How do myths about intimate partner violence influence decisions that can change and even endanger lives? Host Julie Field and co-host Heidi Webb speak with George Washington Law School Professor Joan Meier about her decades of groundbreaking research on domestic violence, child abuse, and the family court system. She explores why misconceptions persist, how allegations of parental alienation arise in response to abuse claims, and what empirical evidence actually reveals. Professor Meier also details her efforts educating judges and attorneys to bridge the gap between assumption and science. Understanding this distinction is essential to protecting children and survivor parents while improving decision-making in family courts. Whether you’re a family law professional or interested in how research shapes justice, this conversation will challenge what you think you know.
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When Assumptions Hurt: Separating Myths From Evidence In Intimate Partner Domestic Violence With Professor Joan Meier
Welcome to the show. This is the episode series for the Consilium Institute. We are very honored to have Professor Joan Meier with us to talk about the pioneering work that she has done for families across the country and really across the world. May I call you Joan?
Of course.
Joan, welcome and thank you for being here with us.
Thank you so much for having me, Julie. It’s great to be here.
Let me just tell the world about your brilliance because I’ve been able to learn much about you over the years that I’ve known you. I think the world needs to know who you are and what you’ve accomplished. Joan Meier is the National Family Violence Law Center Professor of Clinical Law and Director of the National Family Violence Law Center at George Washington University Law School. Professor Meier has been a clinical law professor for 34 years at GW Law School, and she has founded three pioneering and nationally recognized interdisciplinary domestic violence clinical programs.
Joan is well known for her publications on domestic violence, child custody, social science and the law, her clinical teaching, her publications on various Supreme Court decisions, and especially known for her five-year empirical study, Child Custody Outcomes in Cases Involving Parental Alienation and Abuse Allegations, which was funded by the National Institute of Justice and completed in 2019. Those findings have been written about in scholarship and multiple media outlets, including the Washington Post and the New Yorker.
Professor Meier founded the Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project, DV LEAP, in 2003 to provide pro bono appeals in domestic violence cases. In August of 2019 is when Professor Meier stepped down from DV LEAP and launched the National Family Violence Law Center at George Washington Law. This center is the only national organization specializing in both domestic violence and child abuse. It focuses on improving court responses to such cases through professional curricula and training, amicus briefs, and policy consultation.
Joan has received numerous awards for her cutting-edge work, including the Kahn Award from the National Equal Justice Library for her article on domestic violence and welfare reform. Joan graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1980 and cum laude from the University of Chicago Law School in 1983, where I first had the opportunity to meet Joan, who was a couple of years ahead of me and someone I much admired. She also clerked on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit after law school. Joan, thank you again so much for joining us. We are just really excited to hear from you and your wisdom. Thank you.
Thank you again. I apologize for the ridiculous length of my title, which has to do with being a research professor for a center rather than a name anyway. Thank you for saying it all.
It’s worth saying all of it because of all the work that you’ve done. You’ve done cutting-edge work. I know that you’ve been doing work around domestic violence and clinical teaching and approaching these issues from a different perspective and a new perspective that started back when you first started teaching, 30-plus years ago. What got you started with doing work with families and particularly in domestic violence and child protection?
It’s an interesting question. When I was in law school, I think it was the end of 1983, my last year, the first article came out in a mainstream national publication about domestic violence. It was The Burning Bed, the Farrah Fawcett show about the burning bed. I had already gotten interested in this topic. It was because I knew I was a feminist and I identified that way. I’m not sure what in particular about domestic violence. I wanted equality for women and men in families. This thing came out, and I went up and bought ten copies, and I got really interested in it. My first job after law school was with legal services in Chicago.
It was just a summer position, and it was a fellowship, and they allowed me to work on a criminal domestic violence case. I was the advocate. I was not even barred and was not able to represent her. I came in as an advocate, and I advocated for her to get a protection order, even though she was still living with the guy. The judge yelled at all of us, “You want me to give her a protection order, and she’s still going to live with him?” I was already very interested in the topic. I have to say, I think that really radicalized me in the sense that, “We have a lot of work to do.”
I came out of that being very interested, and I had a couple other jobs before I got into my teaching career. All through them, I was interested in this, and I did a little bit of pro bono on the side in one position or another, different types of things. Even before I got into my teaching job, I wrote my first article for the Washington Monthly, which is a very short, talkie magazine. It was about the history of denial of domestic violence and how all the systems deny it. There was a very rich field to draw on for that article. I wrote about police courts, prosecutors in courts, and talked about the changes that are starting to happen. I was already looking into that and knowing what was going on and so forth.
I thought I wanted to teach because I was the child of a professor, not a law professor. I came from an academic family, and I thought of myself as intellectual, and I wanted to be in academics. I also really wanted to make change and do things and help clients. I did some of that first, and then the teaching job I took, of course, was in the clinical programs, which allowed me, with students, to represent people in court. Quickly, I started in a broader family law clinic, and then I created my own domestic violence clinic one year into it and have been doing that work ever since. That’s a short beginning.
That’s amazing.
It explains how you were seeking to combine these things. Also really impacted by your own environment, your own experience, and I think some it’s not unusual for people to have a really jarring early experience that is pivotal in a way that you cannot anticipate until it happens and then it resonates, and then it’s like, “This is not okay.”
