Do estranged parents have the legal right to be loved by their kids?

“Reunification therapy” is a practice designed to rebuild connection between an estranged parent and their child.

It's often court ordered, and forces the child to spend time with the estranged parent and cut off contact with the preferred parent entirely.

Today, On Point: Forced reunification — but at what cost?

Jean Mercer, professor emerita of psychology at Stockton University. Author of the book "Someone Said Parental Alienation: About Divorcing Families Whose Children Avoided One Parent" and the research paper "Reunification therapies for parental alienation."

Danielle Pollack, policy manager for the National Family Violence Law Center at George Washington University.

Olivia Spencer, the mother of an alienated teenager.

Patrick Leonard, the father of two alienated kids.

Ansley Younginer, she was forced into reunification therapy with her estranged mother as a teenager.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Ansley Younginer was 8 years old when her parents split. The divorce was messy.

At first, her parents were able to agree on custody terms. Ansley and her younger brother would spend a week at their dad’s and then the next at their mom’s.

ANSLEY YOUNGINER: We started getting really frustrated with my mom because she was prioritizing her life and not being that emotional support that we needed. Like we, our whole entire world was crashing, and she was more worried about going to get remarried.  The entire time we were at our mom's house, it was just like we were just in the worst mindset I think I've ever been in my entire life. And it just caused me to have anxiety, it caused me to be sad, I was miserable, and so was my brother.

CHAKRABARTI: A few years later, their mother agreed that the kids could live with their father full time, if that’s what they wanted. They did.

For a while Ansley’s life was happy and stable. But then, things turned upside down just one week after she turned 16.

YOUNGINER: I was a junior in high school, and I was actually doing phenomenal. And I was sitting in my last class of the day and there was a phone that rang, and I got called down to the guidance office along with my brother. And we were told that a court order had been faxed over, and our mother would be picking us up from school that day.

CHAKRABARTI: Ansley and her brother had no idea what was going on - they hadn’t seen or spoken to their mother in months.

YOUNGINER: And sure enough, she showed up and she took us down to the courthouse where a judge told us that we were not going to see my dad for a minimum of 90 days. And that my dad had alienated us away from my mother. And we were going to be staying with my mother full time. And if we tried to contact my dad, his family, or his friends, we would go to a group home, foster care, or juvie. And if he tried to contact us, or his family or friends, they would go to jail.

CHAKRABARTI: That was August 25th, 2014.

YOUNGINER: It's probably the worst moment of my entire life. I finally was feeling happy and secure and was doing well. And then anything good was completely taken away from me.

CHAKRABARTI: This is On Point. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti.

Ansley and her brother were ordered by a South Carolina family court into what is called “reunification therapy.”

It’s a practice designed to rebuild trust and connection between an estranged parent and their children after a divisive divorce or custody battle.

It mandates reunification with the estranged parent and cuts off of contact with the preferred parent.

In Ansley’s case, the judge ruled that her father was poisoning the children’s minds against their mother, or what’s called “parental alienation."

Ansley and her brother were ordered to live with their mother full time. They were barred from having any contact with their father.

YOUNGINER: I didn't even get to go back home. I left in my mom's car that day and went down to her house and wasn't allowed to gather any of my belongings or anything. All I had with me was my book bag from school.  And I remember very clearly, that day on August 25th, I told her, I said, if you do not stop this right now, we will never have the relationship that we are supposed to have. And she didn't listen to me. She went through with this.

And that started six months of horror. And we didn't see my father again until February of 2015.

CHAKRABARTI: Ansley started to break down - emotionally and physically.

YOUNGINER: I went through some really scary nights. So much anxiety in me that my stomach started turning so much that I had to go get an ultrasound taken because might have an ulcer in my stomach. I was severely paranoid 24/7. I was severely anxious 24/7.

CHAKRABARTI: Ansley: says a court appointed family therapist made it impossible for her to even contemplate contacting her father.

