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U.S. child custody outcomes in cases involving parental
alienation and abuse allegations: what do the data show?
Joan S. Meier
George Washington University Law School, Washington, D.C., USA
ABSTRACT
Family court and abuse professionals have long been polarized over
the use of parental alienation claims to discredit a mother alleging
the father has been abusive or is unsafe for the children. This paper
reports the findings from an empirical study of ten years U.S. cases
involving abuse and alienation claims. The findings confirm that
mothers’claims of abuse, especially child physical or sexual abuse,
increase their risk of losing custody, and that fathers’cross-claims of
alienation virtually double that risk. Alienation’s impact is gender-
specific; fathers alleging mothers are abusive are not similarly
undermined when mothers cross-claim alienation. In non-abuse
cases, however, the data suggest that alienation has a more gender-
neutral impact. These nuanced findings may help abuse and aliena-
tion professionals find some common ground.
KEYWORDS
Alienation; child custody;
domestic violence; child
abuse; family court
Introduction
Protective parents and domestic violence professionals have long asserted that courts
dealing with child custody and their affiliated professionals frequently deny true claims of
adult partner or child abuse and instead punish parents (usually mothers) who allege
domestic violence, child physical or sexual abuse, or seek to limit the other parent’s child
access for any reason. Anecdotal reports
1
have suggested that courts are even less
receptive to mothers’claims of child physical or sexual abuse than their claims of partner
violence, and that many mothers alleging abuse –especially child abuse
2
–are losing
custody to the allegedly abusive father. Studies describe the severe and damaging con-
sequences for children forced by courts to be with fathers they or their protective parents
claimed were harmful (Silberg et al.2013). Sadly, there is even a growing list of
U.S. children killed by a parent; as of the time of writing, the website for the Center for
Judicial Excellence lists 704 children killed by a separating or divorcing parent; research-
ers have verified that at least 101 of the children were not protected by family courts
despite requests (Center for Judicial Excellence 2019).
A particular target of critique has been courts’reliance on ‘parental alienation’to
refute mothers’claims of abuse by fathers (Bruch 2001, Meier 2009, Milchman 2017,
Neilson 2018). An adaptation of the ‘parental alienation syndrome’(‘PAS’) coined by
CONTACT Joan S. Meier jmeier@law.gwu.edu
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE AND FAMILY LAW
https://doi.org/10.1080/09649069.2020.1701941
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Richard Gardner (1992), parental alienation, while lacking any universal definition,
embodies the notion that when a child (or the primary parent) resists contact with the
non-custodial parent without ‘legitimate’reason, the preferred parent is ‘alienating’the
child, due to her own anger, hostility or pathology (Johnston and Kelly 2004, Zaccour
2018). Although PAS itself –which Gardner defined as a mother’s false claim of child
sexual abuse to ‘alienate’the child from the father –has been largely rejected by most
credible professionals (Meier 2009, p. 5, Thomas and Richardson 2015), alienation theory
writ large continues to be the subject of a growing body of literature, and is frequently
relied on in U.S. family court cases.
Gardner’s‘parental alienation syndrome’treated mothers’abuse claims as specious
and illegitimate. While some contemporary alienation proponents make little effort to
distinguish alienation from PAS and utilize the identical criteria (Bernet 2017, Baker
2019, Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service 2019), others have
endeavored to distinguish their view by rejecting PAS’attribution of blame solely to
the preferred parent, acknowledging that there are typically multiple causes of children’s
resistance to a parent post-separation, including the disliked parent’s own behaviors, and
naming ‘legitimate’cases ‘estrangement’(Saini et al.2016, p. 424, Drozd and Oleson
2004).
Despite the more refined discussions of parent rejection in some literature, however,
these nuances rarely if ever appear in practice. When children reject contact, the
concept of alienation is still regularly used to focus blame on the preferred parent, as
did Gardner and PAS.
