Best of the Best: Gender Bias and the Myth of Parental Alienation

Everyone’s heard of the vengeful ex-wife who accuses her ex-husband of child abuse just to get back at him during a divorce. There’s even a scientific-sounding term for it: parental alienation. But is parental alienation real? And are judges taking allegations of abuse seriously enough? In this rebroadcast of one of our earliest shows, we speak to Prof. Joan Meier from George Washington University Law School who has some frankly startling data on the subject. How does alleging abuse affect custody decisions? Is there scientific proof that alienation exists? And what can we do to persuade the courts to do a better job of investigating abuse?

Topics in this episode:

• Realizing children aren’t being protected (1:30)
• Junk science: parental alienation syndrome (2:47)
• The myth of the vengeful ex-wife (7:57)
• Women are not considered as credible as men (13:15)
• Effects on custody decisions (20:54)
• What should the courts be doing? (23:54)
• Reaction by judges (29:52)
• Advice for child abuse professionals (32:54)
• For more information (36:20)

Links:

This episode originally aired on January 5, 2020 

Joan S. Meier, professor of clinical law and director of the National Family Violence Law Center at the  George Washington University Law School

The study referred to in this episode, “Child Custody Outcomes in Cases Involving Parental Alienation and Abuse Allegations,” and other research by Professor Meier are available on the law school’s website

“‘A gendered trap’: When mothers allege child abuse by fathers, the others often lose custody, study shows,” is a Washington Post article about the study.

Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project (DV LEAP) provides pro bono appellate representation in compelling domestic violence cases and trains attorneys and courts around the country

DV LEAP’s Legal Resource Library include briefs and court opinions, training materials, publications, links to domestic violence organizations, case digests, and custody resources

For more information about National Children’s Alliance and the work of Children’s Advocacy Centers, visit our website at NationalChildrensAlliance.org. Or visit our podcast website at One in Ten podcast. And join us on Facebook at One in Ten podcast.

Transcript

Season 5, Episode 7 (rebroadcast of Season 2, Episode 1)

[Intro music]

[Intro]

[0:32] Teresa Huizar:
You’re listening to One in Ten from National Children’s Alliance. I’m Teresa Huizar, your host. Join us as we engage in one-on-one conversations with the brightest minds in science, medicine, faith, communications, and the law. We’ll discuss the path forward to solve the greatest challenge one in 10 of our children face: child abuse.

Today’s episode is on gender bias and the myth of parental alienation. Everyone’s heard the story of the vengeful ex-wife who accuses her ex-husband of child abuse just to get back at him during a divorce. There’s even a sort of scientific sounding term for it: parental alienation. But is parental alienation actually real? And are judges taking allegations of abuse seriously enough?

I spoke to Professor Joan Meier from George Washington University Law School who has some frankly startling data on the subject. How does alleging abuse affect custody decisions? Is there actually scientific proof that parental alienation exists? And what can we do to persuade the courts to take abuse claims more seriously?

[1:30] Teresa Huizar:
Well, Joan, thanks so much for joining us and our podcast listeners on One in Ten. How did you come to this work?

Joan Meier: 
If by this work you mean custody and abuse as opposed to domestic violence more generally? I’ll back into the answer to that. The custody side of the work kind of came up on me when I decided that I wanted to launch an appellate nonprofit DV LEAP [Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project] that would handle appeals all over the country and in the Supreme Court involving domestic violence.

I was not looking for custody appeals. In fact, I was sort of hoping not to have too many of them. But as soon as we opened our doors, we were deluged with mothers—almost all mothers, but a few fathers—who were having a terrible time getting the courts to be willing to protect their children from an abusive other parent in custody litigation.

And so I handled a few appeals. I wrote some briefs. I did a lot of scholar—you know, I started digging into the research on parental alienation. I did scholarship on that, did a lot of trainings. It just became very compelling, and it seemed an area of the practice around domestic violence that people didn’t seem to realize that children were not being protected and were being sent to abusers.

So it felt like a really important issue to address. 

[2:47] Teresa Huizar: 
Well, this is a complex and important issue, and one of the things that I was thinking about is, when I was starting my career, there was a lot of talk of parental alienation syndrome, a syndrome that has now been, you know, thoroughly debunked but which seems to have had this interesting morph. As though if you just take off the word “syndrome,” the fundamental idea is still sound. 

And so for other listeners who may have come to the work more recently, may not be familiar with the term and the history of that, can you just provide a little background about that? 

