Third Parties Who Become Involved

Unholy Alliances and Tribal Warfare

In high conflict divorce, the social networks of the spouses can become incorporated into the dispute scenario, helping to maintain, solidify or expand it, leading to 'tribal warfare' (6). With the breakdown of the marriage, once private details of the couple's relationship often become the subject of lengthy conversations with sympathetic, potentially supportive others about what went wrong and who is at fault. Hearing primarily one side of the story, family, friends and professionals may lose their objectivity as they try to protect someone they care about or to bolster a parent's self esteem. Such support may be mixed, however, with what is experienced by the distressed parent as criticism, interference, obligations and demands which create stress above and beyond the divorce itself.

Johnston found that women were more likely after separation to depend economically on family members or kin. Women were also more likely to involve these 'support people' in the parental disputes (6). Third parties entering the dispute initially were likely to do so on behalf of the mother. According to Johnston, the other side typically responded by assembling a comparable array of allies. A stepwise progression of active and reactive coalition building was then likely to ensue.

New Partners

The advent of a new partner in divorce may escalate parental disputes over the child or precipitate new ones (6). A parent who feels threatened by an ex-spouse's new partner may initiate efforts to gain increased control of custody and visitation. Sometimes, new partners are the instigators and mobilizers of custody disputes, where previously there was little overt conflict between the parents. The new partner may be experiencing difficulties in the new marriage, feel a need to prove themselves, or be gratifying their own needs for domination and control. Alternatively, the new partner may bring a more objective viewpoint regarding the degree to which the child is being harmed by an emotional disturbance of the parent in the other household and provide a balancing influence.

Role of Mental Health Professionals

Mental health experts can become involved in contested custody/visitation disputes in a variety of roles: as evaluators, therapists, advocates, mediators, case managers, educators and/or consultants to parents or their attorneys. Mental health professionals may assist in identifying the needs of the child, assessing strengths and weaknesses of the parents, modifying the specific dynamics of parental conflict and advising the courts. In many jurisdictions, the courts are increasingly relying on the assistance and input of mental health professionals. This entails rising costs for divorcing parents who must pay for these services. Some argue that mental health services which help to reduce the often escalating cycle of action and reaction between the parents saves them money in the long run by reducing litigation costs. On the other hand, mental health services may be protracted and ineffective in high conflict cases. Sometimes they actually cause damage to the parties and to family relationships.

Potentially Harmful Influence of Mental Health Professionals

Written and verbal statements by custody evaluators can have a negative impact on disputing parents, especially when the situation is explained in terms of what is wrong with the parents (6). Parents are particularly vulnerable during the upheaval of the separation. Comments by mental health professionals in this context, especially when publicized, can escalate parents' needs to vindicate and defend themselves from further exposure and humiliation.

Lund pointed out that therapists, especially individual child therapists, can unwittingly become part of the system maintaining PAS (3). This is more likely to occur when the therapist takes statements by the aligned parent and child at face value, lacks knowledge about PAS and avoids contact with the target parent.

Campbell (32) discussed the pitfalls of triangulated relationships in doing therapy with children of divorce, citing Gardner's first book on PAS (33) in the opening paragraph. One of the problems for therapists seeing children of divorce is that the parent who selects the child's therapist, who brings the child for therapy and who arranges for payment is in a position to influence the therapist regarding the therapist's role, the goals of treat ment, and who participates. Therapists who are provided with incomplete, selective data are at risk for reinforcing and endorsing the idea that the child needs to be 'saved' from the alienated parent. A variation of the victim-villain-rescuer triangle may then develop. Citing well known family therapist Murray Bowen, Campbell observed, 'When clients and therapists organize their relationship around the reciprocity of victim and savior, the identity of each demands that the other persist in their respective role' (34). When abuse is alleged, advocate therapists may become so overinvolved as to exhibit what amounts to a shared paranoid disorder with the aligned parent and child (35).

Campbell observed that professionals can become slowly compromised by the 'us versus them' mentality in the context of adversarial family relationships and legal proceedings (32). As discussed in the section to follow, an advocate therapist for an aligned parent and child may inappropriately use the therapy sessions to 'validate' allegations of abuse against the target parent, rather than helping the child adjust to the divorce and maintain affection for both parents. The individual therapist for an alienating parent may agree to recommend to the court that the client have custody, without meeting the other parent. Target parents may also recruit advocate therapists to their side. Mental health professionals who make custody recommendations without interviewing both parents may be in violation of ethical standards. Where professionals compromise themselves in high conflict cases, valuable information about parental dynamics can often be gleaned from analyzing the process by which this occurred.

