harassed.

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We first reported about the death of 3 year old Serenity Gandara of Bakersfield, California, nearly two years ago. Her foster parents, Alberto and Carla Garcia, were named as suspects in her death and charged with first degree murder. But they were on the run, somewhere in Mexico, so there has been no trial. The US FBI finally caught up with them in Mexico last week and is now working to extradite them to California to stand trial.

Quoted from Serenity Gandara’s Grandmother Speaks Out Against CPS and Foster Parent Abuses, Advocates Grandparents’ Rights:

The Kern County medical examiner has reported that Bakersfield foster child Serenity Gandara, a 3-year-old girl living in the home of relatives, was found dead on the living room floor of the home on July 18, 2010. Blunt-force trauma injuries are named as the cause of death.

Grandmothers Maria Garcia and Renee Maese both state that other relatives wanted to care for Serenity and her abandoned brother Isaiah. Isaiah is still alive, but was found with injuries consistent with ongoing physical child abuse. Kern County CPS refused to place the kids with other relatives, preferring to leave them with Albert and Carla Garcia despite child abuse complaints by multiple relatives including both grandmothers.

Any child’s death is disturbing. But what is particularly vexing about this case is that Kern County CPS had evidence and warnings from other family members that Serenity and her older brother were in danger. Instead of moving the children to a safer home with capable relatives, they colluded with the foster parents to prevent other family members, such as grandmother Renee Masse, from having access to the kids. That put a stop to the complaints over their care, but is probably also a significant part of why Serenity died and her brother was abandoned in the home with her dead body.

In my view, Kern County CPS, some of the social workers, and the US Federal Government should be on trial as co-defendants with Alberto and Carla Garcia for the wrongful death of Serenity Gandara. All too often, CPS agencies rip children out of homes in which they are not in any real danger and place the kids in even worse homes. The social workers and government didn’t inflict the killing blow in this case, but they set up the situation that resulted in the child’s death.

Federal Title IV grants reward local governments for these abuses. It’s game of “seize a child, earn your paycheck” in which it doesn’t matter if the child is being hurt, what matters is that “services were provided” so US taxpayers’ funds will be forked over the the local government for reimbursement. The US government has completely failed to institute any effective oversight for abuses by state and local governments that it is funding. As a result, it is blindly financing child abuse and violation of civil and family rights that were significant factors in the death of Serenity Gandara.

These problems go back decades, they result in widespread violations of civil rights and deaths of children, and despite that, Uncle Sam has done nothing to solve it. Instead, it just keeps forking over more money to the same abusive government agencies that are the problem. Social workers are given immunity, victims are pummeled to ruin so they can’t sue their abusers in government, and the Feds pay for it. In my view, the US government is funding terrorism against American families that does far more damage to its victims than that caused by the terrorists the Feds have the US military fighting all around the world. I hope that Serenity’s sad ending will help more Americans understand that their government has become a deadly big problem and reform is badly needed.

More on Serenity Gandara’s Death

Foster parents arrested in Mexico for Bakersfield toddler’s death

Couple accused in toddler’s death found in Mexico

Serenity Gandara’s Grandmother Speaks Out Against CPS and Foster Parent Abuses, Advocates Grandparents’ Rights

I’ve been meaning to publish a review of Welcome Back Pluto: Understanding, Preventing, and Overcoming Parental Alienation for some time now. Having watched it myself and with some children who are targets of parental alienation, I think it is a very helpful video for most kids who are at risk for alienation but who have not yet been totally turned against parent they are being encouraged to hate.

There are a lot of positive reviews of this video on Amazon, I’d encourage you to read them. Instead of simply rehashing the universally positive general comments about the video, I’m going to outline chapter by chapter what you’ll see when you watch it so you can better understand what Dr. Warshak is trying to accomplish with this video.

Chapter 1 – What is Alienation?

This first chapter explains what parental alienation is and what it isn’t. It makes it clear that even though it sounds like it has something to do with space aliens, it has nothing to do with this. It explains alienation in the general sense, that people can hate a person, their government, or their family. It breaks down the level of alienation in levels via the terms disillusioned, alienated, and estranged. It also explains that alienation can be realistic, such as when somebody has been very cruel for a long time, or unrealistic when the rejected person was once loved but now is not despite not having done anything to justify this.

I often use the term “target parent” to refer to what the video calls the “rejected parent”, in part because I’ve observed that such parents are often not only targeted for alienation but also for defamation, false accusations, harassment, intimidation, and more by the parties who are out to harm them and the children’s relationships with them.
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Jesse Ventura is not just a former wrestling star. He’s also the former governor of Minnesota from 1999 to 2003, a former Navy SEAL, and a man disgusted by the fascist United States of America. Almost a year ago, he filed suit against the US government’s TSA (Transportation Security Administration) over its practice of patting him down that is an evident violation of the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure.

US Constitution Fourth Amendment

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Ventura been a frequent target for pat-downs and other searches because he has a titanium hip implant. But he’s obviously no security threat given his personal history.

What particularly angers Ventura is that his suit was tossed out of Federal court on the grounds that the Federal courts have no jurisdiction over the TSA. Yes, you read that right — the TSA cannot be sued in Federal court unless perhaps you have the money and connections to somehow get a case into the Federal Appeals courts. That essentially means the TSA can essentially do anything it wants because access to those courts is extremely difficult to obtain. The US government’s abusive policies have led him to label the nation as the “Fascist States of America” and vow to seek dual citizenship in Mexico.
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After hearing yet another friend discuss how it is impossible to live happily or even function due the many years of continuing chaos being caused by his children’s mother and the parental alienation she inflicts upon them, I was alarmed but not surprised to hear him say that he’s about to give up on all his kids. I can’t say on blame him, he has been trying for years to simply be a part of his children’s lives and is attacked and persecuted relentlessly for simply wanting to be an involved parent. The damage caused by the combination of a parental alienator and the government bullies who support and reward this and other abusive conduct by bad parents, be they abusive mothers or abusive fathers, is immense. It eats away at your peace of mind, burns holes in your soul, and drains your finances to near bankruptcy over the years. You are left but a battered shell of a person with an empty wallet unable to enjoy anything in life, unable to even have a moment of peace and contentment.

Then I remembered something I just read from our friends at CopBlock, a great web site that discusses police brutality and misconduct across the United States. CopBlock suggested that we all spend some time on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to remember the travails and tactics of the African-American leader who put the nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience tactics of India’s Gandhi into action in the United States. Civil disobedience is a just and fair suggestion for a means of action for parents being afflicted by the American courts and law enforcement and their near universal support for parental alienation, family terrorism, false accusations, and many other crimes against children and families.

Parents who are being pushed to the limit like my friend should engage in civil disobedience and rally their families and friends to do the same. Simply stop cooperating with the government. Stop paying your taxes and stop funding a system that abuses and terrorizes millions of innocent children and their loving parents. Start protesting all you can against bully judges and corrupt politicians who do nothing to protect children and good parents who are being victimized by psychologically brutal attackers in the form of alienating parents, CPS social workers, family law attorneys, and the many other criminals who scheme to use and abuse children to make a profit. Or maybe just vote with your feet by leaving the United States as it increasingly appears to be an irredeemably sick nation that persecutes good parents and innocent children in the name of profit and power of the government and its friends.
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