Dangerous games with mandatory joint custody of children and the unscientific «Parental Alienation»

Article by Fotini Lambridi
Source: tvxs.gr
Date: 06/10/2022
Link: https://tvxs.gr/news/ellada/epikindyna-paixnidia-me-tin-ypoxreotiki-synepimeleia-ton-paidion-kai-i-antiepistimoniki-Justice Minister Mr. Tsiaras announced the formation of a special legislative drafting committee at the Ministry of Justice tasked with reforming the institutional framework for addressing domestic violence.

This could be good news, if it weren't preceded by the Tsiaras law on mandatory joint custody, which has resulted in many women seeing their children in the hands of abusive partners, and if there weren't concern that the government intends to officially recognize the term «Parental Alienation», which has been proven to be linked to dangerous unscientific views and was in fact coined by a supporter of pedophilia.

"The committee should have included bodies working in this field. Unfortunately, however, it only has lawyers and executive staff. Neither organizations nor bodies dealing with this issue," Kiki Petroulaki, president of the European Network Against Violence, tells tvxs, adding that the Tsiaras bill has already created enormous problems for women and children, since there is a growing number of cases where custody is granted to an abusive partner.

Parental Alienation Syndrome: The term conceived by a defender of pedophilia

Feminist organizations, which have every reason to be concerned, note that the mandatory joint custody lobby welcomes the committee and points out in a post on its website that "Parental Alienation is also a form of domestic psychological violence - the violent intervention in the child's psychological world with the aim of breaking the parent-child relationship and disrupting the parent-child emotional bond."

Ms. Petroulaki points out that during the consultation on the law, the organizations had managed to prevent the term from being adopted. "The ministry ultimately just renamed it," she tells tvxs.

But what is "Parental Alienation Syndrome," which the joint custody lobby is trying, with the tolerance of the ministry, to have officially recognized in the country?

Parental Alienation Syndrome is a term coined by Richard A. Gardner in the early 1980s to refer to what he himself described as a disorder in which a child systematically and unjustifiably denigrates and insults one parent, as a result of a combination of factors including brainwashing by the other parent (usually within the context of a dispute over parental responsibility) as well as the child's own efforts to disparage or unfairly accuse the other parent.

It is worth noting that Gardner based his work on his personal observations and his work as an expert witness, often on behalf of fathers accused of molesting their children. Gardner claimed that the syndrome is a very common "disorder of children, arising almost exclusively from child custody disputes, in which one parent (usually the mother) encourages the child to hate the other parent (usually the father)"!

Before he committed suicide, Gardner developed his theory further through his published works and caused controversy with his views on pedophilia. We quote some relevant excerpts:

"Pedophilia 'is a widespread and accepted practice among literally billions of people.'" "The overwhelming majority ('probably over 95%') of all allegations of sex abuse are valid." "There is a little pedophilia in all of us." "Pedophilia is considered the norm by the vast majority of individuals throughout the history of the world." "Children suffer from pedophilia because society overreacts to it." "Pedophilia may enhance the survival of the human species by serving reproductive purposes." "Sexual abuse is not necessarily traumatic. The determining factor as to whether sexual molestation will be traumatic for the child is society's attitude toward such encounters."

Gardner also claims that children's aggressiveness often indicates that children want to have sex with adults and may seduce them (!), since some children experience high sexual desires in early childhood!

While "...if the sexual relationship is revealed, the child is likely to fabricate the facts so that the adult is blamed for initiating it!"

In conclusion, the guru of custody matters for the joint custody lobby in Greece advised, regarding children who had been sexually abused by their father: "Keep the child connected to the father. Special care should be taken so that the child is not alienated from the parent who is molesting them. The child should be told that there is no perfect parent"!

As for mothers who discover that their husband is sexually abusing their child, Gardner places the blame for the father's abuse of the child on the mother. Why is she to blame? Because she does not fulfill his sexual desires, and so the father is "forced" to have sex with the child. He suggests that therapists help mothers of children who are victims of molestation to fulfill the men's sexual desires. "Discourage legal disputes. Encourage her to stay with her husband. Blame her and the daughter for the sexual harassment by the father. One of the reasons the daughter turned against the father may be the child's problematic relationship with the mother" (Gardner, R.A. (1992) True and False Accusations of Child Sex Abuse).