I never experienced domestic violence directly, not partner violence directly. There was a power dynamic in my family. My father was the big man on campus. My mother was not employed and was a housewife. There were moments and times when that power dynamic was very troubling to me. I do think I grew up and grew into this need to combat that without it being about violence in my own history.
You had a sensitivity, or a visceral knowledge of like, this does not feel okay.
I had some of that. Sorry to interrupt.
No, I think that’s fascinating. For people to understand that about you, in most cases, there’s like an academic pursuit. There’s something emotional that draws you into that academic pursuit.
I also liked that it was so cutting edge that nobody knew about it and that I could help be the person or one of the people, very much one of a group of people, trying to bring it and awaken the world to it. I liked that very much. I was drawn to the idea of bringing something new and changing the way the system understood things.
Being impactful. I am sure that you encountered obstacles in doing that. I guess I’d be interested in knowing what some of your earliest experiences or obstacles were that you encountered from the courts or from the field.
The story I already told you was my first exposure to that. I already knew there was some resistance in the courts, and I was prepared for it. It was a pretty visceral experience. When I got here, people here were trying to organize a coalition against domestic violence and to adopt laws for protection orders and strengthen them. We were starting to train judges, or wanted to. That was hard. It was hard to get in. The biggest obstacles have come later in my career, I would say. Actually, it was easier in the early days when everything was new, and people acknowledged that they didn’t know stuff.
Identifying Systems of Abuse Denial
I started feeling much more frustrated 10 or 15 years into it when we had been training and teaching and writing all about DV for many years, and the courts were supposed to know the basics, and they were still acting like they knew nothing and had never heard of any of it. That got really frustrating. That’s when I started to feel like there’s something deeper going on here. This is not just about information and ignorance. This is about resistance to this particular information.
Not to jump too quickly up to 2019, is that what led you up to saying we need some empirical evidence here, we need to understand this in another way to make sense of it?
Confronting Family Court Disbelief
The study that I did, the five-year study, grew out of, again, a more sophisticated and developed understanding of problems in the system. When people think about domestic violence, they tend to think of the crime and the prosecution. Maybe they think about protection orders if they’ve heard of them. They rarely think about custody, child custody, nor do the courts, it turns out. The courts think domestic violence is over there in criminal court and in protection order court.
When it shows up in family court, where it’s a battle between the parents over the care of the children, the courts are very resistant to taking family violence of any kind, but especially child abuse, seriously in the custody context. They tend to think it’s just problems in the relationship. It’s got nothing to do with parenting by the perpetrator. I started experiencing the problems around when I found it a little before I founded DV LEAP in 2004. As Julie knows, we were referred to a case that we helped pro bono of a professional woman who was actually a lawyer, and her husband was also a lawyer.
He was also an abuser. We helped her in the appeal, and we saw through that the depth and the complexity of the way the abuse was denied, the significance of the abuse was denied, and the way the mother was discredited for incorrect reasons and so forth and so on. I saw many layers of the denial of these issues in custody court. When I launched DV LEAP right on the heels of that case, I actually said, “I’m not going to do custody. It’s too draining.” That case ate me alive for six months, and I needed to do other stuff. I was hoping for custody, criminal, and protection order cases.
Legal systems historically resisted domestic violence disclosures, driving early advocacy movements. Share on XEverything that poured into DV LEAP, which was taking appeals pro bono, pretty much everything was custody. I’d say around then, early 2000s, which was when I started turning and was forced by the demand to start specializing and digging much deeper into the custody problem. I was seeing this problem, and all these appeals were coming in where mothers were not able to keep their kids safe from an abusive father. I was reading transcripts. The next best thing is being there. I was seeing how the trials go because the transcript records every word that’s spoken in a trial.
Exposing the Misuse of Alienation Claims
You have to review that if you’re an appeals lawyer, because you have to know what was raised at trial and what the court said and what the witnesses said and all that stuff to analyze the potential for an appeal. I was seeing all these cases word for word and seeing how mothers were demeaned and treated punitively and how abuse evidence was kept out and how parental alienation was being used to deny the allegations of abuse and deny the credibility of the children’s own words, etc. I saw all those layers, and my first reaction was to start doing training.
I did a training at AFCC long before you, and I met Heidi, and I cried coming home because I had not realized that parental alienation was so integrated into the family court system. I thought it was a pernicious theory that was being misapplied to deny abuse, and we needed to just educate courts about it. What I realized after that conference was that it was fueling and driving family courts. They were very wedded to it, and I was just seeing it among the professionals. I saw that in the AFCC.
I was doing trainings here and there when I could, and I was doing research and scholarship, which is what I’m supposed to do as a law professor, in which I was deconstructing as best I could the way parental alienation was discussed and understood and trying to lay out word for word why that understanding didn’t work and was misleading and was wrong when it comes to abuse concerns. If I do say so myself, I wrote some of my best articles doing that because they were very integrating social science research with legal thinking and with court experience.
I did these great articles and some of them were a couple of them were invitations to the alienation field to some extent, because they were like, “Here’s a way we can do justice by abuse without throwing out alienation.” I actually proposed a decision tree, which I said could constrain the ways it’s being used wrongly while still allowing its consideration without using it wrongly. I hoped that someone in that field would take me up on that. There was radio silence. Nobody had the slightest interest in stopping it from being misused.
