Research on parents is part of a mediator's job, as it is for evaluators, minors' counsels, and judges — no single court official is specifically designated as an "investigator." Metroka says that Gallup went too far, conducting criminal background checks in cases where they weren't relevant. "It's easy to violate [parents'] due-process rights if you try to make more out of a case than is there when it's presented to you," Metroka says. "Emily's position is that in every case a mediator should investigate and get every piece of evidence she can before the mediation."
Just last month, Gallup prevailed in a grievance against the family court system over her dismissal. Arbitrator Christopher Burdick found that she "had reasonable cause to believe that Court's Family Court Services department had violated or not complied with statutes and rules of court," and ordered an audit of the court to investigate the claims in her grievance.
Courtesy of Joyce Murphy
Joyce Murphy (right) fled California with her daughter because family-court officials wouldn’t listen to her accusations against her ex-husband. He was later
sentenced to prison for sex crimes.
Courtesy of Califonia Department of Justice
Rex Anderson (left) and Henry “Bud” Parson were both convicted of child molestation after family courts awarded them custody of their daughters.
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"They're making these monumental decisions based on air," Gallup says. "They think if you have too much information about a parent, that makes you biased. My contention is, if you have more information, that will make you less biased."
In addition to mediators like Gallup, family courts make extensive use of psychologists in researching and adjudicating child custody. There is arguably no branch of the legal system where psychological theories — including some that are highly controversial — are more influential. And critics say the courts' less than rigorous approach to investigating allegations of child abuse is formalized in one such theory, which is widely used by evaluators and attorneys: the concept of Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS).
PAS was coined by Richard Gardner, a child psychiatrist affiliated with Columbia University, to describe what he believed was a form of brainwashing that took place in the context of divorce proceedings. According to Gardner, the condition arises when a parent — usually, but not always, the mother — "programs" a child to hold delusions of sexual abuse by the father. Armed with this theory, Gardner hired himself out as an expert witness in family courts across the country, appearing on behalf of men seeking to discredit sex-abuse allegations.
Yet many questioned the scientific basis of his work. Gardner's research consisted for the most part on his personal observations as a clinician, rather than systematic, peer-reviewed studies. PAS has never been accepted into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the psychiatrist's bible of known conditions. The syndrome has also been denounced by professional groups including the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and the American Psychological Association Presidential Task Force on Violence and the Family, which view it as a ploy for obscuring a court's inquiries into allegations of child abuse.
"Alienation is being used in almost every case where a child is taken from a safe parent and placed with a dangerous parent," says Kathleen Russell, executive director of the Mill Valley–based Center for Judicial Excellence, a family-court reform group. "It's a legal tactic."
Gardner's ideas are also controversial in light of provocative statements he made criticizing society's condemnation of pedophiles, and seeking to portray adult-child sexual contact as normal. "Pedophilia has been considered the norm by the vast majority of individuals in the history of the world," he wrote in the 1992 book True and False Accusations of Child Sex Abuse. In the same book, he suggested wives of pedophiles masturbate in order to increase their own sex appeal, reasoning that "increased sexuality may lessen the need for her husband to return to their daughter for sexual gratification."
Few defend Gardner's more outlandish stances, but his theory of parental alienation has persisted, in part because he trained psychologists and family court officials in California and other states prior to his suicide. (Gardner punctuated an unusual career in an unusual way, stabbing himself to death with a steak knife in 2003.)
Amy Baker, a New York–based psychologist who does extensive work in the family courts and is one of the most prominent adherents nationally of Gardner's theories, says isolated instances of the misuse of PAS by abusive parents have given it a bad name. "I think there's a very simplistic idea that just because people make false allegations of parental alienation, parental alienation doesn't happen," she says.
Yet such assurances are scant comfort to those who have seen the term "parental alienation" turned against them as a weapon by child molesters. San Diego resident Joyce Murphy is one parent who has reason to regret the shadow Gardner and PAS still cast over the family court system.
In 2003, Murphy, a research biologist at UC San Diego, was fighting for custody of her 6-year-old daughter with her ex-husband, Henry "Bud" Parson. Murphy, who had been disturbed in the final years of her marriage by what she says was her husband's obsession with child pornography, suspected, based on her daughter's odd behavior after returning from unsupervised visits with her father, that abuse might be taking place.
The judges and court-appointed therapists who reviewed Murphy's case, however, sided with her husband. Murphy says she was accused of committing parental alienation. After the San Diego Family Court refused to heed her warnings about Parson, she fled the state with her daughter. "I reached the point where I broke," she says. "I could not see a way to keep my daughter safe."
