Getting Real About Abuse and Alienation: A Critique of Drozd and Olesen's Decision Tree

Abstract

Specialists in abuse and alienation have long taken opposing positions on the legitimacy of the concept of alienation in custody cases where abuse is alleged. One increasingly popular response that appears to carve a middle path is the acknowledgement that both alienation and abuse may co-exist, and a focus on “hybrid” cases, that is, those in which there are cross-allegations of abuse and alienation. This article discusses and critiques, from the perspective of an expert on abuse, one of the earliest and most significant approaches to the hybrid case: Drozd and Olesen's “Decision Tree.” The author concludes that, while the decision tree is a thoughtful and well-intentioned effort to objectively and fairly assess abuse and alienation as well as other potential causes of a damaged child-parent relationship, the “hybrid” approach and some of the Tree's concepts, such as “counter-productive protective parent,” implicitly privilege alienation over abuse, and unintentionally, but inevitably, contribute to the marginalizing or hiding of credible abuse and risk to children. Johnston's credible empirical research demonstrates that child alienation occurs in only a small fraction of cases where parents engage in alienating behavior and is almost always caused, at least in part, by the disfavored parent's behaviors. Alienation, however, has been widely used to defeat legitimate and credible abuse concerns. The article concludes that alienation has been vastly over-emphasized in family courts and in the literature, in part because it furthers family courts' desire to maximize fathers' role in separating families. The article ends with an alternative and simpler 7-step proposal for assessment of alienation in “hybrid” cases, which is premised on the assumption that “true” alienation must be de-linked from the presence of abuse allegations and can only legitimately be evaluated after abuse has been screened out.

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