That’s one of the things that has been so disillusioning to me because I like to think that lawyers and psychologists and people who work in courts and who are scholars as well care about integrity and honesty and trying to meet halfway if there’s a critique like “What are we doing? Maybe we could do something better. What are you doing, Joan, that you should do better?” I was open to the conversation. They had no interest in it. They have never had an interest in it, which started to convince me that there was not entirely good faith in that field, which was troubling.
Anyway, eventually, my training was not working. My articles were not working. The media were not interested in these stories because they thought it was the exception to the rule. They thought the norm was that mothers always win custody and now and then mothers lose custody. There’s probably something wrong with the mother, and that’s why it happened. I couldn’t get them to accept it as a significant issue of public interest. Finally, I was like, “We need data because the judges are not listening, the professionals are not listening, and the media are not listening.
We need data.” I was like, the data may show me that I’m getting all the worst cases. It’s not representative of what’s going on out there. I would love to know if that’s the case. We put together this study. I was lucky to find people with experience with NIJ grants and people with social science research expertise. We were very lucky to be funded the first time we applied. The goal of the study, I can go into that if you want or not, if you think that’s too much.
No, I’d like to hear about that and then circle back a little bit on whether or not you find this presentation by lawyers to be co-mingled with issues of constitutional law and parental rights, because I think that’s something that I often see.
We’re seeing more now. I’ll take that first, I guess, because it’s shorter. I have heard for over a decade that judges felt like they had to give parental rights to fathers because it’s a constitutional right. The person I remember told me that, because she was doing training, and I was like, “That’s ridiculous.” The constitutional right is to be considered and to have parental rights. It does not mean you have a right to time with your children. Parental rights are separate from having time with your children, and the court’s job is the best interest of the child, not to make sure that each parent gets time.
In fact, mothers get cut off from kids all the time, and nobody makes the constitutional argument then. I think the parental rights claim has always been misstated, to put it nicely. It sounds good. There is a constitutional interest in parenting, and there is Supreme Court case law about it. There’s one person in particular who’s taken all that and parlayed it into a legislative proposal that he’s taking to different states and claiming it’s all constitutionally mandated, and a lot of people like it, including mothers who have lost custody, are getting on the bandwagon of that.
They do not quite see where it’s really coming from and where it’s really going. It could help them in theory. Anyway, that is out there. I just think it’s completely wrong. I did write a very short rebuttal to that particular proposal for one state, which I can dig out at some point. That was in the past year, really, when that came up, and I did that. I didn’t hear it that much, and I have not heard it much in court, although it may be silently in judges’ heads. They’re not necessarily saying it. I have not heard lawyers argue it either in court myself.
We’re going to be seeing that more, especially as Kayden’s Law, which I want to talk about, is gaining traction across the country. I’ve heard just within the last week from judges in Colorado that they’re concerned that the requirement that the legislature just made in Colorado, that said that the court has to make specific findings on safety, has constitutional implications for parental rights under Troxel.
That’s floating around there. It’s gaining some traction here and there. Judges have been worrying about it here and there and maybe more so now. I do not know. There is that. I do not think it’s the core problem. It’s just another tactic. Alienation was a tactic, and now this is another tactic.
It’s that father’s rights. It’s raising that father’s rights.
It’s all about father’s rights as though they’re different from the mother’s.
There’s no other or children’s rights safety.
Quantifying Disbelief in Custody Adjudication
The purpose of the study was to see whether, empirically, quantitatively, we could show whether courts really are rejecting abuse claims as often as it seemed like they were and whether they were also removing custody as often as it seemed like they were from mothers who were reporting abuse. The other thing was that the only studies up until that time were local and regional because the only way to look at court cases was to go to the courthouse physically and get the files if the court would let you have the files, and sometimes they would not, and then analyze all the files.
That’s very state-specific, if not even county-specific. I was determined to get a national picture of what was going on. By the time we started this, it was 2014. We were very lucky that courts were starting to post opinions and decisions online. That’s what allowed us to get a national picture. We were then able to gather data from across the country by state by looking at court decisions that were posted online. Admittedly, the court decisions do not tell you everything you might want to know, so it limited some things for us. It gave us all the data we felt we most needed.
What we did was we looked at. Did either party allege abuse? What abuse? Did either party allege alienation? Was child welfare involved in the case? Were there lawyers, stuff like that? It was a very fine-tuned set of codes that we had two stalwart law graduate coders who spent over a year coding thousands of cases. What we found when we did our search for cases using Lexis, we did a very comprehensive search. We used all these different terminologies because states use different terms for domestic violence and for custody as well.
It was like an eleven-line search string with all the different terms and all of the alternatives and such. It netted us 15,000 cases, which we never expected. The first six months were spent triaging out cases that didn’t belong in the study for various reasons. Were they child welfare cases, or were they cases involving prison, someone in prison? We did not want to look at those. We ended up with about 4,300 cases that were parent against parent involving custody or visitation and involving abuse or alienation claims. We did not collect cases that didn’t involve abuse or alienation claims. That also limited some of our numbers.
Ultimately, we were able to say when moms allege partner violence, this is how often courts believe them. When they allege child sexual abuse, this is how often courts believe them. We threw out, by the way, same-sex parents because we were trying to do gender analysis specifically. We only looked at mother-father cases. When the father counterclaims alienation, do courts believe these things at a different rate, same rate? Also, when mom alleges this and father alleges alienation, do moms lose custody at what rate? When they do not cross-claim alienation, is that different? We were basically looking at the big picture.
