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Many of us in the Courageous Kids Network, in fact most of us, suffered because the court accepted an invalid theory, Parental Alienation Syndrome (nicknamed "PAS"), which was created by a child psychiatrist named Richard Gardner. Gardner was more than a psychiatrist. He was a shrewd businessman. He discovered there was a lot of money to be made from testifying in defense of incest offenders in family court. |
So, with this awareness, Gardner made up and marketed a phony "syndrome" that could be used as a legal defense tactic for the offenders, knowing they would pay a lot of money for "expert" defense testimony. Then Gardner promoted himself as an "expert" on his own made up syndrome. Gardner automatically labeled mothers who brought allegations of child sexual abuse to the attention of the family court as malicious liars who were "fabricating abuse" to "get the father out of the child's life." PAS is used to twist everything around so the protective mother is viewed as the problem parent rather than the offending father. The "cure" for the "syndrome" is to take the children away from the "bad" mother (protector) and give them to the "good" father (sex offender.) Gardner made millions of dollars "selling" his PAS defense strategy to lawyers and mental health professionals through books he published himself, public speaking to legal and father's rights groups, and court testimony. Judges, attorneys, mediators, and evaluators, flocked to hear about this new mental health fad and started to use it in family court litigation. Gardner had created a monster. PAS took on a life of its own, mushrooming to be used as a cover for any type of male abuse. Suddenly, men identified by their children as physical, sexual, or mental batterers, were getting "PAS experts" to suppress evidence of their abuse and convince courts that they were the "real victims"--of lying children and vindictive ex wives. Protective mothers were viciously attacked by the court. Some were even being jailed for doing what the law required them to do to keep their children safe. Eventually, PAS was also used to take children away from mothers who wanted to move away with the children, or asked for child support from fathers. The Gardner followers didn't seem to notice or care that PAS was not even a real mental health disorder, or that Gardner's writings showed that he had a biased, disrespectful view of women, and a perverted attitude about child abuse. Gardner's identification with child abusers, especially child molesters, was proved in his own books. Gardner claimed pedophilia is "normal" and he justified child sexual abuse by saying, "There's a little bit of pedophilia in all of us." Another deviant thing he said was that child molest is good for society because it makes children get involved in sex at an early age, so they end up having more years to populate the earth. How twisted is that!!! Since parents are required by law to protect their children from child molestation, a reporter asked Gardner what a good mother should do if her child discloses molest by the father. Gardner said the mother should tell the child, "Don't say that about your father or I'll beat you!" So obviously Gardner gave no credibility to children, had no respect for the laws requiring parents to protect children from abuse, and even thought that beating a child is a proper thing to do! Gardner was obviously a depraved, mentally unstable man. Last year he committed suicide by slitting his own throat and repeatedly stabbing himself in the chest with a butcher knife, while over-dosed on prescription drugs. It's important to know that there are kids who had grown up who were suing Gardner because his phony syndrome was used to force them into the custody of their abusers and destroy their lives. Even though Gardner is dead, the damaging effect of his phony "alienation" syndrome lives on. There are a few things that are really important to know about PAS: It is almost exclusively used against women, and not men. We know there are protective fathers out there, just like there are protective mothers, but they don't seem to get labeled with PAS, and they don't they get attacked by the courts like protective mothers do. Their efforts to protect their kids from an abusive mother are pretty much ignored by the courts. In other words, their kids aren't protected either. The difference with protective fathers is that they usually don't lose custody, get called denigrating names, or get punished by the courts with supervised visitation. This is because PAS has a built in bias against women. Another thing that is important to know is that PAS is only used against protective parents who are middle or upper class and who have money to spend and assets to sell, to fight in court. It is never used on poor indigent women, like those on welfare who have no money to pay to lawyers, mediators, evaluators, etc. All the mothers who fight PAS end up broke, and all their money and assets end up in the pockets of the "professionals" involved in the litigation-the attorneys, mediators, evaluators, family court "service providers" etc. When all their money is gone, the protective mothers have no way to fight to get their kids back. That way the abuser keeps the upper hand in the litigation, even if he is out of money too, because the protective mother would have to be able to dole out more money to lawyers and other professionals to prove the order giving the abuser custody should be overturned. The last important thing to know about PAS is that since it not a real mental health disorder, there is also no real "cure" for it either. Once a mother is labeled with PAS, the label follows her forever. If she keeps fighting against the dangerous court orders, the court views her as obsessive and rebellious. If she tries to appease the court hoping to get her kids back by doing so, the court considers her to be admitting to PAS. If she gives up trying to get her kids back, the court labels her with abandonment. Any way you cut it the abuser wins, the abused kids lose, and the lawyers and mental health "professionals" promoting PAS get rich off the kids' misery. MODERATOR'S NOTE: Alienation does occur, and can exist even within intact families. However, it is not a syndrome, but a behavior that is not uncommon in human experience, and therefore should not qualify for "expert" testimony. It is the improper assignment of psychological labeling to normal protective behavior, through the use of "abuse excuse" legal defenses, that has resulted in the convoluted knee jerk reaction of courts in punishing protective parents by stripping them of custody. In a review of hundreds of protective parent cases, batterers and incest offenders fought for, and won, custody by labeling the protective parent's efforts to keep the child safe as "parental alienation." Without exception, once the abuser gained custody of the child and control in the litigation, he engaged in the very behavior that he projected onto the protective parent: he alienated the child from the protective parent, and attempted to exclude that parent from the child's life. In no case was the custodial abuser held accountable by the court for thwarting a relationship, or for violating orders for visitation, between the child and the protective parent. By virtue of giving the wrong parent custody, the family court condones and exacerbates the same behavior it allegedly seeks to prevent, that is: one parent damaging the relationship between the child and the other parent. By abolishing psychobabble testimony and focusing on parental history and behavior, under appropriate rules of evidence, the courts could make well reasoned custody decisions that would protect both the safety of children and parental rights. For additional information on PAS, visit these links. |
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