He was divorced.  She had custody.  But she had problems with drinking and drugs.  So he reported her repeatedly to Child Protective Services which took no action.  One day his ex got drunk and passed out, leaving their four-year-old daughter trapped inside a car in the hot Arizona summer.  The little girl, Haley Gray, died.  Read about it here (KPHO, 11/04/09).

The father, John Gray, sued Arizona CPS for their negligence in failing to heed his warnings about his ex-wife's irresponsible and dangerous behavior.  He won a $400,000 judgment.  He also campaigned to get Arizona law changed.  "Haley's Law" now requires CPS agencies in the state to obtain child abuse records from other states when well-founded allegations of abuse are made about a child in Arizona.

But John Gray still has a problem.  He's got two other children with his ex-wife Celene Gray, and the family court in Phoenix can't seem to decide which parent to give custody of the children to.  Now, on one hand you have a woman who's already been found to have allowed a child to die because she was too drunk to care for her.  On the other you have the children's father who seems to have never done anything seriously wrong, although he's spent time in jail.  He cared enough about his children to persistently warn CPS about the danger they were in at the hands of their mother.  He even got the legislature to change the laws relating to how abuse allegations are handled.

That's too tough a decision for the court to make, apparently, so it's placed the children in the temporary custody of Celene's boyfriend, which is to say, in her custody.  Well, at least they're old enough to get out of a hot car if they need to.

As the custody fight goes on, John Gray admits to not being perfect, but one might ask why he needs to be.  According to Gray, "he's had anger issues."  Gee, I wonder why. 

Two major online publications--Salon.com and Slate.com--recently did articles about the men's and fathers movement. The articles discuss various aspects and actors in the movement, and also quote and misquote me. This series of posts will comment on the articles and also straighten out certain misrepresentations.

Kathryn Joyce of Slate.com is a feminist writer who has written much about what she calls the "Christian patriarchy" movement. She told me she was doing a story about George Sodini, who she (accurately) describes as "the Pittsburgh man who opened fire on a gym full of exercising women this August, killing three and leaving behind an online diatribe journaling his sense of rejection by millions of desirable women."

I knew from the beginning that Joyce would try to somehow wrap Sodini around the men's and fathers' movement, and I was very hesitant to be interviewed. I consented, for two reasons:

1) I still nurture the dream that someday feminists and fatherhood activists can understand each other and work together.

2) I hoped that maybe I could get her to understand the absurdity of her premise, and to understand that our movement is based on legitimate grievances.

No good deed goes unpunished. Joyce writes:

Sodini’s diary was republished widely, including on the website of a popular men’s rights blogger, “Angry Harry,” who added his assessment of the case. “MRAs should also take note of the fact that there are probably many millions of men across the western world who feel similar in many ways, and one can expect to see much more destruction emanating from them in the future,” he wrote. “One of the main reasons that I decided to post this diary on this website was because the western world must wake up to the fact that it cannot continue to treat men so appallingly and get away with it.” In a phone interview, Angry Harry said, “Of course there will be more Sodinis—there will be many more,” likening him to Marc Lépine, a Canadian man who killed or wounded 28, claiming feminists had ruined his life...Perhaps, Angry Harry mused, that as the ranks of online MRAs grow, “the threat” of their violence “may be enough” to bring about the changes they desire.

Glenn Sacks dismissed Angry Harry as an “idiot” without real power in the movement and yet he cautiously defends him. “I want to be careful in wording this,” he says, “but the cataclysmic things I’m seeing done to men, it’s always my fear that one of these guys is going to do something terrible. I don’t want to say that like I condone it or that it’s OK, but it’s just the reality.”

I specifically, repeatedly, and emphatically told Joyce that any linkage between the men's & fathers' movements' grievances and Sodini is not my view, but I guess she was determined to jam it in there anyway.

What I did say was that when I do hear of a drastic action--a man on a bridge threatening to jump, the guy here in LA who tried to commit suicide by parking his car on a train track, etc.--my first thought is that it might be a guy dealing with a painful family law issue or injustice.