Do abuse allegations work, and do they lose custody when they allege abuse? Do cross-claims of alienation affect those rates? What we found was yes, and yes. Courts are very skeptical of abuse claims to begin with. They only believe family violence claims in general under 40% of the time, well under 40%. I do not remember the exact number, but I think it was in the 30% range. If you separate it by partner violence and child abuse, courts believe partner violence 45% of the time. They only believe child physical abuse about a third of the time, and they only believe child sexual abuse closer to fifteen percent of the time.
Counter-claims of parental alienation are systematically deployed to discredit allegations of abuse. Share on XThis is without alienation claims. When you bring in cross claims of alienation, all of that plummets still further. Basically, I’m not sure I remember the crediting rates as well as I remember the custody loss rates. The rate of predation falls much further when there’s a cross claim of alienation, and it becomes close to, essentially, zero. We had two percent for sexual abuse, but when we went back and looked at that case, it was one case. It was not a sexual abuse case. It was miscoded. The right number for sexual abuse is zero, but we’ve published our two percent figure. We use it.
I’m just thinking it would be interesting to look at same-sex marriages because you do not have the gender disparity, but you just have the abuse and the alienation claim.
It would be very interesting. Somewhere in our data set, we probably have those cases, but it was not very many, because it had to be same-sex plus abuse and/or alienation. You have to have all those criteria. It would be really interesting to compare that.
I just wonder if part of what the courts are hearing is like, when they hear the alienation claim, does that discredit the abuse claim, regardless of gender?
Uncovering Gender Disparities in Custody Outcomes
I can answer that actually. We were able to find enough cases where mothers accused fathers of alienation and fathers accused mothers of abuse. We were able to find that alienation does not work for mothers the same way it works for fathers. That was a statistically significant conclusion. It confirmed what we knew about the origins of the alienation theory, which was that it was originally conceived by Gardner as a syndrome that mothers use against fathers. It’s still working that way to a fair degree. Not only because mothers are getting some mileage with alienation against abusive fathers, but ironically, most of those fathers are also serious batterers. I’ve seen cases where the court basically harped on the alienation, but not on the serious violence, which just astonishes me.
What do you think the barrier is? What do you think the barrier is for judges and for people at large to accept the truth about what’s going on in families? That’s a big question.
I always say it’s overdetermined and I have a list of reasons. One of them, and I think a big one, is that courts are very devoted to trying to equalize parenting for the sake of children. There’s a sense that children need fathers and fathers deserve children. That grew out of the women’s rights movement. That’s the part of the father’s rights movement that was legitimate and that many of us empathize with. There should be equal parenting, and children should have the benefit of that when the father wants to be an equal parent, if they’re safe and loving, if they’re a decent parent.
There are a lot who are not. Of course, I think the other things that, in connection with wanting to prioritize fathering, are also coming from the place that many others are coming from, which is that they believe that they’re biased towards mothers and they’re bending over backwards to not be biased towards mothers. What I would say is that they’re bending over and becoming biased towards fathers pretty clearly, I would say, at least in the abuse-related cases. I cannot speak to the non-abuse cases because I have not researched them. We do have some alienation cases where the abuse was not at issue, but I have not looked at them very closely.
Where abuse is alleged by a mother, there is a bias towards fathers, I would say. It’s partly for the reasons of trying to equalize, but it’s a misguided attempt. There’s ignorance about abuse and not understanding it, not understanding how partner violence has implications for children’s safety and wellbeing and trauma. Not believing child abuse because believing in the vengeful ex-wife stereotype. Being overtrained and misled by alienation training, which trains judges to believe that children cannot be trusted when they report abuse. Children can be misled and brainwashed by mothers into believing completely false things.
They can even be brainwashed and alienated into being scared when there’s no reason for fear. The level to which parental alienation is used to write off obvious indications that children are terrified and just chalk it up to alienation is astonishing to me. It’s a product of a lot of training and scholarship that condones all of this. There’s all this scholarship backing the training. Courts are not in a position to go read the articles and say, as I do, this does not add up. They take the training at face value, as they should be expected to.
I also think, coming from a judicial perspective, we see the hardest cases. Judges see the hardest cases, and many of those cases are cases that have not been resolved, have not settled, because it’s a way of perpetuating coercive control and abuse. Depending on where you start in terms of your premise, if your expectation as a judicial officer is to say, “Why cannot these people get along?” Most people should get along in a family relationship or intimate partner relationship. There should be equal power in that thing, or there’s presumed to be. What you’re actually seeing is the most extreme imbalance of power. That’s all you see.
You do not recognize it as an imbalance of power. You see a lot of rage and seeming craziness on the part of the victim, and you do not chalk it up to having been abused. Even if you do, some judges feel like, “She was abused, but she cannot possibly be a functional mother because she’s too, whatever, crazy.”
“That relationship is now over, and so she’ll be fine.”
He’ll be fine because he’ll be a product of the relationship. I tend to think that if the mother is, even if she’s messed up because of the abuse, they tend to think that messed up is going to stay. They do not tend to think, in my experience, that she’ll be fine when she’s out of the relationship. They think she’s got psychological diagnoses and conditions and anxiety and depression and all these medical things. Where’s the father? He was abusive to her because they just could not get along. “It was a really bad relationship. He’ll be okay now.” It’s not a diagnosis.
It’s because she triggered him.
