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Parental alienation is a form of emotional child abuse that occurs when one parent teaches the children to fear, disrespect, and/or avoid the other parent. It’s a common problem in divorces, but unknown to many alienation often gets started in marriages well before a divorce.

Studies of parental alienation show that alienators are almost exclusively parents with sole custody of the children. Statistics on child custody arrangements show that around 80% to 85% of children of divorce in the US end up in the sole custody of their mothers and that this has been the case for multiple decades despite changes in family law and society. These two observations combined mean that parental alienators are predominantly mothers and the parents they are teaching the children to hate are primarily fathers.

Alienators are emotional child abusers, often in more ways than just by teaching the kids to hate the other parent. Many alienators suffer personality disorders and also engage in emotional parentification (also known as emotional incest) by inappropriately using their children as emotional crutches for themselves.

To deny the culpability of these mothers who are child abusers, feminists belonging to groups such as the National Organization of Women (NOW) deny the very existence of parental alienation. They usually offer statements that there is “no scientific evidence that parental alienation is real” and “parental alienation is an excuse for why children do not like child abusing fathers.” Richard Gardner, a psychiatrist who was among those early in describing and defining Parental Alienation Syndrome (commonly abbreviated as PAS, it is a severe form of parental alienation in which the child aligns completely with the alienating parent), made it clear that alienation was not at work if the child disliked a parent who was truly being abusive to the child. But the feminists, in their zeal to treat all women as victims and trash all men as abusers, completely overlook that fact.

There are a growing number of alienated moms in which the child abuser in the family is the father. Typically this occurs in families in which the father has a narcissistic personality and has some advantages such as:

• He is more wealthy.
• He has more education.
• He has professional certification such as a doctor, lawyer, judge, or law enforcement officer.
• He is more politically connected.
• He is a native operating in his own culture and the mother is an immigrant.

These advantages for a narcissistic man often aid him in reversing the usual anti-father bias in family courts, generally producing an anti-mother bias in these cases. Although anti-father bias is clearly wrong, it is disgustingly ironic that often when the bias becomes anti-mother it is happening in cases in which the fathers actually are behaving abusively.
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Recently I was listening to an Internet talk show featuring Dr. Tara Palmatier of Shrink4Men and Paul Elam of A Voice for Men. A caller related a story about how his friend showed up for a court hearing to finalize his divorce and was physically assaulted in the court house by his ex and then falsely accused by her and arrested by the police. This story and several others I have heard and read provide ample cause for a revision in US laws to permit private video and audio recording in courthouses to be used for the protection of the people who are forced to appear in courthouses.

It occurred to me that some people may think being arrested for being a victim of assault in a courthouse sounds far out, but in fact it is not unusual conduct for abusers to go after their target in a court or public setting by staging attacks or simply making up false allegations. For details on this particular incident, listen to the radio program about 64 minutes into the show if you don’t have the time to listen to the whole program.

Another person who has been attacked by his ex in a courthouse is family law reform activist Ben Vonderheide of Pennsylvania. His ex and her new boyfriend conspired to attempt to frame him for assault in a courthouse and made false reports to police to attempt to get him arrested. But because he relentlessly employs audio and video recording devices, even when he is threatened over how they are not allowed and he thereby risks his own false arrest, he was able to prove they assaulted him. This resulted in what is claimed to be the one and only prosecution for perjury in a family law case in the United States.

Ben Vonderheide Exposes Pennsylvania’s Abusive Child Profiteering Racket

Vonderheide’s abusive ex and her latest boyfriend Theodore Yoder were convicted of repeatedly lying to police to try to get Vonderheide arrested on false allegations. The convictions occurred in part because Vonderheide had very convincing evidence. He video and audio records constantly because of his extended experience with pathological liar Flanders, especially if she might be in the area. If he didn’t have those recordings, he might have wound up in prison for a very long time. That’s because in the US, domestic violence and restraining order violation allegations are treated as guilty until proven innocent crimes in violation of the US Constitution. You have to prove your innocence, yet even when you do, you can still be hounded with persecution via a record of criminal accusations that will cost you jobs, income, and your reputation potentially for the rest of your life.

Vonderheide finds himself a frequent target for physical violence and false allegations because he asks questions of backers of the abusive family courts and gender-biased domestic violence laws. These people seek to intimidate and harass him any way they can. When he showed up at the US Senate to ask questions of those backing renewal of the sexist VAWA law, National Organization of Women attorney Lisalyn R. Jacobs physically assaulted him. This abusive physically violent woman is a domestic violence expert for CNN and the New York Times. She espouses the “men are violent, women are victims” drivel that is one the primary reasons behind the total failure of the DV industry to put a stop to violence in families, yet she herself is violent and her actions prove she is a liar when it comes to the DV claims pursued by her gender-biased organization.
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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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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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