3
Other causes of a child’s rejection of a parent, including direct
abuse, witnessing their mother’s abuse, or other forms of bad parenting or injuries to
a child’saffection (Johnston 2005, p. 762), are routinely ignored. Nor, after reviewing
and litigating hundreds of cases, has this author ever seen a court order a disfavored
parent (particularly a father) to take action to repair their own relationship with their
child. Instead, a child's favored parents (typically mothers) are expected to prioritize
improving the other parent’s relationship with the child.
4
In short, the widespread
experience of protective parents and their experts and advocates has been that no
matter what term is used –‘alienation’alone or PAS, the outcome is the same: Both are
used to discredit and criticize a mother who is reporting domestic violence and/or child
abuse in the custody context, and to ignore children's expressions of distress about a
parent.
Despite extensive litigation, (DV LEAP Legal Resources), scholarship (Bruch 2001,
Meier 2009, Milchman 2019), and the training (DV LEAP Training Materials; NIJDV) of
judges and other professionals by domestic violence professionals, the gulf between
family court professionals and abuse professionals has continued to widen. Informed
by their focus on parental alienation, family court professionals and researchers reject the
above critiques, asserting instead that domestic violence professionals are too credulous,
that many mothers’abuse clams are actually false or exaggerated, and that abuse profes-
sionals do not grasp the reality and perniciousness of parental alienation (Bala 2018, slide,
p. 10), which they liken to psychological child abuse (Kruk 2018). Some alienation
professionals also assert that fathers commit parental alienation at least as often as
mothers –arguing that therefore alienation is not a gender-biased theory
5
(Gottlieb
2019). The two groups generally lack both respect for and trust in each other.
2J. S. MEIER
At bottom, the two fields differ fundamentally on (i) whether it is true that courts
frequently disbelieve legitimate abuse claims by mothers and wrongly strip them of custody,
subjecting children to ongoing risk; (ii) the degree to which parental alienation labels are
the vehicle for such treatment; and (iii) whether gender bias influences these dynamics.
For all these reasons, obtaining objective data on what is really going on in family
courts has become critical. Neutral data has the potential to speak to both groups as well
as the wider public, and to establish an objective description of reality. Although such
data-gathering cannot tell us whether particular abuse or alienation claims were true, an
empirical picture can shed light on family court patterns of adjudication in such cases,
including potentially the role of gender (Meier and Dickson 2017).
After completing a pilot study of 240 cases in 2012, (Meier and Dickson 2017), the
author and a team of experts
6
applied for federal funding to expand the pilot research.
7
In
2014, the U.S. National Institute of Justice awarded a grant to support the ‘Child Custody
Outcomes in Cases Involving Parental Alienation and Abuse Allegations Study’(‘Family
Court Outcomes (FCO) Study’or ‘Study’).
Previous studies have examined non-protective custody outcomes in cases with
domestic violence claims within particular jurisdictions (Zorza and Rosen 2005), but
none has specifically discussed or analyzed courts’responses to child abuse claims, nor
have any provided a national picture. The Study was therefore designed both to provide
a national empirical overview to assess whether the problems identified in prior localized
research are systemic and pervasive, and to gather information about the impact of child
abuse as well as domestic violence claims.
Description of study
The Study sought to develop empirical measures of (i) the rates at which courts credit (i.e.
believe)
8
different types of abuse and alienation allegations raised by either parent against
the other; (ii) the rates at which parents win/lose the case, or lose custody when alleging
any type of abuse against the other parent; (iii) the impact of alienation claims/defenses
on (i) and (ii) above; and (iv) the impact of gender on (i), (ii), and (iii) above. That is, do
the rates of crediting of abuse, wins, or custody losses vary for mothers and fathers when
one accuses the other of abuse or alienation?
Because there are thousands of state family courts across the United States, the only
way to gather national data on family court outcomes is to examine judicial opinions
posted online. Fortunately, by 2015, most appellate court opinions were available online,
and, as we learned, so were a surprising number of trial court opinions. The search for
published opinions covered the 10-year period from 1 January 2005 through to
31 December 2014. The Study collected all cases reported online that matched these
criteria within a 10-year period, thereby providing a complete ‘census.’Two law gradu-
ates triaged over 15,000 cases that were identified by our comprehensive search string,
and then coded, in detail, the 4338 cases that matched the Study’s criteria. Far more
information was coded than could be analyzed during the Study time-frame; the com-
plete dataset is available to future researchers for secondary analyses.