By the way, one of the forms of gender bias that’s embedded in family courts that people are not conscious of really is the idea that women are subject to diagnoses and men are not. Abuse is not something that we diagnose. We decide whether it’s true factually. Women having reactions to abuse and struggling, we can diagnose that.
Diagnoses become the weapon du jour to discredit and to undermine the competency as a parent of a woman. It should not, because depression could be a very rational, appropriate response to your situation. It does not mean you’re not a good parent. It’s an easy label to throw on someone and say, “She’s not a safe parent because she’s depressed.” I’m not saying I’ve seen a lot of that, but I’ve seen a little of that.
There’s a desire to increase fathering and support fathering and reward fathers who come to court because there’s a belief that fathers do not fight to parent and those that do should be rewarded. There’s ignorance about abuse, so they do not understand that’s what they’re seeing a lot of the time. Real problem recognizing child abuse because they’re taught not to trust what children say, and children cannot always testify, or do not always. The GALs are not always very well educated on this either, the people who are speaking for children. I do not know. I feel like I have other reasons, but they’re escaping me right now.
Those are the dominant ones.
The lawyers who are representing you, women, are not necessarily well equipped to understand this either. There’s an element of, I may not say it in court, but a resignation that your client may be ill-equipped to parent or may not be really fully capable.
A recognition or a belief that is also based on not understanding abuse. A lot of lawyers do not believe sexual abuse when their clients tell them about it, child sexual abuse. There are lawyers who will not take those cases. There are evaluators who will not assess those cases. There are people who just run screaming from sexual abuse claims and mistrust them deeply.
If you have a lawyer like that and you’re trying to say, “My kid is telling me this and doing that,” and I can only conclude that he’s being abused. A lot of those lawyers are just like, “We’ll just downplay that. I do not trust my client.” They’re not going to tell them, but they’re not going to trust them because she’s saying that. There are problems in the field. Even if you do trust them, there are a lot of lawyers who do not know what they’re up against in these cases and how hard they are to persuade courts of in the face of the alienation.
There’s just a level of discomfort too with people who just hear that information and do not for themselves know what to do with it. There’s like a reluctance to really engage with it in a helpful way.
Alienation claims do not function symmetrically in family court, placing mothers at a distinct disadvantage. Share on XIf you’re a lawyer, I would say it’s malpractice. If that’s the case, you need to get off the case and find a lawyer who can handle that. The same with evaluators. I’ve heard of an evaluator who had an eight-year-old girl telling him about sexual abuse, and he called up someone I know who’s an expert, and he said, “What should I do?” She told him how to talk to her about it. “Did he do that?” “No.” He shut down the conversation. I’m like, that’s malpractice as an evaluator, in my opinion, because he was too uncomfortable. Do not be in family court if you’re too uncomfortable with abuse, all kinds.
It’s a huge, multi-layered, multi-faceted problem that exists throughout the profession and the courts. What advice, if you could say 1 or 2 or 3 things that lawyers should do differently or judges should do differently to not fall into this abyss of not protecting children and not protecting victims or survivors of domestic violence?
Most of those things we put into Kayden’s Law, not all of them. Before I get to Kayden’s Law, let me say one thing. Every lawyer and every client that contacts me and says, “This is my story, and I’m fighting for my kid in family court,” I tell them they have to have an expert. Especially if it’s child abuse. If it’s partner violence, you might be able to prove the facts straight up. If it’s child abuse, you’ve got to have an expert to validate the child abuse because courts are just too reluctant to take it from you as a reporter of what your child’s saying or doing.
An expert, especially a child forensic interviewer, which is a particularly high level of training to do a proper child interview that does not taint the interview with bias. Those interviews, if they’re done well, are the best source of validation of a child’s report of abuse. For lawyers and protective parents, I would say make sure you can do your best, if you can do it, to get an expert in that abuse that you’re fighting over. There are not that many, and they cost money, but I try to get them linked up. I’ve done a lot of training for lawyers in these kinds of cases.
One of the things we try to train them on is to be able to cross-examine the alienation expert. They have to learn enough about what’s wrong with the alienation theory and how there is no science behind it and how many of the common claims that are made by alienation people are not supported scientifically. My newest article is waiting to be published. It’s part of a special issue, and there’s other articles that are slower than mine. It’s waiting to be published, but it’s called Misinformation about Parental Alienation, Misleads Courts and Endangers Children.
It focuses on two very common claims by parental evaluation experts or evaluators. One of them is that children who are enraged at a parent are not abused. They’re alienated because the theory is that abused children do not get mad at their parents. They really want to be reunited with their parents. Where does that come from? Foster care research, which A, has no bearing on research on how children feel when they’re living with a safe parent and have no need to go be with an unsafe parent. A and B, those studies did not actually reach that conclusion to that degree at all.
In my article, I collect the research into domestic violence and child abuse that describes how angry children can be at their abusers. The other claim is a little less absurd, but is problematic, which is that parental alienation has such lifelong damage to the person who grows up having been alienated that it’s as bad or worse than direct abuse. That claim is pure assertion in my view. When they cite something for it, which they do not always, they cite articles by the same researcher who did the other stuff, the foster care research, which was not bad, by the way. The research itself was not bad.
