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Melinda and Andrew Thompson

On September 9, 2010, law enforcement finally caught up with parental child abductor Melinda Thompson, formerly Melinda Stratton. On April 24, 2008, she had disappeared with son Andrew Thompson after leaving Australia to go to Germany on a Singapore Airlines flight from Sydney to Frankfurt. Her professed intent was to keep the boy away from his father, Ken Thompson of New South Wales, Australia. After more than a year searching for his son, in mid-2010 he traveled to Europe to do a bike tour across the continent in search for his son. He biked over 3000 miles across nine countries raising awareness of his missing son. He wore clothes covered with pictures of Andrew.

Ken discussed in an interview with BBC news about how he discovered Andrew had been found. He had stopped cycling in Germany between Nuremberg and Stuttgart to check his email. There was an anonymous message stating that Andrew had been found and Australian authorities would contact him.
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Parental alienation child abuse is a worldwide problem. As most of our news-oriented coverage is focused on the United States and Canada, some may not realize that parental alienation and destructive family law courts are plentiful outside of North America, too. This story highlights one troubling alienation case in Singapore.

Parental Alienation in Singapore

Wee Cheng of Singapore, one of our many readers worldwide, is a divorced father of a young boy named Adriel Cheng. His limited 8 hours of contact per week hasn’t been honored in two years. The courts will do nothing but reward the mother’s contempt for their orders. Adriel hasn’t seen his father almost half a year because of interference being enabled and enforced by human rights violators in the Singapore schools and family courts.

While Singapore has a fine reputation in many areas, Mr. Cheng’s experience shows that the government of Singapore is engaged in human rights violations and is intent on enabling parental alienators to abuse their children. In Cheng’s case, the courts and schools are directly involved in access blocking and interfering with the parent/child relationship. They have even threatened police action against him for attempting to spend time with his son at a school carnival.
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A few weeks back, we published an announcement about the Canadian Symposium for Parental Alienation Syndrome. The regular registration fee is $195 per person. However, ACFC (American Coalition for Fathers and Children) supporters can get a discounted rate of $150 and bring along a second person (new spouse, friend, grandparent, etc.) to the conference for free. Here’s the full announcement from ACFC:
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We recently received notice that the American Coalition for Fathers and Children is working on putting together graphics and slogans for signs, banner, brochures, flyers, and other literature to support its goals of enacting shared parenting legislation and reform of child support and domestic violence laws across the United States. They are putting together working groups to create this content and have some people with professional backgrounds in graphic design already on board. They would like to get more skilled volunteers involved. They are also seeking ideas to develop into signs and other materials to help parental rights and family law reform groups get their messages out to the general public.

We’ve seen some of the signs and banners similar groups have created (California Coalition for Families and Children comes to mind) and would like to encourage them to share their work and ideas with ACFC. ACFC aims to build a library of such content and share it with like-minded groups and individuals.
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Rob’s recent comment pointing out the Ben Vonderheide case in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania made me curious. After all, it’s not often that you see the government actually prosecute somebody for making malicious false reports to the police to terrorize a father and block access to a child. On the surface, it looks like the government got it right in this case. Dig deeper, however, and you find that Ben Vonderheide is a poster case for government-backed terrorism against a parent who has been repeatedly abused by the government. The government is now using his son, Quinta Xavier Vonderheide, as a pawn in its vindictive battle to hide its crimes against the state’s children and families and attack those who attempt to expose them.

Alienating Ex Convicted of Lying to Police Gets Sole Custody

Quinta’s mother is Vonderheide’s ex-girlfriend Wendy Flanders. She has systematically alienated her son from his father and engaged in access blocking, denigration, defamation, and false police reports to destroy the child’s relationship with his father. She is unable to accept that their son should have time with both his parents and is willing to break the law, scheme, manipulate, and conspire to ensure that he will never see his father again. As is typical, family law courts reward such behaviors unless a parent can afford to bring contempt of court charges against the abuser.

She even attempted to change his name to Quinta Xavier Flanders, a common stunt for alienating parents who alter their children’s names to remove all mention of the hated ex.

This is nothing new for Flanders as she is a serial parental alienator. She has engaged in this child abuse not only involving Quinta, but also regarding her daughter Bryna Elizabeth Flanders-Harris and that girl’s father John Harris. In that case, she used false allegations of child sexual abuse among other methods. There are also reports that she attempted similar family terrorism against another previous ex, a Mr. Caruso who is no longer alive to defend himself and his child Emily from the sociopathic Flanders.
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California billionaire Donald Bren had two children with former girlfriend Jennifer McKay Gold. They had a 13 year long affair, but they never married and he had little involvement with the children. Gold claims that Bren promised he would be involved in the children’s lives and that his failure to do so is a violation of agreements between them. Therefore Gold and the children, David Bren, age 18, and Christie Bren, age 22, decided to sue Donald Bren for $134 million in back child support.