Cases were coded for claims of partner abuse (DV), child physical abuse (CPA) and
child sexual abuse (CSA), as well as mixed forms of abuse, i.e. DV + CPA or CSA (DVCh)
and CPA + CSA (CPACSA).
9
Altogether, these five categories constitute the coded abuse
JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE AND FAMILY LAW 3
types. Courts’acceptance or rejection of abuse and alienation claims, and their custody
orders were coded. Regarding case outcomes, this paper focuses on custody switches,in
which one parent started with primary custody or physical care of the children and the
court switched custody to the other.
Limitations
The core limitation of the Study stems from its data source: since most trial courts do not
publish their opinions (online or otherwise), the majority of the opinions analyzed were
appellate decisions. This means that the dataset over-represents cases that are appealed and
under-represents non-appealed cases. Fortunately, because our dataset netted hundreds of
trial court opinions online, primarily from four states, we were able to do some compar-
isons. We found that mothers losing custody were over-represented in the appeals; there
were lower custody loss rates among the non-appealed cases. This should not be surprising.
Otherwise, there was little difference between the cases that were and were not appealed.
The second limitation is that the Study did not and could not review the facts and
assess the correctness of courts’rulings; some may have been justifiable in the light of
facts unknown to us. Nonetheless, the Study provides an accurate picture of general
outcomes and trends when abuse and alienation are claimed, which can be compared
to existing anecdotal and scholarly depictions of what happens in these cases.
The final limitation is that the data itself –judicial opinions –is imperfect, because
some opinions may not mention allegations of abuse or alienation which could have been
raised at some point, but had ‘fallen out’along the way. Our comparisons of the
‘alienation’and ‘non-alienation’and ‘non-abuse’cases are subject to that caveat; how-
ever, this data does reflect judges’views of these allegations when they deem them
significant enough to report in the opinion.
Findings
The bulk of quantitative analyses discussed herein consist of simple frequencies, e.g.
percentages of claims of abuse that were believed, and percentages of mothers who lost
custody when alleging different types of abuse, when alienation cross-claims were or were
not made. Regression analyses were brought to bear for selected purposes, most perti-
nently here, to examine gender bias. This article focuses primarily on findings related to
cases where a mother accused a father of abuse. There were some –although not many –
cases where the genders were reversed. Where possible those reverse cases were analyzed
for purposes of a gender comparison.
The following reports the Study’sfindings on (1) courts’crediting of different types of
abuse claims and custody switches from mothers to fathers; (2) the impact of parental
alienation cross-claims on crediting of abuse and custody switches; and (3) some key
findings related to gender bias and gender parity.
Outcomes in simple abuse cases (No alienation cross-claim)
There were 1946 cases where abuse was alleged by a mother against a father, and he did
not cross-claim alienation.
4J. S. MEIER
Crediting of abuse claims
Several conclusions can be drawn from the data in Table 1: First, looking at mothers’claims
of abuse, less than half (41%) of any type of abuse claims are credited. That women’s claims
of abuse are believed less than half the time will surprise many readers. Moreover, mothers’
claims of child abuse are credited even less. The odds of a court crediting a child physical
abuse claim are 2.23 times lower than the odds of its crediting a domestic violence claim (CI
1.66–2.99). Overall, child sexual abuse is rarely accepted by courts (15%).
Mothers’custody losses
Consistent with the above findings on courts’skepticism toward mothers’claims of
abuse, the data show that mothers reporting a father’s abuse lost custody in 26% (284/
1111) of cases. Broken down by type of abuse alleged:
10
Again, these data do not prove that these custody reversals were ill-advised; the data tells us
nothing about why the courts deemed the mothers to be worse parents than the fathers
accused of abuse, nor how severe any credited abuse was. However, the experiences of myriad
lawyers, advocates and litigantsincustody/abusecasesisthatcourtsandancillaryprofes-
sionals frequently react to mothers’claims of paternal abuse –particularly child abuse –with
hostility and criticism (Meier 2003,MeierandDickson2017). It is likely, therefore, that many
of these mothers were penalized with loss of custody at least in part because they reported the
father to have abused themselves or their children, and the court did not believe them.
