January 11, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors
Joan Meier’s 2019 study of court cases involving allegations of parental alienation and/or child abuse and/or domestic violence was badly done and with an eye toward achieving results predetermined by Meier’s strange ideology. That much is clear from her shoddy methodology and her refusal, for as much as a year, to come clean with either her methods or her results.
But, as low-rent as all that is, it doesn’t necessarily mean that her conclusions are wrong, only poorly achieved. So, to test Meier’s claimed findings, Jennifer Harman and Demosthenes Lorandos conducted their own study, correcting Meier’s many procedural errors and false assumptions along the way. And, sure enough, they found that none of Meier’s conclusions hold up. The supposed anti-mother/pro-father bias on the part of trial and appellate court judges entirely failed to appear when the data were scrupulously gathered and analyzed. Meier is wrong on every count.
Harman/Lorandos tested six hypotheses.
The first preregistered hypothesis we tested was whether mothers who are perceived to be undermining the father’s paternal rights and alienating their child(ren) are more likely to get a decrease in parenting time, lose custody of her children, and lose her case than was a father.
That of course has been strongly suggested by Meier and other true believers like Joyanna Silberg. After all, according to the “protective” mother movement, courts discriminate against mothers, so, when a mother is accused of PA, she’ll likely receive harsher treatment by a court than would a similarly-situated father, right? But,
We did not find support for this hypothesis… [T]he only significant predictor in the multinomial logistic regression model testing decrease in parenting time was whether the case had been identified as having a known or alleged alienating parent.
Irrespective of the sex of the parent, the important issue was whether parental alienation was merely alleged to have occurred or actually did. In the latter case, parents – whether fathers or mothers – suffered adverse consequences at the hands of the court.
Regardless of the gender of the parent, a known rather than alleged alienating parent had an 88% greater probability (OR 0.128) of losing than gaining parenting time (p .001). This finding implies that parents known to have alienated their child(ren) had more than a 10-fold increase in the likelihood they would lose rather than gain parenting time.
The same held true even when the alienated parent had at least one proven incident of abuse. Known alienators still tended strongly to lose custody or parenting time.
Hypothesis 2 was that when a mother claims intrafamilial abuse and the father claims PA, her reports of abuse will be deemed unfounded more often than if the father claimed abuse and the mother claimed PA… A statistically significant interaction effect between known and alleged cases of PA and gender would lend support to the hypothesis.
But again, no support for the hypothesis was found. Indeed, the only discovery was that mothers are more likely than fathers to make unfounded claims of abuse.
Hypothesis 3 was that when mothers claim intrafamilial abuse and the father claims PA, she will be more likely to have a decrease in parenting time or lose all custody than if the father claimed abuse and the mother claimed she was being alienated from her children.
That of course is one of the core beliefs of the “protective” mother set, i.e. that mothers who claim abuse are “punished” by courts with a loss of custody or parenting time for doing so. But, alas for Meier, et al, that claim too came a cropper. Parents found to have alienated their children still lost custody or parenting time at a far greater rate than other parents, irrespective of their sex and irrespective of whether they levelled their own claims of abuse at the targeted parent. Interestingly, alienating fathers who claimed the mother was abusive suffered more severe consequences for their alienation than did mothers who did so.
As indicated in Table 12, fathers, compared to mothers, had 1.60 greater odds (61.54% greater probability) of losing custody if they made an allegation of abuse against the mother (p .048).
Meier attempted to cast aspersions on guardians ad litem and custody evaluators who reported parental alienation to courts. So,
Hypothesis 4 was that if a GAL, a court-appointed psychologist, or custody evaluator were to identify or find PA in a case, mothers will lose more parenting time or custody than will fathers.
But, as with all the others, that hypothesis wasn’t borne out by the data.
Mothers did not get decreases in parenting time or lose custody more often than did fathers when a GAL or custody evaluator was involved with the case, whether they were found to be alienating parents or not.
Hypothesis 5 produced only three cases (out of almost 1,000). Therefore, nothing of statistical significance can be concluded about it. Those cases involved allegations of both sexual and physical child abuse against one parent that were found to be true. In none of the three cases did the abusive parent receive any form of custody.
The last hypothesis doesn’t relate directly to Meier’s study, but is nevertheless instructive about her overall view of family courts.
Our last hypothesis was that the greater the number of false allegations of abuse a mother makes, the more likely it is for the father to have a decrease in parenting time or lose all custody.
Sadly, the data supported that hypothesis.
[T]he more unfounded claims of abuse that were made against a parent, the more the accused parent was likely to get a decrease than increase in parenting time— increased parenting time favored the accuser. We also found that known alienating parents had 10 times greater odds (p .001; 90.97% greater likelihood) of receiving a decrease in parenting time than an increase and 4.29 greater odds of getting an increase in parenting time than no change at all. We also found a main effect for gender in that alienated fathers had almost 6 times the odds (85.67% greater likelihood) of mothers of getting a decrease in custody than did alienated mothers (p .031).
So the more false allegations levelled against a parent, the greater the likelihood that he/she will see a decrease in parenting time. And targeted fathers suffer that effect at six times the rate of targeted mothers. Not exactly a gold-star moment for family courts, but one that should please the likes of Meier, et al.
Such is the reality of family courts. Their behavior is starkly different from what Meier claimed in her 2019 study. The issues surrounding cases of parental alienation, abuse and child custody and parenting time will continue and be covered by the MSM. They now have the opportunity to cite a reliable study with reliable findings. Or they can continue to cite Meier. We’ll know soon enough which they choose.
Any bets?