Month: May 2022

What Happens When The Target Parent Is The Mother?

Posted on by Shawn Wygant

In the next few blogs we at PsychLaw.net will share selected cases from the US where the target parent was the mother.

 

In re M.K.T., – Pennsylvania

 

This was a 1993 Parental Alienation by foster mother case.  It began in the 1980s when Pennsylvania’s office of Children and Youth Services (CYS) and foster mother Myrna Hagan became involved with the family.  It seems that father held an M.B.A. and worked as a computer consultant. Mother was employed as a secretary. In 1989, K., then age sixteen, ran away from home and refused to return when apprehended by the police.  The girl alleged that she feared her father because he routinely used excessive physical discipline on her and her siblings. CYS personnel interviewed the children in their home. All three children expressed fear of their father and requested that they be removed from their home. There seemed to be no serious complaints about the mother.  The children were placed in shelter care pending a hearing. Father admitted to a CYS caseworker that he had used physical discipline in the form of paddling and slapping across the face. Explaining quite clearly that the complaint of CYS and their “expert” were “shallow and picayune,” the appellate court chastised their lower court judge saying that a review of the record in this case compelled only one conclusion.  The appellate panel insisted that the conclusion was so clear that they were puzzled how either the trial court or CYS could maintain a contrary position. Concerning the mother’s right to parent her children, the appellate panel apologized: “Unfortunately, the trial court lost sight of the goal.”

 

In this difficult case at least six behavioral scientists were involved over the “shallow and picayune” CYS process.  One handpicked psychologist for CYS, Dr. Neil Rosenblum, and five neutral experts: Dr. Susan Nathan; Dr. Donald Hazlett; Dr. Kenneth Stanko; Dr. Robert Saul and Dr. Anna Marie Breaux. To perfect their shallow process, CYS had Rosenblum meet each of the children alone once and each child in an interactional session with foster mother Myrna Hagan.  Rosenblum never met the parents but testified on behalf of CYS.  Dr. Robert Saul also testified after meeting with the children and foster mother. Saul expressed that he had concerns about the foster mother’s strong views concerning the return of the children to their parents and feared what the foster mother might communicate to the children.  Dr. Saul also stated that the foster mother’s views about the parents very possibly would have a detrimental effect on the goal of reunifying the family, and, given that the children had become attached to Hagan, they would be influenced by her even more. Clearly, between Hagan and the mother, Hagan was winning their hearts.

 

While Dr. Kenneth Stanko admitted that the father’s methods of discipline were detrimental to the children’s upbringing, he was consistent and emphatic in his belief that the parents had worked very hard at changing their behavior and ridding themselves of inappropriate ways of parenting. He stated that they read many books, both those given by him and those they obtained themselves. They underlined relevant portions and sought him out with questions. Dr. Stanko testified that the parents put this information to use in their parenting of a child who had moved back home without incident. Dr. Stanko emphasized that Hagan’s attitude was a serious problem to the stated goal of reunification. He testified that to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, placement of the children with Hagan was not conducive to reunification of the family.

 

Dr. Anna Marie Breaux spent twenty-one and one-quarter hours in direct evaluation with the family. Dr. Breaux testified that the parents exhibited a great degree of motivation to get the family reunited. The crux of the problem, according to Breaux, was the children’s belief that they had to choose between their foster mother and their mother. Dr. Breaux stated that Hagan was competitive with the parents rather than being neutral to the relationship with their children. Dr. Breaux testified that the children were being done a disservice by continued placement with foster mother Hagan. Dr. Breaux opined that this foster mother had explicitly and implicitly taken actions leading to the children’s alienation from their parents.

 

The only evidence that supported the conclusion that visitation with the parents posed a threat to the children still held by CYS was the testimony of Dr. Rosenblum for CYS at the hearing, and it was not competent evidence according to the appellate panel reviewing the matter.  The appellate court determined that the other expert testimony in the case was significant, both in quantity and quality. The record demonstrates that for over three years, every psychologist or psychiatrist who treated this family said the same thing: the parents acknowledged their wrongdoing, worked very hard to rectify it, and proved themselves in their care of the child who returned, but they were prevented from reunification with the other children due solely to the efforts of the foster mother and her influence over them. The appellate court chastised their trial judge and ruled that the order terminating visitation with the parents was reversed. They demanded their trial court hold an expedited hearing to determine whether the children may be returned forthwith to their parents’ home.

What is the purpose of our blogs?

Posted on by Shawn Wygant

The purpose for building this blog was two fold:

First, to give the reader representative examples of parental alienation cases from the United States and Canada. One goal we at PsychLaw.net had in developing this material has been to provide professional and lay readers with a source with which they can easily see the similarities in alienator, child victim and target parent behaviors as it was seen and described by legal authorities.  An additional goal has been to offer the reader a source with which they can become familiar with the contours of the courts’ response to alienators, their child and target parent victims.  Another goal has been to assemble material from which readers can find brief descriptions of parental alienation patterns that may be similar to cases in which they are enmeshed.  Hopefully, the material can be added to a brief, a lecture, a shared story and it will help to curtail the pain and suffering alienators inflict on so many people.