Remarkably, a fair number of mothers lost custody even when the court credited the
father’s abuse:
Table 1. Rates at which courts credited mothers’claims of fathers’abuse.
Domestic violence (DV): 45% (517/1137)
Child physical abuse (CPA): 27% (73/268)
Child sexual abuse (CSA): 15% (29/200)
Mixed DV with CPA or CSA (DVCh): 55% (165/302)
Mixed CPA & CSA (CPACSA): 13% (5/39)
Any: 41% (789/1946)
Table 2. Custody switch to father by type of abuse mother
alleged.
DV: 23% (149/641)
CPA: 29% (39/135)
CSA: 28% (37/131)
DVC: 26% (48/182)
CPACSA: 50% (11/22)
Any: 26% (284/1111)
Table 3. Custody switch to father when courts credited fathers’
abuse.
DV: 14% (43/303)
CPA: 20% (7/35)
CSA: 0% (0/23)
DVC: 13% (13/103)
CPACSA: 0% (0/4)
Any: 13% (63/468)
JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE AND FAMILY LAW 5
The good news in these data (Table 3) is that when courts believe a father has sexually
abused his child, they do not switch custody from the mother to the father. However,
overall, the data in Tables 2 and 3powerfully affirm the reports from the field, that
women who allege abuse –particularly child abuse –by a father are at significant risk
(over 1 in 4) of losing custody to the alleged abuser. Even when courts find that fathers
have abused the children or the mother, they award them custody 13% of the time. And
in cases with credited child physical abuse claims, abusers still win custody 20% of the
time (Table 3).
It is also notable that when mothers allege mixed types of child abuse (both
sexual and physical) their custody losses increase dramatically, from under 30% up
to 50% (Table 2). In effect, mothers have 2.5 times the odds of losing custody when
alleging both forms of child abuse than when they allege child sexual abuse alone.
11
It is not clear what accounts for this: A child sexual abuse penalty (Meier and
Dickson 2017) would be explainable by the well-known particular skepticism and
hostility of courts and professionals toward such claims. (Id.) But the data in Table
2indicate that custody losses are about equivalent when mothers allege child sexual
abuse as when they allege child physical abuse: It is only when they allege both that
their custody losses skyrocket.
Paradigm cases with cross-claims: mother alleges abuse, father claims alienation
Crediting of abuse
There were 669 cases in which one parent made an alienation
12
claim against the
other. In 312 of these there were cross-abuse-and-alienation claims. Of these,
222 met our definition of paradigmatic cases: where mothers accused fathers of
abuse and fathers accused mothers of alienation.
13
In these cases, mothers’abuse
claims were credited at even lower rates than in the non-alienation cases discussed
above:
The relative rates of crediting of abuse claims in alienation and non-alienation cases in
Table 4 and Figure 1 below show that courts are still less likely to credit abuse claims
when fathers invoke parental alienation. The drop in crediting of abuse is even more
significant when it comes to child abuse (from 27% to 18% for CPA and from 15% to 2%
for CSA) (see Tables 2,4,Figure 1). Child sexual abuse, in particular, appears to be
virtually impossible to prove (only 1 case out of 51 was believed) when a father defends
with an alienation claim (Table 4).
Overall, the findings in Tables 2,4, and Figure 1 indicate that:
Table 4. Rates at which courts credited mothers’abuse claims
when fathers claimed alienation, by type of abuse.
DV: 37% (28/76)
CPA: 18% (4/22)
CSA: 2% (1/51)
DVCh: 31% (17/55)
CPACSA: 5% (1/18)
Any: 23% (51/222)
6J. S. MEIER
●When fathers cross-claim alienation, courts are more than twice as likely to dis-
believe mothers’claims of any type of abuse than if fathers made no alienation claim;
and
●When fathers cross-claim alienation, courts are almost 4 (3.9) times more likely to
disbelieve mothers’claims of child abuse than if fathers made no alienation claim.
