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                            Funding & Awards
 Child Custody Outcomes in Cases Involving Abuse Allegations and Parental Alienation
Award Information
Awardee
              The George Washington University
Award #
              2014-MU-CX-0859
Funding Category
              Competitive
Location
                    Washington, DC
Status
              Closed
Funding First Awarded
              2014
Total funding (to date)
              $501,791
Original Solicitation
              NIJ FY 14 Research and Evaluation on Violence Against Women: Teen Dating Violence, Sexual Violence, and Intimate Partner Violence
Description of original award (Fiscal Year 2014, $501,791)
Arguably the most troubling aspect of justice system response to intimate partner violence is custody courts' failure to protect children when mothers allege the father is abusive. Family courts' errors in assessing adult and child abuse, and punitive responses to abuse allegations, have been widely documented.
A significant contributor to these errors is the pseudo-scientific theory of parental
alienation. Originally termed parental alienation syndrome (PAS), the theory suggests that when mothers allege that a child is not safe with the father, they are doing so illegitimately, to alienate the child from the father. PA labeling often results in dismissal of women's and children's reports of abuse, and sometimes trumps even expert child abuse evaluations.
PAS was explicitly based on negative stereotypes of mothers and has been widely
discredited. However, the term parental alienation is still widely used in ways that are virtually identical to PAS. However, because PA is nominally gender neutral (and not called a scientific syndrome)it continues to have substantial credibility in court.
The first goal of this Project is to ascertain whether empirical evidence indicates that parental alienation is also gender-biased in practice and outcome. Drawing from courts' own reports of facts, findings, and outcomes, such research could powerfully inform advocates and the courts regarding the validity or invalidity of relying on parental alienation to strip mothers of their children and potentially subject children to ongoing abuse. Second, inspired by some tentative findings, the study seeks to explore outcomes in custody/abuse litigation by gender and by differing types of abuse. The study relies solely on electronically available published opinions in child custody cases; to date we have identified 240 involving alienation and alienation plus abuse. We seek to expand the database to include non-alienation abuse cases as a comparison, and to address additional questions about custody/abuse adjudications.
The Principal Investigator, Joan Meier, Professor of Clinical Law at GW Law School,
will be supported by consultants Chris O'Sullivan, PhD, Leora Rosen, PhD, Sean
Dickson, MpH, Esq., and the Institute for Women's Policy Research.
First year - collect data set of opinions coded by relevant factors; second year - perform statistical analyses; third year - develop scholarly publications and practice tools. The Project will also produce an invaluable database identifying 15 years of published cases involving alienation, abuse, and custody while coding parties claims and defenses, outcomes, and other key factors by gender and parental status. ca/ncf



  
Grant-Funded Publications
        
                      The trouble with Harman and Lorandos’s attempted refutation of the Meier et al. Family court study
                  Questioning the Scientific Validity of the Parental Alienation Label in Abuse Cases (From Challenging Parental Alienation: New Directions for Professionals and Parents)
                  U.S. child custody outcomes in cases involving parental alienation and abuse allegations: what do the data show?
                  Child Custody Outcomes in Cases Involving Parental Alienation and Abuse Allegations
                  Draft Summary: Overview of Family Court Outcomes Study

  
Date Created: September 16, 2014
    
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