Influence of Therapist Attitudes

The fundamental beliefs of many therapists about the etiology of psychological problems and what constitutes appropriate treatment can make the therapist an unwitting reinforcer of alienation. Psychotherapy is a potent form of social influence. Campbell conducted a study which revealed that the majority of therapists make significantly more negative than positive inferences about significant others in their client's lives (34). In addition, therapists frequently assume that the client's psychological distress has its origins in an interpersonal environment which is 'disrespectful psychologically avoidant, unempathic and punitive'. These assumptions can substantially influence the course of treatment and the client's view of their situation. Children of divorce may feel overwhelmed by the chaos and hostility of their parents' conflicts. They may also feel a sense of betrayal when a parent moves out and the parents are focusing more on their conflicts with each other than on their parental responsibilities (32). Child therapists who are predisposed to making negative inferences about significant others in the child's life may inadvertently reinforce a child's sense of anger and blame toward a target parent, sometimes in very subtle, pernicious ways. Where the therapist's own view of the tar get/alienated parent is negative, even if only to mild degree, the therapist's view is likely to adversely influence the child. This provides fertile ground for the development and reinforcement of PAS. A detailed example of such a process is presented in The Real World of Child Interrogations which contains an analysis of multiple child therapy sessions in a con tested custody case (36). Transcripts of the sessions illustrate the process by which the therapist helped teach the child to make abuse allegations and reinforced the child's expressions of hatred toward the target parent, in this case the father.

Validators

When abuse is alleged, anyone in a position of authority can act as a 'validator', including therapists, police, child protection workers, and medical personnel (37). Validators are professionals who, when presented with allegations of abuse, assume that abuse occurred. They see their role as validating the alleged abuse rather than conducting an objective investigation. Validators are relatively easy to find, especially when sought out by a parent seeking to strengthen their position in legal proceedings. Validator interviews of the child tend to promote the child's voicing of an abuse scenario, whether or not abuse occurred.

Real World of Child Interrogations

Once the issue of molestation is raised, the child is often subjected to repeated interviews and evaluations, sometimes more than 20, according to a family law judge in California (28). An analysis of 150 tape-recorded abuse interviews with children identified specific adult interviewer behaviors which influence children to alter accounts and to say things that will satisfy or please the interviewer (36). Most adults are unaware of how their ideas and expectations teach children to conform their accounts to the expectations of the adult interviewer. When the child is brought by a parent for an abuse interview, the parent's report of what occurred tends to shape the interviewer's ideas about what occurred and the questions which are asked. These interviewer expectations are communicated to the child through the adult's reactions, leading questions and other suggestive techniques (e.g., drawings or 'anatomical dolls'). Such effects occur even among professionals trained not to use suggestive methods.

Suggestibility of Children's Recollections

There has been a growing body of research in recent years which shows the potential for interviews to teach children what adults expect to hear. Ceci and Bruck conducted a comprehensive historical review and synthesis of this research in an article on the suggestibility of witnesses (38). These authors cited Gardner as raising important questions about the ability of powerful authority figures to coach children and about children's ability to differentiate fact from fantasy. Ceci and Bruck's review resulted in several important scientific findings:

1) There appear to be significant age differences in suggestibility, with pre-school children more vulnerable to suggestion than either school-age children or adults.

2) Children can be led to make false or inaccurate reports about very crucial, personally experienced, central events.

3) Children sometimes lie when the motivational structure is tilted toward lying.

4) The previous points notwithstanding, children, including pre-schoolers, are capable of recalling much that is forensically relevant.

Ceci and Bruck concluded that in order to know the reliability of a child's report, the conditions surrounding the report need to be carefully evaluated, including prior access to the child by an adult motivated to distort the child's recollections. Distortions frequently occur as a result of relentless and potent suggestions by adults, sometimes to the point of outright coaching.

Memory Research and its Forensic Implications

Many people subscribe to the incorrect belief that memory is somehow fixed and not malleable. Loftus and her husband surveyed 169 people from a variety of socioeconomic groups (39). The majority of respondents endorsed the belief that everything we learn is permanently stored in the mind and that consciously inaccessible details can be recovered with the use of special techniques such as hypnosis. Psychology graduate students were particularly prone to endorse this view, although it is disproved by three decades of research. It turns out that memory can be altered in a myriad of ways.

The implications for law enforcement and the courts are staggering since eyewitness testimony is heavily relied upon in these settings. The American Psychological Association sought to address these problems where children are concerned, publishing a compilation of articles by psychology's leading authorities on memory entitled The Suggestibility of Children's Recollections: Implications for Eyewitness Testimony (40). Ceci and Loftus were among the contributors.