Joan Meier: 
Sure. You’re absolutely right. “Parental alienation syndrome” was invented by Richard Gardner. I’ll start there and explain that it was debunked. So Richard Gardner was an MD at Columbia and was somewhat well regarded in some of his work on divorce, and he came up with the idea that was purely from his own experience, that when women claimed child sexual abuse in custody litigation, they aren’t doing it because it’s true or a real concern but to alienate the children from the father.

And he called it parental alienation syndrome and he described it in very subjective terms. There’s like seven criteria. And, um, things like frivolous rationales, like if you ask the child why they don’t want to see father, their answers are frivolous in the eyes of whoever is observing—that kind of thing.

And so it became called PAS. It got picked up by a lot of courts, and over maybe the first decade or so, from the eighties into the nineties, it got increasingly debunked. Um, and because the word “syndrome” was in the name, it was easier to attack it as junk science because the word “syndrome” kind of made it clear it was a kind of a scientific theory. 

So it got rejected by many leading professional organizations. It got excluded by a bunch of courts that said it wasn’t valid. Those are the courts, you know, who published opinions. Of course there were still a lot of courts below the radar using it. But what happened was the family court field, the professionals who worked in that arena and who did believe there was a lot of lying about abuse by mothers and who did and who were concerned about fathers being pushed out of families, kind of resurrected the idea, calling it “parental alienation” or “child alienation” or just “alienation,” and basically said there’s no such thing as a syndrome but there is such a thing as alienation.

And they basically started doing roughly the same thing in courts, which was, you go to court, you’ve got a mother saying, “He’s not safe for the child.” You’ve got a child saying, “I don’t want to see him.” The other side or the forensic evaluator comes in and says, “That’s parental alienation. It’s not true. It’s just malicious strategy for kicking the father out of the family.” Or in cases where the mother doesn’t seem malicious, they’ll say instead that she’s pathological. She’s just very, very confused about reality.

And that “yes” of alienation against not only women who alleged child sexual abuse but also allegations of child abuse that are physical and allegations of domestic violence. And even cases where it’s not an alleged abuse claim, but it’s just this father has been so horrible in the family, this kid doesn’t wanna see him. It’s not, it doesn’t have to rise to the level of abuse. There could be all kinds of reasons that a kid is terrified or, you know, just really resistant to having to spend time alone with this person.

So now pretty much anytime a mother or a child go to court and say they don’t want to spend time with the father, that they don’t want the kid to spend time with the father, alienation tends to get raised. And even though PAS was rejected as junk science, alienation—because it doesn’t have the word syndrome—perhaps somehow continues to be completely accepted.

And there’s a very roaring battle in the kind of research fields over whether it’s legitimate or not. And if you want, I can say more about what the research does and doesn’t show. 

[6:29] Teresa Huizar: 
Well, I think it would be helpful to know what the research does and doesn’t show, because it seems interesting to me that this doesn’t appear to be an equivalent concern when custody is sort of flipped.

Right? And so there’s a gendered quality to this that seems to me to maybe require a little more probing. 

Joan Meier: 
So this is very complicated. The impression out here in the world, especially in my world and perhaps yours, where we work with abuse survivors, is definitely what you just said, that it’s a completely gendered. And it’s used against women and not against men. 

The folks in the alienation field would argue vociferously that’s not true. And there definitely are cases where women are alleging that a father’s alienating. Shat’s interesting is that the study that I did, which I know we’re going to get into, shed some interesting light on that question.

So basically, you know, where I come out and I think most of us do, obviously it’s a claim that can be used against fathers and it’s beginning to be used that way, increasingly. But the question is, does it have the same power when it’s used against fathers? So, you know, do fathers—are there stereotypes around fathers alienating children that fit the same way as there are stereotypes around mothers doing that? Of course there aren’t. And so how is it playing out? 

And by the way, if it was invented in a completely gendered way, the idea that it’s no longer gendered is, you know, worth questioning.

[7:57] Teresa Huizar: 
R\ight. Well, you know what I’m wondering, and we are going to go right into your study here shortly, but one of the things that I’m really wondering is why you think that professionals—I mean even outside the court—but professionals, the court system, etc., has been so willing to believe that women purposely alienate their children from loving, wonderful, supportive non-abusive fathers? 

Joan Meier: 
That’s a great question. And my answer is obviously speculative, but I definitely have some opinions about it. 