Judy Berman of Salon.com, writing about Joyce's article, writes:

It's certainly chilling to hear Sacks empathize (albeit ambivalently) with men like George Sodini, the deeply misogynist Pittsburgh gym shooter...

Again, this is ludicrous--I never said anything remotely sympathetic to Sodini and I made that abundantly clear to Joyce.

Joyce writes:

The movement seems eager to supply more martyrs. After Sacks wrote about a San Diego father who shot himself on the city’s courthouse steps over late child-support payments, numerous men wrote Sacks, telling him, “They’re taking everything from me, and I want to go out in a big way, and if I do, will you write about me?”

This isn't the movement--it's desperate individual fathers who've been driven to the brink by a cruel, inhumane family law system. That's why since 2002 I've had a policy of not writing about fathers who commit suicide--I don't want to encourage copycats.

The case she refers to was the Derrick Miller case, about which I wrote a column for the San Diego Union-Tribune. The case wasn't exactly "over late child-support payments"--the father, a longtime Navy veteran, was being assessed 70 or 80% of his income in child support.

Joyce quotes RADAR’s Mark Rosenthal:

“In any movement, there is going to be a reasonable voice and people who are so hurt, who are so injured by the injustices, that they can’t afford to step back and try to take their emotions under control. But no movement is going to get anywhere without extremists.”

The part about the need for extremists is a silly thing to say, but Rosenthal is usually reasonable and I frankly doubt he's being quoted correctly. If Mark would like to clarify this on my site, he's welcome to do so.

The two articles are Kathryn Joyce's "Men's Rights" Groups Have Become Frighteningly Effective (Slate.com, 11/5/09) and Judy Berman's "Men's rights" groups go mainstream--Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability (Salon.com, 11/5/09). I'll be posting about them in a few parts, and clearing up more misrepresentations, as well as commenting on Joyce's and Berman's views.

Better late than never.  This article could have been gleaned word for word from GlennSacks.com pieces over the past few months (New York Times, 11/2/09).  They didn't mention us, so I'm sure it's all original material.  I wonder if their other writers will read it and remember what it says the next time they're moved to produce the type of anti-dad screed that seems de rigueur at the "paper of record."

It's a good piece.  It even discovers Sara McLanahan and the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study that I've reported on several times.  McLanahan is excellent herself and everyone should know about the Fragile Families study, so I'm glad the article gave a link to it.

For the most part, it takes off from the recent study done by child psychiatrist Dr. Kyle Pruett and colleagues into parenting outcomes using a particularly rigorous method of involving low-income mothers and fathers in California.  I reported on that study in September here.  And in keeping with Pruett's take on the study's results, the article establishes some basics about fathers and their ways of relating to their children and vice versa.

Without using the term, it deals with maternal gatekeeping and points out that (a) mothers should back off and let children and fathers be together, (b) the fact that dad may do things differently from mom is OK and (c) fathers parent differently from mothers. 

Fathers tend to do things differently, Dr. Kyle Pruett said, but not in ways that are worse for the children. Fathers do not mother, they father.

Dr. Kyle Pruett added: “Dads tend to discipline differently, use humor more and use play differently. Fathers want to show kids what’s going on outside their mother’s arms, to get their kids ready for the outside world.” To that end, he said, they tend to encourage risk-taking and problem-solving. 

So the article lets its readers know that men and women parent differently and each is necessary to the child's ability to become a whole person and one capable of withstanding life's slings and arrows. 

And it goes a bit beyond maternal gatekeeping to the kind found in the broader society.

Uninvolved fathers have long been accused of lacking motivation. But research shows that many societal obstacles conspire against them. Even as more fathers are changing diapers, dropping the children off at school and coaching soccer, they are often pushed aside in ways large and small.

“The walls in family resource centers are pink, there are women’s magazines in the waiting room, the mother’s name is on the files, and the home visitor asks for the mother if the father answers the door,” said Philip A. Cowan, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, who along with his wife, Carolyn Pape Cowan, has conducted decades of research on families. “It’s like fathers are not there.”

