Web resource:	http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/docs/Hoult.pdf
Type:	Journal Article
Title:	The evidentiary admissibility of parental alienation syndrome: science, law and policy
Other Titles:	Children's Legal Rights Journal
Authors:	Hoult, Jennifer
Keywords:	Family law;Legal issues;Impact on children and young people;Theories of violence;Parenting;Child protection
Year:	2006
Publisher:	Loyola University Chicago
Citation:	26 (1), Spring 2006
Notes:	This article presents the first detailed US analysis of the science, law and policy issues in the evidentiary admissibility of Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS). It examines precedent-relevant decisions in the US and law review articles on PAS in the past 20 years. It finds that US precedent holds PAS inadmissible and the majority of legal scholarship sees it negatively. It analyses PAS’s admissibility under the standards defined by leading US cases with regard to its scientific validity, reliability and finds that PAS remains inadmissible under those standards. It provides a critique of PAS, including that: it is not a medical syndrome; its aetiology is legal rather than medical; its diagnosis is based on third-party symptoms; it pathologises women’s exercise of legal rights; its treatment is legal coercion, not medical; its treatment violates medical and legal duties of care; its error rate is unacceptably high; it tautologically presumes pathology; it tautologically presumes parental programming; its diagnostic criteria are ambiguous and undefined; its lack of inter-rater reliability testing to confirm its existence; and peer-review has not shown its reliability or validity. The writings of PAS’s author, child psychiatrist Richard Gardner, involving the 23 peer-reviewed articles and 50 legal decisions which he cited in support of his claims, are analysed. It finds that those materials do not support either PAS’s existence or its legal admissibility. It further discusses the policy implications arising from the admissibility of PAS through the origin of PAS in Gardner’s theory of human sexuality, a theory which views adult-child sexual contact as benign and beneficial to the reproduction of the species, which mirrors pro-paedophilia advocacy by not treating paedophilia and incest as child abuse. It concludes that science, law and policy all do not support the admissibility of PAS. A list of relevant cases by US jurisdictions and a list of relevant law review articles are attached in the Appendix.
URI:	https://anrows.intersearch.com.au/anrowsjspui/handle/1/12258
ISSN:	0278-7210
Appears in Collections:	Journal Articles

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