Dr. Richard Warshak, noted child psychologist and creator of such helpful titles as Divorce Poison New and Updated Edition: How to Protect Your Family from Bad-mouthing and Brainwashing
In his introductory email, he explained his motivations for the site:
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Karen Lebow of the Southern California Parents of Alienated Children’s Network has announced that an all-day conference on parental alienation is planned for Saturday, November 13, 2010, from 8am to 5pm, at California State University as Northridge near Los Angeles. Admissions prices range from $60 to $75.
The keynote speaker is Amy Baker, Ph.D., author of the acclaimed book Dr. Amy Baker entitled Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome: Breaking the Ties That Bind
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Once someone like Stephen Doyne, ill-reputed San Diego custody evaluator, or many of his Associate Family Court Dismantlers recommend a restraining order between two parents, the divorce industry is on its way to milking profits from yet another family. The Honorable Judge is highly likely to rubberstamp such recommendations. Why? We suspect many, perhaps most, have been receiving unpublicized Election Campaign Donations from such people. Such judges know how to support their financial backers.
As soon as the restraining order is issued, if mom or dad tries to communicate on any level, it will be considered a crime! No collateral contacts of any type are allowed — no priests, no friends, no family members of any side, no direct or indirect contact or any US mail or email or phone communications from any parent is allowed. Why? The divorce industry wants to isolate the parties from each other, sticking themselves in the middle where they can be sure to encourage the parents to fight until they exhaust their funds by limiting, monitoring, and controlling all communications.
The court then finds itself justified to make the next move by ordering a “mediator” such as Doyne & Associates. Stephen Doyne and those like him charge for back and forth phone communications between parents because it is now illegal for parents to communicate by any means by order of the court. Every phone call is about $75 or more to each parent. The more phone calls claimed, the richer the dismantlers become. Even if there is a simple inquiry about food for the children, instructions for medication, or questions about a school assignment, with a restraining order on board the divorce industry profiteers will be the only ones making the calls. They make a fat check from back and forth phone calls between them and both parents, turning a few minutes direct conversations into claims of several phone calls. The court won’t allow verification of such calls, so families should be rightly wondering just how many of them were actually placed and how long they took.
Imagine this order is enforced for a few years. Would this order alone pay the evaluator’s or mediator’s house payments? Would this order compel such dismantlers serving the court order to more generously contribute secretive judicial election campaign funds?
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| Child Custody, Children, Courts, Crime, Divorce, Family, Government Abuse, Parental Alienation, Politics, Restraining Orders |
Sweden seems like a progressive country to the uninformed. It has parental leave policies for both genders. While mothers have always availed themselves of such leave, fathers seemed reluctant. So the parental leave laws have changed over time to encourage fathers to take time off of work after the birth of a baby. At present, two months of the 390 leave days allocated for parents must be used by the father or they are lost.
(from Why it’s time to reimagine masculinity at work and at home.)
Consider contemporary family life in Sweden. In the past, new parents split 390 days of paid leave however they liked—monthly, weekly, daily, and even hourly. Women used far more of it than men. But today, new fathers no longer rush back to work, leaving the mother to raise little Sven all by herself. The reason for the change? Smart public policy.
In 1995, Sweden passed a simple but revolutionary law: couples would lose one month of leave unless the father was the one who took it. A second use-it-or-lose-it month was added in 2002, and now more than 80 percent of Swedish fathers take four months off for the birth of a new child, up from 4 percent a decade ago. And a full 41 percent of companies now formally encourage fathers to go on parental leave, up from only 2 percent in 1993. Simply put, men are expected to work less and father more.
By altering the roles of the Swedish father and the Swedish worker, Sweden’s paternity-leave legislation has, in turn, rewritten the rules for Swedish men (and, by extension, women). “Swedish dads of my generation and younger have been raised to feel competent at child-rearing,” writes Slate’s Nathan Hegedus, an American who experienced the system firsthand. “They simply expect to do it, just as their wives and partners expect it of them.” If a man refuses time at home with the kids, he faces questions from friends, family, and, yes, other guys. Policy changes produced personal changes—and then, slowly but surely, society changed as well.
On the surface, this sounds quite progressive. The United States lacks similar leave policies and American men often feel discouraged from taking time off from work for family matters. They fear they will be looked down upon, ridiculed, or passed over for promotions if they take more than a short time away from work for a new baby.
But the reality is that Sweden’s progressiveness is merely a veneer over a solid core of the same false feminist male-bashing that predominates in the Western world. Children in Sweden, you see, are treated as property of the mother. If the mother doesn’t want to share, she simply starts making false abuse allegations. No proof is required, obviously a mad mom’s word is more reliable than all the evidence in the world. She will be quickly and easily rewarded with sole custody, marginalizing the father to no more a few days per month with the children.
Many fathers quickly see even this small amount of contacted whittled down to just a few hours of supervised visitation, supervised because obviously fathers cannot be trusted with children if the mother says so. In Sweden, as in the United States, men are guilty upon accusation and must struggle to prove themselves innocent, a task which is effectively impossible in many cases. After all, if you are a man who was accused of some crime that nobody else saw and there is no evidence of it occurring or not occurring, how are you to prove that you didn’t do it when a mom says you did? You can’t, so her lies win.