One is that I think the stereotype of the vengeful ex-wife is very strong in our culture. In fact, it’s not just a stereotype. I mean, every time I talk to people who are not in the field about this, and I say this alienation thing, blah, blah, women do this. They all pipe up, “I know someone who did that. I know a woman who, you know, punished the father for leaving his family and didn’t let him see the kids.” I’m like, “Okay. Did she claim—falsely claim—abuse?” “Oh, no.” 

And so, of course we all know, well, we should all know because there are many men who do that to mothers when they get the kids. But anyway, the enemy seems to know somebody who is vengeful. And so the idea of the vengeful ex-wife is just a very robust one in our culture. So that’s number one.

Number two is there’s—and I’ve written about this, like, long ago—there’s a very strong sense in our society and definitely in our courts that fathers often get the short end of the stick in custody battles, but also that they are desperately needed in families, and children need them. And there’s a lot of research and trainings around how much children need fathers, etc.

And so there’s kind of gratitude on the part of courts when a father comes in and fights for custody. And there’s a real reluctance to believe that’s a bad father, that the father fighting for custody is bad. We want to believe the father fighting for custody is the good father. He’s in there wanting to be a father.

So some of that, you know, has its roots in this sort of the fatherlessness of our culture where, you know—

Teresa Huizar: 
Mmm.

Joan Meier: 
—until this generation maybe or so, fathers haven’t been that involved with kids. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Mmm.

Joan Meier: 
And there’s a, you know, a strong sense that that’s been a problem, and we want more fathering to happen.

So there’s, you know, there’s a real resistance to criticizing the father who fights for custody. There is a stereotype, and there is definitely gender bias, whether implicit or explicit. And then there’s a lot of junk science, which, you know, is leading a lot of otherwise open-minded judges astray. 

[10:27] Teresa Huizar: 
So, you know, it’s interesting. One of the things when I read the brief summary of your study, I think I first read it someplace online—a news outlet—and then heard an interview with NPR, etc. I remember what I found so striking about this study is that it looked at a question that, you know, as a child abuse intervention professional we had been dealing with for a long time.

That, you know, we dealt with child sexual abuse cases every single day and we worked in the context of Children’s Advocacy Centers where you have professionals that, you know, believe kids when they come forward and say they’ve been sexually abused. 

Joan Meier: 
Yeah.

Teresa Huizar: 
And yet when a child custody case would come up, so an allegation either came up out of that or not, t was very interesting how contentious that could become on the multidisciplinary team. You know, with some individuals going, “You know, it absolutely happened. It’s not motivated by anything the mom is saying or not saying,” and others who I would say mirrored that sort of stereotype that you are talking about, which is to be not—if not disbelieving, certainly far more skeptical—

Joan Meier: 
Skeptical, yeah. 

Teresa Huizar: 
—about claims that came up in that way.

Joan Meier: 
Yep. 

Teresa Huizar: 
And a lot of that I think was rooted not so much in the angry ex-wife trope—although I do completely agree with you that that’s very real—but in a sense that someone could be so upset by their divorce that— 

Joan Meier: 
Mm-hmm.

Teresa Huizar: 
—not out of retaliation or anything else, would misconstrue something, or something like that. 

Joan Meier: 
Right. Right.

Teresa Huizar: 
I mean, it was a sort of a excessive giving of the benefit of the doubt to the father, if you know what I mean. 

Joan Meier: 
Yep. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Yeah.

Joan Meier: 
Absolutely. And the excessive reduction of benefit of the doubt to the accuser. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Right. 

Joan Meier: 
And then, and that is implicit gender bias. I mean, and that’s been documented in a lot of places. Women are not considered as credible as men right off the bat, and particularly, of course, when it comes to family issues or issues relating to, you know, sex and fathering and gender. There’s a real barrier to being believed. And there’s a excessive benefit of the doubts to fathers because they want to protect fathers from these claims. 

And there’s also a sense that the, you know, the price to fathers from being falsely accused can never be repaid. You know, that there’s simply nothing worse than being falsely accused of sexually abusing your own child.

Whereas I would suggest that what’s worse is being a child who’s being sexually abused— 

Teresa Huizar: 
Yes.

Joan Meier: 
—and isn’t being protected, but the courts don’t seem to think of it that way. There, you know, there tends to be a view once there’s an accusation of what is actually a crime, which is this kind of abuse, everyone kind of goes into criminal justice mode and starts protecting the rights of the accused. And there I think the child is lost sight of.

[13:15] Teresa Huizar: 
Well, that’s an interesting frame on that. 

So let’s talk about the study and its findings. So what do you believe to be the most compelling parts? Because there’s certainly more than one of this study regarding child custody outcomes and cases that really involve these abuse allegations.

