Do Courts Use a Controversial Theory to Punish Mothers Who Allege Abuse?
Shortly after the visit, Cooper was warned against taking Ben to Yale. In a letter, her husband’s lawyer, Noah Eisenhandler, wrote that her “insistence on exposing this child to these baseless accusations will result in a request for sole custody based upon child alienation.” He cautioned her to “tread very lightly on these allegations that she is making.” (Both Eisenhandler and Cooper’s ex-husband denied requests for comment.)
Cooper didn’t know what Eisenhandler was talking about. She had no idea that “alienation” referred to a controversial form of emotional abuse that typically involves children in high-conflict custody disputes. Nor did she know its history — that alienation is rooted in the theories of Richard A. Gardner, the once prominent child psychiatrist who spent much of his career arguing that women often fabricated custody-related child-abuse claims and programmed their children to do the same. He called this phenomenon parental alienation syndrome, or PAS.
For the last two decades, the concept has been the subject of a high-pitched, highly gendered debate. Despite a recent campaign to add the syndrome to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the concept is still not officially recognized. Many experts argue that when alienation surfaces in the legal system, it is used to punish well-intentioned mothers who raise allegations of abuse.
“It really is Gardner’s PAS that laid the groundwork for what is happening in family courts across the country,” says Joan Meier, a professor of clinical law at George Washington University. “When a mother alleges abuse or children allege abuse or fear or hostility to a parent who is alleged to have been abusive, it tends to be very quickly attributed to the mother’s vendetta.”
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