Donald Bren is Rich

Bren is very secretive and media-shy about his life, income, and assets. Estimates are that his assets may be worth around $12 billion, largely derived from real estate development in Southern California. Forbes Magazines has placed him 16th on its list of the 400 richest Americans.

He and his attorney claim he paid about $10 million in child support, vacations, cars, and other payments and gifts to Gold and the children during their childhood. He felt obligated to ensure they would receive advanced education through graduate school if they wished, received luxury German cars when they started to drive, and live in an upper middle class standard of living well beyond that of most of the US population. Clearly these children were not in need of more money.

Is Gold a Golddigger?

Gold disagrees on the amounts. She and the children also claim that he owes far more because he didn’t stay involved in their lives.
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(Originally published January 15, 2009. Updated August 27, 2010.)

So you’re getting a divorce, or have already gotten one. Have any kids in the picture? You can bet they are confused about what you and your ex-spouse (or soon-to-be-ex-spouse) have done by breaking up the family. Kids need to understand what is going on from such a big family change as a divorce, and it’s not a simple thing for them. Why? Well, for starters:

• Children often blame themselves for the divorce.

• They need to know that divorce is an adult problem, not one caused by children.

• Child self-blame for divorce creates psychological problems, some of which can be long-term and severe.

• Children need to know that it’s OK to love both parents.

• They are often put in the middle and made to “pick sides” by one or both parents and don’t like this at all.

• They need to know that parents who try to make them “pick sides” and bad-mouth the other parent are doing the wrong thing so they won’t participate and may possibly help their misguided parent(s) control themselves.

Even in an amicable divorce involving children, there are going to be questions and worries. All of the books discussed in this posting can help with those, especially for the intended audience which is generally late toddler-hood to early grade school, about ages 2 to 9.

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Serenity Gandara

Renee Maese, grandmother of deceased foster child Serenity Gandara, has decided what she can best do to honor her granddaughter’s memory is to fight against the abusive CPS and foster care system in California. Each year, dozens of children die in California foster care homes from child abuse. Serenity was one of these children. Her foster parents, Albert and Carla Garcia, are more than a month later still missing and wanted by police for murder and child endangerment.

Maese explains that the 3 year old girl’s death on July 18, 2010, has motivated her to work to change the system to protect children and families:

I will be the first to admit, if it wasn’t for Serenity dying, I probably would be doing my everyday life things, but now I’m advocating for Serenity. Deceased children no longer have a voice, but being her Grandmother, I will speak for her and fight for her justice.

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Until you’ve been through a divorce in a child abusing nation like the United States or United Kingdom, you likely have no clue of the extortion and abuse families are put through by the courts and governments of such nations. But that may change as more and more fathers with ties to the entertainment and mass media industries start to open up about their experiences, particularly how their children and they are blocked from contact with each other with the full cooperation of the courts in what amounts to state-sponsored parental alienation child abuse.

Noted writer Louis de Bernieres, author of Corelli’s Mandolin which was later turned into the movie Captain Corelli’s Mandolin starring Nicolas Cage and Penelope Cruz, has recently experienced state-sponsored parental alienation himself. He seldom gets to see his children Robin and Sophie, all of five and two years old respectively, as the courts engaged in the usual sexist practice of marginalizing the father. He’s now joined UK’s shared parenting group Families Need Fathers to fight against the ongoing abuse by UK courts and government against children and families.
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In my previous article Extreme BPD / NPD Behaviors Are Internally Triggered, I discussed the puzzling ways in which normal circumstances seem to trigger abusive behaviors from Borderlines, Narcissists, and other personality disordered abusers. My advice to those who can do so is to get away and stay away from these people as they are a serious danger to your own mental health, even your freedom and your life, if you continue to have anything to do with them.

Unfortunately, not everybody can easily extricate themselves from the abuse without severe consequences. This is particularly true for parents of children whose other parent is a Borderline or Narcissist. Staying in the children’s lives means staying in the line of fire of the abuser. Leaving is likely to subject the children to even more abuse. Often the abuser has focused most of her or his rage against their former partner or spouse. But if that parent leaves, the rages, abuses, and emotional manipulations are not going to stop. They will probably be redirected at somebody else close to the abuser as loved-ones are the tops targets for these sick people. The children are a likely target for even more abuse than they have already received. This chronic abuse with no escape (as the healthy parent has disappeared) is likely to create severe psychological damage, even personality disorders, in these children as they have even less means to defend themselves against one of these sociopaths than an adult does.
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