Joan Meier: 
Okay. So I actually have put together, since we spoke last, highlights of the summary. And I’ll just take you through that—and happy to share it— 

Teresa Huizar: 
Sure. Please.

Joan Meier: 
—if you’re your listeners would be able to access it. So I break it down—and there’s many more findings to be had, by the way. I’m really looking forward to doing more data analysis on a variety of other important issues. But these are sort of what we see as the core, most fundamental ones. 

So first of all we looked at: How often do courts believe mothers who accuse fathers of abuse? 

And should I share something about how the study was constructed, where the data comes from?

Teresa Huizar: 
Please. Sure. 

Joan Meier: 
OK. Let me start by doing that then.

We wanted a national picture. There’s been no study before this that looks at what’s happening nationally in family courts. There’ve been a decent handful of studies in different courts or different states that look at different elements of the problem, but nothing that was persuasive on a national scale, and really hasn’t gotten any national attention.

So we wanted national data. The only way to get national data on what family courts are doing is electronically. And as it happens, I’m in the right decade for that. And you know, I think 10 or 15 years ago, it wouldn’t have been true, but it is now true that most appellate opinions are published online, and a surprising number of trial court opinions are published online.

So we were able to basically carve out a 10-year period. And we searched all online opinions, judicial opinions, from family court cases that involved our issues: abuse and alienation. And we sorted through them and triaged them down to the ones that really belonged in the study. And we wound up with about 4,000. And then we—and that’s not even a sample, it’s a census, as they call it. It’s all the cases that at least were reported online. And then we analyzed what happened in them. 

So the first thing we did was look at: How often do courts believe mothers who accuse fathers of abuse in a custody type battle? And we found that even without parental alienation being in the case, at least as far as we could tell from the opinion, that courts were starting at a baseline of skepticism about mothers and children’s claims of abuse by fathers. 

For instance, if you averaged—and we broke it down by different types of abuse. We looked at domestic violence, partner violence, child physical abuse, child sexual abuse. And then we had two mixed categories, adult and child abuse and mixed child abuse. And what we found was, if you averaged those all out together, even in the nonalienation cases, courts only believed abuse claims by mothers 41% of the time. 

So that alone I thought was worth an article, because nobody knows that going to court and alleging abuse if you’re a mom is not a good strategy. Everyone thinks then you get protection. But you actually don’t get believed more often than not. 

Now, when you break that down by types, what you find is that child abuse and child sexual abuse both are far less likely to be believed than domestic violence. So we found courts were only believing child physical abuse 29% of the time and child sexual abuse 15% of the time. Domestic violence was 45% of the time. And I’m just talking about the pure categories, not the mixed categories, just because that complicates things. And then we—

[17:00] Teresa Huizar: 
Joan.

Joan Meier: 
Yeah.

Teresa Huizar: 
So just to stop you right there, because I think— 

Joan Meier: 
Sure.

Teresa Huizar: 
—you know, I want that to kind of sink in to listeners.

Joan Meier: 
Mm-hmm. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Because I think it’s really shocking. 

Joan Meier: 
Yeah.

Teresa Huizar:
I mean, to find that when it’s alleged, mothers are only believed about child sexual abuse 15% of the time. And if I remember in the study itself, it said for both physical and sexual abuse, even when there was other corroborating evidence, including medical evidence, those numbers really did not shift much there.

Joan Meier: 
The corroboration cases, there’s a smaller number of those, and I’ll have to dive into the report to look at those, but they didn’t shift that much. You’re right.

Teresa Huizar: 
Yeah. 

Joan Meier: 
And yeah, I think that’s—you know, that’s the other paper, is courts will not believe child abuse when alleged by mothers, by and large—especially not child sexual abuse.

And this—and I’m starting here in the nonalienation cases because it gets much more pronounced in the alienation cases. So I’m trying to say, here’s a baseline of how often women are believed. 

[18:02] Teresa Huizar: 
Well, I think that one of the things that, you know—and maybe just to talk about it for a minute—I think that one of the things that, you know, it certainly most concerns me that there are so many kids who would potentially go unprotected in a situation like that. Because fundamentally the court is going to offer protection where it believes something has occurred.

Joan Meier: 
Right.

Teresa Huizar: 
And not where it doesn’t.

Joan Meier: 
Right.

Teresa Huizar: 
And so we really are talking about an extraordinary percentage of children that are really left in a very precarious position. Even if you assumed that some tiny proportion of cases are false reports— 

Joan Meier: 
False, right.