YOUNGINER: I was told that people were watching me.  I would get my phone taken so that they could go through it and scan it. And then questioned about every single text message on my phone. I wasn't allowed to delete anything either. Again, I was threatened with juvie, group home, or foster care. If I disobeyed anything that they were saying, if I reached out to any of my dad's family or friends.

CHAKRABARTI: Ansley and her brother wanted more than anything to see their father, but they were too afraid of what would happen if they tried.

Now - Ansley adamantly refutes the claim that her father alienated her and her brother from their mother. In fact - she stresses that her father pushed for them to have a good relationship with their mother and never spoke ill of her.

But Ansley’s experience was never heard in court. She wanted so desperately to live with her dad, but no one was listening to her. So, she started journaling.

YOUNGINER: September 18th, 2014, 3:18pm. She took us away. She took us away from our loving family, friends, and home. She took us away from everything. She took us away from our dad. She took us away from Tia and Scotty, my grandparents. She took us away from everything. Nothing is the same. Nothing is normal. She took us away from somewhere we were comfortable. She took us away from happiness. She took us away from sanity. I will never forget what she did. I will never forget she took us away.

CHAKRABARTI: And then a few days after that very journal entry…

YOUNGINER: We're told that we're going to be boarding a plane tomorrow morning to Bozeman, Montana. It was described as a reunification camp and that my mother would be going, and her husband would also be going and then the therapist would be going as well. We were told if we didn't willingly go, we would be forced to go.

CHAKRABARTI: The next morning - Ansley and her brother were flown to Montana.

YOUNGINER: We were put in a hotel in the middle of nowhere. They took the phones, they unplugged the phones from our room. Took my cell phone from me so that we couldn't call anyone. Before we even left for the trip, we weren't allowed to tell anyone where we were going, when we would be back. We couldn't tell them anything. I had no idea what was going on. Like, I was just shipped across the country against my will. It felt like something out of a movie.

CHAKRABARTI: The reunification camp took place in an office near the hotel. Ansley and her brother were forced to watch movies about parental alienation. Workshop counselors gave them handouts describing how they claimed Ansley’s father planted false memories and brainwashed them to alienate them from their mother.

YOUNGINER: They were trying to, like, remind us, you know, that we were happy with our mother at one time. And they had her bring all of these pictures of like from when we were little and like pictures where we're smiling with her and everything to try and like remind us that, you know, she's not this bad person. But they didn't show us one picture of my dad. And that's really what the paradox of all of this is, is that, you know, they're trying to quote unquote reunify us with our mother by completely alienating us away from our father, essentially.

CHAKRABARTI: The program was run by Family Bridges, a company founded in California in 1991. It’s since become one of the largest providers of “family reunification” camps both in the U.S. and Canada.

Dr. Randy Rand is the company’s founder. The state of California suspended his license in 2009, disciplining him for “unprofessional conduct,” “gross negligence,” “violation of laws governing the practice of psychology” and “dishonesty.”

Family Bridges’s website claims it’s “the gold standard globally in helping children and teens reconnect with a parent whom they are alienated.”

And that its curriculum is “grounded in scientific evidence based instruction principles.”

We contacted Family Bridges with multiple requests for comment, including whether they would share the evidence base behind their work. The company never responded.

However, a 2019 South Carolina Bar legal training document frequently cites Family Bridges’ therapeutic models. But it also states that “measuring effectiveness of interventions … is challenging” because of how difficult it is to even define what “effective” outcomes are in these cases. We’ll hear a lot more about that later.

Recall, Ansley and her brother had been ordered into family reunification by a South Carolina court in 2014, and that’s what landed them in Montana against their will.

YOUNGINER: Nothing broke through. We had to act like it did because if we didn't follow this protocol and go along with the program again, group home, foster care, juvie. We did everything that they told us to do so that we could see our dad.

CHAKRABARTI: But while at the camp, they were often shown pictures of their family that did not have their father in it. Ansley remembers being told that this was their “new normal.”

The “reunification therapy” workshop lasted four days. The kids flew back to South Carolina but were required to continue living with their mother, and prohibited from having any contact with their father.

