Author: Lianna

February 9, 2021 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

At last, women in Australia are starting to hit back at the family (and criminal) law systems that privilege mothers, often at the expense of their children and former husbands.  A new organization called Mothers of Sons has gone online and promises to be a resource for mothers and their sons who are fighting the lonely fight against a system that believes males to be the enemies of children and all allegations of domestic abuse made by women against men to be true.

Unsurprisingly, radical feminist groups are up in arms against any movement that might be beneficial to men or that could reduce women’s power in family courts (NCA Newswire, 1/29/21).

For years, we’ve seen the prospects for fathers and their children in Australia’s family courts grow ever dimmer.  The most knowledgeable and respected attorneys in the country, like Augusto Zimmerman, can rail against the damage done to children when their fathers are taken from them based on zero or fabricated evidence.  In vain.  They can point out that the very concept of due process of law, of the requirement that actual evidence be produced before a person’s rights can be diminished by the state has been eroded to practically nothing before our eyes.  Pointless.  They can scream that the system bankrupts those with the money to fight cases that drag on year after year and denies justice to those without.  No response.

And often lost among the hurly-burly of false allegations, courts and lawyers are the children who suffer horribly, not knowing whether they’ll see their father again and bewildered by a process that bewilders those far older and more experienced than they.  The system that claims at every juncture to care only about the “best interests of the child” all too often does the opposite.  It does so because it’s long been in thrall to a false radical feminist narrative that claims all women’s allegations of abuse to be true and all abusers to be men.  With that as its basis, it’s no surprise that mere allegations made by a woman against a man can result in him losing all contact with his children, his home and his belongings for months at a time while the case is pending a hearing.  That can be true even when the woman is known to have serious mental health issues, to have made false claims previously and her present claims are plainly false on their face.

The Mothers of Sons website includes a number of mothers’ stories of exactly those sorts of legal outrages.  Here, for example is Jo Thomson-Jones:

The Family Court processes were continuing and at one point a Family Reporter carefully interviewed both parents and observed them both separately with Lyla. When it was time for Lyla to leave Nathan she dissolved into tears, screaming “No, No, I want Daddy!” The Family Reporter recommended Lyla be removed at once from the mother who should have supervised contact only.

But a second Judge refused to rule on what the Family Reporter had advised and said it would have to go to trial six months later.

Due to delays caused by Tamara’s false allegations it ended up taking 18 months for it to finally happen with the case taking five days in court and costing us over $70,000.  An Independent Children’s Lawyer recommended Lyla be placed with the father. This third judge took another three months to make the decision that Lyla be returned to Nathan and made the fatal mistake of informing Tamara over the phone that she had four days to return the child to her father. The next day Lyla was murdered by her mother.

Yes, the child’s “best interests” were so important to a series of judges that, despite her mother’s patent instability and danger to her, they took literally years to make a decision, cost the family $70,000 and ended in the murder of the girl by her mother.  Well played, family courts, well played.

What about Michelle Jones, whose son went to prison for months, had their family’s savings gutted and her own marriage destroyed by the stress placed on them all by the unquestioning acceptance, by police, prosecutors and courts, of claims by her son’s ex that were demonstrably (and eventually proven to be) false.  All along Daniel and his parents had the evidence needed to disprove his ex’s claim, but for months the police, the prosecutor and the courts went with the prevailing narrative of male corruption and female honesty and innocence.  Years later, Sarah Jane Parkinson went to prison for her crimes against Daniel and the criminal justice system, but no serious person argues that justice was done.

The whole process lasted five years, from the day the first AVO landed in December 2013 to the sentencing of Sarah Jane Parkinson in January 2018, to the charging of Scott White for perjury in 2018. It broke my marriage. It destroyed my family’s life’s savings. It stripped a year from my son’s life. And who really paid any serious price? No-one. John White, the ACT Director of Public Prosecutions, retired after the story blew up in the media.

Amy Knibbs, the prosecutor who put Daniel into prison, left Australia and is now a political activist in the United States. Scott Corcoran, who tried to stop the investigation into the conspiracy, was allowed to resign from the AFP despite multiple disciplinary issues.

Scott White, who moved in with Sarah Jane, was charged with perjury and weapons offences. He was suspended on full pay by the NSW Police. A slap on the wrist.

NSW Police Inspector Anthony Hill, who started the conspiracy by claiming he had “five Police witnesses” against Daniel, has, as far as I know, faced no discipline. Not even Sarah Jane Parkinson paid a high price. She was sentenced to three years in jail but will be out in 2021. She has married Scott White and will simply change her name and move on.

Meanwhile, radical feminists are aghast, as reported by NCA NewsWire.

