The Age, Australia, By Annabel Crabb, Political Correspondent, January 20, 2004
Prime Minister John Howard looks set to reject a plan for a new, lawyer-free tribunal to handle Family Court
custody matters. "I'm not convinced," he said about the recommendations of his child-custody inquiry, which
lodged its report on December 29 last year.
The bipartisan report urged the Government to set up a tribunal to allow family members to reach agreements
aided by mediators instead of fighting it out in the Family Court.
"I don't know that it necessarily will produce a more efficient and just outcome," Mr Howard said. "I mean,
I've got an open mind, I'm prepared to be persuaded, but I'm not blown away by it."
He said there were good ideas in the report, which stopped short of recommending a presumption of 50/50
shared custody between separating parents. Instead, it found they were entitled to "shared responsibility"
in the big decisions in their children's lives. "I think the emphasis on joint responsibility is very good,"
Mr Howard said.
He said the Government was likely to "have a fairly early look" at the report, with a view to implementing
some of its recommendations.
He said he understood why some non-custodial parents were disappointed with the present system. "The problem
here is that, in the minority of cases where parents don't reach sensible agreements, a small but
significant number of non-custodial parents feel that they are being shut out of any kind of decision-making
in their child's lives - it does happen," he said.
"People behave in a vindictive and irrational manner, in all stratas of society."
The president of the Lone Fathers Association, Barry Williams,
who has lobbied MPs and the Prime Minister for changes to the child-custody system, said he was relieved Mr
Howard did not appear to back the tribunal. "We think it would just end up being another tier set up at
public expense," Mr Williams said.
"Men would be just put through the mill again." He said shared responsibility should guarantee both parents
a legitimate input into major decisions.
"Children should be able to ring the other parent whenever they feel like it, and both parents should have
an input into how the child grows up - what school the child goes to, what religion and so on."
Mr Williams, who runs a counselling and assistance service for fathers, said the Christmas season had been a
difficult time for non-custodial fathers. He said he had encountered 41 cases in three days of access
arrangements that had not been honoured, resulting in nine attempted suicides.
The world of divorce is scary for any child. But when a divorce becomes
especially toxic, children can become the target of an unrelenting crusade
by one parent to destroy the child's relationship with the other. Experts
call it parental alienation.
A Mother's Heartbreaking Story of Parental Alienation
What does Parental Alienation Syndrome mean? In my case, it meant losing
a child. When Dash was 4 1/2 years old his father and I broke up. I dealt with
the death of our marriage and moved on but Peter stayed angry, eventually turning
it toward his own house, teaching our son, day by day, bit by bit, to reject
me. Parental Alienation Syndrome typically means one parent's pathological hatred,
the other's passivity and a child used as a weapon of war. When Dash's wonderful
raw materials were taken and shaken and melted down, he was recast as a foot
soldier in a war against me.
The New York Times, New York city, U.S.A. August 8, 2004
Not too long ago, Jacqueline Scott Sheid was a pretty typical Upper East
Side mother. Divorced and with a young daughter, she had quickly remarried,
borne a son, and interrupted her career to stay home with the children while
her husband, Xavier Sheid, worked on Wall Street.
Early last year, Mr. Sheid lost his job and saw his only career
opportunity in California. But Ms. Sheid's ex-husband, who shares joint
legal custody of their daughter, refused to allow the girl to move away. So
Ms. Sheid has spent much of the last year using JetBlue to shuttle between
her son and husband on the West Coast and her daughter (and ex) on the East.
The New York court system, which she hoped would help her family to
resolve the problem, has cost her tens of thousands of dollars in fees for
court-appointed experts, she said, and has helped to prolong the process by
objecting to her choice of lawyers.
TV Show Parental Alienation - The View - Alec Baldwin
Alec Baldwin talks about his experience with parental alienation. Alec (
3rd from right) was accompanied by Jill Egizii ( 2nd from right) , president of the Parental Alienation
Awareness Organisation (PAAO) and Mike McCormick, president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children (ACFC).
A key court decision to grant a father custody of his daughters after the
mother flouted contact orders for four years was today welcomed by
campaigners.
Fathers 4 Justice said that the High Court ruling was a vital victory and
called for more judges to take a similar stance when faced with resistant
parents.
The comments come after Mrs Justice Bracewell transferred the residence of
two young girls to their father because the mother persistently refused him
contact, despite court orders. Read More ..
The 10-year-old Katy boy accused of murdering his father this summer
is now the face of an unofficial psychiatric disorder that may have lead
to his father's death.
Some psychiatrists call it Parental Alienation Syndrome and they say
that's why the son killed Doctor Rick Lohstroh last summer. The syndrome
is basically caused by a bitter parent who poisons a child against the other
parent, usually in cases of divorce.
THE CANADIAN BAR ASSOCIATION L'ASSOCIATION DU BARREAU CANADIEN
By Nicholas Bala, Suzanne Hunt & Carrie McCarney
Faculty of Law
Queens University
Kingston, ON Canada
Alienation cases have been receiving a great deal of public and
professional attention in the past few months in Canada. As with so many
issues in family law, there are two competing, gendered narratives
offered to explain these cases. Men's rights activists claim that
mothers alienate children from their fathers as a way of seeking revenge
for separation, and argue that judges are gender-biased against fathers
in these cases. Feminists tend to dismiss alienation as a fabrication of
abusive fathers who are trying to force contact with children who are
frightened of them and to control the lives of their abused former
partners. While there is some validity to both of these narratives, each
also has significant mythical elements. The reality of these cases is
often highly complex, with both fathers and mothers bearing significant
responsibility for the situation.
Two of the many findings are:
Mothers are twice as likely as fathers to
alienate children from the other parent, but this reflects the fact that
mothers are more likely to have custody or primary care of their
children; in only 2 out of 89 cases was a parent with only access able
to alienate a child from the other parent.
Fathers made more than three
times as many unsubstantiated claims of parental alienation as mothers,
but this too reflects the fact that claims of alienation (substantiated
and unsubstantiated) are usually made by access parents, who are usually
fathers.
Courts criticized for recognizing 'parental alienation'
National Post
March 27, 2009
Toronto -- The scope of the courts' reach into family affairs has
long been contentious, but a recent trend in Canada's legal system has
brought a new controversy that has some onlookers praising judges and
others condemning them for accepting what they call "voodoo science."
More than ever before, Canada's judges are recognizing that some
children of divorced and warring parents are not simply living an
unfortunate predicament, but rather are victims of child abuse and
suffering from Parental Alienation Syndrome.
Read More ..
Many celebrities would shrink from view after a PR nightmare like Alec
Baldwin's leaked voice mail in which he calls his 11-year-old daughter,
Ireland, a "rude, thoughtless little pig." But Baldwin wants to
use the media scrutiny to give exposure to parental alienation, the controversial "syndrome"
caused by one parent's systematically damaging a child's relationship
with the other parent.
Parental Alienation
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.
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 ..