YOUNGINER: 10.31.2014. It's now been a month since I was in hell. Just the thought of Montana gives me chills because it was so terrible. Gosh, I'm so happy to be back in Blythewood High School. Who in their right mind takes a kid out of school for something like that? It's crazy. They were trying to say we were brainwashed. For the last time, I, Ansley Younginer, am not nor have I ever been brainwashed.

CHAKRABARTI: It wasn’t until February 2015 - five months after they were forced to live with their mother – that Ansley and her brother were allowed to see their father again.

But since she was still a minor, Ansley still had to see her mother - living with her one week, and her dad the next.

But when Ansley came of age, which is 17 in South Carolina, she left her mom’s house and never went back.

YOUNGINER: For ten years of my life, it didn't matter what my mother did, she could do these terrible things to me, but I'd still have to forgive her, because she was my mom, and I think that is a terrible, terrible way to train a child. I had been trained that way my entire life. And I've realized now, years later, that's not okay. It isn't okay for somebody to continuously hurt you mentally, physically, emotionally, and then you forgive them. That is not okay. And we should not be training kids to think that way.

CHAKRABARTI: Ansley is now 26 years old. She speaks to her dad almost every day and sees him every week.

Meanwhile - she hasn’t spoken to her mom in years.

She says it’s sad that she doesn’t have a relationship with her mother. She thinks maybe she could have, but reunification therapy was definitely not the way.

YOUNGINER: I think the best thing that you can do is not try and force anything and just you just have to play it out and let it happen. The more that you force somebody to try and do something, the more they're not going to want to do it. The more that you try and tell somebody not to do something, the more they're going to want to do it. So as unfortunate as it is sometimes there just has to be time allowed for things to heal.

CHAKRABARTI: That was Ansley Younginer of South Carolina.

We contacted her mother, Caroline Hilliard Donaldson. She told us she stands by sending her kids to reunification therapy. She said, “I was desperate to have a relationship with my kids” and that “I was being presented with all the positives of this program and that for me it was worth a shot.”

After the break we are going to dig much deeper into what “reunification therapy” is - how it works, what the research says about it and how states across the country are seeking to restrict it.

I’m Meghna Chakrabarti. This is On Point.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Today we're talking about so called reunification therapy. I'm joined in the studio now by Jean Mercer. She's professor emerita of psychology at Stockton University and author of "Someone Said Parental Alienation."

Professor Mercer, welcome to On Point.

JEN MERCER: Thanks so much for having me on this snowy day.

CHAKRABARTI: So I'd like to understand in more depth exactly what reunification therapy supposedly is. We heard in Ansley's story a little earlier about being separated from her preferred parent, which we'll talk about in a second.

And then these camps. Can you tell us more about what goes on in these camps?

MERCER: I can tell you about it. But you know, I'd really rather not use the word camp. Okay. Because there are some which actually function as, in a camp like way. Most of them don't. So I would tend to say intensive reunification therapy.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

MERCER: Instead, if you look at what the, I don't know, seven or eight different brands of reunification therapy have in common. The main things that, in which they resemble each other, is they very abruptly remove any association between the child and the preferred parent. And as a general rule, the children are not told what's going to happen and in fact, from my reading of reports about this, it would seem that this is a tenet of reunification therapy. That for the children not to know what's happening is considered to be the best.

They don't want the kids, I think, to plan how they're going to resist this or to attempt to escape or whatever it might be. In any case, they don't tell them. And what Ansley talked about is typical, they're at school. You know, they're planning to go home after school, and all of a sudden, bingo, you know, they're not going to go home.

They're going to go someplace they had not anticipated. Now, for some of the kids, and I have no idea how many. The camp situation is preceded by a quite unpleasant experience, which is that they are not taken to the camp by a parent, but taken by youth transport service workers. And these people may threaten them in various ways.

Certainly, we'll say we have handcuffs. If you run, we can take you down and so on. So, you know, resistance is futile. There's no question about that. So they are taken somewhere either by the avoided parent or by the youth transport service workers. They're taken to a venue which is quite unfamiliar to them, and they are often, as I understand it, either in an Airbnb, a hotel.

