Child Custody Outcomes in Cases Involving Parental Alienation and Abuse Allegations, United States, 2005-2014

Abstract

A troubling aspect of justice system response to intimate partner violence is custody courts' failure to protect children when mothers allege the father is abusive. Family courts' errors in assessing adult and child abuse, and punitive responses to abuse allegations, have been widely documented. A significant contributor to these errors is the pseudo-scientific theory of parental alienation (PA). Originally termed parental alienation syndrome (PAS), the theory suggests that when mothers allege that a child is not safe with the father, they are doing so illegitimately, to alienate the child from the father. PA labeling often results in dismissal of women's and children's reports of abuse, and sometimes trumps even expert child abuse evaluations. PAS was explicitly based on negative stereotypes of mothers and has been widely discredited. However, the term parental alienation is still widely used in ways that are virtually identical to PAS. However, because PA is nominally gender neutral (and not called a scientific syndrome), it continues to have substantial credibility in court. The first goal of the study was to ascertain whether empirical evidence indicated that parental alienation is also gender-biased in practice and outcome. Drawing from courts' own reports of facts, findings, and outcomes, such research could inform advocates and the courts regarding the validity or invalidity of relying on PA to strip mothers of their children and potentially subject children to ongoing abuse. Second, inspired by some tentative findings, the study sought to explore outcomes in custody/abuse litigation by gender and by differing types of abuse. The study relied solely on electronically available published opinions in child custody cases; to date, the researchers have identified 240 cases involving alienation and alienation plus abuse. The researchers sought to expand the database to include non-alienation abuse cases as a comparison, and to address additional questions about custody/abuse adjudications.