JANUARY 2010

• Author: Andrew Schepard
• Published date: 01 January 2010
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-1617.2009.01304.x
• Date: 01 January 2010

EDITORIAL NOTES

JANUARY 2010

ALIENATED CHILDREN IN DIVORCE AND SEPARATION

Volume 48 begins with a renewed focus on the alienated child in divorce and separation.

Serving the best interests of alienated children poses a severe test for the family court

system. Children alienated from a parent challenge the ideal that a child should have a

relationship with both parents following divorce and separation. It also challenges the

capacity of courts and mental health interventions to inf‌luence profoundly negative behav-

iors by parents that often seem to stem from very deep-rooted causes. The very concept of

the “alienated child” also raises critical issues about when children can and should have the

right to make their own decisions about their relationships and best interests and to set the

objectives for those who represent them in court.fcre_12851..5

FCR last comprehensively addressed the subject of the alienated child in July 2001 in

Volume 39 in a landmark special issue guest-edited by Joan Kelly and Jan Johnston. In my

editorial notes to that issue I wrote:

Before this [2001] Special Issue family courts looked at the problem of child alienation in an

adversarial framework.Their focus was on the parents’ behavior, not the child’s reactions to it.

If a Parental Alienation Syndrome label could be attached to a parent’s behavior, the rejected

parent potentially won a great victory—a shift of custody to him or her.

This adversarial formulation of the problem of a child’s alienation has potentially tragic

consequences. Parental Alienation Syndrome has become a kind of nuclear weapon in the

custody wars. A custody shift to the rejected parent, regardless of the child’s feelings or other

best interests factors, was sometimes seen by family courts as a kind of necessary shock

therapy for the child. In rare cases, children were threatened with contempt and jail when they

would not obey such orders. Injecting PAS into a case also became an occasion for embittered

parents to hire mental health experts to testify that it existed. Such testimony was sometimes

based on clinical observations in a few cases rather than systematic empirical research and was

without interviewing all members of the family.These expert opinions inf‌luenced judges in

some cases to make a f‌inding PAS existed based on a questionable ‘scientif‌ic’ rationale.

Controversy over such judicial decision discredited mental health experts in custody cases as

unscientif‌ic and hired guns. Whether these perceptions were accurate or not, they troubled the

courts who relied on them and the entire family law community. . . .

The fundamental achievement of this Special Issue is to reject the PAS adversarial frame-

work. The authors treat child alienation as a very real and very tragic consequence of divorce

and separation for some children. Indeed, the harm to a child of irrationally rejecting a parent

is almost self-evident. This Special Issue recognizes that a child who rejects a parent may be

the victim of profound and real abuse or neglect by the rejected parent or the victim of

profound and real emotional cruelty by the alienating parent.

Correspondence: Andrew.I.Schepard@hofstra.edu

FAMILY COURT REVIEW,Vol. 48 No. 1, January 2010 1–5

© 2010 Association of Familyand Conciliation Cour ts