Despite what its supporters say in Greece, Parental Alienation Syndrome is not recognized as a disorder by the medical and legal community, and Gardner's theories as well as related research have received widespread criticism for their lack of scientific basis. It has been rejected, among others, by an expert report and by the Court of Appeal of England, by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges of the USA, and by the Superior Courts of the USA. It is not included either in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems of the World Health Organization (WHO) or in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

When New Democracy brought the theories of Gardner's disciple to Parliament

Could one say that the concern of Feminist Organizations and other organizations against gender-based violence is excessive? No. And this is because, as Mariniki Alevizopoulou and Yannis Orestis Papadimitriou had noted in their report on tvxs, these unscientific views were brought to Parliament by the ruling party itself.

In the report titled "Tsiaras Law: Pseudoscience and the inventors of reunification camps in Parliament" they write that the source cited by the defenders of mandatory joint custody "...is none other than the notorious 'Warshak report,' a 2014 text by American psychologist Richard Warshak, which, as Ms. Papadatou-Pastou informed us, was supported by 110 scientists in the field and the American Psychological Association. The author of the text was a student of psychologist Richard Gardner, who introduced the concept of 'Parental Alienation Syndrome,' and inherited the scientific material he left behind. Since Gardner's death in 2003, Warshak has become the continuer of his theories on 'parental alienation' and, by extension, the main scientific alibi for advocates of mandatory joint custody.

This "report" cited by Ms. Papadatou-Pastou has a series of problems, the first of which is that it is not a report at all. It is a paper published in the pluralistic journal of the American Psychological Association, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, as part of scientific dialogue, which argued, by compiling the literature on Parental Alienation, that equal time with both parents is proven beneficial for children under four years old. It is only the somewhat brazen title "a consensus report" given by the author himself that makes it a "report," even though neither its sources nor the text itself represent any kind of "consensus" whatsoever, given that they had received and continue to receive criticism from a large part of the scientific community" and

As for what happens when ideas about "parental alienation" are put into practice, in an extensive related piece titled

"When the Child Becomes a Weapon," published in The Atlantic magazine in December 2020, the founder of the Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma also describes Family Bridges as "torture camps for children." The article speaks of children who developed suicidal ideation within the program, suffered panic attacks, while one of them still describes themselves as "emotionally destroyed by the program."

The three children — now adults — who spoke to NBC about the program state, among other things, that "they wouldn't wish this on anyone" and that they all came out of it "hating" one parent. In another 2018 report by the American network, children who went through Family Bridges speak of manipulation and intimidation tactics.

"In a recent podcast by Reveal, the award-winning Center for Investigative Reporting in the USA, primary testimonies describe the traumatic moment when two siblings leave the courtroom escorted by police officers to be transferred to a Family Bridges program. Within the program, they describe feeling like 'prisoners' and 'trapped,' and testify that Rand and Warshak themselves told them they would not get out of there until they admitted that their father had brainwashed them."

There is a pattern in all the testimonies collected by the journalistic investigation into Family Bridges: the side of the "alienated" parent proposes recourse to such a program in court; the court accepts it (in 27% of cases in Canada and reportedly at a higher rate in the USA); the parents pay an exorbitant amount for the program; the children go through a systematic "training" that changes their preferences regarding the parent; the children are removed from the parent who originally had custody and may not see them for years. As one lawyer testified in a related 2017 Washington Post investigation: "These programs are essentially scams. It's clear to me that they were making exorbitant amounts of money by selling a change of custody." Richard Warshak himself refused to speak to the newspaper, presumably because prosecutions were pending against him, the outcome of which we were unable to learn.

It is therefore strange how Ms. Papadatou-Pastou considered that she could base her argument on a man whose theories do not fit, even remotely, within scientific consensus, while his clinical work appears to fall within the sphere of criminal procedure."