Custody losses
There were 163 cases in which it could be determined that mothers had physical
possession of the children at the outset of the litigation and raised abuse claims in
court, and fathers claimed that mothers were alienating. Similar to the above data on
courts’rates of crediting of abuse, fathers’alienation cross-claims significantly increase
the rate of courts’removals of custody from mothers. Table 5 shows rates of custody
losses when fathers' cross-claimed alienation.
Figure 2 compares rates at which mothers lose custody in cases with and without an
alienation claim by the father:
As Table 5 (and Figure 2) indicate, when fathers claim alienation, the rate at which
mothers lose custody shoots up from 26% to 50% for any abuse allegation. That is,
fathers’alienation claims roughly double mothers’rates of losing custody driven primarily
by child abuse cases.
Not surprisingly, when courts credit the alienation claim, rates of maternal
custody losses increase more drastically, from an average of 26% where there is no
alienation claim, to 50% where alienationisclaimed,to73%wherealienationis
credited by the court:
Alien. Cases
Non-Alien. Cases
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
DV CPA CSA DVCh CACSA
45%
29%
15%
55%
13%
Overall, courts credited only 23% of mothers' abuse claims in
ALIENATION cases
Comparison of Abuse Crediting with and without
Alienation defenses
37%
18%
2% (1/51)
31%
5% (1/18)
Figure 1. Comparison of Abuse Crediting with and without Alienation defenses.
Table 5. Mothers’custody losses when father claims
alienation..
DV: 35% (20/57)
CPA: 59% (10/17)
CSA: 54% (19/35)
DVCh: 58% (25/43)
CPACSA: 64% (7/11)
Any: 50% (81/163)
JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE AND FAMILY LAW 7
Again, we see in Table 6 that the mixed child abuse (CPACSA) allegations are the most
disastrous for mothers, when courts believe they are alienators: Every one of them lost
custody to the alleged abuser.
Finally, while the numbers are small, the impact of credited alienation is apparent in
cases where both abuse and alienation were credited by the court. Even when courts
believe a father has abused a mother, if they also believe the mother is alienating,
some mothers still lose custody to the abusive fathers. In other words, in these cases
alienation trumps abuse:
As Table 7 indicates, the zeros for credited child physical or sexual abuse show that no
courts were prepared to believe that both a father’s child abuse and a mother’s alienation
were true.
Table 6. When courts credit fathers’alienation
claims.
Type of Abuse Alleged Mother Lost Custody
DV: 60% (15/25)
CPA: 59% (10/17)
CSA: 68% (13/19)
DVCh: 79% (19/24)
CPACSA: 100% (6/6)
Any: 73% (60/82)
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
Comparison of Mothers' Custody Losses with and
without Alienation Defense
29%
59%
(10/17)
23%
35%
26%
28%
50%
64%
(8/12)
54% 58%
50%
26%
Figure 2. Comparison of mothers’custody losses with and without alienation defense.
Table 7. When mother is found to be alienating and father is found to be an abuser.
Type of Credited Abuse Mother Lost Custody
DV: 29% (2/7)
CPA: 0% (no cases where both abuse & alienation were credited)
CSA: 0% (““)
DVCh: 57% (4/7)
CPACSA: 0% (no cases where both abuse and alienation were credited)
Avg: 43% (6/14)
8J. S. MEIER
Selected gender comparisons
14
While additional gender analyses will be forthcoming, the following gender comparisons
provide powerful insight into the dynamics of gender in family court cases involving
abuse and alienation.
Alienation’suse is generally highly gendered
First, fathers’and mothers’rates of custody losses differ significantly when one or the
other alleges alienation: Across all alienation cases (both with and without abuse claims),
when a father alleged a mother was alienating they took custody from her 44% of the time
(166/380). When the genders were reversed, mothers took custody from fathers only 28%
of the time (19/67). This means that when accused of alienation, mothers have twice the
odds of losing custody compared to fathers.
