angiEmedia

California Assembly Representative Jim Beall is back with another attempt to shut down destructive use of child custody evaluations. This new Assembly Bill 2475 has grown out of his failure in 2009 to pass his Assembly Bill 612 that wrongly aimed to ban discussion of parental alienation in family law courts. This time around, AB 2475 is on more solid ground as it aims to strip quasi-judicial immunity from private family court appointed experts such as psychological and custody evaluators. This would provide a legal fallback for civil suits for egregious cases of misconduct by these professionals.

Failed AB 612 from 2009

Last year, Jim Beall wanted to outlaw the discussion of parental alienation in family law cases. We and many other organizations that support shared parenting and protecting children from abuse and neglect vehemently opposed the AB 612 legislation he introduced. AB 612 was nothing but whitewashing of emotional child abuse to enable abusers to get away with hurting children and in many cases rewarding them for doing so. That bill, AB 612, was gutted by legislators who understood that parental alienation is a real phenomenon. Beall later withdrew the bill.
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The American Psychiatric Association has published early draft of its proposed changes for DSM-5 (also known as DSM-V), an upcoming version of its mental health manual scheduled for 2013, at its website APA DSM-5 Development. While the draft version does not yet contain a definition of parental alienation syndrome or disorder, the APA has indicated that a group of mental health professionals including William Bernet, Wilfrid von Boch-Galhau, Amy J. L. Baker, and Stephen L. Morrison has submitted a document discussing how to include parental alienation in DSM-5 and ICD-11 (International Classification of Diseases, 11th Edition).
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