There's not a clinic kind of venue that's devoted to this. So they're in a strange place. They're with a person that they did not want to be with. They're with some strangers, the therapists. And then over the next usually four days they are not allowed to talk about what has happened in the past.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, can I? Oh, yeah. Sorry. So that's actually where I was going to go.

MERCER: Oh, okay.

CHAKRABARTI: It's really, really interesting. So, because, as far as I understand it, the stated goal is through this intensive reunification therapy, as you're talking about, is to reunify, to rebuild a relationship with the not preferred parent.

But from the things that Ansley described, it sounds like part of that is to create a sense of alienation with the preferred parent.

MERCER: Well, that's certainly the logical result of what's happening because the mechanism here is basically to try to convince the kids that they have been brainwashed and that false memories have been implanted, that's sometimes suggested.

Now if the kids are convinced of that, that obviously is going to make them very suspicious of that preferred parent. How could that person do that to me? So it's as if there is some sort of erasure of the previous relationship with the preferred parent, and then this, it sort of opens things up. There seems in some of these groups to be a belief that the basic positive relationship with the parent they're avoiding is really there under the surface somehow.

And it's been overlaid by the machinations. So now they're going to let it emerge again.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So you heard us say a little earlier that there is a very large question about the evidence base upon which these practices are, they claim to be following. We couldn't find one. I quoted that South Carolina bar document that said, the challenge is that you can't even really define what effective is in this case, or for this practice.

Did you find an evidence base for any of this?

MERCER: I found something that was presented as an evidence base, but not something that's equivalent to the standards of the community that's relevant to this. And I saw three serious problems about it. The first one is that there is no established way for identifying parental alienation.

There are lots more kids who don't want to see a parent than anybody could possibly say were alienated.

HAKRABARTI: Well, let me jump in here before we get to the base then, because, okay, this phrase parental alienation. Is it treated in the courts, and amongst people, practitioners of family reunification as a bona fide psychological syndrome?

MERCER: Yes, it is. And they claim that although it is not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association or the International Classification of Diseases, nevertheless, they say there are other words in there that mean the same thing, therefore it is a diagnostic category.

CHAKRABARTI: So there's some kind of like mental health issue with the child that leads them to be alienated from their not preferred parent?

MERCER: Well, being alienated for that group of people is equivalent to a mental health disorder. And they predict if this mental health disorder is present in the child's adulthood, there will be damage that shows up.

CHAKRABARIT: In that case wouldn't every estranged relationship be diagnosable.

MERCER: Oh, well, no.

CHAKRABARTI: If the directionality is you are alienated.

So therefore, you must have this syndrome. It sort of medicalizes almost all human relationships.

MERCER: It medicalizes a lot of things, but when you use the word estrangement, that has a different meaning from parental alienation. When people talk about estrangement of a child, they're saying there is some logical reason, you know, there was abuse.

There's something bad. When they talk about parental alienation, it's not just being estranged. It's being estranged because the preferred parent has persuaded the child to believe something which is not true.

CHAKRABARTI: Brainwashing.

MERCER: Right.

CHAKRABARTI: That's the claim.

MERCER: That's the claim. And I hate, I don't use that word. Because psychologists don't say brainwashing, that's a legal and political term.

CHAKRABARTI: Fair enough. Not being a psychologist, I'll use a layperson's term. Okay. So that was actually important background. So then take us back to what you were saying, the evidence base or lack thereof.

MERCER: Okay. So the first problem of finding an evidence base is that you have to be able to measure the thing. You know, you can't say that it's gone if you couldn't say that it was there in an accurate and valid way.

So we haven't got that, but nevertheless, we do have maybe half a dozen research reports that make claims that they have demonstrated that their reunification therapy is effective. That is that now there is a good relationship with this previously avoided parent. Unfortunately, it's really an apples and oranges kind of thing.

