To: pap@access.hky.com Subject: PAPI Casualty of the Gender War From: JLaigle@aol.com Date: Sun, 21 Jun 1998 00:29:45 EDT Cc: letter@post-gazette.com Don Hank Translations/ 2929 Columbia Avenue/ Lancaster, PA 17603/ Phone: 717-390-8894/ Fax: 717-390-8790 6/20/98 Editor John G. Craig Pittsburgh Post Gazette Dear Sir: Forty percent of America's kids live in homes where father is absent. Fatherlessness has been characterized as America's most pressing problem by David Blankenhorn in his book "Fatherlessness America". Indeed, family issues analysts link very significant increases in delinquency, teen suicide, school failure and in fact all known social ills to fatherlessness. False statistics to the contrary, courts award custody to mothers in about 90% of custody cases. Even in disputed cases, men lose 7 to 3, where joint custody is considered a win. Fifty-fifty joint physical custody is a rarity in Pennsylvania, and male custody is even rarer (if you doubt this, just ask your friends how many men vs how many women they know who have custody after divorce). Despite this, Mackenzie Carpenter and Ginny Kopas have created, in Casualties of a Custody War, the strong impression that fathers grudgingly given a few meager hours of visitation a month are a pressing problem that merits a long 3-part series of news-opinion articles aimed at curtailing the enforcement of father visitation in high-conflict cases. And this despite facts - presented in the series itself - that suggest the contrary. The premise of this writer duo is that the phenomenon of Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) upon which a few father visitation court cases are based is spurious and that its discoverer, Dr. Richard Gardner, is in bad need of a come-uppance. Briefly, PAS is defined by Gardner as the syndrome exhibited by a child who has been alienated, usually maliciously, from a parent (usually a non-custodial parent) by the other parent (usually the custodial one). In its severest form, the syndrome would lead the child to hate and totally reject the parent - even a non-abusive (but perhaps flawed) parent who loves the child. Logically, therefore, one would expect a child who had had long- standing prior contact with a non-abusive parent to be less susceptible to such malicious coercion than a child who had had only brief contact in the remote past and had at least partially forgotten the parent targeted for alienation. The authors present the case of 16 year old Nathan Grieco who, according to the coroner, had died of unknown causes. (Although the authors state that the boy was found on the floor of his bedroom, they also manage to entice the unwary reader into believing he hanged himself). Because Nathan was unhappy about his parents' custody battle, his motive, they suggest, was his father's abusiveness. (They base this suggestion of abusiveness on a fight between the father and the mother in which the father reportedly sustained considerably more injury than the mother.) Now if PAS did not exist in this case, one would expect that the couple's 3 sons would have had roughly equivalent responses toward the father, since his abusiveness would be responsible for their response, not suggestion or coercion on the mother's part. If, on the other hand, PAS did exist in this case, then the eldest son, who had a more indelible memory of the father, would most likely be at least somewhat more inclined to maintain contact. In fact the authors admit that the dead boy was the one who still wanted contact with the father and further that this boy was the eldest son, ie, the one with the longest-standing relationship with the father. They also state that Nathan was somewhat cowed, if not bullied, by the second son, and part of the conflict with that brother was due to Nathan's desire to maintain contact with the hated father. Thus the evidence suggests the existence of external factors other than the father's alleged abusiveness that would have created antipathy toward the dad. Given the circumstances, a likely such factor would have been deliberate vengeful and malicious alienation of the child by the mother (PAS), as suggested by Dr. Gardner. Indeed the author tells us that on two occasions, the father traveled 700 miles by car from Illinois, after making arrangements with the mother to pick up the boys (back before the alienation took place we are told), only to find that the rendezvous was called off by the mother. This denial of visitation is in fact one of the factors in PAS. Yet the authors spin these facts so skillfully through the use of emotional manipulation including copious quotes from feminists and pro- feminist professionals that the unwary reader is ultimately guided around the facts and into the conviction that the mother is the usual female victim. The reader is so blinded by the author's spin and our reflexive urge to believe in the innocence of motherhood that we somehow feel vindicated to learn that Mrs. Scott took her story to the Pennsylvania legislature during (as some of the watchful are aware but is not mentioned in the article) hearings on a joint custody bill which has since been somewhat dampened by these authors' treatment of the custody issue and by the statements made by the assumed victim-mother. The effect of this anecdotal evidence spun against father visitation and custody by the aforementioned writers remains to be seen. Legislators could be adversely swayed by the strong spin and decide that joint custody is not a good thing for the kids of our state. That would leave children fatherless as before in disputed custody cases. On the other hand, they could see beyond the claptrap to the heart of the matter: namely, that if joint custody had been awarded from the very start, it is likely that the children would have learned to appreciate both of their parents, despite their differences, because obviously the ex did her share of alienating, and by any other name, it is just that: parental alienation. And then, although a lot of rabid gender feminists may feel bad about the outcome, Nathan would quite possibly be alive today instead of a casualty of the gender war. Sincerely, Don Hank, Facilitator, Lancaster Non-Custodial Parents