Ο αμφιλεγόμενος ρόλος της Jennifer Harman ως επιστημονικής συμβούλου για την γονεϊκή αποξένωση σε αντιδικίες για την επιμέλεια

By 2017, Katherine’s divorce case had dragged on for eight years. The litigation crushed her financially: She took out credit cards, then a second mortgage to pay those off. But she escaped her abusive ex-husband, and by 2017, four separate experts had made reports for the court recommending Katherine continue to have sole decision-making authority and primary custody of their two children.

Still, she feared for her sons’ safety after her ex filed a court motion to increase his parenting time. Police had charged her ex with misdemeanor child abuse for allegedly choking their older son, then 13 years old. Nearly six months later, her ex blocked her driveway when she sought to take that son to basketball practice. She said their two boys called her shortly after that when they were at her ex’s apartment one night, alleging that her ex was drunk and they feared he would drive.

Katherine, identified by a pseudonym for this article, asked a Jefferson County judge to restrict her former husband’s parenting time. But she first had to contend with the testimony of an expert witness her husband had hired. It was the first time that Jennifer Harman, a Colorado State University associate psychology professor, took the witness stand in Colorado to espouse her beliefs in the controversial theory of parental alienation.

Harman testified that her studies show some parents deliberately turn their children against their other parents, especially in contentious custody situations, a hypothesis at the center of the parental alienation theory. And she told the judge such deviousness scars children and is associated with high rates of suicide, academic decline and depression. Though she never spoke to Katherine or her children, Harman recommended the judge consider giving primary custody to Katherine’s ex-husband to combat what she called Katherine’s “psychological aggression” and “campaign of denigration she has been engaged in.”

But the judge dismissed Harman’s opinion in the custody orders he entered in late 2017, saying her limited investigation and “refusal to recognize father’s own alienating behavior” took away her credibility.

“Her testimony was of little benefit,” the judge wrote.

Six years after the judge dismissed Harman’s testimony in Katherine’s case, Harman has fashioned herself into one of Colorado’s most well-known proponents of the parental alienation theory.

Since 2016 she has written a book on parental alienation, published her theory in peer-reviewed journals, held training sessions for lawyers and judges, and given other presentations on the topic all over the U.S. and as far as Croatia, Iceland, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

She advocates in extreme parental alienation cases temporarily removing children from a parent engaging in alienating behavior and, for 90 days, cutting off all contact between that parent and the children to deprogram the children and repair their relationship with the alienated parent.

But Harman has attracted critics who question her research and say her expert testimony risks putting already damaged children in danger. They say parental alienation can help abusive parents gain parental rights while dismissing the fears of children experiencing actual physical and sexual abuse.

The Human Rights Council of the United Nations in April issued a report calling parental alienation a “discredited and unscientific pseudo-concept” that is “used in family law proceedings by abusers as a tool to continue their abuse and coercion and to undermine and discredit allegations of domestic violence made by mothers who are trying to keep their children safe.”

In 2020, parental alienation was removed from the International Classification of Diseases by the World Health Organization.

Custody cases involving accusations of parents turning their children against the other, and pushback from experts who dismiss parental alienation as junk science that can end up returning children to abusive parents, have attracted the attention of legislators in Colorado and other states. In this year’s legislative session, Colorado lawmakers moved to increase scrutiny on the qualifications of experts offering opinions in custody cases about alleged abuse.

In a new law that had bipartisan support, courts no longer will be allowed to restrict the custody of a parent who is competent, protective and not abusive solely to improve a relationship with the other parent. It prohibits reunification treatment that is predicated on cutting off the relationship between a child and a protective parent the child has a bond with.

Still, Harman remains an adherent to the theory along with several parenting evaluators who regularly are appointed by Colorado judges to help them decide high-conflict child custody cases.

Harman declined comment, citing medical issues. She declined to respond to a list of detailed questions emailed to her. “Please do not contact me again,” she emailed back, adding that her work is “scientifically supported.”