This research is not very good because it’s interviews with adults who say they were alienated as children against one parent. Now they have this litany of struggles as adults. They have a drinking problem, they’re depressed, they cannot date. Guess what? In many of those cases, there was also abuse in the family. The studies cannot parse out how much different things going on in the family affected the adults. The adults do not know. They cannot know. They’re only being asked a set of questions about alienation. That’s the data that’s being used to prove and claim that alienation has such lifelong severe damage that it says bad or worse than abuse.
This article deconstructs the research and shows how absurd it is. It quotes from real evaluations to show how these things are being misused. I’m hoping it will be useful for lawyers. This is the connection back for lawyers to use with cross-examination. I cannot expect lawyers to go in and do all the research I’m doing about the limits of the research. I’m trying to convey it to them here and allow them to do that. If judges will read my article, they will also know that even if the lawyer does not. They can start questioning those claims.
One thing is that everybody needs to learn enough about the limits of alienation and how it’s being distorted as a theory and misused to deny abuse. Another thing is you’ve got to have an affirmative expert to validate child abuse because courts just, they’re very reluctant to validate, to believe it. Here’s another reason, Julie, that it’s hard for courts. They feel like it’s going to tar the perpetrator forever and that he might get put in jail if they find that he sexually abused or physically abused his child.
In reality, I do not think so. I do not think prosecutors are looking at family courts and finding out which ones found anything. Usually those cases have already been declined for prosecution or are often likely to be because the burden of proof is so different. Judges are very hesitant to potentially put a criminal finger on the scale against a parent. They’re reluctant about child abuse. The experts can really help with that and explain the validity. What were you going to say, Heidi?
I was just going to say I’ve seen some reluctance on the part of lawyers to present that evidence in a family law case because they think judges, for all the reasons you’re saying, these are courts of not reconciliation exactly, but we’re trying to engender a family moving forward. It tarnishes the family if you bring in testimony. Again, that works against the person who is bringing in the evidence because it looks like you’re trying to build a case.
To demonize the other parent. The problem is it would not be in court if this family could work together and do what’s best for the kids. It’s in court because they cannot. When someone alleges abuse, it should be logical to you if you’re in family court, because yeah, these are the 6% of cases, or 8% of cases that actually go to trial out of all the families that separate and divorce. I agree with the culture of the court, and especially traditional family lawyers, those who represent men in particular, but the traditional family lawyers want to settle out of court. They do not want to try cases. The last thing they want to do is sound like they’re firebrands bringing in little nuclear bombs called child sexual abuse.
It’s a strange dichotomy that so few cases go to trial in family law. The ones that do and have this issue, there’s this almost, I do not know if it’s subconscious conscious, but this desire to treat them like a “normal,” to normalize the situation. They’re there because they have not been able to normalize the situation. It’s like they’re outliers just by virtue of having gotten to that point.
Sadly, family violence is really quite common. We do not want to believe that, but it is. One of the things I’d like to do is find a way to help educate judges about that. That it is really common, that you should not be surprised when you see it in your case for the reasons you’re saying, Heidi. This is about children. We have to protect children. You’re not criminally convicting anybody. You’re not penalizing anybody. You’re taking care of children’s well-being. That’s all you’re doing.
When these same issues arise in the, say, district court on a child abuse claim, child protection, they’re believed, they’re heard, and I would think in a way that’s different than in family court because they’re not a family member.
It’s because the state’s involved, because the state is saying it, not the mom. Moms are not credible.
A lot of times it’s an adjacent member of the family or something. It’s not a parent. Sometimes this, but sometimes an uncle or grandfather, like whatever or neighbor.
Kayden’s Law. Tell us about Kayden’s Law, what it is, where it came from.
Establishing Legal Protections Through Caden’s Law
Kayden’s Law was named after a little girl who I think was eight, who was murdered brutally by her father during a court-ordered visitation. She had been taught to run for the door if she got scared, and her body was found right at the door. Sorry, her mother felt like, “I cannot let this happen to anyone else,” which is typical for traumatized people. When something could have been prevented, they often turn into warriors to prevent it from happening. Same with gun violence and other things.
She connected with my colleague, Danielle Pollack, who at the time was not my colleague, but they were both in Pennsylvania. Danielle was doing legislative work and other work with another group, ChildUSA. They started working on developing a statute to try to protect future kids. Danielle brought me in, and she also brought in Richard Ducote, who is a godfather of this field, has been a very powerful advocate for protecting these kids in these cases, and has even argued one in the Supreme Court long, long ago.
The three of us, and then with the help of some other colleagues and some legislative experts and pro bono lawyers from firms, drafted a law that we thought would help courts do better. It went through many iterations, so I’m going to leave out the ones that ultimately got chopped when it was on the Hill. It ultimately was picked up by Representative Brian Fitzpatrick from Pennsylvania, who saw what Danielle was doing for the state legislature. He said, “We need something federal.”
We said, “Great. Let’s do this, and you can roll it into VAWA, the Violence Against Women Act, as an incentive law because the federal government cannot regulate and govern state courts on custody, but it can create incentives for states and state courts.” Kayden’s law boiled down to four provisions, and it did get rolled into the Violence Against Women Act as an incentive law. The first provision is that you have to hear all evidence presented if it’s admissible evidence of abuse, past violence, including evidence from before the last hearing, etc.
