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The Canadian Symposium for Parental Alienation Syndrome will be held at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City on October 2 to 3, 2010. The speakers include a wide variety of experts from across the United States and Canada.
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Parental alienation is a very serious form of widespread child abuse aided and abetted by the corrupt and abusive courts in the United States and Canada. Parental alienation is driven by the psychological problems of parents abused as kids as well as by the government and divorce industry. Courts are commonly encouraging conflict in divorcing families that leads to parental alienation and other long-running conflicts damaging children. From this, they derive income and job security.

In a very real sense, parental alienation is government-backed child abuse. When you see a judge in a black robe, if you are reminded of the grim reaper or angel of death coming to kill your family because that’s its job, you’re not far off the mark. Parental alienation will not stop unless court reforms are implemented that support shared parenting, move away from the adversarial “winner takes all” decisions common today, and put into place support systems that help parents work together for the benefit of their children without repeated conflict-inducing trips back to court.

Parental alienation is a form of emotional abuse against both children and the alienated parent, sometimes called the target parent, and often his or her entire extended family. As parental alienation expert Dr. Amy Baker has found in her research, it causes greatly elevated rates of long-term depression and substance abuse in the children who are victims. The harm does not stop when they become adults, either. A large portion of alienated children will in turn enter into emotionally abusive relationships which result in them being alienated from their own children.

(from Parental Alienation Book For Middle School Kids: “I Don’t Want to Choose!”)

Alienated children frequently are psychologically damaged in long-term ways. They often develop depression, substance abuse problems, eating disorders, and even manipulative behavior patterns similar to their alienating parents. Some compare growing up with an alienating parent as being kidnapped and brainwashed. Of her 40 research subjects covered in Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome: Breaking the Ties That Bind, some notable statistics are:

• 70% suffered from depression
• 58% were divorced
• Half of the 28 who had children are estranged from their own children
• 35% developed problems with drugs and alcohol

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Tonya Craft

False sexual abuse allegations are an appalling mainstay in child custody cases today. They cause immense damage to the falsely accused parent and to the children. The false accuser usually doesn’t care who they hurt so long as they get the kids as a result. The courts and government are quick to side with the false accuser, demanding that a careful investigation be done and in the meantime the children will live with the parent making the accusations.

These “investigations” are often nothing but a witch-hunt that takes multiple years to fizzle out. By that time, the children involved are often suffering badly from the lack of a parent who loves them. The falsely accused parent has often not only lost years with his children but has lost his job, career, home, savings, reputation, and quite possibly a new marriage, too. Usually none of this is remedied. The falsely accused parent doesn’t even receive an apology from anyone. Some “mother’s rights” groups don’t care about any of this and view false sexual abuse allegations as a sure-win strategy of choice because they are willing to do anything to get children away from their fathers, even when it results in psychological damage to the children. But the recent case of Tonya Craft may give reason for them to change their positions. That’s because it is a case in which the mother was falsely accused of sexual abuse by her ex-husband, a malicious parental alienator of the most vile sort named Joal Henke.
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Nursing infants should be able to spend quality time, including overnights, with their fathers. Yet some mothers try to use nursing as an excuse to block contact between infants and their dads. Courts should be fully aware that there are plentiful means to ensure a good supply of breast milk for use by fathers caring for infants.

Robert Franklin of Fathers & Families recently penned the posting Expert: No Conflict Between Breastfeeding and Shared Parenting about an article from a breastfeeding advocate who claims fathers are trying to assert in court that breastfeeding is inappropriate behavior:

(Breastfeeding Court Letter, by Katherine A Dettwyler, Ph.D., Anthropology)

In addition, my research has been used to counter charges of child abuse and “inappropriate parenting behaviors” in many court cases, especially involving divorce and custody disputes, where fathers may accuse the mother of “inappropriate parenting by virtue of extended breastfeeding” as a strategy to gain custody of children, or may simply claim that ‘continued breastfeeding’ is not relevant to shared custody arrangements.

At this point (2005), all of the research that has been conducted on the health and cognitive consequences of different lengths of breastfeeding shows steadily increasing benefits the longer a child is breastfed up to the age of 2 years, and no negative consequences. No research has been conducted on the physical, emotional, or psychological health of children breastfed longer than 2 years. Thus, while there is no research-based proof that breastfeeding a child for 3 years provides statistically significant health or cognitive benefits compared to breastfeeding a child for only two years, there is no research to show that breastfeeding a child for 3 years (or 4-5-6-7-8-9 years) causes any sort of physical, psychological or emotional harm to the child. This has recently been confirmed in the 2005 American Academy of Pediatrics “Recommendations for breastfeeding the healthy term infant” (see below).