Teresa Huizar: 
—or anything else, it still is an astonishing number.

Joan Meier: 
It’s not 85%. That’s right.

Teresa Huizar: 
Right. It’s astonishing.

Joan Meier: 
That’s absolutely right. It is astonishing. It is stark. and all I can say is that it completely matches the experience of me, my experience and my colleagues at DV LEAP and around the country, because we were reviewing—you know, people were desperate for us to help, either at trial or on an appeal all over the country. And we’d get, you know, these requests like maybe 20 a month and, you know, child sexual abuse is the kiss of death. You lose—we’ll get into that, but it’s—you do not win with a child sexual abuse claim. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Mmm. Mmm. All right. Well then I’m going to let you move forward with this— 

Joan Meier: 
OK. OK.

Teresa Huizar: 
—while I continue to contend with my shock here.

Joan Meier: 
Yeah. Make sure you’re sitting down.

Teresa Huizar: 
Right.

Joan Meier: 
When fathers cross-claim alienation in, you know, roughly the same cases, the same categories, courts believe—it basically reduces credibility. Even more so where in the regular nonalienation cases, courts believe 45% of DV. In the alienation case, they believe 37%.

In the regular child physical abuse cases, they believe 29%. In the alienation cases, that drops by half, 18%. And this is the “best” of all: In the child’s sexual abuse cases nonalienation cases, they believe 15%. But when alienation is cross-claimed, they believe 2%. And that represents one case out of 51.

[Quietly] Teresa Huizar:
That’s just incredible. 

Joan Meier: 
I know. 

[Silence]

[20:07] Teresa Huizar: 
Well, which means there’s absolutely no incentive at all. Because, of course, this is sort of the popular argument, right? Like there’s an “incentive” for someone to claim this, to falsely claim abuse.

Joan Meier: 
Right. Right. Right.

Teresa Huizar: 
Because then they’ll have complete custody—

Joan Meier: 
Right. Right.

Teresa Huizar: 
And then they can control the child, and control—

Joan Meier: 
Right

Teresa Huizar:
Actually, there’s not only no incentive— 

Joan Meier: 
No.

Teresa Huizar:
—there’s such an overwhelming active disincentive to do so. 

Joan Meier: 
And there’s a pretty serious conversation among the bar now. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Yeah. 

Joan Meier: 
About, well, you know, some people are upset that lawyers are advising women not to raise abuse. But when I’m asked what would I tell a woman, I would tell a woman with a child sexual abuse claim to fight the case on other grounds.

Because not only is she going to not be believed, really bad things will happen after she’s not believed. 

[20:54] Teresa Huizar: 
Can you just talk a little bit about the custody element of this too? 

Joan Meier: 
Yes. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Because it’s not just— 

Joan Meier: 
Right.

Teresa Huizar: 
—that they’re not believed, right? There’s consequences to this.

Joan Meier: 
Yeah, well that’s the next finding. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Alright. 

Joan Meier: 
So mothers who alleged fathers’ abuse faced significant risk of losing custody.

So, again, going back to the nonalienation cases, on average, cutting across the different types of abuse claims, mothers lost custody about a quarter of the time. Now that’s, you know, that’s something we can talk about whether that’s right or wrong. I’m not sure it’s easy to judge if you’re talking about generic cases where—but they are all cases where moms are alleging abuse by a father. So it might be bad.

But when mothers cross-claim alienation, that doubles. Mothers lose custody half the time. And mothers lose custody most often when they allege child, physical or sexual abuse. That ranges from 54 to 64%. And when the courts decide to—not only alienation has been alleged but the court decides that she is an alienator, involved in that subset of cases, mothers almost always lost custody. It averaged out at 73%, and it ranged from 60 to 100% of the time. 

[22:00] Teresa Huizar: 
There’s something so incredibly punitive. I, you know. 

Joan Meier: 
Mm-hmm. Exactly. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Even if you—

Joan Meier: 
That’s exactly right. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Even if you thought a mother was confused or pathological or whatever the term is, the punishment so outweighs the—not even a crime, but it so outweighs what’s occurred that it, you just marvel, really, at this punitive, punitive bent toward mothers who are trying to be protective of their children.

And in our context, what particularly worries me about this is, you know, multidisciplinary teams who work on childhood sexual abuse, one of the things they periodically encounter is: A non-offending caregiver, whether mother or father, but generally a mother who’s not initially protective of their child. And teams often really struggle with: Why are they not protecting their child?

