A Call to Action on Parental Alienation
Take your opportunity to tell the United Nations your story of parental alienation to counter the dodgy research currently underway.
The Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls at the United Nations recently put out the call for input about how fathers’ claims about parental alienation (PA) in court are most often nothing by a cynical violation of the human rights of mothers and children to counter allegations of abuse against fathers. The assumption underlying this request is that mothers are losing custody to abusive fathers trying to use PA as a legal defense.
Of course, there isn’t peer-reviewed, scientific evidence that this is actually occurring. Rather, there is evidence that courts are taking claims of all types of abuse, whether it be DV, child abuse, or PA seriously, and yet not accepting PA allegations at face value.
The request is born out of an unreviewed paper posted online by Joan Meier and colleagues (2019) that fails to report statistical models, and whose authors admit to “amplifying” their data to get desired results. This is hardly an objective basis from which to draw conclusions, let alone justify a distorted call for input from people around the world by the United Nations.
The language in the call for input is nakedly biased. For instance, it asks people to describe factors related to “the increased number of allegations of parental alienation cases in custody battles and/or disputes involving allegations of domestic violence and abuse against women, and its differentiated impact on specific groups of women and children.” Of course, this assumes there is an “increase” in allegations of PA, with no scientific support for this statement. Talk about “leading the witness!”
A member of our writing team is currently in the midst of a new scientific study examining trial-level family law decisions in Canada. While it’s in the early stages (we will present the findings in a future substack), the data so far paints a picture that directly contradict the assumptions underlying the UN inquiry.
For example, out of 100 recent cases, a similar proportion of mothers and fathers are claiming to be alienated parents. So, according to the preliminary findings of this study (as just one recent example of similar findings), parental alienation is not just a legal defense made by abusive fathers to deflect allegations of abuse, but rather a legitimate problem that affects both mothers and fathers.
It is important to recognize that anecdotal stories are not equivalent to the systematic, scientific inquiry of a problem. It is very concerning that the United Nations is collecting anecdotal input in this manner and appears to be overlooking scientific research published about the issue, or even making the effort to conduct their own investigation of publicly available data.
We encourage you to submit your own response to the UN request, and PASS THIS ON to others you know want their story heard.
Please submit your experiences here. The DEADLINE is mid-December, so please act soon.