Don Rojas, the chair of CSU’s psychology department, said, “Dr. Harman’s research and publications fit well with the expectations for scientific freedom of discovery. Her research is peer reviewed and published in some of the most prestigious journals in psychology.”

Sons are now thriving

The experts in Katherine’s case included one hired by her ex-husband, Janice Black, a licensed clinical social worker, who described her ex’s behavior in a supplemental report as “obsessive” based on phone records showing about 80 attempts to contact their sons in one month, according to Black’s statement. She characterized him as “fixated beyond the point that seems practical and effective, perhaps to a pathological degree.”

“This personality trait, obsessiveness, seems so extreme, it is likely to fall under a category of Personality Disorder,” Black wrote.

Katherine’s sons are now in college and thriving. She got some relief as they got older and grew bigger than their father so he couldn’t control them physically anymore. Getting their drivers’ licenses so they could leave his home when they wanted to also helped, she said. “I didn’t sleep for eight years when they would go over there.”

Harman has consulted or testified as an expert witness in at least 27 custody cases between 2017 and 2020 in Colorado, Nebraska, Utah, New Mexico and Ohio, according to a resume she submitted in a court case in 2022. She testified last year that she’s been designated an expert witness in 13 states as well as in Ontario and 10 judicial districts in Colorado. Last summer, she conducted training sessions on parental alienation for the judiciary in Oklahoma and Indiana.

Joan Meier, a national expert in the intersection of domestic violence and the family court system, has testified as a competing expert witness for parents battling Harman in court. Meier said that for decades proponents of parental alienation have pushed to have their theory included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, without success.

“Harman has become their darling” of that push, Meier said. “Because Harman is really good at writing in ways to get her published in these high profile peer-reviewed journals. And that lends credibility to the concept and to the label.”

Meier said that if Harman and her supporters succeed in getting parental alienation officially designated as a mental disorder, abused children and parents seeking to protect them will pay a cost. She predicted abusive parents then will gain leverage to argue for removing children from the care of protective parents.

“They’ll say, ‘This is a whole syndrome that exists. It’s a mental disorder, and this parent is causing a mental illness, and these treatments have to follow,’ even if the treatments are completely bogus, and there’s been absolutely no safety or efficacy in any of them,” Meier predicted.

Meier said too many children already suffer when courts wrongly decide that a protective parent is manipulating a child to reject the other parent.

“There have been some kids who killed themselves over this,” Meier said.

No contact for 90 days

A Weld County magistrate in June 2022 relied on Harman’s report and testimony in her ruling that found a mother had subjected to severe parental alienation her 15-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son who refused to spend time with their father. In her ruling, the magistrate cited Harman’s testimony that physically abused children don’t reject their abusers in the definitive, polarized way children do when parental alienation exists.

“A lot of times abused children will definitely feel bad about it,” Harman testified. “You know, they — they want to repair the relationship … They’re not saying, ‘I hate you, I never want to see you again,’ and not care about their feelings.”

The magistrate removed the children from the mother’s care, ordered them into a reunification camp with their estranged father and barred the mother from having any contact with the children for 90 days. The no-contact order was extended for nearly a year and only recently was the mother granted two hours a week visitation with her children, and only while underpaid supervision.

The children, since their removal from their mother’s home, have run away at least twice from the father to whom the judge granted full custody. In one incident, the children fled to a neighbor’s home. There, they asked police to protect them from what they described as a violent outburst from their father they said left the daughter with scratch marks on her arm and side when the father wrested his cell phone away from her.

In another case out of Steamboat Springs, Harman testified in 2020 in a custody case involving allegations that a mother’s new boyfriend had sexually abused two boys, both aged 8, and physically abused one of the boys. Harman suggested in a 96-page report she submitted to the court that anal fissures in one of the boys were caused by constipation instead of sexual abuse despite the boy reporting that the mother’s new boyfriend had shoved items up his anus.

When pressed on the witness stand on why she offered constipation up as an explanation, Harman testified that she merely was documenting what medical professionals had reported.

