Oversimplified beliefs about alienation rebuttals of child abuse allegations–practice issues

Abstract

Empirical research documents the risk that alienation allegations will prevail over child abuse allegations in custody cases despite evidence to the contrary (Silberg & Dallam, 2019; Milchman, 2017a). This article analyzes oversimplified beliefs, implicit or explicit, about alienation that support such practice. Professionals demonstrate oversimplified beliefs that lend unjustified credibility to alienation claims when they assert or imply that they observed alienation directly rather than inferring it from behavioral observations; that their inferences are unambiguous in their meaning; and that the validity of their inferences is not compromised by difficult-to-detect risks to the child (Milchman et al., 2020). They support these oversimplified beliefs when they claim that suggestibility research calls the validity of abuse interpretations of the behaviors they observed into question. The adversarial nature of the legal system in the U.S. and other countries encourages acceptance of oversimplified beliefs about alienation because blaming one parent for the child’s rejection of the other is consistent with legal concepts of personal responsibility and with legal remedies that directly control the behavior of the person deemed responsible (Meier, 2022). A forthcoming companion article discusses empirical findings related to alienation claims that these oversimplified beliefs support.