PARENTAL ALIENATION SYNDROME (PAS) by: Julie R. Ancis, Ph.D.

EXCERPTS:
Julie Ancis PhD would appreciate if you could briefly share any stories or issues you think are important to address to the group considering PAS inclusion in the DSM. Please email Julie Ancis with your input at julieancis@yahoo.com

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PARENTAL ALIENATION SYNDROME (PAS)
by: Julie R. Ancis, Ph.D.
Parental Alienation Syndrome, which is being proposed for inclusion in the DSM-V, has been generally defined as a child’s denigration of a parent without justification. The creation of “Parental Alienation Syndrome,” otherwise known as PAS, is partly the result of two major trends: 1) a backlash against sexual abuse survivors who disclosed the abuse and 2) an increase in the divorce rate in North America when both parents and child custody assessors became more likely to notice signs of child abuse (Caplan, 2004).
Statistics indicate that 1/4 of girls and 1/6 of boys are survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) (http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/ace/prevalence.htm). According to the World Health Organization (2006), worldwide prevalence of sexual violence involving forced intercourse and touch in children under 18 years of age is 150 million for girls and 73 million for boys and 150 million for girls. The majority of CSA perpetrators are men (Finkelhor, 1994; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 2010), and more mothers than fathers tend to report that their ex-spouses might be abusing their children (Bala & Schuman, 1999).
Richard Gardner (1985/87) argued that the majority of children in child custody litigation suffered from the so-called disorder of Parental Alienation Syndrome. His focus was almost exclusively on mothers as turning a child against the father, allegedly in order to get or retain custody of the child. He included denigration of the father via ‘‘programming (‘brainwashing’),” as well as the child’s own contributions to vilifying the target parent. Gardner claimed that many reports of CSA in the context of divorce cases were false allegations. In this connection, it is important to note that Bala and Schuman (1999) found that only 1.3% of mothers’ allegations of abuse by their children’s fathers were deemed by civil court judges to be intentionally false, in contrast to 21% of cases in which fathers had made such allegations against mothers. And Meier (2009) reports after reviewing the research that it is a mistaken belief that mothers’ allegations in child custody proceedings that fathers have sexually abused their children are usually false.
The use of the term PAS and variants such as “parental alienation” has been extended in recent years, so that it is applied even to cases in which a child refuses to visit the noncustodial parent, whether or not the child’s objections entail abuse allegations.
http://parentingnewsnetwork.com/?p=1123&cpage=1