But Caitlin Roper, PhD candidate and campaigns manager for feminist activist group Collective Shout, is sceptical of the website, which she says makes baseless claims…

She said it was far more common that truthful allegations were made about men that could not be proved.

Hmm.  According to Roper, it’s frequent that “truthful allegations” are made about men that “could not be proved.”  That of course raises the obvious question, “If they can’t be proved, how does Roper or anyone else know the allegations are truthful?” 

But the NCA NewsWire article’s author didn’t ask Roper that obvious question.  Coincidentally, that’s exactly what the family and criminal courts fail to do.  Great minds think alike.

February 8, 2021 by Zack Teague, Chair, National Parents Organization of Illinois

As a former Department of Children and Family Services foster care caseworker, working with a private contracting agency for the department beginning in 2016, I have seen many Illinoisans from many walks of life, encountering the department at the investigation stage.  More often than not, the interventions executed by the DCFS and its contracts further destabilize Illinois families.

For example, when a parent encounters police involvement that results in a mandated report to the child abuse and neglect hotline, it takes 48 hours or more, but no less for an investigator to arrive at the home to follow up with the mandated report. Police involvement resulting in a mandated report can vary from an occurrence of domestic disturbance resulting in an arrest of a parent, the identification and the use of illegal substances in the home, a violation of probation or parole including a failed or missed drug screen. Very rarely is a mandated report made on the presumption or evidence of actual abuse or neglect of a child, by a first-hand witness.

The DCFS divides the state into regions. The Central Region of Illinois is made of 49 Counties. According to published statistics provided by the DCFS, during Fiscal Year 2020, from October 1st, 2019 through September 30th, 2020, 22,776 reports of alleged abuse and neglect originated from the 49 counties of the Central Region. Of those reports of alleged abuse and neglect, only 6,631 resulted in the report being described by the results of an investigation as “founded”. When a report of abuse or neglect is determined to be “founded”, the alleged perpetrators, presumably the parents or family members of the allegedly abused or neglected children, are recommended to receive corrective services by the department, contract agencies, and sometimes but not always, the circuit court in a given county with jurisdiction over the matter.

What can we conclude from the 15,380 reports that are determined by the results of an investigation to be “unfounded”?

1. Are people too quick to make reports of abuse and neglect?

2. Are Investigators, and the investigatory process inconsistent across the 49 counties to such a

degree that 15,380 reports were incorrectly identified as unfounded?

3. Or is abuse and neglect actually not as widespread as the number of reports would suggest it is?

In my humble opinion, all are true presumptions based on the evidence. In my experience, the investigatory process is manipulative, coercive, and destabilizing to a degree that DCFS and its contracts become a necessity. On July, 10th, 2015 the General Assembly passed Public Act 099-0023, which essentially requested that the Children’s Justice Task Force conduct a study and produce recommendations. The report titled: THE URGENT NEED IN ILLINOIS FOR UNIT-BASED MULTIDISCIPLINARY TEAMS TO INVESTIGATE CHILD ABUSE can be found here. Almost 5 years after the issuance of the report the question remains, “has the Illinois Child Welfare System improved?” From my perspective, as a previous foster care caseworker and as someone who has had DCFS involvement I would resoundingly say NO. I have contacted the authors of the report and will follow up with their responses to get an understanding of how the recommendations have been implemented.

January 29, 2021 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

Here’s a good piece that makes the important point that, like men, women can be controlling in their intimate relationships (The Sun, 4/15/19).  That of course is no surprise and nothing new.  But the article does what few others do; it focuses on individual men who’ve been in those controlling relationships.  It lets readers see the realities of those relationships from the inside.

But, for our purposes, it does something else at least as important.

IF Matthew Wrightson didn’t do as his ex-wife wanted, she’d disconnect his computer, hide the cables and force him to do housework.

Even worse, she’d threaten to limit his access to the children if he dared to even think about leaving her.

Aye, there’s the rub.  Wrightson stayed for years in a relationship that he eventually came to understand was abusive, because he knew how much power his wife could wield in family court.  Specifically, if he divorced her, she’d get custody of the children and could limit his contact with them, or deny it altogether.  Wrightson understood that, so he stayed and took the abuse.

In short, family courts contribute to abusive relationships.  British men know to a certainty that, in the event of divorce, they’ll be relegated to the sidelines in their children’s lives.  British women know that too.  Of course most women don’t abuse the power the courts grant them, but some do and all men know they can.  And no man knows whether his wife or partner will be one who’s fair or one who uses the power the system gives her. 

So, what’s a man to do?  He stays the course for as long as he can because the alternative is losing his children.

