Dear Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana

Dear Governor Daniels,

Many Father’s Rights groups are running in a rabid-like fashion throughout the country trying to get governors to proclaim April 25th as “Parental Alienation Awareness Day.”  Some of these Father’s Rights groups are fronts for abusive men, who seek to get custody of their children away from the mothers.  They will use the rouse of “share-parenting” as a starting point, then seek to remove the mother totally in a continued attack in court.  Not all fathers in these groups are “abusive.”  These groups go out and look for good fathers who have lost custody and are alone and fall easy for these group’s mantra.  They grow their ranks and try and look respectable.  But the ones that yell the loudest in these group are the abusers.

There are many Father’s Rights supporters here in Indiana…after all, this is the home of the Fatherhood Initiative (thanks to Senator Evan Bayh).  By using claims of “parental alienation” in the courts in Indiana, many abusive fathers manage to get full custody of the children.  Some states, specifically Tennessee and California are seeking to pass legislation this year to stop the use of claiming “parental alienation” in court when dealing in child custody situations.  Can you image what it is like for a child to end up with the parent they saw abuse their parent who protected them, possibly never to see them again?  It happens all the time here in Indiana. 

The use of “parental alienation” has happened to many of us in our group.  The courts will be quick to dismiss claims of domestic violence in court, but will fall for this so-called “syndrome”, which is not recognized by any professional body, and has been widely criticized by many top psychologists.

This except from a newspaper article in Los Angeles explains the problem well:

Parental Alienation Syndrome, which has no scientific basis whatsoever, is most often used against women in custody cases including by ex-husbands with documented histories of domestic violence against their ex-wife and/or children.  It does not mean “alienated parent” as the author above implies, it means that a parent, usually a mother, is being accused in court of alienating her child or children from their father by being truthful about the danger they pose to their child’s physical safety or the mother’s safety.  Courts seem to love the made up syndrome as an excuse to give custody rights or shared custody to men who have abused their wives and/or children, but until now there has been no official status for this made up syndrome.  If it makes it into the DSM’s next version, divorce lawyers and abusive divorcing spouses will have even more ability to continue to abuse their exes through the courts and to put their children in danger in some cases.  Women will continue to be labelled hysterical for reacting normally to horrible experiences such as discovering their children have been sexually abused by their father but now there will be so called scientific backing for these made up claims in court. 

Up for inclusion again is making women’s menstrual cycles into a psychiatric condition also.  We now have many more women psychiatrists than we did when the first DSM came out, why do women continue to be the target of sexist and destructive labelling by the American Psychiatric Association behind closed doors even so?  While there is a dearth of concern about psychiatry and its destructive effect on women over the ages today, nothing like the great work that was done in the ’70’s and 80’s is out there now and in fact many feminist blogs are guilty of the same continuation of prejudice against people with psychiatric labels as the rest of society, forgetting their history altogether in my personal opinion, maybe the threat to custody of children will start to wake feminists up to the destructive and continuing sexist power of psychiatry over the lives of women in the United States.

Dr. Richard Gardner, the inventor of “parental alienation syndrome”, isn’t with us anymore…he committed suicide.  But here are just a few of the outrageous statements that Dr. Gardner has written in his own books published by his own vanity press: 

• “Pertinent to my theory here is that pedophilia also serves procreative purposes. Obviously, it does not serve such purposes on the immediate level in that children cannot become pregnant nor can they make others pregnant.  (WTF!)

• However, the child who is drawn into sexual encounters at an early age is likely to become highly sexualized and crave sexual experiences during the prepubertal years. Such a “charged up child” is more likely to become sexually active after puberty and more likely, therefore, to transmit his or her genes to his or her progeny at an early age.

• The younger the survival machine at the time sexual urges appear, the longer will be the span of procreative capacity, and the greater the likelihood the individual will create more survival machines in the next generation. The ideal then – from DNA’s point of view – is for the child to be sexually active very early, to have a highly sexualized childhood, and begin the time of puberty. This increases the likelihood that more survival machines will be produced for the next generation. (…)

• This reflects society’s repression of the animal within us: a male animal who has the potential for rape and a female animal who, by merely a small extension of permissible attitudes, may become masochistic – thereby gaining sexual pleasure from being beaten, bound and otherwise made to suffer. It may very well be that, for some masochistic women, allowing themselves to be beaten into submission is the price they are willing to pay for gaining the gratification of receiving the sperm.” (!!!!!)

• Gardner’s sociobiologist ideology has him endorse all “paraphilias” (merely atypical sexual behaviors) as “serving the purposes of species survival” by “their ability to enhance the general level of sexual excitation in society and thereby increase the likelihood that people will involve themselves in activities that are more directly contributory to the reproductive (and by extension, species survival) process”.

• This extends not only to pedophilia but even to zoophilia and, yes, necrophilia. In the same essay Gardner writes: “Yet, the necrophiliac is still keeping (the likelihood) of heterosexual involvement with a person who is more likely to conceive.”

• Gardner says that “the mother’s own suppressed and repressed sexual fantasies are projected onto the child and father. By visualizing the father having a sexual experience with the child, the mother is satisfying vicariously her own desires to be the recipient of such overtures and activities.”

• According to Gardner, 90% of “alienators” are women.  (Bingo)

• “In custody litigation,…the vast majority of children who profess sexual abuse are fabricators.”

• ”What I am against is the excessively moralistic and punitive reaction that many members of our society have toward pedophiles … (going) far beyond what I consider to be the gravity of the crime.”

• “…there is a bit of pedophilia in every one of us.”  (Oh really)

• When a child has been sexually abused and feels guilt about it, Gardner suggests, the child may be helped to appreciate that “sexual encounters between an adult and a child are not universally considered to be reprehensible acts. The child might be told about other societies in which such behavior was and is considered normal.” If sexual urges continue after the abuse ends, Gardner suggests such children be encouraged to masturbate.
• As for the alienating mother, Gardner suggests that vibrators can be useful and “one must try to overcome any inhibition she may have with regard to their use.” (WTF! Really, WTF!)
  . . . . An apparent benefit of the mother’s use of a vibrator is that “her diminished guilt over masturbation will make it easier for her to encourage the practice in her daughter, if this is warranted.” With this imagined solution, Gardner believes, the mother’s “increased sexuality may lessen the need for her husband to return to their daughter for sexual gratification.”   (Again…WTF!  These are the beliefs of these “parental alienation” people, Governor Daniels)

All of the above quotes are from Gardner’s self-published True and False Accusations of Child Sex Abuse: A Guide for Legal and Mental Health Professionals, Creative Therapeutics, 1992, as reprinted in Ralph Underwager’s self-published journal “Issues in Child Abuse Accusations”, Spring 1993, pp. 115-118, under the title “A Theory About the Variety of Human Sexual Behavior” and Richard A. Gardner, M.D. , The Parental Alienation Syndrome (1992).

So please, Governor Daniels, please don’t fall for this scam.  And the next time are out, look for us mothers who are homeless, being beaten down by use of this syndrome, leaving us penniless to fight anymore.  The abusive fathers in Indiana are winning here and it has to stop!

Also see:  Governor Daniels, While You Are Embracing “Parental Alienation” Other States Are Trying To Outlaw It