Evidence-based judicial training is essential for accurate evaluations of coercive control. Share on XAll of it, even if it’s been previously heard or decided in a protection order or something like that, all of it is relevant to a child’s best interests, even though it was adjudicated in some other context in some other way. You have to know the history of abuse to determine a child’s best interests. That includes police reports and protection orders and any other form of evidence of past abuse. Second one, which has gotten so much pushback, is that we didn’t ever think about ruling out parental alienation claims because we knew how wedded the courts and the professionals are to that.
Frankly, it happens. We know it happens. What we wanted to rule out was the misuse of it to deny abuse, which is what my original article always said. What we said was, “If you’re going to have an expert assessing or opining about abuse, whether it’s sexual abuse, physical abuse, or partner violence, that expert needs to have expertise in that abuse. We said purely forensic expertise does not count. You had to have out-of-court expertise, meaning you had to have worked with victims basically.
That has the effect of excluding a lot of alienation professionals who like to consider themselves abuse experts. They’re not because they’ve never worked with abuse victims, and they do not really know the abuse field the way abuse experts do. They’re very good at denying the credibility of abuse because the way they’ve gotten into abuse has been in the context of alienation and doing evaluations and not in the context of working with survivors. We defined experts who are going to opine on abuse as being people who have worked with I do not know if we said work with survivors, but we basically said non-forensic experience in the field.
The alienated people are coming in with guns blazing all over the state. They’re trying to do it more and more. They were slow on the uptake, but now they’re getting more energized and activated, and where states are considering Kayden’s law, which a number of states have done and are continuing to do because children are being murdered in so many states after family courts did not protect them. People are coming in and saying, “This is going to exclude alienation. This is going to do all of these things. It’s going to be terrible for children.”
That’s not true because nothing in the statute excludes alienation claims. You can testify about it. You can opine about it. You can evaluate it. What you cannot do is opine about the abuse if you’re not an abuse expert. That’s a very fair compromise that allows for alienation discussions and assessments while trying to ensure that abuse assessments are clean and are valid and not tainted by an alienation commitment. That’s what it says, but they’re distorting that in these battles. The third provision is about reunification remedies.
That is something that there’s been a lot of press about because a lot of kids are now old enough to talk to the media about what they went through. Basically, the alienation field has designed these treatment programs, some of which are called camps, many of which are overnight and far away from wherever the child lives. They cut the child off from anything in their life and make them go with the alienation treatment people and the parents they’re resistant to.
They’re forced into contact, and they’re hammered with videos and didactics about how everything they thought about their parent is wrong, that the parent they love was misleading them and mistreating them, that they have to renounce everything they ever said or thought about the other parent because if they do not, they will never see the beloved parent again. It’s a very coercive and abusive intervention. Courts do not know that. They are given a presentation about how these treatment programs are excellent and 90% of them work. The children are reunified with the parent they’ve been resisting.
They do not say anything, by the way, about how often they were unified with the parent they were ripped away from. Many of these programs will not allow the protective parent contact with the children until the protective parent says to the satisfaction of the person running the program that everything they said was a lie and false and tells the children that. If a protective parent cannot do that, or even if they try to do it, but it’s not convincing enough, they never get to see their kids again. Kids are stuck with a parent they resisted, often for good reason. The court didn’t believe that. These are the kids who are getting murdered.
Some of them are murdered during visitations, some of them not. The reunification provision says basically you cannot rip a child from a parent they are attached to and bonded with who is non-abusive. We say physically or sexually abusive because we know that the alienation professionals are now saying that is psychological abuse. We knew if we said psychologically abusive, they would just shoehorn alienation right in there and take the kids away. We said physical or sexual abuse. If that’s not there, you do not get to rip the child away.
Whatever reunification treatment you do, they get to stay with their safe parents in the meantime. There are treatments that do not require you removing them. We say that there needs to be proof of safety and effectiveness of the treatment program, which has been very controversial. We are working on how to rephrase that because some of our friends have pointed out to us that there’s really no proof of safety and effectiveness of any therapy for DV survivors, or maybe cognitive behavioral therapy may have.
I was going to say CBT probably does have some.
Reforming Professional Education in Family Law
Most traditional therapies that people go to for emotional difficulties do not have that proof. We were thinking, “We need to try to figure out how to revise that.” The states that are adopting this law are all adapting it and tweaking it in different ways. They’re naming it after the kids in their state that have either been murdered or suffered in one of these cases. There have been some really interesting additions and improvements to Kayden’s law that we’ve seen in different states that we think should be carried forward. That’s the third provision. The fourth provision is training.
It requires states to provide that training on a series of abuse-related topics like coercive control, child sexual abuse, child physical abuse, and psychological abuse. Implicit bias, how perpetrators and survivors appear in court, like the dynamics of that. There’s a series of other topics that I’m forgetting now, but it lists topics because these were the things we felt courts do not get in a normal course of training. These are the things that are undermining their ability to properly assess abuse claims. Those are in there.
I’m very pleased and proud to say that my National Family Violence Law Center, which started some years ago developing trainings to meet those requirements, has now completed coercive control, which is a three-hour training, and child sexual abuse, which is three and a half. They’re both online, on demand, and they’re interactive. It’s very reasonably priced. Julie, you should know that. I will send it to you right away. We’re trying to get it out to all the courts. Actually, it finally dawned on me this year to mail it, to get all the addresses and mail it. That started having an effect. I’m hearing from more courts now that are buying it. The judges are really liking it.
