Burning Down the Straw Men
Bad faith arguments throughout a recent book critiquing parental alienation highlight the need to fight back with arguments of steel.
If you’ve been reading our recent Substacks, you know that there is an ongoing war being waged against the now well-established legitimacy of parental alienation. The onslaught continues with a recent book co-edited by Jean Mercer and Margaret Drew titled, Challenging Parental Alienation: New Directions for Professionals and Parents. While I don’t want to give the work any more oxygen than it deserves, it provides a useful illustration of how disingenuous arguments are so often at the heart of criticism of the concept of parental alienation.
A key epistemological sleight of hand is on full display in the book: the straw man argument. Let’s refresh our memory on what straw mans are and how they’re employed. The term itself is a perfect metaphor that explains the idea well. A critic who can’t engage with an opponent’s original argument, because it’s too strong (made of steel, perhaps), will construct a weaker cartoonish “straw man” version of the argument that is easier to argue against, or “knock down.” There are many ways to degrade the original argument. You can take words out of context, oversimplify ideas, or summarize a position incorrectly, stripping it of its nuance or casting specific neutral points in a negative light. Then, the critic contends with this caricature of the real argument, rather than trying to fight it straight on. Of course, this schtick is used in all domains of life by politicians, biased journalists, and—shocking, I know—family law lawyers.
As someone who has been studying parental alienation for over 10 years, I have seen many examples of straw man arguments employed in an effort to reduce it to nothing more than a “belief system” of radical individuals with no basis in science. The rhetorical trick can be hard to spot in the heat of battle. With a straw man, the flaw doesn’t lie in the argument itself, but in the mischaracterization of the original argument. And so, unless the audience knows the content of the actual argument, they can be easily fooled. That’s what makes the tricky tactic so effective.
Which brings us back to Challenging Parental Alienation, in which authors Mercer, Drew and others employ the straw man liberally to get to false conclusions. For example, across many chapters, they falsely claim that parental alienation theory rests upon a supposition that all children who resist contact with a parent have been influenced to do so by the alienating parent, and therefore parental custody evaluators should assume every case of contact refusal is caused by an alienating parent. In Chapter 11, in one argument against parental alienation, Joan Meier states:
“Alienation—as a label—facilitates the automatic attribution of a child’s avoidance or a parent’s concerns about the other’s parenting to an illegitimate ‘alienating’ motive without meaningful investigation.” (Meier, p. 223)
This is a straw man because no parental alienation scholar or scientist relies on this “single factor” argument. The authors then go on to enumerate in great detail the dangers of parental alienation based on this distorted explanation of what experts claim it actually is. And of course they also omit any mention of the rebuttals that have been made by parental alienation experts against this bad faith line of argument.
The authors of the book go on to claim that the alienating behaviors of a favored parent always lead to the child’s rejection of their other parent, another straw man fabricated out of thin air. And they even change the definition of parental alienation to make the reader believe that the research on the topic doesn’t “add up.” For example, Mercer equates all rejection by children of their parents with parental alienation, when scholars and scientists all agree that parental alienation is only one of several reasons a child might reject a parent. After setting up this straw man, Mercer then knocks it down by claiming that research on child development related to rejection and avoidance does not support the arguments made by parental alienation scholars (p. 176). Again, through this strategy, the reader, if they do not know the original argument, can be fooled into believing that Mercer and the other authors have “won” the argument and concluding that parental alienation does not exist.
Those who have lived through the destructive power of parental alienation or have studied its effects with scientific rigor must fend off these pervasive straw man arguments by engaging them honestly and calling out the blatant distortions. If we don’t, straw man upon straw man build up on top of each other until the original argument becomes lost to the subterfuge, and the public—and more importantly, decision-makers affecting the lives of families— eventually can’t dig down to the truth. We also must combat the misinformation by continuing to study the issue and disseminating the scientific advancements to the public, so that we can get intervention and treatment for this serious problem to families and children who need it most. We must fight the straw men with our own arguments of steel.
Congratulations to Jennifer Harman and Greg Ellis on this excellent description of a malicious, misguided book that attacks parental alienation theory. Readers should send letters to the publisher of Challenging Parental Alienation and request that it be withdrawn from distribution.
My son was wrongly accused of attempting to alienate the child from the mother when all he was trying to do was get medical attention for him. The child was abused and injured.