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Separation anxiety is a behavior normally found in infants and small children when a loved one is moving out of contact with them. They become worried and uncomfortable, anticipating the absence of the loved one. Often this loved one is a parent, other times it is a relative or a familiar care provider. This is a normal part of the development of children and tends to go away by the time they are around three or four years old. But not all behaviors that appear to be separation anxiety are in fact so. Alarmingly, sometimes such behaviors are the result of premeditated child abuse by the parent handing over a child to another person, particularly to the child’s other parent.

Personality Disordered Abusers Hurts Kids To Hurt Ex and Win Custody

When you’re a divorcing or divorced parent of a child you had a with a sociopath, psychopath, or other personality disordered abuser (PDA), there’s a chance you will come face-to-face with the reality that your ex is willing to abuse your child to make it look like he or she doesn’t like being returned to you. The ex wants to worsen the separation anxiety, or at least the apparent “symptoms” of it, often in front of witnesses whom will be asked to write declarations or testify in court or to talk with psychological evaluators, therapists, CPS, and court-appointed mediators. The PDA expects these reports that the child doesn’t like to be returned to you will help ensure your custody is reduced and the PDA’s custody is increased.
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We’ve all heard horror stories about parents who are falsely accused of crimes by a vicious ex who is bent on banning the children from seeing them. False domestic violence and false sexual abuse allegations are a sure-fire way to manipulate family law judges to participate in parental alienation child abuse. But they are not the only way malicious parents interfere with the contact between kids and the unfortunate parent who is targeted for malicious mischief.

In this article, I’ll outline a few of the less obvious but still damaging ways that malicious parents, particularly those engaging in parental alienation, use to cause trouble for the other parent. All of these tactics are simple, easily spun by a masterful manipulator to look like they are somebody else’s fault, and yet wrongly interfere with contact between kids and their other parent. They generally rely upon wasting the parent’s limited time with the kids and creating aggravation to upset both the parent and kids. They are more commonly used by “custodial” parents to abuse “noncustodial” parents, but in theory the small percentage of noncustodial parents engaging in parental alienation could use similar tactics.
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There are probably thousands or more mother’s rights groups around the world. The web is replete with their sites such as Justice4Mothers and Rights for Mothers. Generally they are irate about being deprived of contact with their kids and being financially and emotionally destroyed by family law courts. I certainly understand that as it has happened to me, too, as it has to many other parents. Unfortunately, some of these moms have gone off the deep end into sexism and gender warfare that is both counterproductive to their cause and to the interests of their children. A very obvious sign of this is the many mother’s rights web sites that issue blanket denials of the existence of parental alienation, a form of emotional child abuse that is common in divorces and troubled families.

Kids Need Both Parents

Mothers deserve to spend time with their kids, just like fathers do. In almost every case, aside from extreme abuse and neglect, kids benefit from significant time with both of their parents and their parents’ extended families. That judges in family courts across the United States and in many other nations use child custody as a means to encourage conflict and thereby increase workload, revenues, and relish in their own power as family dictators is a disgusting display of tyrannical behavior that must be stopped.

If the family law courts of which I am aware are even remotely similar to those in other parts of the United States, the many abusive family law judges in this country are a far worse threat to the safety and security of the typical American child than Al Qaeda 9/11 terror attacks and BP oil spills combined. In opposing the tyranny of the family law courts, I support these mother’s rights groups in regards to their intent to stop the abuses of the government and its war on families. I have similar opinions of the father’s rights groups in this regard.
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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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On April 10, 2010, various family rights and family law reform organizations including the American Coalition for Families and Children (ACFC), Parental Alienation Awareness Organization, and Sisters In Solidarity are sponsoring a rally to raise awareness of children’s need to have ongoing substantial relationships with both their parents. The rally is planned for 9am to 11am at the Judicial Center at 160 North LaSalle Street in downtown Chicago, Illinois.
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Donna Anderson wrote ”Red Flags of Love Fraud – 10 Signs You’re Dating a Sociopath” to explain how to detect if your romantic relatioship might be with a sociopath. If you didn’t realize this soon enough and had a child, she’s got some other advice for you on how to cope with the problems of trying to co-parent with such a person.

On her website, I happened across a very good posting on LoveFraud.com titled LETTERS TO LOVEFRAUD: Tips for co-parenting with a sociopath containing advice on how to co-parent with a sociopath. Sociopaths are people who manage to portray themselves to the general public as friendly, caring, nice people but in reality they are manipulative, deceitful, and endeavor to hurt others to get what they want. Some of the common sociopaths you are likely to find in family law courts are people who are “acting out” Borderlines, Narcissists, and Antisocials. Their morality can be summed up in one sentence: If it gets me what I want or will hurt somebody I don’t like, it’s A-OK.
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