When a lawyer pointed out that the medical professionals eventually ruled out constipation as the cause of the injury, Harman testified that leaving the medical professionals’ ultimate conclusion out of the report was an innocent mistake. She testified her mistake should not discredit her opinion that the children’s father may have engaged in severe parental alienation that prompted the children to make false sexual abuse allegations about their mother’s new boyfriend.

“If I missed one thing, then it was an oversight,” Harman testified. “It wasn’t central to my conclusion about parental alienation.”

She further testified that child-protective workers aren’t equipped to diagnose parental alienation. A lot of child protective cases are “run on a case-by-case basis whereas parental alienation involves patterns of behavior over time,” she testified.

“It’s easy to show like one-time events, you know, like neglect where a parent overdoses or they — they — they’re arrested and the children are left home,” she continued. “But longer-term patterns of abuse are more challenging, and that’s what parental alienation is.”

A Routt County District Court judge in that case ruled against Harman’s theory of parental alienation and stressed during the hearing that she believed “something occurred” between the mother’s boyfriend and the children. The judge further found that the mother was “emotionally damaging” the children to the point they were suicidal. The judge cut off all parenting time for the mother and allowed the father to move to Hawaii while giving him full custody of the boys and his 14-year-old daughter.

The mother and her boyfriend have continued to pursue their claims of parental alienation in separate pending lawsuits, stressing in court filings that criminal child sex abuse charges prosecutors brought against the boyfriend were dismissed.

Parental alienation confab at CSU

Harman’s previous research focused on infectious diseases. Her dissertation as a student at the University of Connecticut in 2004 dealt with the spread of HIV. She shifted her focus about 10 years ago to studying parental alienation and has testified she did so after witnessing one of her past boyfriends and her current husband become victims of parental alienation.

“It’s no different than a lot of social workers who study domestic violence; they get into it for a reason,” Harman testified in one case in July 2020. “People in psychology study topics that are related to their personal experience because they’re passionate about it, and it’s interesting and it provides insight.”

In one 2016 TED talk from a Colorado State University stage Harman told a rapt audience her studies suggest that 22 million parents in the United States have been victims of parental alienation.

Harman is a director of the Parental Alienation Study Group, an international non-profit with 800 members from 62 countries, which this Father’s Day weekend hosted a conference in Fort Collins at Colorado State University’s Laurel Village and the Lory Student Center. Among the presentations at the conference: Surviving the witness stand as a parental alienation expert and how to overcome challenges in publishing and disseminating information about parental alienation.

Harman in testimony and her expert witness reports describes a five-factor model for assessing whether a custody case has involved alienation. She called the model during testimony in January 2022 a way of summarizing empirical research into a framework.

“It’s not a diagnostic tool, it’s more of a framework of what we know from the scientific literature that can help differentiate cases where parental alienation is happening from cases where there’s other kinds of family conflict,” she testified.

She says the five factors include rejection of a parent, evidence of a prior positive relationship, absence of abuse or neglect or seriously deficient parenting, multiple alienating behaviors by the favored parent and certain behavioral manifestations that occur in alienated children.

Meier argues those factors just as easily could be evidence of child abuse that authorities haven’t confirmed.

“It is used to deny credible reasons for kids’ fear, such as abuse or other forms of harsh parenting or horrible bullying by a new sibling,” Meier said. “Or there can be 1,000 reasons that a kid doesn’t want to be with their dad that may not be abuse. Some of them may be abused. And to call all of that parental alienation is nonsense.”

‘Horrible hit job piece’

Psychiatrist Richard Gardner developed the parental alienation theory in the 1980s, and in 1991 self-published “Sex-Abuse Hysteria: Salem Witch Trials Revisited.” He told Newsweek in a 1992 interview about the custody dispute between Mia Farrow and Woody Allen that “screaming sex abuse is a very effective way to wreak vengeance on a hated spouse,” and claimed he testified in more than 400 child custody cases, The New York Times reported after Gardner’s death in 2003. He was a professor of child psychiatry at Columbia University.