Joan Meier: 
Right. Right. 

Teresa Huizar: 
And so CACs—I know in my world, we spend all this time really helping teams understand through our mental health professionals, child sexual abuse dynamics, why somebody might struggle to believe that’s true. All of these things. But you can see that if the punishment for believing your child is to potentially lose custody of that child through this entire court system being tilted toward the father and crediting their claims, and particularly crediting and over-crediting parental alienation—

Joan Meier: 
Alienation.

Teresa Huizar: 
—you could just imagine that women are in a position to be damned if they do and damned if they don’t. 

Joan Meier: 
Yep. That is exactly right. And what’s the one consistent thread in those two responses to mothers? Gender. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Mm-hmm. 

Joan Meier: 
We can trash mothers either way. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Mm-hmm.

Joan Meier: 
We can trash them for protecting, we can trash them for not protecting.

It’s not that we have a particular—we as a society have a really clear idea of what mothers should do. But we know that mothers are wrong and bad in these cases where abuse is alleged by the dad.

[Silence]

[23:54] Teresa Huizar:
So.

[Laughter]

I’m very curious on what you believe the prescription of this is aside from—I mean, I think it’s wonderful that you shed light on this. Because I do feel like many of us in the field had been feeling for a long time, maybe not that these numbers were going on, but certainly our general sense was that courts often did not pay attention to childhood sexual abuse claims in the context of custody disregarded them and there were perverse outcomes. But the—

Joan Meier: 
Yeah. And what this shows is that they don’t just disregard them. 

Teresa Huizar: Right

Joan Meier: 
They punish for them. Absolutely. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Right. So what is the solution to this?

Joan Meier: 
Well, you know, many of us are doing a lot of work to try to puncture the power of parental alienation as a theory. I mean, the science isn’t there. And even the experts in the field who are somewhat credible as thinkers and researchers acknowledge the science isn’t there.

But then they also assert that everyone knows it when they see it, and it’s reliably identifiable. 

[Laughter]

And yet none of them has come up with any strategy in research or in cases for deciding and distinguishing between the cases where a parent really is toxically turning a kid against the other one. In the cases where the abuse claims are simply valid, she has valid reason to be concerned about them.

And so what they’re just allowing this constant—what one of my friends and colleagues says “misclassification,” which I think is a nice term, this constant whitewashing of abuse as alienation. And nobody’s contending with: How do we stop doing that? 

And the fact that the alienation field has not really seriously wrestled with stopping doing that lends credence to those of us who feel that it’s just really all about denial of abuse. It’s a kind of fancy way to empower fathers to deny abuse and to not trust mothers and children. 

If it weren’t, if it was really about child well-being, there would be much more attention paid to not having it misused the way it is to deny true abuse. And, you know, you just don’t see expressions of that concern very much. There’s one article that’s just coming out about that, but it’s been, you know, we’ve been writing these critiques for 20 years, and children have been harmed for 20 years. So, you know, theory needs to be done away with. 

And one of the reasons I did this study—I mean, not always. I don’t mean to say there’s no such thing as one parent trying to toxically turn the child against the other. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Sure, sure. 

Joan Meier: 
If that happens, it should be stopped. It just should be decoupled from abuse claims. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Yes. 

Joan Meier:
Like, let’s stop pretending those two are two sides of the same coin. They’re not. Take the abuse seriously and do a much better job of assessing it than we do now.

And you know, where there’s toxic alienation, show me the evidence. Don’t just point to the abuse claim and say she’s an alienator. That’s just, that’s what’s wrong with it. That’s easily fixed. I have a number of proposals in various places about how courts could do a better job. But getting them to do it the way I think they should is another matter.

But, you know, the biggest proposal, and it’s actually embodied in a resolution that many of us worked on long and hard and finally got unanimous passage of last fall. It’s called House Concurrent Resolution 72 on Child Safety and Family Courts. It specifically says courts should be determining abuse and safety considerations first before they reach any other best interest.

Teresa Huizar:
Interesting. 

Joan Meier:
And you know, the idea is just simply if there’s abuse, there might be abuse, and you can’t rule it out. You have no business talking about alienation. 

Teresa Huizar:
Mm-hmm. 

Joan Meier:
Period. 

Teresa Huizar:
Mm-hmm. 

Joan Meier:
That’s the idea. And that’s, you know, where that resolution points. And now I’m working with various state advocates, state level advocates to try to get pieces of that rolled into law.

And I’m hoping to get a program I’m about to launch, I’m hoping to raise the funds to make state law legislative clearinghouse to support a lot more folks on that. 

