Gender and child custody outcomes across 16 years of judicial decisions regarding abuse and parental alienation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2023.107187Get rights and content
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Highlights

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    A mother found to have alienated her child(ren) was not more likely to get a decrease in parenting time, but was more likely to lose her case and lose custody than a father who was found to have alienated his children but the effect sizes were small and not meaningfully significant.
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    25 “abusive” alienated parents were mothers (71.4% of 35), and 10 were fathers (28.6% of 35), so the presumption that “abusive” alienated parents are mostly fathers is not reflected in these data.
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    Alienating mothers’ claims of abuse against known “abusive” alienated fathers were not being discredited more often than they were for alienating fathers.ze
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    Alienating mothers were not more likely than chance to lose custody than alienating fathers when the third party who found PA was a custody assessor or GAL.
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    Alienating fathers made fewer allegations of abuse against alienated mothers (n = 112), but the percentage of substantiated allegations was similar (7.1%) to those of alienating mothers.
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    Gender of the alienating parent, number of unsubstantiated allegations of abuse, and an interaction of the variables were not predictors of whether an alienated parent lost custody of their children.

Abstract

There have been legislative efforts to control how child custody decisions are handled in family courts where allegations of abuse and of parental alienation (PA) are levied. The “findings” reported to support such legislation have been based on one unreviewed study with identified methodological issues (Harman & Lorandos, 2021). We tested six pre-registered hypotheses to determine whether there is empirical support for the “research findings” used to support these laws. Five-hundred PA cases were sequentially selected from 4,889 Canadian trial court decisions. Independent coders who were blind to the hypotheses coded all cases for details about custody and allegations of abuse. We failed to find support for the “findings” that have been used to support legislative changes. For example, this study focused only upon cases where PA was determined to actually have occurred in at least one of the children in the family. It differs from Harman & Lorandos (2021) in that this study found that alienating mothers’ claims of abuse against known “abusive” alienated fathers were not being discredited more often than they were for alienating fathers. The negative impact of failing to base legislation on a comprehensive consideration of the full scope of scientific evidence available (e.g., Kayden’s Law in the reauthorized Violence Against Women’s Act, 2022) is discussed.

Keywords

Parental alienation
Domestic violence
Intimate partner violence
Child abuse
Family court
Child custody

Data availability

All data is publicly available on Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/3ngqm/?view_only=f3ebcbfc511548919f10536616b0803a)

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© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.