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(Click here for an update to this post.)

A California representative, Democrat Jim Beall, has reintroduced legislation as Assembly Bill 612 (AB 612) to ban the discussion of parental alienation in child custody evaluations. California judges, psychologists, and family law attorneys all oppose this legislation because they know that parental alienation is a real problem that is harming children in many families, especially in high-conflict divorces. So do the many California parents who have been alienated from their children. And so do the grown children who are victims of parental alienation and recognize it for the damage their alienating parent caused in their own lives.

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On March 20, 2009, Ellie Cunningham viciously attacked her husband Adam with a broken wine glass, repeatedly slashing him and leaving him with multiple severe cuts on his arms and legs and a broken ankle. When police arrived and found him on the steps outside of their home in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada, it was clear Ellie had badly assaulted him.

Ellie was arrested by police and a domestic violence (DV) investigation ensued. A restraining order was issued on the wife, and Adam moved in with his mother to recover from the assault. He had extensive stitches to hold together his slashed skin and surgery to repair his broken ankle. Unfortunately, he was found dead on his mother’s sofa three weeks later. An autopsy indicated the cause of death to be complications from the surgery to fix the damage from the DV assault.

During the time between the assault and his death, Adam was interviewed by police and wrote about his experiences during the nearly four years of marriage to Ellie. He recounted how Ellie would have outbursts and become verbally abusive.

Video news coverage of Adam’s death, including photos of his injuries and an interview with his sister Nikki, can be found at:

Global BC TV News Coverage of Death of Adam Cunningham

Oddly, his wife published this obituary claiming that she’ll miss him:
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It’s quite possible that many of the filings for Domestic Violence Temporary Restraining Orders (DV TRO — also known as DV protective orders) in the US are based upon false claims and are stunts to persecute a spouse and/or bolster a child custody case.
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(Click here for more coverage on parental alienation.)

Psychologists Dr. Amy J. L. Baker and Dr. Katherine Andre have written a new book entitled “I Don’t Want to Choose: How Middle School Kids Can Avoid Choosing One Parent Over the Other”. This work is targeted for an audience of middle school children who want to keep both parents involved in their lives. It teaches children to use their critical thinking skills to avoid being duped or pressured into picking one parent over another.

What is Parental Alienation?

Parental alienation involves the systematic and frequently repeated denigration of one parent by the other and blocking of access to the parent who is the target of denigration. This is not just a simple and occasional comment such as “mommy can be so annoying sometimes” or “it is frustrating that daddy doesn’t keep his schedule”. While those comments are inappropriate in front of children as they tend to make children anxious and feel like they might have to take sides, infrequent comments like these probably do not constitute parental alienation.
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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

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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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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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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