Second, narrowed down to the cases where one party alleged abuse and the other
defended with alienation, mothers accused of alienation lost custody to the fathers they
accused of abuse even more: 50% (81/163) of the time. Fathers who were accused of
alienation by the mother they accused of abuse lost custody only 29% (5/17) of the time,
but this is not a statistically significant result due to the relatively low numbers.
In some contexts alienation is gender-equal
Mothers and fathers fared equally in several circumstances: First, when a parent’sclaim
of alienation was credited (across abuse and non-abuse cases) mothers and fathers lost
custody at identical rates (71%). More broadly, win
15
rates were also identical (89%) for
mothers and fathers when the other parent was found to have committed alienation.
Second, and notably, virtual parity is apparent in the non-abuse alienation cases, where
win rates are 58% (fathers) and 56% (mothers). In contrast, when abuse and alienation
are cross-alleged, this parity disappears
16
(fathers win 66%; mothers 52%).
Discussion
The presence of a substantial number of alienation cases without abuse claims, and the
apparent gender parity in those cases, suggest a nuanced, compelling, and ‘something-for
-everyone’potential explanation for how alienation operates in custody litigation. First,
the surprising presence of more alienation cases without abuse claims (357) than with
abuse claims (312) in such a comprehensive dataset supports alienation specialists’
insistence that alienation is a problem in itself, not just a defense to abuse claims.
Moreover, the apparent gender neutrality in courts’handling of these non-abuse cases
corroborates similar assertions that the alienation construct need not be intrinsically
gender-biased.
At the same time, however, the gendered outcomes in alienation cases where abuse is
alleged strongly support the critiques of the domestic violence and protective parent
fields, that when mothers report abuse in family courts, fathers’cross-claims of alienation
create an extraordinarily powerful thumb on the scale against serious consideration of
the abuse. The fact that the same dynamic does not appear when the genders are reversed,
i.e. fathers do not see a statistically significant reduction in the crediting of their abuse
claims when mothers cross-claim alienation, supports the complaint that alienation in
JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE AND FAMILY LAW 9
abuse cases is indeed deeply gendered and, it appears, weaponized to deny mothers’abuse
claims against fathers.
The continued influence of PAS in alienation discussions is evident in several findings
from this Study: First, the bias against women but not men in abuse/alienation cases is
consistent with the stereotypical roots of the PAS theory, which framed the problem as
a pathology of vengeful ex-wives falsely alleging abuse (see also Boyd and Sheehy 2020,
Rathus 2020). Second, given that PAS characterized mothers as falsely or pathologically
accusing an innocent father of child sexual abuse, it is not surprising that alienation
allegations continue to be particularly powerful in application to precisely those cases,
and by extension, to child physical abuse. As shown in Table 2 above, in only one out of
51 cases where a mother reported child sexual abuse and a father claimed alienation was
the mother’s allegation considered valid by the court. Virtually the same finding appears
in Canadian research (Boyd and Sheehy 2020). While it is possible that some courts were
right to reject a child sexual abuse claim, there is objective reason to suspect they were
wrong more often than not. Outside research undertaken by impartial researchers
indicates that child sexual abuse claims in custody litigation are considered valid –
even by conservative evaluators –50-72% of the time. (Thoennes and Tjadedn 1990,
Faller 1998, Trocmé and Bala 2005) Intentionally false allegations are even rarer. (Id.)
The Study’sfindings, therefore, support women’s widespread complaints that custody
courts are punishing them for raising child abuse by refusing to protect –and thereby
endangering –genuinely at-risk children. We should all be able to agree that where abuse
is real, children must be protected. This finding alone should mobilize courts and other
personnel involved in assessing, at minimum, child sexual abuse claims, to revisit their
approaches.
Third, the striking finding (Table 7) that no court found both alienation and child
abuse by the two opposing parents is consistent with PAS theory, which was built around
false abuse claims, and asserted that true abuse meant there could be no parental
alienation (Gardner 1992). Ironically however, non-syndrome alienation is now more
often defined without reference to false abuse claims, as simply one parent’sefforts to
turn the child against the other parent (Bernet 2017, Bala 2018). Consistent with this
wide-open concept, leading alienation experts are now touting ‘hybrid’cases, suggesting
that even where one parent is abusive, the other may also be alienating. (Drozd et al.