The key to good parenting according to Pruett's study is the parent's getting along with each other.  As a practical matter, they need to negotiate parenting styles in non-confrontational ways.

The article is in the Health section of the Times and therefore deals with social science.  It has nothing to say about the law and the seemingly infinite variety of ways it separates children from their fathers.  But for what it is, it's an excellent piece.

Here at GlennSacks.com we spend a good bit of time criticizing the Times, and with good reason.  But the writer of this piece, Laurie Tarkan, well deserves our appreciation.
 

I suppose it had to happen, but I certainly didn't see it coming.  This article informs us that a number of colleges in the Northwest are restarting football programs, not because their teams had much success in the past or because current students particularly want them, but in the hopes of attracting male enrollees (The Oregonian, 11/3/09).  A couple of the schools the article refers to have under 40% male enrollment at the undergraduate level, and apparently that's cause for concern, at least to some.  The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Pacific University cautiously offered this:

"It's necessary to change the gender balance to be more representative of society," says John Hayes, dean of Pacific's college of arts and sciences. "At more than 60 percent female, there is a different classroom dynamic, and I don't think the discourse is as rich."

I'm all for, er, rich discourse, but I wonder if adding a football team is the right way to go about it.  There's a great deal of information to the effect that classrooms, particularly college classrooms, are not exactly friendly environments to males.  At many liberal arts institutions, anti-male pedagogy is the order of the day.  Consider this quotation from Nathanson and Young's Spreading Misandry:

"Using postmodernism as their front [feminists] have colonized fields as diverse as the humanities, the law and the social sciences.  It is primarily because of this revolution at the upper levels of academia, propagated not only in countless classrooms but also in countless chatrooms on the Internet, that our society is becoming just as gynocentric as the androcentric one that feminists were supposed to correct in the name of equality of the sexes."

To say the least, that is not a collegiate situation that adding a football team will do much to address.  But the fact of plummeting male college enrollments begins far earlier than the first day of freshman year.  My guess is that it begins sometime around cradle days and continues indefinitely, kind of like death and taxes. 

On this blog alone, we've read about a British writer who was appalled at the casual misandry in the most popular children's books he found himself reading to his son.  We've heard from feminist icon Doris Lessing who, on visiting a primary school classroom was enraged at the denigration of boys there.  From Christina Hoff Sommers we've learned that, over the past few decades education itself has turned away from how boys learn in favor of a more "progressive" style that favors girls.  As more than one experiment in pedagogy has taught us, when that is changed, boys' performance changes for the better.  But those experiments are almost uniformly ignored when education policy is made.

If you don't believe me, just read the article.  Imagine yourself to be a 17-year-old male who's due to graduate high school in May and start college next September.  Listen to what this student says.

It's comfortable having classes that are mostly women. It avoids the problem of guys being guys." says Jenny Rodriquez, a junior at Pacific.

Or this professor:

Others don't see why it's an issue to have twice as many female as male students.

"So what?" asks Martha Rampton, a professor of history at Pacific who opposed re-introducing football. "Show me why it's a problem."

Here's a student who says she wants "more boys" on campus.

Pacific sophomore Brandi Palmer says she has a writing class that's all female students.

"We're mostly feminists, and everyone agrees about things," she says. "Having more boys would encourage a clash of ideas." 

Sound inviting?  The most positive one, Brandi Palmer, admits that everyone in her class is female and most of them are feminists.

I like football as well as the next guy, and better than many, but let's get serious here.  The drastic decline in male education in this country doesn't have anything to do with which sports are played at which schools.  It has to do with a culture that, for longer than many of these young men have been alive, has itself made a sport of denigrating men.  It's an experiment that has had disastrous results and those results will continue as long as we degrade everything masculine.  

Teach boys from the cradle that they're second-rate human beings at best and you'll have college classrooms that are mostly girls.  If that's what you want, just keep doing what you're doing. 

Thanks to Rod and Susan for the heads-up.

I've dealt with the categories of Education, and Health and Survival in the Global Gender Gap Report, which I assume Barbara Kay would prefer I call the Global Women's Interests Gap Report, since that would be less misleading.  But I think I won't.  Here it is again (WEForum, 2009).

