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Melinda Stratton of Sydney, Australia, has abducted her 4 year old son Andrew Thompson and fled Australia to go into hiding. She was unhappy her son was seeing his father at all even in supervised visitation because she claimed he was an unfit parent. She made allegations against him that were investigated and dismissed, making this look like yet another case of a parental alienator bent on using any means to prevent a child from having contact with the other parent.

Stratton fled to Germany with Andrew in April 2008. Her current whereabouts are unknown.

On January 15, 2009, she recently wrote a letter stating that she claims “the appalling failure of the Family Law Court and Child Protection Services” is why she’s run away with the child. She claims that he’s an unfit father because of depression and anxiety. He denies that he suffers from these mental illnesses. Even if he did, depression and anxiety are very common especially during divorce and hardly justify a parent being judged as unfit unless they are unusually severe.

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If so, you’re in quite a bit of company. 86% of parents swear in front of children according to a recent poll of 3,000 kids aged 11 years. And they do it on average 6 times per week.

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Child sexual abuse is a serious allegation, often destroying the lives of those accused even when they not convicted. The trauma of the investigation often damages the children, too. In the case of children who were not abused, the investigation can be far more abusive than anything that really did happen to them. Yet apparently the government of Santa Clara County behaves as if child sexual abuse allegations warrant hiding evidence to prevent a defense and possibly bullying children into getting the testimony the police and DA want for their cases.

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Biological parents are not likely to sexually abuse their own children. But in recent decades, there has been an epidemic of false sexual abuse claims against biological parents. This epidemic started in earnest along with changes in laws and policies to allow fathers to have partial or full custody of children after a divorce.

The false claims of sexual abuse may be made by either parent. However, they are more common coming from mothers trying any method they can to prevent the children’s fathers from having contact, custody, and/or visitation with the children. This is a despicable strategy related to parental alienation. It is also particularly effective because of societal taboos and the difficulty of proving innocence of a crime which according to the false accuser was seen by nobody but the alleged perpetrator and a small child (who may not even be able to talk!) and of which there is frequently no physical evidence because the false reports are made about false incidents which supposedly occurred weeks or months earlier.

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The San Diego County Grand Jury conducted years of investigations into misconduct of San Diego County DSS and CPS and their social workers. Despite overwhelming evidence of a routine pattern of misconduct and government abuse of power, the problems have not stopped even years later. This letter from the San Diego County Grand Jury in 1992 explains the problems well. Sadly, nothing much has changed other than the name of the agency, now called Child Welfare Services. The children and families, particularly the fathers, continue to pay the high price of lives damaged and destroyed by San Diego County Child Welfare Services.

In the early to mid 1990’s, there was a push to force CPS agencies to behave according to due process and to be accountable for their misconduct. This was only partly successful. Although the extreme atrocities of the Alicia Wade and Dale Akiki cases are now less common, CPS continues to abuse its power and acts with incompetence, irresponsibility, and impunity ruining the lives of children and their parents without due process.

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Swedish mother Ann-Louise Valette is wanted on child abduction charges for the parental kidnapping of her sons Frank and Andre. She is believed to have been hiding them in Sweden, but it is not certain if they are still there as Swedish police have been unable to locate them. Valette violated court orders to put the boys on an October 9, 2008, airplane flight to return them to their father in Melbourne, Australia.

Andre Nicholas Valette age 9 (left) and Frank Oliver Valette age 11 (center) have been missing since they visited their mother Ann-Louise Valette (right) in Sweden.

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Another of my favorite “real feminist” authors is Erin Pizzey. She was a pioneer in domestic violence activism, in 1971 setting up the Chiswick Refuge in London, UK as one of the first shelters for battered women in the world.

Early on in her work at Chiswick, she noticed that many of the women coming to her shelters were “violence prone”. They sought out abusive relationships and committed a significant amount of violence themselves. Often their violent ways triggered their partner’s abuses against them. Worse, these families raised their children to be a new generation of abusers addicted to violent behaviors.

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Being A Good Parent

As parents, we are responsible for caring for our helpless little newborns from birth through growingly capable toddler years all the way up to teenagers and young adults. For some of us, that care extends into adult years as our children encounter severe accidents and illnesses and possibly formerly unimaginable crises.

Sometimes we may sugar-coat an injury or illness to a child, trying to help him or her recover from feeling so badly a little more quickly. We hope the tears might stop a little sooner if we say “that bump doesn’t hurt so much!” when they fall down on the sidewalk and get a little scrape. Amazingly, it often works. Kids learn from their parents to brush off the small injuries, so long as we avoid teaching them that every little malady is a earth-shaking crisis and instead show them that yes, it might hurt, but it will go away faster if we don’t dwell on it.

Some of us have the misfortune of going through divorces or separations. To look out for our kids’ interests, we share custody of our children. Good parents put the children first. Suzy might get sick with the flu, and we share the temperature, medications, and other medical advice with our co-parent. Johnny might break an arm on the playground, and we share the news promptly along with care directions with our co-parent. Or at least most of us would do that, if we truly care about our children.

But Some Parents Can’t Or Won’t Be Good

But not all co-parents do this. Some simply lie about medical care, trying to hide any little problem the children may have. They go so far as to refuse to answer questions about injuries and illnesses, make doctor’s appointments to “prove” the other parent was wrong about an illness, and refuse to pass along medications. When confronted with proof of their egregious behaviors, then they lie even more in the ongoing attempt to over it all up.

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Earlier this month a court in Toronto, Cananda, transfered full custody of three daughters ages 9 to 14 to their father after a long-term parental alienation campaign by their mother. She had worked for years to brainwash them to hate their father. Judge McWatt of the Superior Court of Justice found that this constituted emotional child abuse and banned the mother from all further contact with the children except for counselling programs, including a program to help the children recover from parental alienation syndrome.

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(Click here for more coverage of Borderline Personality Disorder.)

I’d like to encourage people who are aware of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) to start spreading the news about how devastating this illness is not just for those who have it and their family members, but for the entire United States economy.

I wrote this post to explain to people who may not have the ability to understand how horrific BPD is from personal experience dealing with an afflicted person. Such people can still likely understand the economic impact of this illness and how it would be far more cost-effective for US mental health care policies to be overhauled to raise awareness and get most of the victims into treatment. The increased government spending appears that it would be entirely offset by savings in government expenses (in such areas of courts and law enforcement) and increases in tax revenues due to a significant improvement in worsened productivity harming families affected by BPD.

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a devastating but very common mental illness that until recently has been believed based upon DSM-IV (Diagnostics and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition — a widely used reference book in the mental health field) to affect about 2% of the US population or about 6 million people in the US. Common belief is that it afflicts women about 3 times more often than men.

Recent research published in April 2008 suggests that 6% of the population may be affected and the difference between rates for males and females may be little. If this research is accurate, the United States with its population of about 300 million people has 18 million victims of BPD.

The result of BPD is a catastrophic cycle of child abuse and mental illness that runs for generations. The economic impact of this illness is worse than a 9/11/2001 terror attack each and every year. US mental health care policies are badly in need of an overhaul to deal with BPD and similar personality disorders and the drastic economic impact they have on any tens of millions of US citizens.

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