RULING BY SPOTSYLVANIA JUDGE IN SYNC WITH 6-YEAR-OLD VIRGINIA SUPREME COURT STUDY: J&DR judge rejects connection between spouse abuse and child abuse

"... 'I don't have to believe, sir, that you are a horrible person who abuses your child because you have a history in which you were found by a court to be guilty of assaulting your then-wife. I don't think that, necessarily, makes you a bad person for all practical purposes,' [Judge Joseph] Ellis told [Tina Wilson's] ex-husband, according to a transcript of the hearing ..."

Theory issue in custody dispute
The merits of parental alienation syndrome are disputed among groups

BY KIRAN KRISHNAMURTHY
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Sunday, November 12, 2006

SPOTSYLVANIA -- Tina Wilson says she was following an attorney's advice when she took her daughter to a domestic-violence shelter on Father's Day.
She was desperate. A judge had granted sole custody to her former husband, who had been convicted of assaulting Wilson six years earlier and who is now the subject of physical- and sexual-abuse allegations leveled by their 9-year-old daughter.
Wilson says her daughter kicked, begged and screamed not to go back to her father, who had accused Wilson of alienating him from the girl. "Your dad can't come in here,'" Wilson said she assured the girl at the shelter.
But authorities located Wilson and her daughter at the Williamsburg-area shelter. A police officer took away the girl, who was returned to her father. Wilson alleges that a social worker violated policies for protecting those who seek refuge at a shelter, but testimony during a subsequent court hearing also suggests the possibility of miscommunication.
Wilson, 47, appeared in a Spotsylvania County courtroom a few days later to explain the violation of the visitation agreement.
"My daughter had disclosed to me that her father had threatened her life and my life," she told Circuit Judge Ernest P. Gates, a retired judge from Chesterfield County who was appointed to hear the case after Wilson had appealed the custody ruling from Spotsylvania Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court.
The judge said he did not want to decide final custody until the girl had been evaluated by a psychologist, preferably one agreed to by both parents. At the same time, he restricted Wilson to supervised visitation with the girl, saying she had violated the standing court order.
A hearing for the case is scheduled for Wednesday.
The Times-Dispatch is not naming the father to protect the girl's identity. He has denied the allegations and has not responded to repeated calls from The Times-Dispatch. Wilson has changed her last name.
Wilson says that in her fight to regain custody of her daughter, she has discovered she is confronting a controversial psychological theory known as parental alienation syndrome. The term was devised by a psychiatrist who also has expressed controversial views on pedophilia. The theory has not been formally adopted by the medical establishment.
Parental alienation syndrome, or PAS, holds a parent responsible for brainwashing a child into becoming indifferent or hostile to the other parent and, sometimes, manufacturing abuse allegations. Parental alienation also is at issue in a separate Hanover County case that a mother has appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, Wilson said she has filed a formal complaint with Virginia's Judicial Inquiry and Review Commission against Joseph J. Ellis, presiding judge of Spotsylvania Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court. Ellis had awarded custody to the father in 2005, saying the allegations of sexual abuse were not "particularly credible."
"People need to know this is the outcome they could face if they try to protect their child from an abusive parent," she said. "I've had to be educated the hard way."
. . .
Critics of parental alienation syndrome note that the psychiatrist who coined the term, Dr. Richard A. Gardner, also wrote that pedophilia serves procreative purposes, that children exhibit flirtatious characteristics, and that children seek affection and therefore aren't necessarily psychologically traumatized by a sexual encounter with an adult who expresses tenderness.
Gardner committed suicide in 2003 by stabbing himself multiple times, according to news accounts.
Eileen King, a spokeswoman for Houston-based Justice for Children, calls PAS a "pseudoscientific theory" that some lawyers use to divert judges' attention away from abuse allegations. King also says judges often are seeking to reach a compromise between two battling parents and that PAS is a ready explanation for judges trying to determine why the parent alleging abuse is so intractable.
"Alienation is a way to explain that other parent's difficultness," she said, referring to a parent who support a child's allegations. "They're automatically the unfriendly parent, and that puts them on the wrong side of where the judge wants them to be."
King, who leads the organization's East Coast office in Washington, says PAS has been an issue in as many as 90 percent of the 250-plus cases she has handled in the past five years.
On the other side, advocates for parents alleging they have been alienated say manipulative parents will go to extreme lengths to hurt a former spouse, including making false abuse allegations.
Judi Smith-Phelps, a board member of Minneapolis-based Fathers 4 Justice US, says mothers most often employ alienation tactics. She dismisses the founder of PAS but cites a study that compared alienating parents with cult leaders.
"These women who exhibit these [parental alienation] characteristics are so bent on destroying their ex," she said. "These people are cruel and calculating. . . . They'll coach their children to say anything."
In the Hanover case, Virginia's appeals court in July sided with a lower-court ruling granting sole custody to a father after the mother reported suspected sex-abuse allegations that were later determined to be unfounded. The mother's appeal claims that she was penalized for reporting suspected abuse. The appeals court said she lost custody not for reporting the allegations, but for persisting after claims were deemed unfounded.
Cullen Seltzer, an attorney for the Hanover mother, argues that parents should not be penalized for acting in their children's best interests. He also contends the state's high court needs to clarify a provision in state law that permits a judge to consider whether a parent supports a child's contact and relationship with the other parent in custody matters.