Word of mouth, they’re telling their friends to take it. The evaluations are very favorable. Ninety-six percent of people, including judges and others, are saying other judges should take it, other evaluators should take it. I recommend it to them. It’s a wonderful course because we’re drawing on all the experts. I’m not the expert, but I know who the experts are on all of these things. They’re in there. There are clips of them, and it does not have me in it at all. It’s done by educational design experts who are really good at it. It’s framed in ways that I think judges can take in as information rather than feeling like it’s not like an advocate hammering at them.
That’s terrific. How many states have adopted versions of Kayden’s Law?
I always ask Danielle to update me, but I think the last I heard, ten states have adopted some parts of it. Two states have adopted all of it. It’s interesting the different parts that different states have adopted. One or two states just adopted the reunification provision, which is surprising to me because it’s one of the more challenging ones for courts. One or two states just adopted the training for judges, not for evaluators or evaluators, but for judges. The training provision says everybody, all the neutrals, have to get it. Some of them have adopted the expert provisions, and some of them have tweaked the expert provisions.
It’s variable. Frankly, to be honest, the incentive provision is not working that well because the federal government is getting money out of them under this law. Even before 2024 and 2025, we were not doing a good job of that because Congress didn’t follow it up in the way that they needed to, apparently, and we didn’t know. Now it seems like probably a lost cause, but states are doing it anyway because they’re seeing that their constituents are coming to them telling them horror stories, and they’re taking it very seriously.
Colorado has been one of the leaders in addressing, first of all, in defining domestic violence and coercive control in its custody statutes, twenty years ago when I first started practicing here and developing and adopting the Kayden’s Law pieces. One of the things that Colorado just did this legislative session was to take the different pieces of Kayden’s law that had not yet been included in the 2023 iteration of the law and making sure that there’s clarity around coercive control, domestic violence, and the expertise that’s necessary because there was some, a lack of clarity around that in terms of what experts, who they could be.
The provision that seemed to say that judges should send it out to the DV and OMD.
It was very confusing and problematic. The other piece of it that I think is particularly interesting is that the legislature looked not just at Kayden’s law requirements with this latest update, but also the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges model code.
My coercive control training builds on that. Uses the model code’s definition of coercive control and it uses that and it points out that whether or not it’s in your statute, it all goes to the best interest of the child. You still have to consider it because it affects the best interests of children. The model code, you heard it here, is stronger than Kayden’s law. It’s ironic because the family court professionals who hate Kayden’s law have said not one word about the model code because it was put out by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, which is as neutral a body as you can get. Guess what? It’s stronger than Kayden’s law. It goes much further.
The other piece of that is the National Council, for many, many years, has put out guidelines for judges. Even if you didn’t have it in your statute, they had guidelines for judges in custody cases. Professor Meier, thank you so much for taking so much time to help us do a deep dive into some of the most challenging issues that all families face, and certainly family courts and attorneys face in these cases. We are just so grateful for all the work that you’ve done and the commitment that you’ve had for 30-odd years doing this. I cannot wait to see what you do next. We’d love to have you back, as I said, after your article is published. We could also do some promotional pieces for your conference in the next eighteen months.
Thank you, really. It’s been an enormous pleasure to have this conversation. I was so looking forward to it. Thank you.
Important Links
- Joan Meier on LinkedIn
- Joan Meier on X
- National Family Violence Law Center
- George Washington University Law School
- Misinformation about Parental Alienation, Misleads Courts and Endangers Children
About Professor Joan Meier
Joan Meier is the National Family Violence Law Center Professor of Clinical Law and Director of the National Family Violence Law Center at the George Washington University Law School. Professor Meier has been a clinical law professor for 34 years at GW Law, where she founded three pioneering and nationally recognized interdisciplinary domestic violence clinical programs.
She has published widely on domestic violence, child custody, social science and law, clinical teaching, and various Supreme Court decisions. Her five-year empirical study, “Child Custody Outcomes in Cases Involving Parental Alienation and Abuse Allegations,” funded by the National Institute of Justice, was completed in 2019. Its findings have been written about in scholarship and multiple media outlets including The Washington Post and The New Yorker.
Professor Meier founded the Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project (DV LEAP) in 2003 to provide pro bono appeals in domestic violence cases. While at DV LEAP, she was the co-author of eleven amicus briefs and three party briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court. She also represented domestic violence organizations and survivors of domestic violence in state court appeals all over the country and in Washington, DC. Both while at DV LEAP and since, Professor Meier has provided hundreds of trainings for judges, psychologists, lawyers, domestic violence coalitions, and others on best practices in adjudication of domestic violence and family court litigation and on her empirical research.
In August 2019, Professor Meier stepped down from DV LEAP and launched the National Family Violence Law Center at GW Law. The NFVLC is the only national organization specializing in both domestic violence and child abuse; it focuses on improving court responses to such cases through professional curricula and trainings, amicus briefs, and policy consultation.
Professor Meier has received several awards, including among others, the American Professional Society on Abuse of Children (APSAC) David Chadwick Outstanding Professional Award for her family court research; the American Bar Association’s first ever Sharon L. Corbitt Award, which recognizes exceptional service and leadership in improving the legal response to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and/or stalking; and the Outstanding Leadership Award from Justice for Children. Professor Meier also received the Cahn Award from the National Equal Justice Library for her article on domestic violence and welfare reform.
She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1980, cum laude from the University of Chicago Law School in 1983, and clerked on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.