Teresa Huizar:
Mmm. Mmm.

Joan Meier:
So there are legislative things to be done. There’s advocacy things to be done. I’m really looking for lawyers at the trial stage who have, you know, have the savvy and have a supportive client with some funds to put on expert witnesses, to challenge alienation and make the record that it’s junk science, there’s no scientific basis, and it shouldn’t be used in the case. And then let’s get some precedence on the issue. 

It’s been very difficult. I’ve been looking for like, as long as DV LEAP was in existence, 16 years for the right case for appeal. And, you know, most of the time, trial lawyers don’t preserve the issue because there’s too much in the midst of too many things, and they may not have the funds for experts, etc.

And even when the issue is preserved, I see appellate courts ducking it right and left. They will not take it up. So it’s very hard to fix this in, you know, in the litigation context, I think that needs to continue to be tried. 

Then you do the legislation. And then I went to do the study precisely because it became clear to me that what was going on in these courts isn’t really about truth or fact or evidence or children. It’s about an ideology. There’s a lot of ideology about why abuse is alleged by mothers and children and how much power mothers have over children to make them believe untrue things. And you know, the innocence of these accused men. And that’s all ideological. And it comes from the father’s rights movement, and maybe it comes from people’s own hearts and experiences. And, you know, we needed to paint the picture of what’s really going on. And that’s why I wanted to collect the data to say, “Look, this is what’s happening when women allege abuse. They’re losing the kids to the abuser.”

I think, if the whole culture knows and the society knows and the legal system knows, it will stop being quite as, popular as it has been to bend over backward towards accused fathers. I mean, I think a lot of judges—and some of them say this—they feel that they’re being equitable by protecting father’s rights. You know, because they think fathers have been cheated historically in these cases. And I think they need to learn otherwise, that they’re actually part of the majority. And if it’s a majority that’s harming children then it’s not equitable.

[29:52] Teresa Huizar: 
You know, I’m curious as well about what has been the reception by the courts, by judges, magistrates, those who work in family law? What has been their response to this research study?

Joan Meier:
It’s a great question. So I actually started presenting it from the pilot study before we had completed the big study. And I did a number of presentations to judges of that. And since then I’ve done a couple where there were judges in the room of presentations of the full study. And almost without fail, they are hostile. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Interesting. 

Joan Meier:
There are a couple judges now and then who are sympathetic, but they’re kind of protective of their colleagues, perhaps. Or, you know, you’ve got to figure out how to be the bearer of bad news on this. But I’ve been really struck by the degree of hostility.

And, you know, these are just numbers. I’m just telling you what’s going on out there. You can decide to give it whatever weight it deserves and what you think it means. They don’t want to hear it. Because it feels like criticism and, you know, it is, but it’s not personal.

Teresa Huizar: 
Right.

Joan Meier:
It’s a pattern. It’s nationwide. There are no names attached to any of data. And, you know, it’s information.

So I’ve been pretty struck by the sort of “hear no evil, see no evil responses” of judges. 

I will say one encouraging sign was that in Pennsylvania, which just had an election for family court, a colleague there, an advocate, shared the study with the candidates, and one of them came into a panel with the study—

Teresa Huizar:
Wow!

Joan Meier:
—with several copies of it and said, “George Washington has this new report and it says this and it shows that, and all my colleagues—”

Teresa Huizar:
I love it.

Joan Meier:
Yeah. And he got elected as it happens, which is great. So there’s one judge who’s open to the information. 

Teresa Huizar: Maybe he could talk to his colleagues.

Joan Meier: 
Right. I mean, I think he’s planning to.

[31:43] Teresa Huizar: 
You know, I think it’s interesting, There’s a small part of me that says, I’m not that surprised with there’s reluctance to uptake because of the implications of it.

Joan Meier: 
Yes.

Teresa Huizar:
I mean, the implication is, if you’ve been sitting on the bench for a long time—

Joan Meier: 
Right.

Teresa Huizar:
—you’ve probably decided things in a way, without meaning to, but that have had harmful consequences. 

Joan Meier: 
Yeah. 

Teresa Huizar:
And I think in the child sexual abuse intervention field, you know, we’ve had to cope with that. Practices that we realize that, you know, in the past we thought were fine practices, and then in hindsight, you know, after sufficient research you go, “Oh my gosh, how were we ever doing that?” Because it had these terrible implications that we didn’t understand. And I can only hope that, you know, as you continue to repeat this, and as we do on your behalf as well, that uh, we can change hearts and minds about this. Because I just think it’s so critical. 