The Report includes two other categories, Economic Participation and Opportunity, and Political Empowerment.  It also includes a miscellaneous category called Additional Data.  Frankly, I'm not sure where they came up with some of these numbers.  For example, the Report informs us that, in the U.S., 56% of Professional and Technical workers are women and 44% are men, which sounds fishy to me, but I'm not here to quibble.  (By the way, check out the page for the U.S. and you'll see that that 56:44 ratio, as with all others favoring women, is defined as equality.)

For all its categories, the Report records "outcomes," which means they don't inquire into the whys and wherefores of the data.  They admit that upfront, and I don't have any problem with it, but no one reading the Report should forget what it is they're reading.  So when the Report says that men in the United States outearn women, that's reported as unequal, which it is, but what produces that outcome - women's choices about what jobs to work at and how long to work at them - is ignored. 

Likewise, the Report shows data on Political Empowerment, which records how many women have held elective and appointive offices in the past 50 years.  So outcomes in democratic and non-democratic countries alike get the same treatment.  In the United States, for example, relatively few women have been elected to office including no female heads of state.  But those facts obscure others, like women having had the vote here for almost 90 years, and that they vote in greater numbers than do men, but resolutely don't vote for female candidates. 

The Report's exclusive attention to outcomes has the feel of neutrality.  It's a snapshot of what exists at a particular time and nothing more.  That would be fair enough if the authors stuck to it, but they don't.  For at the same time they announce that the report is merely a neutral snapshot, they turn to frankly pro-female advocacy.  The Preface itself is an extended paean to women's empowerment, pronouncing it "long overdue."  

That too would be fine.  If someone wants to advocate for greater women's rights worldwide, it won't upset me in the least.  Certainly, there are many places in the world in which women are treated abominably, at least according to my way of thinking.  But the Report wants it both ways - to pose as a set of neutral data and a piece of advocacy too.  And as we've seen, the data are anything but neutral.

One look at the "Additional Data" category will disabuse even the casual reader of any notion that this Report is a balanced look at the wellbeing of the sexes worldwide.  It's a radically biased look at one sex - women - that's doggedly determined to find them holding the short end of the stick.

As but one example, the Additional Data section includes information on whether a nation has "legislation punishing acts of violence against women."  Here's some top secret information for the Report's authors - every nation has such legislation.  Every nation has laws against murder, rape, assault, battery, etc.  Indeed, some poor misguided souls like me actually believe that laws against personal violence that apply to and protect both males and females should be considered "equality" in that area of law. 

But we'd be wrong.  In order to achieve the Report's Orwellian concept of "equality," a country must have special laws which benefit only women.  Therefore, having laws benefiting only women constitutes equality; having laws that benefit both sexes equally constitutes inequality.  This is the world the authors inhabit and in which they invite us to join them.  I think I'll pass. 

"Additional Data" is the category which you might expect to include such chestnuts as the ratio of men to women killed in war or on the job.  It might include incarceration rates, suicide rates, homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, child custody, involuntary military servitude, and countless others.  After all, those are not exactly irrelevant to the equality or wellbeing of the sexes.  But the report makes no mention of them at all.  And that alone reveals the anti-male bias of the Global Gender Gap Report.  Reporting those figures would show that, far from being the uniformly privileged sex, men in many parts of the world and in many walks of life are anything but.  From the industrialized world to the third world, men suffer their own inequalities in literally dozens of different areas.

The title, the "Global Gender Gap Report," sounds neutral and balanced.  Its contents are anything but.  When it's not spinning anti-male inequality as the affirmative good called "equality," the Global Gender Gap Report ignores anti-male inequality altogether.

There are a good many judges and prosecutors in this country who would so well to read this article (Telegraph, 10/30/09).  Nominally, it reports on the fact that an appellate court in the United Kingdom has upheld the two-year prison sentence of Jennifer Day for making a false rape claim against Andrew Saxby, her boyfriend at the time.  What the judges say in their opinion is nothing more than the most basic common sense.  But however obvious and sensible the concepts, they still escape many people, among them many district attorneys in this country.