You go in, what evidence do you have that the kid is alienated? The judge said so. Okay, so what was the judge thinking? We don't know that. Who told the judge anything about it? At the end, as far as I'm able to find out from interviewing kids and also from reading these research reports, essentially, the kids are asked to fill out a questionnaire.

CHAKRABARTI: So, self reporting.

MERCER: Yeah, exactly. And according to the kids, the staff members are there in the room with them, while --

CHAKRABARTI: I was just gonna say. Self reporting under duress.

MERCER: Right. So you know, what happened at the beginning? How is it different? What's happening at the end? They're totally different things. So we're nowhere with that.

So whatever claims are made about improvement, you know, we don't know how that's being argued. It doesn't really make any sense. But the other thing I'd like to mention about this is that nowadays, and over maybe the last 20 years, one of the issues about psychosocial interventions has been that we have to ask whether they do any harm.

Okay. And except for one study. These people have never looked to see whether any harm was done. In the one study, they looked to see whether during the time the child was there, for the four days, whether the child either self-harmed or ran away. There was an adult there all the time, so what's the chances that they would be able to do that?

I have to give them credit for even thinking about potential harm. Ansley's story, I think, told about the moderate levels of harm, that she was so distressed, that she was constantly worried about this. And, you know, this must have interfered with what she needed to be doing with her life at that time.

CHAKRABARTI: And so it wasn't just the four days in that intensive reunification therapy. I want to come back to what she also said that almost always is accompanied by forcible separation for a long period of time from the preferred parent. Not even allowed to make any kind of contact.

MERCER: Exactly. Exactly.

And the kids are really scared when they're told if you try to contact him, he's going to go to jail.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So, let me ask you, this practice is pretty widespread, right? And how long has it been going on for?

MERCER: The first published paper that I know about, it was in 1985. And soon after that man, Randy, I think you mentioned Randy Rand.

CHAKRABARTI: Founder of Family Bridges.

MERCER: Right. And he developed a program that was supposed to be for kids who had been internationally abducted. Okay, so here's a kid, you know, nabbed in India brought back to the parent in Springfield, Illinois, you know, may not speak the language, may not, you know, doesn't know this person.

And he said he had a program that would just fix those kids up right away. I've never seen any real discussion of how this was done. But as far as I can see, Family Bridges emerged from whatever he was doing at that time.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. I just want to also remind listeners that we did reach out to Family Bridges multiple times.

The company did not respond to any of our requests. I'm Meghna Chakrabarti. This is On Point. Okay, so if it emerges from the somewhat amorphous belief in, let's say, the mid-'80s about how to reunify children and parents, I'm very focused on the price tag. Because ... let alone the emotional and long-term psychological cost, right, on the kids.

There's also this dollar figure of some of these four-day intensive reunification therapies, $40,000. That always makes my, let's say, skeptical radar quite active here.

MERCER: Exactly. And there's more to it. Okay. You know, just as you know, you go to the shoe sale and it says up to 90% off.

That isn't what the price is going to be. So if you're using the youth transport service workers, they have to be paid separately. Following the program, there will be so called aftercare, where the kids have to keep going to a therapist who agrees with the tenets of the program. If there is going to be any contact at all with the preferred parent, it's likely to be supervised visitation and you have to pay the supervisor.

Okay. And the preferred parent may be ordered to be in the therapy approved by the program. And as you said, this is gonna, initially the order is 90 days and that is very, very commonly renewed for another 90 days until the problem is solved, or until the kid, in most states, reaches 18.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, wow, okay.

Right. So we may be talking about years of expenditures on various kinds of so-called therapeutic methods.

CHAKRABARTI: And these are coming out of the alienated parent's pocket, usually?

MERCER: Most of it is coming out of the so-called alienators pocket.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, sorry, sorry. ... Well, actually, clarify.

I'm getting confused with the language.

MERCER: The preferred parent who has been alleged to have alienated the children and is the alienator.

CHAKRABARTI: Allegedly.

MERCER: Right. Yes. Has to pay.

CHAKRABARTI: Because of the court order. Right. I see. Okay, so getting back, so is this all, does this almost always come through court order?

