This piece of juridical injustice is connected with two terms that recur in custody battles: parental alienation syndrome (PAS) and vicarious violence. One is a sexist male invention and the other a reality that isn’t discussed enough. PAS is a term coined by the psychiatrist Richard Gardner and concerns a child’s supposed brainwashing by one parent — more often than not the mother — after a divorce against the other parent.
Parental Alienation Syndrome is an argument that sells with both male and female judges.
The concept came to the fore in the 1993 court battle between the film director Woody Allen and his former wife, actress Mia Farrow, over the custody of their daughter Dylan. The girl, who was around six years old at the time, had told her mother about supposed abuse from Allen, her adoptive father. This was recorded on tapes later used for the documentary, Allen v. Farrow. Viewing them makes it very difficult to believe that these were trumped up allegations.
Gardner made many assertions that have never been certified by the medical community. In 1992, he published his True and False Accusations of Child Sex Abuse, in which he insisted pedophilia is “normal” in certain societies and “necessary” to human survival. In spite of having been refuted a thousand times, PAS is an argument that sells with both male and female judges and has been used to negate the testimonies of many children who tried to denounce parental abuse.
https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/children-and-parental-custody
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