And my next question—

Joan Meier: 
It is so critical. 

You know, people talk about children falling through the cracks and being abused. 

Teresa Huizar:
Ugh.

Joan Meier: 
These children—there’s a safety net. 

Teresa Huizar:
Yeah.

Joan Meier: 
It’s just turned over. 

Teresa Huizar:
Yeah,

Joan Meier: 
It’s just being deprived. You know, it’s so insane to be doing this to children who can be protected when, you know, when there’s so many children who it’s harder to protect. Anyway, sorry. 

[32:54] Teresa Huizar: 
No, no. I so agree with you about that. 

And I guess my final question for you, well, I would have many more, but we, you know, at some point we’ve got to wrap the conversation up.

But my final question for you is, so for those of us that we’re not in legal arenas. We’re not lawyers. I mean, we are … a step removed from that. We’re a part of the investigatory and treatment process, but not necessarily, we’re not going to be arguing before the court as an attorney. 

Joan Meier: 
Decision makers. Yeah.

Teresa Huizar:
What can we do when we hear these, you know, tropes in conversation or as a part of conversations on cases with the multidisciplinary team?

Joan Meier: 
That’s great.

Teresa Huizar: 
What are things we can do to break this down? 

Joan Meier: 
That is a real question to me. I will think about it in this moment. You may have your own good ideas. 

I mean, I think perhaps the study gives you a place to stand on to say, “That’s a miss. Here’s what’s really going on in these cases.” 

Teresa Huizar: 
Mm-hmm. 

Joan Meier: 
You know, A, B, there’s no scientific support for the alienation theory, not even for the idea that it works the way the theory goes, let alone that abuse claims are part of the problem, are part of an alienation pattern. There’s just nothing to support this. And the data suggests that this is a kind of an elaborated form of denial and gender bias. Let’s stop doing it.

By the way, implicit gender bias in the courts, there’s a great article on that by Deborah Epstein from Georgetown. It’s published in University of Pennsylvania Law Review. It just came out about a year ago, and it’s, you know, a tome of,  authorities in—

Teresa Huizar: 
Interesting. 

Joan Meier: 
Yeah. And so I, I mean, I think when we talk about it as implicit bias, it goes down a lot easier.

And when we all acknowledge that we have our own implicit biases, which we all do—

Teresa Huizar: 
Yes.

Joan Meier: 
I did train a bunch of judges on that. And they were very receptive, perhaps in part because I talked about my own implicit biases. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Mmmm. 

Joan Meier: 
And you know, it makes it much less shameful if, you know, it’s presented that way. And it’s true, we do all have our biases. 

And so I think judges need to learn to recognize that they have some biases, and that there’s information out there that might cast doubt on those biases. And they need to be helped to come to that conclusion by not being overly judged and criticized.

Teresa Huizar: 
Yes.

Joan Meier: 
And you know, I try present the data—the data’s just the data—but they take that as criticism.

[35:14] Teresa Huizar: 
Mm-hmm. Well, and I think sharing the study with our multidisciplinary team members, because many times long before it has gotten to a judge, there have been decisions along the way in terms of—

Joan Meier: 
Mmm-hmm.

Teresa Huizar: 
—believing or not believing a mother—

Joan Meier: 
Right.

Teresa Huizar: 
—that really guide what’s going to ultimately happen in a case.

Joan Meier: 
Absolutely.

Teresa Huizar: 
And how that’s going to be presented before the court, and how the court’s likely to receive it. And so I think for each one of us to think carefully about our piece of that so that we’re not contributing to, this is going to be so important. 

And I just, you know, so appreciate you sharing this with us, and keep up this fantastic work. I don’t know what’s next on, on your desk in terms of research or writing related to this, but I, you know—

Joan Meier: 
I’m doing a series of articles on it.

And thank you so much, Teresa. I love the way you think about it. I love that you’re so embedded in the child protection world. And I would love to hear more from you or maybe even work with you on these questions of are there ways to make adjustments in the processes that will help kids. 

[Outro music begins]

Teresa Huizar: 
Great. We’ll be in touch. Thanks again, Joan. Much appreciated. 

Joan Meier: 
Thank you. Take care.

[36:20] Teresa Huizar:
Thank you for listening to One in Ten. We hope you’ll tune in for our next episode. For more information about National Children’s Alliance and the work of Children’s Advocacy Centers, visit our website at www.nationalchildrensalliance.org.