Years ago, in a study of 40,000 court cases in the U.S., Margaret Brinig and Douglas Allen concluded that the fact that 70% of divorces are filed by women is explained by the fact that “they know they won’t lose their kids.”  Stated another way, men don’t file because they can be reasonably certain they will.

The same is true in Great Britain, but more so.  American courts may be slowly turning toward greater shared parenting and, to the extent they are, doing less to promote abuse by mothers.  Unsurprisingly, that seems to mean fewer divorce filings.  The National Parents Organization successfully promoted the first equal parenting law in Kentucky in 2017 and, since then, divorce filings are down, as are claims of abuse in those filings.  When both parents know they won’t lose their kids, the impetus for divorce lessens.

Obviously then, the answer to Matthew Wrightson’s problem with his ex would have been a court system that assured him that, if he weren’t proven to be an unfit father, he could look forward to enjoying 50% parenting time with his children.  Had the court system provided him that assurance, he could have avoided much of the abuse his wife was dishing out.  For her part, his wife would have known that the courts wouldn’t grant her the power over his parenting time she rightly assumed she’d have in the event of divorce.  In that case, she may well have concluded that her abuse of her husband was pointless and either stopped or at least slacked off it a bit.

Courts have the power to reduce the type of abuse Matthew Wrightson endured.  They can exercise that power by establishing equal parenting as the default arrangement in child custody cases.  That they fail to do so, despite all the evidence militating in favor of shared parenting, means that, however much they may protest to the contrary, family courts not only find abuse acceptable, in many ways, they promote it.

January 27, 2021 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

The excellent and never-to-be-messed-with Lenore Skenazy is on the warpath again (Reason, 1/22/21).

It seems Natasha Kohl, an Ontario resident and mother of four kids, had to quit her job due to the various lockdowns occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic.  Plus, daycare centers are in short supply, so Kohl’s faced with how to take care of her children when she needs to go out to, say, the supermarket.  In the case in question, her solution to that problem is to drop them at her in-laws.  That would have made perfect sense except for the fact that Canadians have become so used to reporting their neighbors to law enforcement authorities for all manner of real or imagined infractions.  So some neighbor of Kohl’s in-laws reported the situation to the police as a violation of lockdown orders.

As far as I can tell, the applicable such order prohibits the gathering of ten or more people inside a house.  Were there ten or more people at Kohl’s in-laws house?  Who knows?  But the police stopped Kohl as she was leaving with her kids and dropped a fine on her of $880 for her supposed violation of the Orwellianly-titled “Reopening Ontario Act,” so named because it’s all about closing Ontario down.

Kohl now has a pro-bono lawyer to represent her and will contest the fine.  Good for her.  My guess is that the Crown will drop the charges because, as I suggested before, they have no proof that there were more than 10 people in the house and, in any event, Kohl wasn’t even one of them.

Still, as Skenazy points out in her commonsensical way,

Look, we are in the middle of a pandemic. Kohl had to quit her job to take care of the kids. Now she’s got no job, no legal way to drop her kids off at her in-laws, and a fine on top if it all. Making it harder for a normal mom to do normal things in an abnormal era isn’t making anyone safer.

Exactly.  After all, what are her alternatives?  Should the kids go to the supermarket with her and be exposed to the virus there?  Should she leave them at home unattended?  No, that would bring a slew of child welfare caseworkers down on her.  As an long-ago ad once asked, “What’s a mother to do?”  Needless to say, neither the police nor the government of Ontario considers that any problem of theirs.  Their job, apparently, is to make life as difficult on parents as possible and then fine them when they can’t toe the line.

The family seems to be an edifice with many doors and windows into which can crawl state agents.  We’ve long known about child welfare authorities who miss no opportunity, and are willing to violate numerous laws, in order to stick their noses into parents’ affairs.  Now we can add the police using the excuse of “protecting” everyone from the plague.

There’s that word again – “protecting.”  Why does all this “protection” on offer by a welter of state actors always feel so threatening, so arbitrary.

January 25, 2021 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

Anthropologist Lee Gettler and colleagues have long been major contributors to our understanding of fathers and the evolution of fatherhood.  In her excellent book, The Life of Dad, Dr. Anna Machin cited Gettler who’s studied populations in the Philippines and Africa.

Machin cited Gettler for teaching us that males with high levels of testosterone tend to be more successful at attracting females with whom to pair-bond, but, when their first child is born, those same males undergo the biggest drop in serum testosterone levels.  It’s long been known that new fathers experience a sharp decline in testosterone, likely an evolutionary adaptation making them more likely to care for and not be a danger to offspring, and be more attentive to the mother.