If a father fights for equal child custody, Swedes will consider him a brute. If he is beaten senseless by false accusations from a malicious mom, his life in tatters, he will suffer in many ways including by very limited contact with his children. Then Swedes will consider him a deadbeat. Being a father in Sweden is a losing proposition, the only chance of success is at the whim of a woman. But if she changes her mind, for any reason — her affair, her drug abuse problem, etc. — the father is instantly a degenerate who should be banned from seeing the children without the watchful eyes of the state closely monitoring his every move.
This is no different, really, than the United States and many other nations in which men are not even second-class citizens in all matters involving families and children. Not only is this extremely unfair, it contributes to a wide range of social problems including gender conflict, parental alienation child abuse, and harming children’s educational attainment and mental health.
To their credit, many women understand these issues very well and fully support equal rights. Some of them are strident enough about it to actively support both the father’s rights movement and going to significant effort to ensure their own ex-partners stay involved in their children’s lives. Unfortunately, there are more than a few naysayers remaining. Some of them are quite intent on not only denying equal rights but going so far as to even any messages that advocate for changes they do not approve.
A lot of children in Sweden are upset about deprivation of access to a loving parent, generally their fathers. Four Swedish high school students, Sara Sivesson, Jerry Wallén, Sandra Atas, and Oskar Krantz, set out to expose Sweden’s human rights crimes against children and fathers to the world. They produced a video which they submitted to Amnesty International for a human rights video contest. Their video explains what happens to so many Swedish fathers who long to spend time with their children but who are prevented from doing so by the typical false feminist tool of false accusations.
The video made it to the finalist stage. The students were of course very excited by this.
But then a woman’s violence organization in Uppsala reportedly demanded that Amnesty International remove the video from the competition and its website.
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| Child Custody, Children, Civil Rights, Courts, Crime, Family, Government Abuse, Legal, Parental Alienation, Politics |
Dr. Amy Baker is a researcher studying and reporting on parental alienation and parental alienation syndrome. As she explains, parental alienation refers to the behaviors and tactics used to cause children’s relationship with a parent to suffer. Parental alienation syndrome (PAS) refers to the effects on the child, especially when they become so severe that the child doesn’t want to spend time with a parent and expresses disgust and dislike for that parent without a valid reason.
In her book Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome, she discusses many case studies of parental alienation and presents summaries that show common alienation tactics and the long term damage to the children and the target parent.
The video below features Baker talking with WABC TV host Ken Rosato in 2009. She discusses what motivated her to study parental alienation and some of her findings on common alienating tactics and effects on children.
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| Child Abuse, Children, Divorce, Domestic Violence, Family, Marriage, Parental Alienation, Psychology |
The US Census Department revealed that marriage rates in 2009 were the lowest in more than 100 years. While they attribute it to the economy, those of us who have seen what it is like to have children and marital conflict in the US know that the government’s anti-family and victim-persecuting policies are major disincentives to marrying.
Given the lack of psychological education for children, many suffer badly from child abuse with no help coping. Many of these abused kids go on to become abusers themselves.
Few know how to identify these abusive adults until after they marry them and discover they are being emotionally, verbally, and sometimes physically abused on a frequent basis. It is far too easy to inadvertently marry a sociopath.
Even when you figure out you have married an abusive person, the courts will often, perhaps even usually, not protect you from these people. Instead, they take the abuser’s side and help them commit even more abuses. “Take the kids, take the house, it’s your reward for terrorizing your spouse” is the common refrain of the black-robed bandits in American family law courts.
Is it any wonder why more and more people are wondering whether marriage in America is even safe any more?
Donald Bren’s $3 to 9 Million in Child Support Enough, Says Jury
Escaping Sociopathic Abuse Almost Impossible When Children Are Involved
American Judicial Terrorism May Lead to Widespread Violence
| Child Abuse, Courts, Divorce, Domestic Violence, Family, Federal Government, Government Abuse, Marriage, Partner Violence, Politics, Psychology |
The recent release of Davis Guggenheim’s film Waiting for Superman has contributed to a flurry of discussion over how to fix failing American schools. I’ve read quite a bit on thoughts regarding school reform and find that there is a striking absence of discussion of American family policies and the abusive family law courts as major contributors to poor student performance. Yet studies show that divorce has a major negative impact on student performance.
(from More Studies Show Divorce Hurts Kids’ Education)
Adverse impact of divorce upon education has skyrocketed as divorce has been more common. Divorces in 1920 caused a 3.6 month loss of education, but since 1970 they have blown up to about a year in lost education. This timeframe roughly corresponds with the rise of “no fault divorce” in Western nations.
