Conclusions and questions from the audience
The important thing for you to take away from this discussion is that Parental Alienation certainly can be seen to have some scientific underpinnings. Parental Alienation certainly can be seen to meet all of the criteria, in better or worse ways depending on what data set you look at, testability, falsifiability, error rate analysis, validity, reliability. That, courts, think, is what covers the waterfront with respect to science. Why do we care? Why do we care? We care for two reasons.
1) We care because the people say, Thats not scientific. Its junk-science and youre just trying to put the kid with the abuser. I can tell because the leadership council told me so. Ok, lets look closely at what underpins that kind of an opinion. Well, weve looked at Sherry Wood. She doesnt even understand base rate. Weve looked at Carol Bruch, she thinks the appropriate citation for a scientific analysis is a newspaper. And weve looked at Kathleen Faller and despite what she writes about, when you look at what she actually does in a PAS case, in a false allegation case, its horrific. Ok, we care because one side or the other is going to say, Well, forget about whats happening to the children. This is stupid, this is a ridiculous conceptualization. Forget about it, no no no. Were not going to talk about whats happening to the kids. No no no no no no Im not listening. Because its junk-science. And you dont find the folks who say that actually looking carefully at the methodology of the analysis that came to that opinion. So we care about whether PAS is scientific because people try to change the argument away from helping the kids by saying its a junk-science concept when it isnt. And we care about it because as we can determine that it has an ability to be that the concept has the ability to be scrutinized with the procedures and the principles, and the methodology of science, we can come to see it as a valid concept. We can come to see it as a reliable concept. We can come to see it as having some predictive weight. I had the honor of going to dinner, night before last, with Barry Bricklin whos been trying to do, and Gail Elliot, who have been trying to do stuff with high conflict divorces for decades. And after Bricklin had about three drinks he was telling me about his contact with Einstein back in the day, hes about 600 years old, and he was telling me, you know, All science really boils down to is attempts at better description and better prediction.
2) So the second reason we care about PAS being scientific is because it tells us that if we dont interdict this process, if we dont stop this, our sons and our daughters are going to be crippled in their object relations and their ability to get along in the world and their ability to have good relationships with the opposite sex. And that is the most important reason of all. Thank you.
Question: Whats being done with this, with the reformulation of the PAS model, which has gone on all this time? Whats your opinion about that? I mean the evaluations I read now are different from the ones I read 5, 10 years ago. I think theyve gotten more middle of the road, less focused on the alienating parents behavior that impacts the solution.
Dr. Lorandos: Ok the question is do I have an opinion about the way in which evaluations and reports about Parental Alienation seem to be developing. They seem to be more middle of the road, more mamby-pamby, less. My opinion about that is that the people that are not confronting the tremendous inertia in the courts in Canada and in the United States lack intestinal fortitude, lack the courage of their convictions, lack a burning sense that theyre in the helping profession to actually help children get through terrible circumstances. And that we should be jacking them up at every opportunity. Thats my sense of it. Yes?
Question: I find it interesting that our field, if I understand this, is kind of gravitating towards a Daubert standard in terms of admissibility evidence and the ways of backing up scientific support. And it seems like were doing this kind of in a defensive posture because there are so many things such as fingerprinting, eyewitness reports and all that, remitted evidence and everything, that never met the Daubert standard. And I want your opinion on that in terms of, you know, in a funny way are we even kind of setting ourselves up by saying that that has to be a standard when a good part of whats submitted to the court never met a Daubert standard. So Im just kind of curious about your thought on that.
In any event, in an interesting study by Rueda, designed to test reliability concepts with respect to Parental Alienation, we find significant concordance among raters that PAS existed.