MERCER: Yes.

I don't think most of these programs will accept someone who is not court ordered.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. So they have the power of a court order behind them.

MERCER: Exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: It's interesting because then, with all of this of what you're saying, like the stakes that are there for the child, for the family, the money that it costs.

I was looking, since Ansley's from South Carolina, I was looking at how the programs work in South Carolina. And it was interesting. There was a report from a local TV station there, WCBD News, that asked the South Carolina courts how many families had been referred to Family Bridges.

And if the court was tracking the success of the program. And the court said to them, they have absolutely no records of even the number of kids and parents that they had ordered into family reunification.

MERCER: Right. In order to find that, you'd have to go to the courthouse. You'd have to pull up each of the records.

You'd have to examine what the order was.

CHAKRABARTI: But the court told this television station that they don't even have, the court had no records, is what they said. I mean, maybe because it's family court, they just didn't want to take the time to look for them. It may be, I don't know. I mean, is that, does that strike you as odd?

MERCER: It strikes me as very likely under the circumstances. When people say to me, how often does this happen? I have to say, I have no idea.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Mercer, I just want to make a point that that divorce is often extremely painful, right? To say the least.

MERCER: Oh, I would have to agree.

CHAKRABARTI: To say the least. And I don't think it's uncommon for children to be used as weapons between adults who are extremely dissatisfied with each other again, to put it lightly.

So with that in mind, we actually wanted to hear the perspective of parents who had been accused of being the alienators, let's put it that way. I think if I've got, I have to be honest, the language is a little, I'm getting a little confused. But let me just share a couple of stories from parents.

This is Olivia Spencer. She lives in Washington State. She has a 15-year-old daughter. And she says that her ex-husband is the one who alienated her daughter from her.

OLIVIA SPENCER: We were so close. We spent all of our time together in her childhood. I loved having her around. I loved being a mom. It was just unthinkable for a long time to see this happening.

And again, I made excuses. I said, you know, divorce is difficult for kids. She'll grow out of this. I don't mind if her dad is, like, her favorite for a while, because I've had her for so long. And only in retrospect do I see that this was the beginning of something much bigger than I could have realized.

But at the same time, I'm not entirely sure what I could have done differently. You know, I didn't want to turn her against him. I always wanted her to have a good relationship with her dad. All I want is for it to not be at my expense.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Olivia Spencer in Washington State. And this is Patrick Leonard.

He's in Kansas City, Kansas. He has two daughters, age 17 and 13. And he says his ex-wife, similarly, has alienated his daughters from him.

PATRICK LEONARD: I'll just say it's progressive false narratives. There's been no assertion or indication of abuse of any sort of either of my daughters, but it's this much more covert operation of, your dad was an absent father.

No, he never went to any of your events. Yeah, I did. I went to about 25 different football games where my daughter cheered. No, your dad never went to any of your middle school basketball games. Yeah, I went to almost all of them, just those kinds of things. Then the girls start to espouse that.

So my 17-year-old is now saying, I quote, I have no positive memories with you. They are my two favorite people in the world. What does it feel like? It is gut wrenching. It is heartbreaking. It is, I would say hopeless, but that doesn't begin to describe it.

CHAKRABARTI: So, Professor Mercer, the reason why I wanted to present these two to you is for parents who are in Patrick and Olivia's positions, and we heard Ansley's mother say it earlier, they felt like they had no other option than to seek this kind of court order reunification therapy to have some kind of relationship with their children.

I mean, your thoughts about that?

MERCER: Well, I think first of all that although they have all my sympathy, and I know that they are extremely distressed about what's happening. Nothing that I heard them say really tells us anything except that the kids don't want to be with them. And both of them say that this fact of the kids not wanting to be with him can be interpreted to mean that the other parent has done something.

Patrick gave some specific things that he thought that the kid's mother had said. I don't, you know, I don't know how he knows that unless he was there. Or, you know, his brother or sister overheard it or something of that kind. But this is always the problem, when we ask the question, has there actually been parental alienation?