In a 1992 writing, he suggested “all of us have some pedophilia within us,” and that judges and prosecutors who pursue child sexual abuse charges may get voyeuristic gratifications from the cases, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

On her CV Harman calls herself an expert on “all forms of domestic violence such as parental alienation and psychological abuse” and “research methods on the study of parental alienation and the public health impact on individuals and society.”

Harman last year offered support to Mark Kilmer, a controversial Boulder psychologist whose court-appointed parental evaluation work in nearly 700 custody cases came under criticism after he publicly declared that he disbelieved 90% of domestic violence allegations he hears, according to emails she sent.

Harman emailed Kilmer telling him she believed his critics were “trying to cherry pick cases” to push for new laws and revised training of evaluators, which she predicted would lead to bias in custody cases.

“It is clear that those behind this will make a large legislative push this year that will not be good and promote a very gender biased perspective on violence,” Harman wrote in one email.

Kilmer provided the emails to the state Court Administrator’s Office, which wasn’t persuaded by Harman’s assertion in her email that Kilmer had been the target of what Harman called a “horrible hit job piece” by ProPublica. The court administrator’s office would go on to bar Kilmer from accepting any more court appointments to conduct parenting evaluations.

A mother receives no-contact order

Despite the reservations of Harman and other parental alienation advocates, state lawmakers this year put up guardrails for those wanting to use the theory in custody battles. HB 23-1178, sponsored by state Rep. Meg Froelich, a Democrat from Greenwood Village, bars reunification treatment that is predicated on cutting off the relationship between a child and a protective parent in order to repair a deficient relationship with another parent.

The law passed too late for Valarie Underwood, a Greeley mother whose custody case included testimony from Harman. Weld County Magistrate Annette Kundelius cited Harman’s report and testimony when Kundelius ruled in June 2022 that Underwood had severely alienated her daughter, 15, and son, 14, from their father.

“Dr. Harman testified that there is a notable difference in the behavior of children who have been abused or neglected compared to the behavior of children who have been alienated by one parent against the other,” Kundelius wrote in her ruling. “Dr. Harman testified that abused children actually tend to have feelings of ambivalence towards the parent that abused them and a majority of abused children engage in attachment enhancing behaviors, not behaviors of rejection.”

In August 2022, Kundelius barred Underwood from having any contact with her children for at least 90 days, stressing that the no-contact order could be extended, and ordered the children removed from Underwood’s care so that their father could have full-time custody to go into reunification treatment. The magistrate ordered the children and their father to attend Turning Points for Families, a New York reunification camp run by Linda Gottlieb, a licensed social worker, who advertises on the Internet “the ultimate four-day therapeutic vacation” for reversing parental alienation.

The magistrate’s no-contact order upended the previous arrangement that had left Underwood with full custody ever since Steven Shinn, a retired chief district court judge for the 13th Judicial District, issued an arbitration finding in 2018 that Underwood and her ex-husband agreed to follow. The parents took the case to binding arbitration after their son, then 10, refused that July to go when his father came to pick him up, despite the encouragement from both parents that he do so.

Shinn found that the father should not have any parenting time until a counselor could ease the concern of the children and make them ready to see their father again.

The father moved in December 2020 to find Underwood in contempt of court after a therapist trying to improve the childrens’ relationship with their father withdrew from the case. The father, who did not return messages seeking comment, hired Harman as an expert witness to support his contention that Underwood had undermined his relationship with the children. Harman helped persuade the magistrate to issue the order temporarily barring the mother from having any contact with children.

The last time Underwood had the children under her unfettered care was when she dropped them off at the Denver International Airport on August 19, 2022 for the flight to the reunification camp in New York.

Journal entries from her daughter that a family friend provided Underwood show the reunification efforts in New York over several days did not go well. The daughter described staying with her father in a “small, rundown” hotel and having therapy sessions with their father in Gottlieb’s “sketchy” apartment.

“When I met Linda, I immediately knew she wasn’t on our side because of her shark eyes,” Underwood’s daughter wrote of Gottlieb, who guided the reunification treatments. “Today was really hard, and I cried a lot, but the plan is just to go with what Linda says so that we can see mom as soon as possible while still speaking the truth.”