It's true that most of what the judges are worried about are the multiple impacts of false claims on the judicial system including police time spent investigating non-existent rapes.  They point out that, for example in the Day/Saxby case, some 270 hours of police time were spent investigating her malicious claim that Day had made solely because she was angry with Saxby. 

More important to them is the fact that false allegations make real ones more difficult to prove.  As the article says,

Dismissing her appeal against sentence, Mr Justice Henriques, sitting in London with Mrs Justice Rafferty, said: "False complaints of rape necessarily impact upon the minds of jurors trying rape cases.

"Every time a defendant stands trial for rape, defence counsel necessarily point out to the jury that false allegations are made.

But the judges also pointed out the effects of false rape allegations on the victims.  They called being named as a rapist "terrifying" and described Saxby's 10-hour ordeal at the hands of the police as "degrading and upsetting."

Intriguingly enough, Justice Henriques wrote in the Day/Saxby case that,

"An immediate custodial sentence is inevitable when a false allegation of rape is made."

Now, we all know that's simply not true.  I've reported on false rape allegations in the U.K. that were met with no punishment whatsover and which even concealed the identity of the perpetrator into the bargain.  So what's the justice talking about? 

Maybe he's encouraging other judges to mete out custodial sentences in false rape cases.  Maybe he's saying that jail time should be the inevitable outcome of maliciously-made claims of rape.  If so, I say "amen."

Whatever the case, maybe someone should send this article to the DA who refused to charge Hofstra student Danmell Ndonye for her false claims against five young men in September.

Thanks to Mikey for the heads-up.

The best symbol of the $787 billion federal stimulus program turns out not to be a construction worker in a hard hat, but rather a classroom teacher saved from a layoff.

That's the latest news from the employment front.  It seems that, of the over 600,000 jobs saved or created by the federal stimulus spending so far, over half have been in the field of education.  For reasons this article explains, the figures are not entirely reliable, but the gist is correct (New York Times, 10/30/09).  Obama's stimulus plan has so far benefited teachers and school administrators far more than anyone else.

Months ago, feminists were exultant that they had been able to convince the Obama administration to direct 42% of stimulus spending toward jobs held mostly by women despite the fact that some 80% of job losses had been incurred in male-dominated industries like construction and manufacturing.  Now, apparently because of a time lag in actually spending stimulus money on construction, the lion's share of job creation has occurred in the female-dominated field of education.  Some 89% of primary-school and 62% of secondary-school teachers in the United States are women.

Of course no one objects to job creation or retention in education.  But in purely economic terms, service-sector jobs like education do little to create what Marx called surplus value.  Construction and manufacturing do a lot to create surplus value.  And it's surplus value that creates the standard of living to which we've become accustomed in the U.S.  Stated another way, an economy that creates surplus value can then redistribute that wealth to those, like teachers, writers, musicians, doctors, etc., who don't create it themselves.  If everyone in an economy were a teacher, economic activity would be a zero-sum game of swapping finite money among people.  Surplus value expands the pie.

So while there's certainly nothing wrong with paying teachers, it doesn't contribute much to expanding surplus value.  And that's what we need to do to get the economy rolling again.  Any sensible stimulus program would concentrate on manufacturing and construction and activities related to them.  That would expand the economy and everyone would benefit.  So far we haven't done that. 

As Monty Python says in The Meaning of Life, "I expect they'll get to that in the next bit." 

I've blogged before about the Global Gender Gap Report for 2009.  Here's a link to it (WEForum, 2009).  I won't repeat the tedious explanations of what it claims to be or its frankly anti-male scoring system.  If you want to read about that, click here.

The Global Gender Gap Report is at pains to avoid any admission that men may fare worse than women in some parts of the world or in certain aspects of life.  So in addition to defining anti-male bias as "equality" (see my previous post on the subject), it carefully chooses categories in which men tend to outperform women.  In other words, it addresses areas in which it can demonstrate anti-female inequality and scrupulously ignores those in which it can't. 