 

Second, to provide brief but accurate descriptions of many alienation cases across a twenty-five year period to illustrate that parental alienation deniers do not seem to know the data. Bruch, Faller, Hoult and other non scientifically based critics maintain that PA doesn’t exist but is a plan or plot by pedophiles to take defenseless children from protective women we at PsychLaw.net believe this is untrue and a dangerous way of thinking.  Curiously, a finding that a court took children away from a protective woman because of proofs concerning PA, and gave them to a man could not be found in any of the thousands of cases reviewed.  Like Global Warming deniers and Creationists, the Parental Alienation deniers thrive in a post-fact / Fox News world.   A tutorial on critical thinking and how the parental alienation deniers do not value evidence based empiricism would be beyond the scope of this chapter; so the approach taken here was to provide the reader with the evidence distilled from three thousand parental alienation case in the United States and Canada.

 

The method we at PsychLaw.net used to distill these examples was as follows:

First, court reports, opinions and citations to parental alienation cases were obtained from the files of persons who had been involved in them as experts or litigators.  This proved unsatisfactory because many of the two hundred eighty cases that were reviewed from these sources were incomplete, lacked signatures, had incorrect citations or could not be found in the public domain. 

 

Second, a query was developed and the ALLSTATES and CAN-ALLCASES Westlaw databases were searched.  The query was (alienat! /3 (mother father son daughter parent!)) & da (aft(1984) & bef(2012)).   This search delivered only cases, which met three criteria: 1. The case contained the sequence of letters:  “alienat”; 2. The “alienat” sequence appeared three or fewer words removed from any one of the words  “mother,” “father,” “son” or “daughter,” or the sequence of letters “parent”; and 3. The case was published after 1984 and before 2012.  The query obtained 1104 cases in the initial United States query pool and 1642 cases in the initial Canadian query pool.

 

Third, these 2,746 cases were individually reviewed and cases were removed that did not contain at least one of the following two criteria: 1.  An independent evaluating expert testified on the subject of PA, whether or not the expert found PA -or- 2.  The court found on any basis that there was PA whether or not there was expert testimony.  None of the following were considered “experts” on parental alienation, for the purposes of inclusion:  the parties, their children, their therapists, their children’s therapists, their attorneys, guardians ad litem, child advocates, mediators, parenting coordinators, custody conciliators, law enforcement officers or CPS personnel.  No testimony on parental alienation by any of these persons qualified a case for inclusion.  Further, if the court did no more than speculate concerning PA, or if the court’s action was to appoint an expert to examine the extent to which there may be PA, the case was not included for further review.  Cases with opinions only in French (all from the province of Quebec) were also manually excluded.  This refining analysis yielded 482 cases of severe PA.

 

Fourth, the 482 cases were reviewed again in depth.  Each case was scrutinized for description of background facts, clarity of the findings of fact, reliance on statutory and case precedent and availability of the case in the public domain.

 

Fifth, the annotated cases were divided into target parent mother and target parent father groupings.  From this sort, thirty cases from the United States and thirty cases from Canada, equally divided among target parent mother and target parent father, were selected by this author for description.

 

         Sixth, the cases were organized chronologically and each case was read and annotated again. Phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, which accurately described the case process and record, were extracted and sorted for chronological clarity.  The verbatim extracted material was chronologically organized and the summaries prepared.  In developing the summaries, the author endeavored to turn what was in some cases tortured legalese, into prose.  Every effort was made to be accurate.  Difficult syntax, long and convoluted sentences, temporal inconsistencies, punctuation anomalies, language differences made the process an arduous one.  For example, in the United States there are very few published and available opinions by trial court judges, but this is de rigueur in Canada.  In the United States, psychologists and psychiatrists aiding the court are typically referred to as Evaluators, but the same folks are Assessors in Canada.  Spelling differences such as: counseling / counselling;  behavior / behaviour; judgment / judgement, were changed to American English spellings by the Microsoft spell checker.  Tenses in the opinions which were contemporaneous for the most part, and were changed to the past tense for readability.  With apologies to the reader, this author left extremely long sentences (judges love long sentences) intact but set them out with semi-colons. The names of the various courts: Provincial, Magistrate, District, Circuit, Supreme, Superior, were reduced to “trial court” or “appellate court” for readability.  The titles of the various judges were also reduced to “judge.” Quotation marks were dispensed with and the citations customary in legal and scholarly writing were jettisoned.  The reader will find exact wording in the case reports themselves and citations to find them are given at the end of this chapter.  Finally, every effort was made to conceal the identities of the parties and particularly the child and target parent victims.  Many cases in Canadian jurisprudence are identified by initials only.  In the parental alienation context, this is laudable.  The author made every attempt to conceal those names the courts printed in their written opinions.  This book is aimed at ameliorating parental alienation, not re stigmatizing its victims.