Meanwhile, among Gettler’s Filipino male cohort, those who’d partnered with a woman but had no children showed little or no change in serum testosterone levels.

Now Gettler has moved on to other things (Child and Family Blog, January, 2021).  He speculates that parenting behavior by males actually predates the sharing of food among pre-humans.  In fact, he asserts that parental behavior by males made the sharing of food possible.  And the sharing of food among various members of a tribe or clan was one of the foundational blocks on which Homo sapiens was built.

New anthropological research offers an intriguing answer. It suggests that caring fatherhood is not only core to men’s parenting, but that it may have come first in human evolution, before fathers provided food for their offspring. Indeed, if humans had not first developed early forms of caring fatherhood, then the provider father might never have arrived: Thus, “caring dad” may have laid the evolutionary foundations for “provider dad.”…

Adult males, females, and children benefit from such sharing. Indeed, the pooling of high-energy food resources (such as meat and root vegetables) helps explain how humans evolved large, energetically costly brains that make up only a small percentage (~4%) of our body weight but require nearly 20% of the calories we burn each day. It also helps explain our unique family strategy of raising many very needy, slow-growing children at the same time, which sets us apart from other mammals, including other primates. 

But why did we begin doing it?  After all, although chimpanzees sometimes hunt and kill, food sharing among adults is rare-to-non-existent.  So Gettler hypothesizes that, among pre-humans, males began to do childrearing work that in turn encouraged them to share the food they brought in with their offspring.

Through observation of non-human primate behaviors, my research team suggests an answer: Low-cost, basic forms of adult male care of infants, aiding mothers, helped pave the way for greater cooperation, including food sharing…

We argue that similar low-cost behaviors could have evolved in early humans and then been ratcheted up through evolutionary time. Caring would have laid the social and trust foundations for the later emergence of more proactive, riskier, more costly food sharing. Such food sharing eventually led to subsistence specialization and resource pooling that became common in human families and communities. Thus, we argue that the caring father predated the provisioning father rather than vice versa.

Plus, it seems that low-testosterone males are more likely to be generous with food and other things including services in the society at large, i.e. not limited to their immediate families.

Of course that’s just a theory on Gettler, et al’s part, but it seems plausible.

And, as we’ve long known, parenting behavior on the part of both sexes is a matter of hormones.  Certain hormones like oxytocin, prolactin, estradiol and others produce parental behavior in adults.  The drop in testosterone levels in males also makes male parenting behavior possible.  Now, exactly why we, unlike the vast majority (90 – 95%) of other social mammals evolved those hormones in males remains a mystery.  My own theory is that genetic mutation produced either the hormones or their receptors in the brain or both and that in turn produced parenting behavior in males having the mutation(s).  Females then began sexually selecting for those parental traits because the male attention, protection and food sharing enhanced both her and her infant’s chances of survival.

These findings challenge how we might think about contemporary fatherhood and its potential. They highlight direct caring for children as an important feature of men’s lives from early in human evolution. This perspective questions more historically and culturally limited ways in which paternal roles have been regarded, viewed through the particularities of 20th-century industrial societies, which shaped quite narrow perceptions of men’s capabilities. Our growing understanding of the biology of fatherhood underscores the flexibility of fathers to adapt to meet the many different challenges that face parents, whether it is providing direct care to children or food and resources for them.

Allow me to phrase the matter somewhat more bluntly: it’s long past time that we stopped regarding fathers as unimportant peripheral players in the lives of children.  In fact, human fathers are necessary to children’s well-being as eons of human and pre-human evolution demonstrate.  Family courts and laws aren’t just behind the times, they’re positively primitive.

January 22, 2021 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

Here and here I criticized Naomi Schaefer Riley’s attempted takedown of kinship care (Quilette, 12/12/20).  Riley’s piece was well below the standards of Quilette that usually produces reasonably thoughtful and thought-provoking articles.  But her reference to J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy made me want to read the book, so I did.

Based alone on Riley’s quotations of Vance, I concluded that her citation of his case to criticize kinship care was seriously misplaced.  After all, she admitted that he highly values his grandmother’s rearing of him during his adolescence.  But, having read Hillbilly Elegy, I find that Riley’s reliance on Vance’s life with his grandmother to make her case against kinship care wasn’t just misplaced, but verges on the dishonest.

As an aside, let me highly recommend Hillbilly Elegy.  It rates an A+ from me.  Vance is that rarest of birds, a person who’s highly intelligent but without an ax to grind or a single point of view to convince readers of.  He sees and articulates nuance, ambiguity and subtlety.  He writes with deep love and compassion for the hillbillies in his family and among his acquaintance, but never hesitates to criticize their dysfunctional behaviors.  His book is, in my opinion, indispensable to an understanding of the current-day U.S.