Or is there some factor that has not been discussed, which is actually the cause of the kid's negative attitude. And I can see that if nobody is thinking about other possible causes, they might say there's only one cause and there's only one cure.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, but nevertheless, the family unification therapy seeks to fix the kid, not the parent, the parental behavior on either side.

MERCER: Well, that's not exactly true. Yes, you know, the intensive part does focus on the kid. People who run these programs will say they are also advising the alienated parent, the one who was complaining about this, advising them on how they might do a better job of parenting. And of course, the so-called alienator is supposed to be with a therapist who is approved by the program.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. Okay.

MERCER: So yeah, it does look like just fixing the kid, but you know, if you look at the details, there is a bit more going on.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So Professor Mercer, hang on for just a second. Because I want to bring Danielle Pollack into the conversation now. She's policy manager for the National Family Violence Law Center at George Washington University.

And she's advocated both at the state and federal level to pass laws to limit reunification therapy. Danielle Pollack, welcome to On Point.

DANIELLE POLLACK: Hi Meghna. Happy to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: So a lot of this, as you've been hearing Professor Mercer say, has been going on for a long time, but at least at the federal level, there was some recent change vis-a-vis the Violence Against Women's Act reauthorization. Can you tell us about that?

POLLACK: Yeah, so in the most recent reauthorization, which was in 2022 of the Violence Against Women Act, there was included a portion that we developed at the National Family Violence Law Center. The name of the act is Keeping Children Safe from Family Violence.

It's Title XV. And it does a few key things to try to incentivize state courts where these decisions are happening to improve their decision-making practices. In these cases, especially when abuse claims or evidence is put forward, because our principal concern is how the alienation concept is being misused in abuse cases to minimize or diminish or draw the attention away from concerning claims of abuse.

CHAKRABARTI: So, to put it more simply, because a judge has to make these decisions in the courtroom, and the judges need more training on how to recognize what they're hearing, the arguments being put before them on this matter.

POLLACK: Yes, they need more evidence-based training.

They also need some guardrails about how to decision make in abuse cases, and what kind of experts should be admitted in. We need to make sure that they're appropriately qualified to testify on abuse, and then some guardrails and limitations on what kind of treatments they can order, which pertains to the subject today around reunification.

CHAKRABARTI: So there's funding in this reauthorization language in the violence against women's act, but the funding comes with some very important strings, right? That states can't just get the money and say, okay, we're going to use it to train judges. They have to do two very specific things.

POLLACK: Yes, there's sort of four pillars of the law.

One pertains to training judges and court professionals on abuse only using evidence-based research. So not pseudo-scientific concepts or theories. It requires them to look at all family violence evidence. So including child abuse or intimate partner violence. When they're decision making on child custody, it requires that the experts testifying, and abuse are appropriately qualified. And that they've worked substantially with survivors of family violence and not just in a forensic role.

So just for the courts. And then lastly, it requires that any treatment that's ordered is safe, effective, and has therapeutic value. And that they need to show that. They need to be able to show that that is the case before any court can order that kind of treatment, that kind of reunification treatment in this case.

And they also, under Kayden's law, cannot, it cannot be premised on cutting the child off from their safe protective parent with whom the child is bonded or attached. And so it limits courts from doing like what Ansley experienced, you know, completely entirely cut off from her preferred parent, who in this case, we hear that they were not abusive.

CHAKRABARTI: So Danielle, hang on here for a second, Professor Mercer, let me just quickly turn back to you. Because again, this is if the states want this money from the federal government to, you know, apply in their courts, when it comes to family reunification. The two things that they have to do well, two of the several things they have to do includes have an evidence base.

MERCER: That's right.

CHAKRABARTI: And not cut the child off from the preferred parent.

I mean, just those two things alone sound like they would undermine the entire practice of family reunification as it's currently done.

MERCER: Right. They just would completely obviate those possibilities.

CHAKRABARTI: Danielle, I mean, what do you think about that?

