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(Click here for more coverage on parental alienation.)

Parental alienation involves the persistent behavior of an alienating parent making a strong effort to cause the children to hate the target parent. Bad-mouthing the target parent in the presence of the children is nearly always involved. But it is not just occasional — it is a consistent pattern. Often the alienating parent will recruit other people to join in bad-mouthing the target parent. What these people likely fail to realize is that they are committing emotional child abuse.

Parental alienation is a huge problem, especially in divorce cases involving personality disorders such as Borderline Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. When parental alienation is involved in personality disordered divorce cases, it can often include the alienating parent fabricating child abuse allegations and training the children to repeat them. Even if it doesn’t succeed at making the children hate the target parent, such tactics can literally land the target parent in jail and bankrupt him or her with legal fees mounting a defense against false allegations.

We stumbled across the web site mentioned below in this posting that offers literally dozens of links to very good information on parental alienation (also known as “Hostile Aggressive Parenting”) and PAS (Parental Alienation Synrome). If you’re interesting in learning more about these topics, the reading could keep you busy learning for hours.

Click this link for more information:
F.A.C.T. Information: Parental Alienation

(Click here for more coverage on parental alienation.)

The Fourth Annual Parental Alienation and Hostile Aggressive Parenting Awareness Day is coming up on April 25, 2009. Visit the Parental Alienation Awareness Day web site for more information.

Spreading Awareness of Parental Alienation

We think it’s really important to the well-being of our children and future generations to spread awareness of parental alienation and its destructive effects. Below is a brief explanation of what parental alienation involves, the harm it can cause, and steps that may be taken to help recover from it. We’ve also included links to books that may help you understand and deal with the problems it causes.
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The way victims of Borderline Personality Disorder and similar personality disorders communicate is confusing and upsetting to many. If you’ve been living with such a person, you’ll find this animation to be a common, perhaps even a tame, version of things that often happen to you. If not, it may give you some insights into how miserable Borderlines can make the lives of their loved ones.
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Toni Valentin, mother of a 5-year-old daughter, was unhappy with the child custody arrangement she had with her ex-husband. On February 17, 2009, she and her boyfriend Dante Quezada allegedly took the daughter to her father’s brother’s home in the 300 block of West 47th Street in Los Angeles, where she believed the father was located at the time, in a minivan allegedly driven by their friend Felipe Carias. Quezada then allegedly proceeded to shoot out the windows of the home with a semi-automatic pistol, in the process shooting the daughter’s 7-year-old cousin in the chest and arm as she was doing her homework. Apparently they were hoping to kill the 5-year-old’s father while she watched. Fortunately, her cousin is expected to fully recover.
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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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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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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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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 domestic violence.)

What is domestic violence? Many people think of it as purely physical in which one person beats up another. Many people think that only men commit domestic violence and women are always the victims.

Neither of these perceptions is accurate. Domestic violence involves more than just physical abuse. It includes verbal and emotional abuse which may have no physical component. Studies show that women commit domestic violence at rates similar to men. Further, they do this not only against men, but even in lesbian relationships in which no men are involved.

Our view is that all domestic violence is bad, no matter who commits it. Domestic violence will continue to be a problem especially if violent behaviors are written off because they are not physical or because women are committing them. Much of the literature and popular beliefs about domestic violence contribute to victimization of children, men, and even women by abusive women due to inaccurate biases that falsely classify women as not possibly being perpetrators of domestic violence. (See Women commit more than 70% of single-partner DV for a Harvard Medical School study which amply shows this.) Further, as modern research shows that partner violence tends to beget partner violence, the women abusing their partners makes it far more likely they will be co-abused in return.

When reading about domestic violence, you must realize that much of the literature and research in this field was done with the assumption that men are abusers and women are victims. Recent research has shown that this is not accurate, that anybody can be a victim and anybody an abuser. Some writings in the domestic violence field are gender-neutral and use well-designed studies to make their conclusions. For whatever reasons, some do not. Some claim it is because of sexist bias, others because of feminist propaganda. Whatever the reason, after you strip away the gender bias from the sources that haven’t caught up to the inaccuracy of the male abuser / female victim model popularized by early work in domestic violence in the 1970s despite much evidence to the contrary, there is still value to what these sources have to say.

For example, Professor Straus of the University of New Hampshire was one of the early researchers in domestic violence in the 1970s. He researched battered women and assumed that men were the abusers. However, over his 35 years of research, he has come to realize that abusers can be of either gender and that his earlier viewpoints were gender-biased. (See Female Violence Against Males.)

The bottom line is that all domestic violence is bad, regardless of who commits it.

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