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University of Washington Survey

Men more than women favor paternity testing at birth

Medical Research News, Published: Tuesday, 28-Sep-2004 U.S.A.

Substantially more men than women favor routine paternity testing when a baby is born, according to a recent University of Washington survey, but the surprise to researchers is that the percentage of men favoring such testing wasn't higher.

"The amazing thing is that the guys are always split 50-50. Age and income groups don't seem to matter," said Lisa Hayward, a UW doctoral student in biology and lead author of a paper reporting the findings in the current issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

The survey showed just 32 percent of women favor such routine testing. The difference in response between genders remained consistent in spite of marital and income status.

Previous studies have shown that generally less that 1 percent of married women bear children fathered by men other than their husbands. The exceptions are studies conducted among women living in extreme poverty in the United States, Mexico and England, where the rate was as high as 10 percent.

Researchers have speculated about why a woman would seek a father for her child other than her husband and often conclude that it is to improve the child's genetic heritage or to gain parental investment from more than one male. Either way, it would normally be advantageous for the woman to keep the child's paternity a secret so that her husband would continue to care for the child as if he were the father.

"There's this fascinating aspect that when we ask the guys who do not favor paternity testing why they are opposed, more than half of them say, 'Ignorance is bliss,'" said co-author Sievert Rohwer, a UW biology professor. "Then the question becomes, 'Whose ignorance, the cuckolder or the person being cuckolded?'"

Rohwer said the researchers speculate that few men are likely to father offspring with women to whom they are not married.

"Men who are successful as philanderers probably are rare, but they may be successful with many women," he said.

Rohwer for several years has, at the beginning of the fall quarter, asked students in a freshman-level and a senior-level biology class whether they would favor routine paternity testing when a baby is born. The answers were very similar year after year, he said, but those results were never formally compiled for research purposes.

While working as a teaching assistant in Rohwer's class, Hayward agreed to compile the results into a research paper. Surveys were given to 733 adults, 655 of them students enrolled in science classes at the UW or at Highline Community College in Des Moines, Wash. Of those responding, 294 were men and 439 were women. To broaden the range of ages and backgrounds, surveys also were completed by 78 adults outside a Washington state driver's licensing office and at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

Four different versions of the survey were used. For one version, 170 people were asked only one question: whether hospitals should routinely include paternity testing for newborns. The rest received a survey with two additional questions - one regarding a father's presence in the delivery room and the other regarding inducement of labor - to mask the real aim of the survey. The order in which the questions were asked was changed randomly.

"It comes out pretty much the same, whether you ask it by itself or ask it in the context of other questions, and no matter what order the questions are in," Rohwer said.

Smaller groups of those surveyed were questioned further about their responses. A high number of women who favored routine paternity testing said they wanted to reassure their husbands of their faithfulness, he said, and some wanted to make sure that, for health reasons, their children had correct information about their genetic heritage.

Of the men who favored testing, it was unclear just how strongly they were in favor of finding out their children's paternity. Rohwer said he hopes to conduct further surveys to determine the strength of that desire.

"There's a huge cost to finding out because there's all this mistrust that comes in," he said. "It has the potential to break up families and may not be in the male's best interest."

Parental Alienation

Canadian Press

B.C. judge bars mother from seeing daughter

Court orders one-year ban after 'unfounded' abuse allegations made about teenager's father

THE CANADIAN PRESS
March 10, 2009

VANCOUVER - In a case of extreme parental alienation, a mother has been banned by a B.C. Supreme Court judge from seeing her teenage daughter for more than a year.

Because of the urgency of the matter, Justice Donna Martinson issued the terse, two-page ruling outlining 15 conditions the parents must follow, including that the mother, known only as Ms. A, not see her daughter until at least March 31, 2010.

The decision came after the mother alleged extreme emotional abuse by the father, which she claimed was putting the teenager's safety at risk.

"I am satisfied that Ms. A's allegations are unfounded," Martinson wrote.

"I am further satisfied that she has continued to undermine the relationship between M and her father and has acted in ways that are detrimental to M's psychological healing."

Names have been stripped from the court ruling to protect the girl's identity.

The judge has ordered that both the mother and maternal grandmother have no contact with the girl, which would be enforced by police if necessary.

The Globe and Mail

PSYCHOLOGY: MIND GAMES

The family Pandora's Box

Some victims of parental alienation syndrome don't realize until adulthood that one parent turned them against the other

The Globe and Mail
March 24, 2009

After Joe Rabiega's parents divorced, when he was an adolescent, his father repeatedly told him his mother had abandoned him. The boy had to return any gifts that came from his mother's side of the family and, twice daily, he had to pledge his allegiance to his father.

"I was never allowed to have anything to do with her," he says from his home in Raleigh, N.C. "The consequences were dire if I did. He said I would have nobody."

Even though Mr. Rabiega, now 33, had witnessed ugly behaviour by his father toward his mother and knew his dad to be an erratic alcoholic, it wasn't until he sought counselling for personal problems in his early 20s that his past snapped into focus: He had been the victim of parental alienation syndrome - his father had systematically turned him against his mother.

The phenomenon, coined by psychiatrist Richard A. Gardner in 1985, has gained traction recently due to a number of recent high-profile divorce cases in Canada - not to mention the very public case of movie star Alec Baldwin, who accused his former wife, Kim Basinger, of parental alienation.    Read More ..

A GUIDE TO THE PARENTAL ALIENATION SYNDROME

November, 1999

WHAT IS IT?

The Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) is the systematic denigration by one parent by the other with the intent of alienating the child against the other parent. The purpose of alienation is usually to gain or retain custody without the involvement of the non-custodial parent (NCP) The alienation usually extends to the NCP's family and friends as well. Though this document is written with the father in mind, it must be clear that there are many cases of PAS where the NCP is the mother, and PAS from the non-custodial mothers' viewpoint will be discussed later.

Dr. Richard Gardner in his book 'The Parental Alienation Syndrome' states (p. 74) "Many of these children proudly state that their decision to reject their fathers is their own.";

They deny any contribution from their mothers. And the mothers often support this vehemently. In fact, the mothers will often state that they want the child to visit with the father and recognise the importance of such involvement, yet such a mothers every act indicates otherwise.

Such children appreciate that, by stating the decision is their own, they assuage mother's guilt and protect her from criticism. Such professions of independent thinking are supported by the mother who will often praise these children for being the kind of people who have minds of their own and are forthright and brave enough to express overtly their opinions.

Frequently, such mothers will exhort their children to tell them the truth regarding whether or not they really want to see their fathers. The child will usually appreciate that "the truth" is the profession that they hate the father and do not want to see him ever again. They thereby provide that answer - couched as "the truth" - which will protect them from their mother's anger if they were to state what they really wanted to do, which is to see their fathers.

It is important for the reader to appreciate that after a period of programming the child may not know what is the truth any Read More ..d come to actually believe that the father deserves the vilification being directed against him. The end point of the brainwashing process has then been achieved.    Read More ..

Scholarly Paper -
Parental Alienation is Child Abuse

Parental Abduction is child abuse

by Nancy Faulkner, Ph.D

Presented to the
United Nations' Committee on the Rights of the Child in Special Session, June 9, 1999, on behalf of P.A.R.E.N.T. and victims of parental child abduction.  Read More ..