POLLACK: I mean, as I said, our primary goal with developing the policy that then was enacted federally and is now being adopted in states, we have eight states that have adopted it in part or in entirety.

Is really to get them, the courts to decision make in an improved way in these cases that involve abuse allegations, the courts frequently miss, you know, real valid claims of abuse, and they frequently will decision make and order children to a parent who is dangerous, who is abusive. And in the more extreme cases, they'll order them entirely into the custody of the dangerous or abusive parent. And sometimes order them into these, you know, questionable reunification treatments or camps.

And we're very concerned that this happens. Because many, many, many children and protective parents are reporting that it's deeply traumatizing and harmful to children.

We also have some, you know, case studies showing what happens, you know, when kids get court ordered to the parent who is abusive. And there's a study by Joyanna Silberg that shows turned around cases where courts do this, and then the court has to change their decision and place the child back with the actual safe parent, who very commonly is accused of being an alienator.

So the concept of alienation was developed and coined by a man named Richard Gardner, who was loosely associated with Columbia University. He's self published all his books. And he was very worried about especially child sexual abuse allegations in family courts. He was of the mind that most or all of them were essentially fabricated or made up by angry, vindictive moms, mothers, and he wanted to counter that.

And so the alienation concept grows from what fathers who are accused of abusing can do. And so the alienation concept functions on sort of disbelieving mothers and children's claims of abuse. It's evolved since, and you know, it's been rebranded.

Sometimes practitioners will refer to it as other things, like resist, refuse, parent child contact problems. But in essence, in the courts, it's still functioning this way. In many cases where the child is at risk, the child has been harmed and yet the parent who's accused of abusing then cross claims alienation.

And those abuse claims and evidence and real concerns get diminished and then courts many times will order as a quote-unquote remedy to the quote-unquote alienation, this reunification. And since, as Jean Mercer pointed out earlier, you know, we don't even really have a clear definition of alienation let alone a scientific basis for it. So they're ordering a remedy on a thing which also lacks a scientific support.

So it's very problematic and when its court ordered you have to follow the law. It's not like a protective parent can break the law. Sometimes parents, you know, who are very worried about their children's safety do not send the child or try to protect them and sometimes they're jailed. Sometimes they lose all custody.

CHAKRABARTI: Danielle, let me jump in here because I think you just put it in a very compelling way, right? There's this thing that we don't even know if it exists. We can't really fully define it. There's not much of an evidence base for it, but courts are ordering a remedy for this thing that there's so much uncertainty about.

But that brings us to one of the interesting, sort of a heart of this conversation, which is people are seeking these remedies through the court. With that comes the assumption that parents have a legal right to be loved by their children, to have a relationship with their children. Do you think they do?

POLLACK: I mean, it's, you know, policy and practice is different from social science. And yet the courts are decision making around this, right? So there's this tension in policy and law and case law and statutory law between what they call the best interest of the child, which is supposed to be sort of the guiding principle in child custody decision making.

There's a tension between that and the parental rights. So you know, courts get into these cases where they're oftentimes complicated, you know, there's these cross claims of abuse and alienation, and they really struggle to decision make in part because they haven't really resolved the question of whether the parental rights are more important than the child's rights.

And so when parental rights, you know, take supremacy over child's rights, then, I mean, of course, you know, parents do need some rights and they have them legally, but it just becomes a question of where's the child's rights in this, like where was Ansley's rights to not be, you know, taken from her school and forced away from her preferred parent for six months.

And where's the child's voice in these court proceedings then? Like many children who are abused and sometimes ended up being murdered by that parent who they were ordered to be back with, they ask, you know, to be heard by the courts during these litigation processes. And they oftentimes are not, sometimes they're heard in chambers.

CHAKRABARTI: But often not. We have just a few seconds left and Professor Mercer, I want to ask you a final question, based on all your research. Do you think courts should even, should ever be ordering this kind of therapy?

MERCER: Not at this point. If they can put together some solid evidence, they can produce a valid measure, yes, you know, if that were all out on the table, the courts could use it.

As it is, they should not be using it.