It’s been going on for as long as estranged couples with kids have been facing each other on the battlefield of divorce court and those kids have been made pawns in something that should be kept between the parents. Called ‘parental alienation,’ it is often defined as a disturbance in which children are preoccupied with deprecation and criticism of a parent-denigration that is unjustified and/or exaggerated.   

“It’s basically brainwashing,” said Bonnie Russell, who runs www.FamilyLawCourts.com, a type of watch dog website for the family court system. Russell is also the founder of www.1st-pick.com, a Del Mar, Calif.-based public relations and referral firm for attorneys, physicians and Realtors. “It’s when one parent turns the kids against the other parent by subtle and repeated manipulation.”   

That brainwashing has been struggling for some credibility within the court systems in this country for years, she said. According to parental alienation researcher and author of “Divorce Casualties: Protecting Your Children From Parental Alienation,” psychologist Douglas Darnall, Ph. D, says the battle rages over the fact that there is no real science behind what he calls parental alienation syndrome.   

“Parental alienation is any grouping of behavior whether conscious or unconscious that evokes a disturbance in the relationship between the child and the other parent. Basically the focus is on the parent and what the parent is doing to alienate the child from the other parent,” he said.
 
Part of the problem, he said, is the medical doctor who first coined the phrase parental alienation, Dr. Richard Gardner, who is now deceased, has come under criticism for his research into the topic or lack thereof. “I personally knew Dr. Gardner and he really was not much of a researcher even though he was an extremely prolific writer,” said the Youngstown, Ohio-based psychologist who has been studying parental alienation for 20 years. “Part of the controversy stirred because of his arrogance.”    

Since parental alienation is treated as a forensic science–in the sense that it is used in courts of law – Darnall says it has to pass muster. “There is an emphasis on being able to validate and test the reliability of the concept. One of the criticisms has been that the validation has been extremely weak and some would say non-existent. There are tons of articles written about it but the science is still evolving.”   

And Darnall views himself in the thick it. The 55-year-old often testifies in divorces as an expert witness where parental alienation is suspected. He fights the uphill battle with attorneys who try to discredit it. “When I am brought in to a case as an expert witness, prior to my decision coming into the case, I have to review all the documents because I don’t get to see the child or the other parent, so anything that I say has to be construed as hypothetical,” he said. “That raises question: What to do I do?”