Parents as Interviewers

Parents who are preoccupied with suspicions of abuse by the other parent often question their children repeatedly. Some false allegations of abuse in divorce begin with a parent questioning the child after visitation about a rash, a bruise, or bathing at the other parent's house. Everson described the case of a six-year-old-boy who produced more and more elaborate accounts of abuse in response to the attention and support he received from his mother as they discussed 'his memories' of abuse each night at bedtime (41). Initially, the child provided a consistent, plausible account of a teenage baby-sitter fondling his genitals and anus. The baby-sitter confessed to this. Over the course of several months, however, the child's description of what occurred became more elaborate, bizarre, implausible, and finally impossible. According to Everson, the child may have become confused about the source of his more fantastic 'memories' which probably grew out of the conversations with his mother. This is sometimes referred as 'source amnesia'. Everson referenced Gardner's work relating to the assessment of child sexual abuse.

When Cults Have a Role in Parental Alienation

In extreme cases, a divorced parent determined to deprive the other parent of a relationship with the child will join a cult for the powerful help the group can provide in alienating the child from the other parent. In an effort to recruit and control members, cults have perfected the art of parental alienation.

People tend to think of cults as large, well organized groups. According to Singer and Lalich, however, cultic social organization can also be found in very small groups, such as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) which abducted Patricia Hearst (43). Cults can be organized around different ideological themes such as prosperity, health, psychotherapy, UFOs, or religion.

Regardless of size or thematic focus, cults share certain social structures in common. The group is built around a charismatic leader who controls the members directly, or indirectly with the help of loyal followers. Cults routinely employ deception in recruiting, often using elaborate, cleverly conceived fronts to conceal the true nature of their activities. New members are taken through a progressive process of thought reform, sometimes referred to as 'brainwashing'. Compliance is obtained in small steps which isolate inductees from the influence of non members and which foster dependence on the group. The process discourages criticism of the group's ideas and encourages inductees to replace 'old' ideas and relationships with the group's ideology, which is portrayed as 'new' and more advanced. Recruits are encouraged to reject the past and to drastically reinterpret their life history. These tactics destabilize the inductee's sense of self and increase motivation to serve the group and its leader. When the recruit's indoctrination is complete, he or she can then be deployed as an agent of the organization, to help expand the group's financial resources, power, and influence.

Almost anyone can be drawn into a cult under the right set of circumstances (43). People are most vulnerable to recruitment when they are depressed and between affiliations. Almost by definition, parents of divorce are 'between affiliations'. To varying degrees, they are also likely to experience depression at some point in the divorce process. Religious cults may appeal to divorce parents who are seeking validation of their blamelessness and moral superiority in the proceedings. Pastors and other church members in fundamentalist religious cults may openly denigrate the target/alienated parent to the children, claiming the authority of their holy book in referring to the target parent as an 'adulterer', 'harlot' or 'whore'.

In a presentation at a recent forensic conference, Bower (44) pointed out similarities between the mechanisms by which cult leaders control their followers and the tactics of alienating parents who form 'unholy alliances' with their children. Similar comparisons appear in Children Held Hostage (1). This study of 700 divorce families, was reviewed in Part I. Clawar and Rivlin anchored their research in 30 years of literature on the psychology of social influence, including indoctrination techniques variously referred to as brainwashing, mind control, thought reform, modeling, reeducation and coercive persuasion. Bower likened the alienating parent to the leader of a one-on-one or small group cult, pointing out that children's dependence on parents makes them vulnerable to this source of influence. The aligned parent and child, along with other supporters of the alienating parent's views, come to share, a closed, impermeable belief system, similar to the fixed ideology of an organized cult.

In normal circumstances, the power differential in parent/child relationships helps parents to instill a sense of conscience and moral values in their children. As children grow, the love they experienced from their parents in early years becomes a model for treating others with courtesy and considering other people's feelings. In more severe PAS however, the child's social and moral development are co-opted to varying degrees by the alienating parent's agenda. In extreme cases, children growing up in the custody of an alienating parent become 'corrupted', in the sense defined by Garbarino et al. They are encouraged to use deceit, manipulation and aggression in the service of the PAS agenda. The SLA succeeded in 'corrupting' Patricia Hearst for a time: after she was subjected to isolation, indoctrination, terror and intimidation, she was induced to participate in a bank robbery, a violation not only of the law itself, but of her previous moral values. Once separated from the SLA, she was able to resume prosocial values.

In extreme cases of cult indoctrination, members are trained to commit suicide rather than have contact with 'evil', 'dangerous' outsiders. In a parallel situation, severe PAS sometimes involves direct or indirect encouragement by the alienating parent for the child to threaten suicide or homicide if forced to have contact with the alienated parent. Johnston encountered a case in which a 10-year-old boy hung himself when the court ordered that he be placed in the custody of his alienated father (10). Two cases of attempted homicide by the child were reported in Part I (4, 45). Both boys were in folie a deux relationships with their disturbed mothers after the parents divorced.

One boy tried to poison his father (4), the other tried to burn his father's house down (45). Careful evaluation and case management are required when there is reason to suspect that the child may be a danger to self or others.