I find it impossible to believe that anyone – Riley or anyone else – could read Vance’s book and honestly come away with the antipathy and grave misunderstanding of kinship care Riley expresses.  Time and again, Vance says, in so many words, that his grandmother saved him, saved his life, made it possible for him to become the successful, responsible, productive, happy man he is.  In a book freighted with ambivalence, Vance isn’t ambivalent about that.  But he never needed to say those things.  They’re simply too obvious to conclude otherwise.

His grandmother and grandfather were poor and poorly educated.  But they were endlessly kind, loving and giving to their grandson and his older sister.  When the elementary-school-aged J.D. came home one day in anguish because a kid in his class demonstrated a greater knowledge of arithmetic than he could, his grandfather sat him down and, in a couple of hours turned J.D.’s defeat to victory.  By then, he understood both multiplication and division and was head and shoulders ahead of the rest of the class.  When he needed a calculator in high school, his grandmother spent $84 that she barely had to make sure he got it.  Throughout, she made demands on him – to stay away from kids who smoked pot, to make good grades, to aspire for more – and enforced them. 

In the end, Vance prevailed over his background, over a culture that, at every turn imbued him and everyone in it with the certain knowledge that he wasn’t good enough, couldn’t do the work, was destined, like so many around him, only for drugs, poverty, ignorance and maybe prison.  He did so because of the grandmother who took him in when his drug-addicted mother and her parade of husbands and boyfriends proved incompetent to care for him.  Every page of Hillbilly Elegy fairly screams the value, in J.D. Vance’s life, of kinship care.  He’s the poster boy for kinship care whom Riley attempts to recruit to her campaign against it.  Amazing, but true.

But, to those who know a bit about the foster care system, the book hints at far more.  When readers see the lengths to which Vance’s “Mamaw” goes to make sure he doesn’t fall through the cracks in hillbilly culture, denies herself needed medication so he can have food, clothes and the necessaries of education, the question arises “Would a foster parent do all that?”  The passion that Mamaw had for her grandson’s welfare is the stuff of family.  Yes, many foster parents are devoted to their foster children and go the extra mile for them.  But Riley is arguing for a policy change, and we don’t build policy on the foundation of the exceptional, we do so on what we know generally to be true.  In the case of kinship vs. stranger care, the choice – kinship care – is both obvious and borne out by the science on children’s welfare.  Hillbilly Elegy shows how that works in everyday life.

Then there’s the fact that foster care ends when the child turns 18, but kinship is forever.  The age of 18 is a watershed moment in the lives of many young adults and, if they’re in foster care, it’s doubly so.  Eighteen is the age at which foster kids, unlike others, suddenly find themselves without a roof over their heads, food on the table, running water, etc. unless they can figure a way to provide those things for themselves.  Unsurprisingly, many simply return to the families from whom they were taken by CPS years before. 

But J.D. Vance didn’t have to do that.  Nothing about his relationship with his Mamaw changed when he turned 18.  She was every bit as devoted to him as she’d ever been and would continue to be until the day she died.  Again, some foster parents maintain relationships with their foster kids after the kids age out of the system and the adults are no longer being paid by the state.  But most don’t and almost none do so with the type of resolve Vance’s grandmother showed.

And it wasn’t just his grandmother.  His grandfather, an aunt and his older sister all played significant roles in caring for J.D. as he grew up.  They did so because they were his family and none of them ever dreamed of not stepping up when the need arose.

It’s beyond astonishing that Naomi Schaefer Riley would attempt to use Hillbilly Elegy to attack kinship care.  That book and J.D. Vance’s life are in fact among the most articulate and powerful arguments in favor of kinship care and against placing children in the care of strangers that we have.

January 15, 2021 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

It’s a dubious distinction, but it’s ours.  Yes, in all the world, no nation surpasses the U.S. in the rate at which children live with a single parent (Pew Research, 12/12/2019).  Almost one in four children under the age of 18 lives with one parent and no other adults.  As much social science shows, that happens to be the worst living arrangement for kids (short of, perhaps, foster care or an orphanage).

Our nearest neighbor, Canada, has only 15% of its children living with a single parent.  Even places like Denmark and Russia do better than we do.  Poorer countries, like China and India and nations of sub-Saharan Africa do far better than the U.S., coming in at single digits.  Worldwide, just 7% of kids live with only a single parent.

