Attached is a brand new preprint landmark paper that will have a huge implication in the future of many parents and children affected by parental alienation. We are going to try to provide our opinion on the topic discussed in this 73-page paper:
There are some people who claim that parental alienation is “junk science”. This is outrageous for us, the millions of alienated parents, as the pain and grief are the reality that we must live with every day. Parental alienation is also undeniably real for us, the adult children of parental alienation, as we now, as adults, realizing the full extent of the manipulation, and have to live with life long consequences of identity crisis, guilt, loss, depression… There have been thousands of peer-reviewed scientific studies, yet this group continues with their propaganda against parental alienation, denying this serious public health problem.
Last year, one subset of this group managed to get public funding and published a paper (Meier’s 2019 paper), supposedly based on data from appellate court cases, essentially claiming to find that parental alienation is merely a tool for abusive fathers to use in court to gain custody over mothers and that the court system failed to protect mothers suffering from domestic violence because legal and mental health professionals are distracted by parental alienation claims.
Many influential institutional decision-makers (for example legislators) believed in this paper. Meier’s paper and the campaigns by this group led the APA, APSAC, and WHO to change their positions in recognizing parental alienation as child abuse. This has direct and serious consequences on families that are suffering from parental alienation. Without authoritative institutions like the APA and APSAC recognizing parental alienation as child abuse, the legal system does not have the tools to enforce parental alienation as a crime and for the children to get protection. As such, the court has been inconsistent in recognizing parental alienation; and that is, unfortunately, what many alienated parents are seeing with their own custody cases. Meanwhile, children and alienated parents suffer.
This year, Dr. Jennifer Harman and Dr. Demosthenes Lorandos undertook a study to examine how the study in Meier’s paper was conducted and found that Myer’s paper represented at least 30 serious conceptual and methodological problems with the design and analyses. In addition to cheery-picking, manipulating, and misrepresenting the data, Meier’s study also represents an ethical problem in its lack of transparency, particularly for a scientific study that was publicly funded.
Dr. Harman and Dr. Lorandos took it further and with a clear, transparent, and scientific method, drew from the same set of public data (the appellate court cases), and found that the majority of courts carefully weigh allegations of all forms of family violence in their determinations for the best interests of children.
Let’s hope that this sound scientific study is recognized by decision-makers so that parental alienation can be clearly recognized as child abuse. It needs to be recognized as child abuse so that it is a punishable and enforceable crime, so alienated parents can quickly seek remedies and protection for their children.
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