Oversimplified beliefs about child abuse allegations in custody cases with alienation rebuttals – review of empirical data

Abstract

This article is a companion piece to a prior article that analyzed the implications of oversimplified beliefs about alienation. Those beliefs support excessive skepticism about child abuse (CA) allegations in custody cases (Milchman, 2022a). Alienation refers to a child’s unjustified rejection of one parent and alliance with the other (Bernet, 2010). Responsible theoreticians recognize that there are many legitimate reasons a child might reject a parent (Drozd et al., 2013). However, alienation rebuttals of children’s abuse allegations in custody cases claim that the preferred parent has manipulated the child to make a false allegation. The plausibility of this argument rests on accepting untested assumptions about CA allegations in custody cases. This article empirically tests three assumptions: (1) CA and child sexual abuse (CSA) allegations are common in custody cases, (2) typically false, and (3) malicious. The empirical findings reviewed here address the frequency of these allegations in custody cases; child protective services (CPS) substantiation rates; judicial decisions; children’s disclosure patterns (prior disclosures, non-disclosures, delayed disclosures, and recanted disclosures); residual suspicions of unsubstantiated abuse; and deliberately false allegations. Results show that support for the assumptions about CA that underlie alienation rebuttals consists of small-to-moderate differences between custody and non-custody cases. On their own, these findings could indicate that custody cases are somewhat more likely to have false CA allegations. However, other empirical findings undermine support for that interpretation.

Keywords:

• Alienation
• child abuse
• custody
• empirical data

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 “Disbelieved cases” affirmatively rejected the CSA allegations. They are not unsubstantiated cases.

2 Parents were counted separately for each type of relationship they had with other abusers.

3 Pipe et al. (2007) report the statistic as 71% disclosed within the month. The non-disclosure rate is the inverse of the disclosure rate.

4 Bala and Schuman (1999) and Bala et al. (2007) cite this as 35%, based on 61/196 cases, which is 31%, Bala agreed to the correction in a personal communication, 2/20/22.