Therefore, you won't find categories entitled "Killed in War," "Killed on the Job," "Homeless," "Incarceration," etc.  You won't find any references to disparities in child custody, sentencing for crime or crime victimization.  Military impressment of boys as young as eight likewise gets a pass.  And of course you will find statistics for things like female genital mutilation which, from my perspective, is barbaric, but is also unknown to the vast majority of women and girls in the world.

Still, try as they might, apparently the authors couldn't avoid certain categories in which men's outcomes are worse than women's.  One is education, and in that category they simply define any anti-male inequality as equality and let it go at that (see my previous post).

But health is another category they apparently felt they couldn't leave out, and inconveniently for the authors, men tend to have shorter lifespans than do women.  Indeed, according to the report itself, the ratio of women's lifespans to those of men is 1.04, meaning that, on average worldwide, women live longer than do men.  So the authors were presented with a problem - how to spin better female health as worse female health. 

Not to worry, though; they were more than equal to the task. 

They divided the category Health and Survival into two subcategories and gave each a weighting.  The first subcategory is life expectancy, which is an obvious measurement to use when rating health. 

But strangely enough the second subcategory is sex at birth.  Now, what precisely does the sex of a child at birth have to tell us about its health?  Not anything that I can see.  Of course boy babies are statistically likely to live shorter lives than are girl babies, but that's captured in the subcategory for life expectancy.  So what gives?

More to the point, why do the authors accord that second subcategory more than twice the weight (0.693 : 0.307) they give to life expectancy?  The answer should be obvious; they do that in order to arrive at an overall score for Health and Survival that indicates anti-female inequality.

That's because in many countries, there are more boys born than girls.  (The overall ratio of girl babies to boy babies is 0.93)In a few countries like China, that's because female fetuses are often aborted due to a preference for boys.  Somehow, in the authors' minds, that has something to do with the health and survival of living children and adults, which it transparently does not, but they needed something with which to overbalance women's greater longevity.  Apparently that's the best they could do.

(As an aside, I'd point out that, in many countries in the West, abortion is not only legal but a woman's right.  That means that, in the legal systems of those countries, a fetus is given less moral and legal standing than is a person who's been born.  Roe v. Wade, for example, makes that clear.  But in the scheme of the Global Gender Gap Report, the opposite is true - the unborn, or at least unborn girls, are statistically given over twice the importance of those already born.)

Given the radically-unequal, and inexplicable, weighting given to the two subcategories, the fact that men live shorter lives than women is easily overbalanced by even minor statistical differences in percentages of girls and boys at birth.  And presto, the fact that fewer girls are born than boys magically obscures the fact that women live longer than men. 

On the planet most of us occupy, how long you live is surely the most important single factor in assessing "health and survival."  But for the authors of the Global Gender Gap Report it's what sex you are.  Fewer girls at birth mean poorer women's health even though they live longer than men.  Got that?        

I'm sure artist Ben Stone of Chicago feels much safer now.  After all, he's protected by a restraining order.  He's got the order itself in his hands.  It's signed by Judge Daniel Miranda and signed and stamped by County Clerk Dorothy Brown.  He's even got his own videotape of police officers serving him with the order.

But wait.  Serving him with the order?  Isn't he the one protected by the order?  Why would they serve it on him?

This article explains (ArtForum).  It was a simple matter of Stone's filing the request and providing the court with all the proper documentation for an order of protection against himself.  Apparently it all went like clockwork too.  Ben Stone went to court and got an order of protection against himself.

Come to think of it, I could use one of those.  So the next time I cut myself in the kitchen or slip on a step I can get the police to arrest me.  That'll show me!  I'll have to stop talking to myself.  Better yet, I'll have to stay away from me altogether.  I won't be allowed to call myself on the phone or interfere in my finances, and believe me, that's probably a good idea.  Seriously, I feel safer just thinking about it. 

I don't know if Ben Stone's taking out an order of protection is more ridiculous than Colleen Nestler's taking one out against David Letterman, a man she'd never met and who lived many states away from her.  I call it a dead heat.