2011, p. 28, 37, Bala 2018, slide, p. 9). The clear implication is that, in these cases,
aparent’s abuse should be balanced against a protective parent’s supposed alienation. As
Lapierre et al.(2020) state: “domestic violence [is now treated] as a context that fosters
the emergence of ‘alienating behaviors'’’.
Unfortunately, the ‘hybrid’concept is likely to perpetuate the misuses of alienation to
deny the implications –if not the fact –of abuse. Inviting courts to criticize protective
parents for ‘alienating’behavior inevitably undermines focus on the abuser, while main-
taining pressure even on parents who were abused or legitimately seek to protect a child,
to remedy the abuser-child breach. After all, if courts are told that ‘yes, he hit the child and
abused the mother, but she is over-reacting, criticizing him and sharing her irrational fear
with the child,’experience suggests that her ‘alienation’will be seen as the more impor-
tant problem (Boyd and Sheehy 2020; Lapierre et al.2020, describing a case that ‘started
with domestic violence and ended up with parental alienation’). This prediction is
supported by the Study’sfinding that, in 43% of cases where courts found both that
10 J. S. MEIER
a father abused the mother and the mother was also alienating, the mother lost custody to
the abusive father (Table 7).
So-called ‘hybrid’cases aside, the Study’s clear indication that alienation allegations
are widely used to deny abuse claims should be deeply concerning to all who care about
children’s well-being and safety. Even experts in the alienation field have acknowledged
that neither theory nor practice adequately differentiates between cases of illegitimate
alienation from those where a child is ‘legitimately’estranged (Saini et al.2016, p. 417–18,
423, Milchman 2019).
17
This recognition logically implies that alienation can easily be
misused to deny actual abuse or other destructive parenting; with one recent exception,
date there has been very little attention paid to this problem by the alienation field.
(Warshak 2019) Similarly, that field’s acknowledgment that a child may resist contact for
legitimate reasons stemming from the disfavored parent’s conduct should logically elicit
calls for courts to address that conduct when concerned about a relationship breach. This
author is aware of no such discussion in the alienation literature. Both these lacunae may
help explain abuse professionals’distrust of alienation professionals.
Logic and other thoughtful scholars
18
urge that, if a parent has caused a child’s
rejection or discomfort, particularly by abusing the child or other parent, addressing
the breach in relationship should start with that parent’sconduct and that parent’s
remediation. From this perspective, courts’persistent focus on mothers’responsibility
for fathers’relationships with their children smacks of patriarchy, and the beliefs that
fathers should not be criticized and that mothers and children must respect their paternal
rights regardless of their behavior (DV LEAP et al. Brief; Rathus 2020, Boyd and Sheehy
2020, Elizabeth 2020).
This does not mean to suggest that one parent’s disparagement of the other to
a child is unproblematic. It does, however, suggest that if a child is frightened or hostile
due to a parent’s conduct, regardless of potentially sub-optimal contributions from the
preferred parent, the priority should be on curing the original reasons for the child’s
fear or hostility, i.e. the parent who has frightened or angered the child should be
responsible for addressing it. Indeed, if enraged or traumatized protective parents –
who may behave inappropriately in their fight to keep their child safe –see a court
holding the abuser accountable by asking him to remedy the relationship consequences
of his abuse, such protective parents are likely to become less enraged and trauma-
tized –and so, less ‘alienating.’
Conclusion
The Family Court Outcomes Study provides the first set of national, objective data
describing what U.S. courts are doing when confronted with abuse and alienation claims.
The data support the widespread critiques of family court proceedings sending children
into the care of destructive and dangerous parents. The gender disparity in how much
more powerfully alienation claims work for fathers as opposed to mothers also reinforces
critics’claims that, in abuse cases, alienation is little different from PAS, operating in an
illegitimate, gender-biased manner. At the same time, the Study’s evidence that alienation
need not be –and is not –gendered in non-abuse cases is a reminder to abuse profes-
sionals that alienation may have some independent legitimacy. Hopefully these nuanced
findings will encourage specialists on both sides of the ideological divide to turn their
JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE AND FAMILY LAW 11
attention to ensuring that alienation’s use is constrained so as to avoid its misuse in abuse
cases while exploring its legitimate contours in non-abuse cases.
