December 28, 2020 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors
I’ve criticized Joan Meier numerous times. She’s a professor who’s long been a prominent member of the team that seeks to cast doubt on the very existence of parental alienation and alleges that courts allow abusive fathers to gain child custody simply by claiming that their ex is alienating the kids. To that end, in 2019, she did a study of appellate court cases that, as I show here, here and here, does little to advance her cause. In a nutshell, Meier’s study was so badly done that it can’t be used as a guide to figuring out whether judges rightly or wrongly decide custody cases in which there are claims of domestic violence, child abuse or parental alienation. Meier nowhere defines abuse or domestic violence and, when she does define parental alienation, gets it spectacularly and obviously wrong.
More importantly, she makes no effort to differentiate among kinds and severity of domestic violence. Mom shooting Dad with a pistol is, in Meier’s study, treated the same as Dad shoving Mom. Meier of course is free to play fast and loose with her definitions, but judges aren’t. A responsible family court judge could be entirely right to not deny custody to a parent who’s committed DV as long as it was a minor case. Why should a child lose that parent simply because of a momentary lapse?
Now, the distinct odor wafting from Meier’s work is that of a gender idealogue who decides what outcomes she wants from her study and designs the study to ensure those outcomes. Her anti-father/pro-mother bias is all but impossible to miss and I did my best to reveal the matter in my previous posts.
But now we have Prof. Jennifer Harman of Colorado State University and attorney Demosthenes Lorandos to do what I never could, i.e. mercilessly slay the dragon that is Joan Meier’s sorry work. They do so in their article entitled “Allegations of Family Violence in Court: How Parental Alienation Affects Judicial Outcomes” that was published in the most recent edition of the APA journal, Psychology, Public Policy and Law.
Harman and Lorandos’ article is divided roughly into two parts. The first part savages Meier’s work; the second reports on their own study that found none of the shortcomings in the judicial system claimed by Meier.
As to part one, Harman and Lorandos identified an astonishing 30 errors in the design of Meier’s study, its methodology, its use of statistics, etc. Actually, there are more, but those only came to light after Harman/Lorandos had conducted their study and written it up. The reason they couldn’t discover those errors earlier is that Meier resorted to what radical feminist “scholars” (e.g. Lenore Weizman, Carol Gilligan, Susan Brownmiller, etc.) so often do – hid her data and how she analyzed it.
Amazingly, the U.S. agency that funded Meier’s work requires all that information be reported to the agency at least 90 days ahead of publication so that other scholars and divers others can access it. Almost a year after publication, Meier had never complied with the terms of her agreement with the agency, meaning that Harman/Lorandos couldn’t tell exactly what she’d actually done. Once she finally got around to informing the agency and the material became public, additional errors became apparent.
Harman/Lorandos weren’t deterred by the opacity of Meier’s article reporting on her study. Much pertinent information was simply left out of it, rendering it hard to figure out exactly what her data do and don’t say. So Harman/Lorandos contacted Meier who evinced not the slightest interest in providing the information and not a little defensiveness at the notion that they even asked. It’s an understandable posture for someone whose work is as bad and ideologically-motivated as Meier’s.
I’ll have more to say on this in my next two pieces.