But whichever one you prefer, both give a pretty good idea of how seriously we take people's rights to things like freedom of speech and association.  I've discussed this before, but honestly, imagine the court hearing in which a woman in New Mexico can get a TRO against a star like Letterman.  Was the judge even awake? 

Ditto the Ben Stone hearing.  How is it possible that Judge Miranda was so out of it that he didn't notice that the name of the person requesting the order was the same as the name of the person he was requesting it against.  I mean, did the judge ask him a single question?

The Stone and Letterman cases are absurd, of course, but the principles are anything but.  Restraining orders are acts of the state abridging the liberties of people who supposedly have rights to due process before that can happen.  How much more blatant does a case have to be before we realize what we've given up?

Thanks to William for the heads-up.

Now 23, divorced, and a parent herself, Anne has recognized only recently that she was manipulated, that her long-held view of her father isn't accurate. They live 2,000 miles apart but now try to speak daily. "I've missed out on a great friendship with my dad," she says. "It hurts."

A group of 50 mental health experts from 10 countries are part of an effort to add Parental Alienation to the 2012 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association's "bible" of diagnoses. According to psychiatrist William Bernet, this "would spur insurance coverage, stimulate more systematic research, lend credence to a charge of parental alienation in court, and raise the odds that children would get timely treatment."

Few family law cases are as heartbreaking as those involving Parental Alienation. In PA cases, one parent has turned his or her children against the other parent, destroying the loving bonds the children and the target parent once enjoyed.

Numerous misguided feminist groups oppose recognition of Parental Alienation in court or in DSM. Some of these opponents raise legitimate concerns. For example, Janet Johnston, a feminist-oriented clinical sociologist/justice studies professor, fears that PAS could be invoked by an abusive parent to gain rights to a child.

She is correct--this can happen. One example is the Joyce Murphy case in San Diego--to learn more, see my post Feminist Opponents of Shared Parenting Get It Right in Parental Alienation/Abuse Accusation Case. The solution to Johnston's concern is to have courts make thorough, unbiased investigations into abuse claims.

It also true, as some opponents of recognizing Parental Alienation assert, that there are fathers (or mothers) who have alienated their own children through their personality defects or lack of parenting skills, and who attempt to shift the blame to their children’s mothers (or fathers) by falsely claiming PAS.

However, some opponents of recognizing Parental Alienation are on the lunatic fringe, denying that Parental Alienation exists at all, and spinning fantasies of masses of mothers losing custody to molesting fathers. In most of the cases put forth in the media by these extremists, no abuse occurred and the mothers only lost custody of their children after going way out of their way to destroy the relationship between the children and their fathers. Some examples of these frauds include the Genia Shockome, Sadia Loeliger, and Holly Collins cases

Even if many claims of Parental Alienation were false--and there's no evidence to suggest this--it still would not mean that opponents' assertions that PA doesn't exist are credible. In family law cases, false accusations of any and all types of maltreatment, including PA, are used to gain advantage. Since false accusations of domestic violence and child sexual abuse are common, should we then conclude that battering and molestation don't exist?

Another issue opponents of recognizing Parental Alienation have latched on to is the debate over whether Parental Alienation should by considered a syndrome. They then argue that if it's not a syndrome, it can't be real. I believe the assertion that Parental Alienation is a "syndrome" is defensible, but regardless, the key fact is that alienating behavior and Parental Alienation campaigns exist and are a major problem in divorce.

Johnston also asserts that in teens, a level of parental rejection appearing similar to Parental Alienation might be a developmentally normal response. This assertion is questionable. Johnston is correct that many teens reject their parents to various degrees. However, there's a difference between this and active alienation.

Several of my wife's male friends have been alienated from their teenage children, and many of them try to mask their pain by shrugging and saying, "You know how teenagers are." Well, I do, and I don't buy it. For example, my 17-year-old son is convinced that I'm a hopelessly out of touch old loser, and I certainly don't disagree with him. Still, he clearly loves me, and will sometimes (grudgingly) acknowledge it. That's not Parental Alienation, which is far more visceral.

