Parental Alienation should not be rewarded

Original Article: NJ Family Law Bolg ..........http://njfamilymotions.typepad.com/

V.U. vs L.U. (2006) Unpublished NJ Appellate decision

Parental alienation should not be rewarded, but that’s not the decision in today’s unpublished appellate opinion in V.U. v. L.U., A-5395-04T5 (App. Div. Sept. 22, 2006). In this case, the trial judge rejected the opinion of the court's expert psychologist and instead relying on the judge’s own interviews with the children, awarded custody of two of the children to the mother who had repeatedly disregarded the court’s orders and sought to alienate the children from their father. In recognition of this, the judge awarded the father $5000 in compensatory damages and $20,000 in punitive damages for the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress due to the alienation activities the mother engaged in.

Not only is the delay between the start of the divorce trial on January 26, 2004 and the issuing of the trial Judge’s opinion on May 4, 2005 troubling where custody is a major issue, but in a parental alienation case, the weight given by a Judge to interviews with children raises some concern.

According to the limited excerpts contained in the appellate opinion, the trial judge rejected the opinion of Dr Rabinowitz, the court’s expert psychologist who recommended that custody be transferred to the father. Instead the trial judge decided to interview the children a second time, using the psychologists concern at the unreliability of child interviews as justification:

I fully recognize Dr. Rabinowitz’s concern that because of the [defendant’s] alienation of the children, that these children cannot be considered “valid reporters concerning their feelings about their fathers, their feelings about their mother, past behavior, and past life events.” [] For this reason, I decided to interview all of the children a second time in an effort to truly determine whether the children are well-adjusted and happy.
In awarding custody of the parties’ two daughters to the mother based on his determination of what was in the best interests of the children, the trial judge to some extent relied on these interviews as another of the excerpts in the appellate opinion states:

I am also influenced by the children telling me that [the mother] does not attempt to control their decision about spending time with the [the father].
Additionally by the time the Judge interviewed the children they were settled at school and he found that they were” thriving and doing very well.”

According to psychologist Dr. Jonathan Gould, in parental alienation syndrome ‘[e]ventually, the child adopts the malicious, intolerant, rejecting attitude of the alienating parent toward the target parent, resulting in a belief system in which the child views the target parent with hatred and fear.” Gould states, “time is the alienating parent’s most powerful ally.”

Relying on the present circumstances of the children as elicited during the second interview is fundamentally flawed. To me, this is analogous to the child abduction case where a parent abducts the child to another country and by the time an action is brought to return the child, the child is now settled and assimilated in their new living arrangements and beliefs with the abducting parent. In the face of an illegal abduction, a court acting under the Hague Convention would have no compulsion in sending a child back even if they had developed new ties during the time they were illegally abducted. The maxim is clear under these circumstances that illegal behavior should not be rewarded.

In this case, the appellate division affirmed the trial judge’s decision, firstly based on the fact that a family part judge “is not obligated to accept the testimony of an expert witness.” State v. M.J.K, 369 N.J. Super. 532, 549 (2004). Secondly, in deference to the fact that “the judge interviewed each child twice in order to assess what was in the best interests of the children.” Unfortunately there is no discussion of the reliability of testimony from children who have been subject to parental alienation when there is substantial credible evidence from the court’s expert psychologist raising concerns about it.

One of the maxim’s often seen in appellate opinions is the notion that ‘[w]e must not lose sight of the broad equitable powers of the Family Part to accomplish substantial justice.” Weitzman v Weitzman, 228 N.J. Super. 346, 358 (App. Div. 1988). It’s questionable from the father’s perspective whether that occurred here. Parental alienation should not be rewarded.

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Posted on September 22, 2006 in Custody, Divorce, Parenting Time | Permalink | TrackBack (0)