Multiple divorces had an even worse impact on high school graduation rates. While students who parents stay together average a 78.4% rate of graduation from high school by age 20, one divorce drops the graduation rate to 60%, about the same as for children whose mother or father died. Divorce and remarriage did not significantly change the graduation rates for children versus divorce with no remarriage. But with divorce-remarriage-divorce (two divorces), the graduation rate drops further to only about 40%, half of that for children whose parents remained married.
Parties as diverse as social scientists, economists, and national security experts point out that America’s under-performing educational system is a threat to the future of the nation. The United States has long maintained the economic and military superiority over its adversaries that lead to a secure and prosperous nation in large part due to the educational opportunities available to American children. Universal K-12 education means every child is supposed to have access to the knowledge and skills needed to get a start in life. American universities attract the best and brightest students from around the world. The inventiveness of these students is immense. They often become scientists, entrepreneurs, and other major contributors to the advancement of knowledge and wealth of the nation.
America’s academic performance has been on a steady downward slope for decades. This decline parallels the destruction of families via no-fault divorce that has made divorce far more common as well as the laws and court behaviors that create conflict and place children into traumatic and contentious custody battles. Often these children are stripped of most or all contact with one of their parents due to wrongful sole custody decisions and the courts enabling and encouraging parental alienation child abuse. The two phenomena of poor school performance and poor family life are directly related. While parents do make their own share of mistakes, failed government policies are the glue that binds together these interconnected disasters into a destructive spiral.
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Personality disorders are a growing problem in the United States. Recent NIH studies indicate that 20% or more of Americans suffer from one or more personality disorders. Author Bill Eddy points out that in his experience about half of “High Conflict Personalities” (or HCPs) involved in destructive divorce and child custody battles probably do have one or more full-blown personality disorders. The other half may not meet all the criteria for a full-blown personality disorder yet still show many traits consistent with troublesome personality disorders such as BPD and NPD.
(from Don’t Alienate the Kids! Raising Resilient Children While Avoiding High Conflict Divorce
)
I believe that about half of HCPs have a personality disorder and about half have some of these traits, but not a full personality disorder. This means that they are still difficult, but may respond more easily to approaches designed for people with personality disorders.
It helps to understand some of these traits, but it is important to not tell someone you think they have a personality disorder. They may become very defensive and angry with you, as defensiveness is a common characteristic of those with personality disorders and those just with traits.
I fully agree with Eddy’s advice about not telling a person they may have a personality disorder. To be clear, this is not because it is better for them but primarily because hearing this news seems to turn them into even more destructive abusers than they were in the first place. Even if you are only trying to help, they will probably interpret your words as dire threats and redouble their efforts to destroy you. There is also a substantial risk that you will be ridiculed for your reasonable beliefs by divorce industry “professionals” who have an agenda that does not make room for unpleasant truths unless they are stated by an expensive paid expert.
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While the old research on BPD reflected in the DSM-IV indicates that females Borderlines far outnumber male Borderlines, newer research indicates that is not so. Yet there has still been a strong focus on BPD being an illness affecting primarily women. We’ve previously shared a video produced showing the emotionally manipulative conversations some Borderline females have in about a minute and a half. A year later, it’s still a popular article as it resonates with folks who have had relationships with Borderlines.
Recently I ran across a set of three videos about a Borderline male made with the XtraNormal animation tools that have been popular with many of those trying to explain what it is like interacting with personality disordered emotionally abusive people. After watching them, I’d say the conversations are quite plausible representations of how these people reason and speak. The guy in these videos, represented by a cuddly looking teddy bear, seems to engage in the “magical thinking” sometimes seen in Borderlines. In particular, he seems to believe that his girlfriend is inhabited by demons because she doesn’t do what he wants. This sort of twisted thinking is typical of Borderlines. If you don’t do what they want in every way, something must be wrong with you. And they are not afraid to tell you that and to make threats, such as the “withdrawal of affection” threat seen in these videos, to get you to comply with their demands.
| BPD, Child Abuse, Children, Divorce, Domestic Violence, Family, NPD, Parental Alienation, Partner Violence, Psychology |
Ben Vonderheide of Daddy Justice is well on the way to assembling a documentary film of his experiences dealing with the abusive courts and government in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. We summarized his story in our article Ben Vonderheide Exposes Pennsylvania’s Abusive Child Profiteering Racket last week. While Vonderheide particularly identifies with these abuses being done against fathers, he’s clearly aware of the state attacking and destroying mothers, too, as evidenced by various videos he’s produced and put on his website.
Below is what he has been calling a “trailer” for his movie. At over 21 minutes, it’s much longer than the typical trailer. It features Vonderheide, his son Quinta, and many of the dirty players in the Lancaster County courts and government, and his ex Wendy Flanders and her new boyfriend, Ted Yoder, both of whom were convicted for filing false police reports to get Vonderheide falsely arrested. Video that Ben recorded was important evidence for obtaining the convictions. Flanders then was given probation, rather than jail time, and sole custody of their son. The message is that false accusations pay in Lancaster.
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| Child Custody, Children, Civil Rights, Courts, CPS, Crime, Divorce, Family, Government Abuse, Legal, Parental Alienation, Police, Politics, Prosecutor |
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