Now, some of that has to do with our prosperity.  Generally speaking, extended families in less affluent cultures tend to stick together better than those in better-off ones.  Those families can’t afford to split up, but ours can.  That’s true despite the fact that, in the U.S., the family arrangement most likely to live below the poverty line (about 33%) is that of a single mother with kids.  Single fathers with kids earn over 50% more on average than do single mothers with children in the home.

How did this sorry state of affairs come about?  Pew Research doesn’t say outright, but offers a suggestion.

For decades, the share of U.S. children living with a single parent has been rising, accompanied by a decline in marriage rates and a rise in births outside of marriage.   

Yes, those are definitely factors in the number of kids living with single parents.  But marriage rates and out-of-wedlock childbearing are cultural phenomena, largely beyond the reach of the law to influence. 

But, interestingly unmentioned by Pew, other factors contribute to single-parent childrearing that are unquestionably within the purview of public policy and therefore reformable.  I refer of course to the almost complete absence of shared parenting laws, the complete absence of any law requiring an unmarried woman to inform a man that he has a child, no-fault divorce, the absence of laws on paternity fraud, the rules and regulations governing child support that discourage hands-on parenting by non-custodial parents, the demonization of fathers by popular culture, etc.  All of that contributes to the current dysfunctional situation that finds 23% of children having little or no contact with one of their parents, almost always their father.

Unsurprisingly, the preference for mothers over fathers is a worldwide phenomenon.

Women ages 35 to 59 in the U.S., for example, are more likely than men in the same age group to live as single parents (9% vs. 2%), a pattern mirrored in every region and religious group around the world.

Unless absolutely necessary, the rearing of children by a single parent is a bad idea.  It’s mostly bad for kids who tend strongly to suffer from the lack of whichever parent is missing from their lives.  But it’s also bad for the parents who suffer the emotional consequences of separation from their children and the parents who bear the entire weight of childcare.  Whether female or male, those parents are much more likely to live in poverty than all other parents. 

We’ve known this for decades at least.  Who knows?  Some day we may get around to acknowledging what we know and making constructive change.  For now, we’re paying a huge price for our choice to raise a higher percentage of our kids in single-parent homes than any other nation.

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?

January 5, 2021 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

Jennifer Harman and Demosthenes Lorandos’ takedown of Joan Meier’s survey of cases involving allegations of domestic violence, child abuse and parental alienation effectively reveals Meier’s frank bias in the matter.  Meier has long played for the team that seeks to convince us that parental alienation is a sham concocted by scheming fathers to take custody from “protective” mothers.  Her study, published in September, 2019, is Meier’s effort to coat that bias with a scientific gloss. 

Here and here are my two previous pieces on Harman/Lorandos as they lay waste to Meier’s shoddy work.

Meier is herself plainly biased against fathers and the very idea of parental alienation and her 2019 study’s many flaws all promote that bias.  Harman/Lorandos identify an astonishing 30 errors in the design and implementation of Meier’s work.  Needless to say, I won’t go into all of them, but I will hit a few of the most egregious ones.

One of the most significant issues is the fact that Meier plainly doesn’t want skeptics (or anyone else) to be able to know exactly what she did in her study or how she did it.  The organization that funded her work, the taxpayer-funded National Institute of Justice, requires that recipients make their methodology and data readily available prior to publication, but Meier simply refused.  She published in September, 2019, but it was almost a year before she got around to complying with her obligations of honesty and transparency.  That way, apparently, she and her fellow travelers could point to her work as authoritative without anyone being able to criticize her methodology or her treatment of data.

That included behavior that gets close to “the dog ate my homework” type of dodge that even fourth-graders get called out on.  Not Meier, whose work is routinely cited as authoritative by the MSM.

So, for example, readers of Meier’s study are directed to refer to “Appendix B” and “Appendix C” for information on coding and the plan for analyzing data.  Those appendices would then allow other academics to understand how coding of legal cases and the allegations therein was conducted and how data were analyzed.  But Meier failed to include those two appendices, rendering criticism of her work all but impossible.  Not only that, but when Harman/Lorandos contacted Meier to obtain the information, she refused to provide it.  Normally, academics are quite open and accommodating of such requests by other academics, but not in this case.

Meier’s study was of mostly appellate cases, each of which was coded for data such as claims of parental alienation, various forms of abuse, etc.   Now, the facts of each case are unique, so questions arise about the nature of the alienation, the nature of the abuse, the severity of each, whether either was deemed “founded” by the court, etc.   In dealing with a large number of cases, researchers have to rely on coders to accurately analyze the facts and findings of each case and code them correctly for later statistical analysis.