The new U.S. News & World Report article Parental Alienation: A Mental Diagnosis? (11/2/09) covers the efforts of Parental Alienation experts to get PA accepted by DSM. I suggest that readers comment on the piece by sending Letters to the Editor at letters@usnews.com.

In it, author Lindsay Lyon writes:

From an early age, Anne was taught by her mother to fear her father. Behind his back, her mom warned that he was unpredictable and dangerous; any time he'd invite her to do anything—a walk in the woods, a trip to the art store—she would craft an excuse not to go. "I was under the impression that he was crazy, that at any moment he could just pop and do something violent to hurt me," says Anne, who prefers that only her middle name be used to guard her family's privacy.

Typical of a phenomenon some mental-health experts now label "parental alienation," her view of him became so negative, she says, that her mother persuaded her to lie during a custody hearing when the couple divorced. Then 14, she told the judge that her dad was physically abusive. Was he? "No," she says. "But I was convinced that he would [be]." After her mother won custody, Anne all but severed contact with her father for years.

If a growing faction of the mental-health community has its way, Anne's experience will one day soon be an actual diagnosis. The concept of parental alienation, which is highly controversial, is being described as one in which children strongly attach to one parent and reject the other in the false belief that he or she is bad or dangerous.

"It's heartbreaking," says William Bernet, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, "to have your 10-year-old suddenly, in a matter of weeks, go from loving you and hiking with you...to saying you're a horrible, ugly person." These aren't kids who simply prefer one parent over the other, he says. That's normal. These kids doggedly resist contact with a parent, sometimes permanently, out of an irrational hate or fear.

Bernet is leading an effort to add "parental alienation" to the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association's "bible" of diagnoses, scheduled for 2012. He and some 50 contributing authors from 10 countries will make their case in the American Journal of Family Therapy early next year. Inclusion, says Bernet, would spur insurance coverage, stimulate more systematic research, lend credence to a charge of parental alienation in court, and raise the odds that children would get timely treatment.

But many experts balk at labeling the phenomenon an official disorder. "I really get concerned about spreading the definition of mental illness too wide," says Elissa Benedek, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Ann Arbor, Mich., and a past president of the APA. There's no question in her mind that kids become alienated from a loving parent in many divorces with little or no justification, and she's seen plenty of kids kick and scream all the way to the car when visitation is enforced. But, she says, "this is not a mentally ill child"...

In any case, divorcing parents should be aware that hostilities may seriously harm the kids. Sometimes manipulation is blatant, as with parents who conceal phone calls, gifts, or letters, then use the "lack of contact" as proof that the other parent doesn't love the child. Sometimes the influence is more subtle ("I'm sure nothing bad will happen to you at Mommy's house") or even unintentional ("I've put a cellphone in your suitcase. Call when everyone's asleep to tell me you're OK")...

"The long-term implications [of alienation] are pretty severe," says Amy Baker, director of research at the Vincent J. Fontana Center for Child Protection in New York and a contributing author of Bernet's proposal. In a study culminating in a 2007 book, Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome, she interviewed 40 "survivors" and found that many were depressed, guilt ridden, and filled with self-loathing. Kids develop identity through relationships with both their parents, she says. When they are told one is no good, they believe, "I'm half no good."

Now 23, divorced, and a parent herself, Anne has recognized only recently that she was manipulated, that her long-held view of her father isn't accurate. They live 2,000 miles apart but now try to speak daily. "I've missed out on a great friendship with my dad," she says. "It hurts."

Lyon did a pretty good job with the article but her assertions about Parental Alienation and the American Psychological Association are incomplete. She wrote "The American Psychological Association has issued a statement that 'there is no evidence within the psychological literature of a diagnosable parental alienation syndrome.'" Yet the APA has given mixed messages on PAS--to learn more, click here.

The controversy over Parental Alienation is largely political. Children are vulnerable and impressionable, and parents in emotionally-charged divorces are quite capable of using them as tools of their anger. It is true that family courts must weed out false claims of PA made by abusive or manipulative parents. It is also true that courts must act decisively to protect children from the emotional abuse inflicted by alienating ones.