Thread by @reveal

1/ Judges are taking children away from the parents they want to live with, then placing them with parents who the kids say abused them.

It’s happening thanks to a questionable theory called “parental alienation.”

Reporter @treybundy explains: revealnews.org/episodes/bitte…

2/ In the 1980s, a New York psychologist named Richard Gardner pioneered something called “parental alienation syndrome.”

3/ He claimed that false allegations were rampant in custody cases – planted by one of the parents. He had no evidence.

His solution: Remove children from their “indoctrinators.”

4/ This wasn’t Gardner’s only controversial theory.

He also argued that it was natural for adults to have sex with children. And he wanted to abolish laws that require child abuse to be reported to authorities.

5/ Gardner died by suicide in 2003. Parental alienation syndrome was labeled junk science by many in the mental health field.

Some state courts have even ruled it inadmissable. documentcloud.org/documents/5756…

6/ Yet a group of judges, lawyers and psychologists pushed on.

They dropped the “syndrome” and redefined “parental alienation.” It’s now an umbrella term to explain why certain kids reject their parents.

7/ Like Gardner’s “syndrome”, parental alienation gets weaponized by allegedly abusive parents who want to keep custody.

A parent who has been accused of abuse often accuses the other parent of turning their kids against him or her. A judge sides with the first parent.

8/ That’s what happened to Ana Ionescu. When she and her brother were children in New Jersey, their parents fought bitterly in court for years over custody after their divorce.

9/ Even though the kids claimed that their mother hurt them, destroyed their belongings and failed to feed them regularly, a judge eventually decided the real problem wasn’t the alleged abuse. It was that the children’s father had turned them against their mother.

10/ The judge shipped both kids and their mother to a “reunification program” across the country. They were prohibited from speaking to their father – the parent they actually wanted to live with.

Here's audio of that decision.

11/ The program cost $5,000 per day.

The judge recommended that the family sell off property and dip into a retirement account to afford it.

12/ The Ionescus ended up paying tens of thousands of dollars for the program. Today, neither child believes it worked.

Yet in some ways, they got lucky. @treybundy found another case where one family spent more than $200,000 on a similar program.

13/ Trey went to chat with Rebecca Bailey, a psychologist who runs one of these programs in Sonoma County, California. He wanted to know if there’s any concrete evidence these programs work.

She couldn’t provide any.

14/ But she did say that the families she treats are generally satisfied with the program.

Meanwhile, families we’ve talked to say Dr. Bailey and her team pressure kids to believe they’ve been alienated, even when the kids say they haven’t.

15/ Researchers have bolstered criticism of this approach, too. Joan Meier is a professor at @GWtweets. She’s studied family courts for 20 years, and she’s finishing up a national study on alienation cases.

16/ Meier’s study looked at more than 300 custody cases where one parent was accused of abuse and the other of parental alienation. Her findings showed that claiming alienation raises the odds that courts will dismiss abuse allegations.

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