Who were Meier’s coders, how were they trained, how were discrepancies in the coding resolved?  We don’t know because Meier refused to tell us.  Perhaps more importantly, did the coders know what the study was about prior to coding the data?  Did they know the hypotheses to be tested beforehand?  How were they selected?  Did Meier hire only coders who share her biases about PA, allegations of abuse and child custody?  Did she tell them the goals of her study?  We don’t know, but clearly, that information is vital to the validity or invalidity of her work.  Truth to tell, anyone who’s hired by Meier to code data likely knows, without being told, both her biases and that the study is intended to confirm them.

Then there was the problem of how Meier selected the cases to be studied:

One of the most striking problems with Meier et al.’s (2019) research paper is how the legal cases for two data sets were selected, leading to what may be a “cherry-picked” sample that is stacked in favor of the hypotheses that were described. There was a lack of transparency about the search terms used to select cases and processes by which they were developed in the original paper. The inclusion and exclusion criteria for the cases appeared biased because the Meier team deliberately selected the “cleanest” and most “paradigmatic” cases involving abuse and alienation (Meier et al. 2019, p. 7). The Meier et al. paper also notes that a large number of cases that reflect a significant proportion of postdecree appellate cases, such as cases where both parents claimed the other was abusive, were excluded.

The clear shortcomings of Meier’s work go on and on and eventually leave the reader agog at the lack of basic honesty and integrity of the paper.  In short, not only Meier’s work itself, but her history of frank bias, strongly suggest that her 2019 study is less a disinterested search for the truth about the interaction of dueling claims of PA and abuse than an effort to simply confirm that bias.  Harman/Lorandos suggest the same.

Given the sampling, coding, and analytical problems described above, it is highly likely that Meier et al.’s (2019) interpretation of their findings is plagued by confirmation bias…

The good news is that Harman and Lorandos have done their own analysis of legal cases and very publicly and transparently corrected Meier’s many errors.  Unlike Meier, they’ve done their work for all to see and are content to let the chips fall where they may.  That means their findings are much more likely to be reliable and therefore much more interesting than hers.

We’ll see what those findings are next time.

December 30, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality, while making it easier for them to part with them.
     ~Vaclav Havel

The battle is joined; the long knives have come out.  With the publication of Harman and Lorandos’ paper entitled “Allegations of Family Violence in Court: How Parental Alienation Affects Judicial Outcomes,” the scientists who promote understanding of and combatting parental alienation have officially had enough.  They’ve had enough of the specious, anti-science mutterings of those who would have us believe that parental alienation is nothing but a clever scheme concocted by abusive fathers to wrest child custody from “protective” mothers.  Led by the likes of Joan Meier, Joyanna Silberg, Robert Geffner and their fellow travelers in the news media, those forces have little-to-nothing with which to answer the growing body of science that finds parental alienation to be relatively common and psychologically damaging to kids.  Finding themselves empty-handed, the ideologically-driven, rather than accepting the scrupulous findings of scientists around the world, instead confect their own “reality” and then repeat it ad infinitum as true.

Harman/Lorandos are having none of it.  Their paper is a thoroughgoing takedown of Meier’s 2019 piece that sought to create controversy where there is none.  It’s a shot right between the eyes.  Harman/Lorandos pull no punches.

The paper begins (and ends) by revealing Meier’s work as that of an ideologue, bent simply on producing a study that can then be cited as evidence for the above-mentioned claims of the “protective” mothers crowd.  Meier’s study stands revealed as entirely without merit, so shoddily done as to embarrass a more scrupulous academic.  I’ve criticized Meier’s work many times, but never in such devastating terms.

So, for example, she seems to not mind frankly lying.

An underlying assumption that is repeatedly cited throughout the report is the premise that the concept of PA “was created specifically as a rationale for rejecting child sexual abuse claims.”

That of course is simply untrue.  It’s merely part of the ideologue’s worldview and therefore repeated even though it’s known to be false.  As Harman/Lorandos point out,

Gardner never recommended applying the PAS term if there was bona fide child abuse by the rejected parent (Gardner, 1985, 1987), and evidence-based assessments continue to require that child abuse be ruled out as a cause for the child’s rejection of a parent for PA to be diagnosed (Baker et al., 2014; Freeman, 2020).

But those simple, well-known facts conflict with the Meier narrative and so she not only ignored them, but lied about the reality.  Plus,

Without citing evidence to support their claim that the concept of PA was created to reject child abuse claims, Meier et al. (2019) implied that Gardner and other scholars who pioneered the concept had malignant motives, which is tantamount to an ad hominem attack.