The daughter wrote the next day: “I don’t think she’s actually going to lower the no contact period because she continuously threatens us with her power on the situation then changes the rules.”

Gottlieb declined comment.

‘A blind witness’

The magistrate in December extended the no-contact order, ruling that Underwood did not sufficiently support the children having a relationship with the father. It wasn’t until about nine months after the first issuance of the no-contact order that Underwood was able to see her son, and then only two hours a week, while under the guidance of a supervisor to whom Underwood had to pay $105 an hour. In June, Underwood finally was granted two hours a week with her daughter, which also requires supervision at a cost of $105 an hour.

Underwood said she still can’t believe Harman had so much credence with the court considering that Harman never met with Underwood or the children.

“A blind witness had my custody removed,” Underwood said. “She doesn’t even know what the dynamic is, and yet she’s making decisions that decide where a child lives.”

When Underwood unsuccessfully tried to get the magistrate’s ensuing 90-day no-contact order lifted, Sharon Feder, a psychotherapist and proponent of parental alienation the magistrate appointed to work as a reunification therapist, testified that the children were “severely alienated” from their father.

A police report states the children ran from their father’s home one night in October 2022 to a neighbor’s house. When police responded, the children reported that the daughter had been trying to use her father’s phone to check a school email when their father became aggressive. He wrapped her in an arm hold, leaving her with scratches on her arm and side, which police said they observed. The son reported that his father similarly had grabbed him by the wrist in a similar incident that occurred weeks earlier.

Despite the children’s wishes that they be returned to their mother’s home, Feder testified keeping the no-contact order in place against Underwood would incentivize her children to improve their relationship with their father. She added that children always need to have a relationship with both parents, even if one abuses them, also stressing she had not found any abuse by the father.

Both children filed complaints against Feder through the Department of Regulatory Agencies, accusing her of yelling and threatening them during therapy sessions, and telling them she would take away extracurricular activities and work if they refused to continue with therapy. Feder denied the accusations in her testimony, suggesting the children filed the complaints to coerce her to resign because they didn’t want to do reunification therapy with anyone.

“I know they’re trying to get out of reintegration therapy. And that’s the tactic I believe they’ve used to do that,” Feder said.

According to records from Colorado’s judicial branch, the state in 2018 removed Feder from its list of child and family investigators eligible for court appointments to help guide judges in making custody decisions. Those records show a complaint against Feder was founded for violating the state’s practice standards for CFIs of professionalism and requirement to prepare a “clear, concise and timely” report.

In an interview, Feder said patient confidentiality barred her from commenting on the Underwood case. She said her removal from the rosters of CFIs should not bar her from continuing to accept court appointments as a reunification therapist because those roles are “not related at all.” She added that the change in state law the legislature passed this year was “bad and ridiculous.”

Underwood laments all the time lost with her children she will never get back. For months, Underwood’s only updates on the status of the children came from family members, who still are in contact with the children.

“My daughter had her 16th birthday,” Underwood said. “I couldn’t see her. I couldn’t give her a car. I couldn’t do anything.”

She had to wait until her supervised visits began in May with her son to give him family Christmas gifts and still won’t be allowed to attend when a doctor sees her son at Children’s Hospital for help with an orthopedic issue related to his back. She missed her daughter’s trip to a state-level golf tournament. Recently, she took her daughter for a pedicure, but the trip cost her more than $200 that she had to pay a supervisor, required by Feder to oversee Underwood’s parenting time.

A new judge handling her custody dispute has not yet ruled on the motion Underwood’s lawyer filed last month seeking to bring an end to Feder’s reunification therapy. The motion stressed that the therapy was based on the court’s decision to cut off the child’s relationship with the mother to improve their relationship with the father, the exact type of no-contact order state lawmakers barred this year.

“They’re at an age right now where they’re turning into young adults,” Underwood said. “They are having milestone events within school, within sports, driving and homecoming. I can’t help them grow into young adults and be there for them when they need me the most.”