The Child & Family Law Journal includes an article: "Parental Alienation in Family Court: Attacking Expert Testimony.”
The authors who have written extensively on the subject are John E.B. Myers, JD, Professor of Law, University of California, Hastings College of Law, & Jean Mercer, Ph.D., Emerita Professor of Psychology, Richard Stockton University.
From the abstract:
In child custody litigation, when a parent raises the possibility of child abuse, the accused parent may respond that the parent wo has raised the possibility of abuse is alienating the child in an effort to gain an unfair advantage in court. The parent accused of abuse may offer expert testimony on parental alienation. A voluminous and contentious social science literature exists on parental alienation. Family law attorneys often lack ready access to social science literature. The purpose of this article is to give family law attorneys information from the parental alienation literature that can be used to cross-examine experts who testify on parental alienation.
From the introduction:
Professionals who participate in or preside over child custody litigation understand the stress of such cases. Emotions run high in all contested custody cases, but when one parent accuses the other parent of child abuse; levels of stress, fear, anger, and recrimination increase significantly. Typically, the accused parent angrily denies the allegation1 and may counterclaim that the accusing parent is alienating the children to gain custody.
Today, claims of parental alienation (hereinafter “PA”) are common in family court.
In most family court cases involving accusations of child abuse, the accusing parent is a woman. For that reason, this article refers to the accuser as “mother” and the accused as “father,” realizing the roles are sometimes reversed.
The term PA is potentially confusing. Frequently, PA is used in reference to custody cases where a child rejects a parent and does so because of allegedly unjustified persuasion by the other, preferred parent. Children who avoid a parent for reasons other than the preferred parent’s alleged improper actions (e.g., the child was abused) are referred to as estranged rather than alienated. Occasionally, the term PA is used to describe a child’s rejection of a parent whether or not the preferred parent
Read more:
Myers, John E.B. and Mercer, Jean (2022) "Parental Alienation in Family Court: Attacking Expert Testimony," Child and Family Law Journal: Vol. 10: Iss. 1, Article 3. Available at: https://lawpublications.barry.edu/cflj/vol10/iss1/3
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