In what looks like a classic case of projection, Meier attributes bad motives to Gardner who is conveniently dead and therefore unable to defend himself or bring libel charges.  Meanwhile, as I’ve said many times, those who cast doubt on the existence of PA in fact go to bat for child abuse.  PA is a form of child abuse and, to the extent that a person succeeds in convincing others that it doesn’t occur, that person encourages judges to ignore PA and therefore leave children in abusive circumstances.

But Harman/Lorandos are far from done knocking the props out from under Meier’s work.

The way Meier and colleagues (2019) discuss the “crediting” of abuse claims throughout the report reflects an alignment with critics that all claims of abuse made by children or “protective parents” should be believed (p. 11). The authors fail to acknowledge studies that indicate parents, regardless of gender, often make false claims of abuse to gain a custody advantage (Clawar & Rivlin, 2013; Dunne & Hedrick, 1994; Harman et al., 2018; Harman & Matthewson, 2020; Hines & Douglas, 2016). For example, a thorough analysis of 7,672 child maltreatment investigation cases found that one third of the investigations were unsubstantiated, and the proportion of allegations shown to be fabricated was 12% in cases where a contact or residence dispute had occurred (Trocmé, & Bala, 2005). Ceci and Bruck (1995) also reported around half of abuse allegations in divorce are probably false. Despite this research, Meier and colleagues cited a paper where child sexual abuse claims made in custody litigation are likely valid more than half the time (p. 10; see Faller, 1998, but see Bielaska v. Orley, 1996). Nevertheless, this data document that a large proportion of allegations are still false. Meier et al. never addressed the fact that the parents in her data set may have been lying about abuse, which is a parental alienating behavior (Baker& Darnall, 2006; Harman & Matthewson, 2020).

That’s precisely the point I’ve made before about Meier’s work.  It’s critically defective because it makes no effort to discriminate among abuse claims.  Some may be true, some may be false and others may be impossible to identify as either.  So if a judge decided an abuse claim was false, then he/she can hardly be faulted for not acting on it, but to Meier, all allegations of abuse levelled by mothers against fathers must be true.  No serious observer of family courts believes that, but Meier uses the concept anyway.  Why?  Because it suits her ends.

Now, as I wrote last year, Meier does use events like the issuance of restraining orders to tag abuse allegations as “founded.”  But of course nothing could be further from the truth.  It takes little or nothing beyond an allegation and a five-minute “hearing” in court at which the target of the order isn’t even present, to produce a restraining order, hardly sufficient to conclude that abuse actually occurred.

Meier’s ideology-driven work goes on:

To further matters, Meier et al. (2019) reported that guardians ad litem (GALs) and custody evaluators were not likely to credit mothers abuse claims (pp. 20 –21) and need to be educated to “deconstruct misconceptions” about the use of PA claims when child abuse is alleged by mothers (p. 26).

The irony of course being that it’s Meier who’s bent on creating and peddling misconceptions about PA.  Still, the point is clear: this is ideology, not science.

This position implies that all claims of abuse made by mothers should be taken at face value and fails to acknowledge that these third parties have had access to considerably more information than what is reported in the judicial reports the research team reviewed. These third parties may have concluded that allegations made by the accusing parent were not substantiated and were, instead, strategies used to obtain a custody advantage. When GALs or custody evaluators reject an abuse claim, this is not necessarily an indication they are untrained or biased. The data presented by Meier et al. does not support such a conclusion.

It’s a point I’ve made before.  GALs, mental health professionals, custody evaluators, etc. have access to families and children that judges don’t.  That means their conclusions often have a great deal of merit, but to Meier, if such a person reaches the “wrong” conclusion, i.e. one that doesn’t conform to Meier’s own agenda, then their recommendations must be smeared.  Again, that’s the point of view of an ideologue, not a scientist, and certainly not someone concerned with getting custody and parenting time orders right.

Finally, Meier simply makes stuff up.

[T]he authors stated that protective parents and their attorneys have claimed that GALs and custody evaluators fail to recognize abuse, yet no references were cited to support this statement. The portrayal that “consensus” and “many experts” believe something based on anecdotal evidence makes it appear to the reader that there is general agreement on a topic when there is not (Nielsen, 2015, p. 599).

Anyone can make generalized claims about anything.  Without empirical support for those claims, that’s all they are – claims.  Of course there are people who say that GALs and custody evaluators sometimes fail to recognize abuse.  With 900,000 divorces in the U.S. every year, how could all of them get all matters regarding children right every time?  But is there any evidence to support the notion that GALs and custody evaluators are generally wrong in their conclusions or recommendations?  Meier cites none and, in the absence of same, her assertion lacks any merit.

And with Meier’s ideologically-based bias revealed for all to see, Harman/Lorandos move on to destroy her study.

More on that next time.