Notes
1. The author’s former non-profit organization, the Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment
and Appeals Project (DV LEAP), receives 30–40 urgent requests for help per month from
protective parents –primarily mothers –from across the country; similar reports have been
made by other domestic violence organizations and lawyers.
2. This paper uses the term ‘child abuse’to refer to any sort of child abuse –physical or sexual.
When only one is intended, it is specified.
3. This describes the scenario found in well over a thousand custody cases reviewed by the
author and described by other attorneys and litigants.
4. A well-regarded custody evaluator suggested to the author that the preferred parent, even if
avictim of abuse by the other parent, should be expected to ‘take the high road’and help
repair the child’s relationship with the abusive parent. For a powerful example of this single-
minded focus on the preferred parent over an abusive and frightening other parent, see Brief
of Amici Curiae DV LEAP et al, available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/
10dTGOh2AZLVPASBCiC3yFjeQ8LcC4sqw/view (describing case where father had abused
mother and was harsh and terrifying to child, yet only mother was blamed for child’s
resistance to contact).
5. It is well known that male batterers typically denigrate the mother to the children and
aggressively seek to instill children’s disrespect and hostility to her (Meier 2009). However,
courts paid little attention to alienating conduct in this context; it only became a behavior of
grave concern to courts after it was newly coined as a basis for disbelieving mothers’abuse
claims (Id.). Thus, the mere fact that abusive men may alienate children against their
mothers does not lessen abuse specialists’concerns about the misuse of alienation claims
to deny mothers’abuse claims.
6. The Study team consisted of Joan Meier (Principal Investigator), J.D., Sean Dickson,J.D.,
MPh; Leora Rosen, PhD; and Chris O’Sullivan, PhD (consultants); with JeffHayes, PhD,
Institute for Women’s Policy Research (contractor). Particular thanks are owed Sean
Dickson, whose inter-disciplinary expertise made him a critical ‘bridge’and translator for
the team.
7. See Meier and Dickson (2017).
8. Allegations were coded as ‘credited’if the court expressly found them to be true, or
a criminal conviction existed. This paper uses ‘credited,’‘believed’and ‘proven’
interchangeably.
9. The categories ‘domestic violence,’‘child physical abuse’and ‘child sexual abuse’include
only cases where that was the sole type of abuse claimed. Where multiple types of abuse were
alleged, they are captured in the ‘mixed’categories (DVCh or CPACSA). When coding
whether abuse claims were credited, mixed abuse cases were coded ‘credited’if one or both of
the types of abuse was credited.
10. ‘Alleged’means the abuse claim may or may not have been credited.
11. This finding is significant at the P < .05 level (CI 1.01–6.36). The difference in rates between
CPA and mixed CPA/CSA is not statistically significant.
12. We conservatively only coded cases as alienation cases if the court used that word. When
courts used similar analyses but different language, cases were coded as a.k.a. (‘AKA’) cases.
AKA cases included in the study were limited to those in which courts expressly found one
parent committed such conduct, not those in which it was claimed but not found by the
court. Discussion of these findings are beyond the scope of this article.
13. The small number of ‘paradigmatic’cases (222) –and of cases with explicit alienation claims
by either parent (669) in the entire dataset –surprised the Study team. There were also 304
AKA cases.
12 J. S. MEIER
14. For simplicity and efficiency, these data are pulled from the Study directly, without Tables or
Figures.
15. A litigant was coded as winning if they ‘substantially won,’i.e. received all or part of their
own custody/visitation request or defeated the other parent’s request.
16. The difference is not statistically significant at the .05 level, but it is at the 0.1 level.
17. This author has previously proposed such an approach (Meier 2010).
18. Milchman’speer-reviewed model (2019) requires all legitimate reasons for a child’s dis-
comfort with a parent to be ruled out before alienation can be considered a causal factor.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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