Jennifer Hoult has a wonderful paper about the reasons why PAS is not admissable under either Frye or Daubert standards in a court of law. PAS needs to be kicked to the curb in all custody situations. It is useless, baseless and fraudulent.Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) is the idea that one parent can badmouth the other parent to a child and generate hostility in the child towards that other parent. It most commonly arises when the mom gets primary custody, and then doesn't want to be bothered with the dad's visitation schedule.
You would think that it would be obvious that PAS sometimes occurs, but these feminists want arguments about PAS banned in court. The above paper argues that PAS evidence should be inadmissible in family court.
I actually think that it is good that feminists are drawing attention to the admissibility of arguments like this. If PAS is inadmissibility then most of the other commonly-used family court evidence would be also. The family courts should have to consider admissibility of evidence just like any other court. It would be much better if it followed either Frye or Daubert standards.
A commenter writes:
You might be interested to do a little research on the author of that "wonderful paper". She won a $500,000 judgment against her father for episodes of child abuse for which the only evidence was her own "recovered memory". Recovered memories are, if anything, considerably more controversial an issue in court and are known to have destroyed many innocent families. Many of the "practitioners" of recovered memory therapy have been exposed as charlatans.Wow. No, I didn't know that. It sounds like Hoult has her own parental alienation issues. Her own personal parental alienation is at least as relevant as Richard Gardner committing suicide.
The issue gets interesting when one considers that Hoult shows many of the characteristics of an alienated child, albeit apparently not at the hands of a malicious mother, but one wonders maybe those of a dangerous therapist? Having dug a hole for herself and her father, could she be digging that hole further in order to justify it?
Furthermore, that "wonderful paper" is quite the most horrendous piece of scholarship being largely an extended ad hominem attack on Richard Gardner and containing very little which discusses the reality of the phenomenon of parental alienation. The scary part is that certain influential people are taking it at face value. The dangerous result is that it could easily be used to excuse malicious behavior in custody battles - quite the opposite of its claimed purpose.
Yes, you are right, the recovered memory folks are charlatans. They'd be among the first to go, if the court started rejecting more quack experts.
1 comment:
Hi George,
You might be interested to do a little research on the author of that "wonderful paper". She won a $500,000 judgment against her father for episodes of child abuse for which the only evidence was her own "recovered memory". Recovered memories are, if anything, considerably more controversial an issue in court and are known to have destroyed many innocent families. Many of the "practitioners" of recovered memory therapy have been exposed as charlatans.
The issue gets interesting when one considers that Hoult shows many of the characteristics of an alienated child, albeit apparently not at the hands of a malicious mother, but one wonders maybe those of a dangerous therapist? Having dug a hole for herself and her father, could she be digging that hole further in order to justify it?
Furthermore, that "wonderful paper" is quite the most horrendous piece of scholarship being largely an extended ad hominem attack on Richard Gardner and containing very little which discusses the reality of the phenomenon of parental alienation. The scary part is that certain influential people are taking it at face value. The dangerous result is that it could easily be used to excuse malicious behavior in custody battles - quite the opposite of its claimed purpose.
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