The Supreme Court has not decided whether to hear the appeal.
. . .
Wilson, who has moved from Spotsylvania to the Richmond area, says her ordeal began after her daughter, then 7, told a therapist in January 2005 that she had been physically abused. Wilson said her daughter had been acting aggressively, wetting the bed and having night terrors.
Wilson and one of her attorneys say Spotsylvania social services officials failed to properly investigate the girl's claim.
The department's primary investigator in the case later testified that the girl at one point recanted the physical-abuse allegation, but not the sex abuse claim; that she did not review with the girl a drawing the child had made depicting the alleged sexual abuse; that she never visited the father's house to confirm whether the computer room where the girl claimed to be molested actually existed; and that she had not referred the girl for a medical examination to help determine whether the girl had been molested because she did not want to traumatize the child.
"They added two and two together and got three. It's inexplicable," said Richard Ducote, a renowned lawyer for battered women, particularly mothers involved in child custody matters. He is one of Wilson's attorneys.
The investigator also testified she was not aware of Gardner's opinions on pedophilia but that she agrees with and uses in her work the concept of parental alienation syndrome. Repeated efforts to reach her were unsuccessful.
During an April 2005 court hearing, the juvenile court judge, Ellis, told Wilson and the father that he did not know whom to believe. The judge placed their daughter in foster care.
"They snatched my child from under me like it was Nazi Germany," Wilson said.
Wilson acknowledges her daughter did not make additional allegations of abuse during the few months she was in foster care. But, in Wilson's view, the child stopped talking about abuse in hopes of being returned to her mother. Ellis later said in court that the child had "flowered" when removed from both of her parents.
In June 2005, Ellis awarded sole legal custody to the father and ordered supervised visitation for Wilson. The judge said Wilson had exercised "the nuclear option" by alleging sexual abuse, and that he didn't find any of the abuse allegations "particularly credible." In awarding custody to the father, Ellis cited the girl's "deteriorating condition," Wilson's move to the Richmond area, her new job and her allegations of sexual abuse against the father.
Wilson says she was stunned by some of the judge's words.
"I don't have to believe, sir, that you are a horrible person who abuses your child because you have a history in which you were found by a court to be guilty of assaulting your then-wife. I don't think that, necessarily, makes you a bad person for all practical purposes," Ellis told her ex-husband, according to a transcript of the hearing.
Then he turned to Wilson. "Which is not to say that you're lying. Because I believe you believe it. . . . You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. If you don't report him, you are a crummy mother. If you do report him and you persist in reporting and seek different people who will report him on your behalf or the child's behalf, then you're looking for an answer consistent with what you believe to be true. And I don't think that's, necessarily, bad. It might be ill-advised."
In her complaint to the state's judicial commission, Wilson wrote that Ellis had violated her due-process rights.
The commission does not publicly confirm or otherwise acknowledge receipt of specific complaints, until and unless the commission files a formal complaint against a judge in the Virginia Supreme Court or reports information to the General Assembly when legislators are considering a judge for re-election.
Ellis did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment on the complaint, Wilson's case or his general views of parental alienation syndrome. Ducote, one of Wilson's lawyers, said he is restricted from discussing whether Wilson filed a complaint.
. . .
Wilson appealed Ellis' custody ruling to Spotsylvania Circuit Court, where Gates is presiding over the case.
During the hearing after the shelter episode, a psychologist who reviewed the case for Wilson testified that the girl had spoken of both physical and sexual violence. "I feel like she's in a hostage situation," the psychologist, Joyanna Silberg, testified.
Gates, who had ordered an evaluation when Wilson appealed the case from the juvenile court, asked Silberg whether it would be productive to interview the girl while she was still living with her father. Silberg said the girl might feel threatened and not be forthcoming while her father still had custody or visitation rights.
"Every time she has tried to disclose, ultimately it has resulted in her losing her mother," Silberg said.
At the same hearing, the father testified that he had never hit or threatened his daughter and that the allegations of sexual abuse are unfounded. "She manufactures these allegations to get her way," he said of Wilson.
The father's attorney, J. Bruce Strickland, emphasizes that both judges have sided with the father so far in terms of custody. "That says something," he said in an interview. He added that he was speaking on behalf of his client, who did not return repeated calls.
Strickland, who raised PAS as an issue in court, said he has not done extensive research on the subject but that he frequently sees parents driving wedges in custody disputes. "The premise makes sense," he said, adding that he could not speak to the founder's views on pedophilia.
Meanwhile, lawyers for both sides have yet to agree on who will evaluate the girl.
No one involved in the case doubts the girl is suffering. The question is how -- from physical abuse, sexual abuse, being caught in the middle, or some combination -- and at whose hands.
"This child is being exposed to something horrific," a visibly distressed Gates said in court. "It's just about beyond my comprehension."

Contact staff writer Kiran Krishnamurthy at:
kkrishnamurthy@timesdispatch.com or (540) 371-4792.

This story can be found at:
http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=RTD/MGArticle/RTD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1149191651357

Veronique Wyvell, RN
Member, Fairfax County Network Against Family Abuse
Founder, MOMMY GO BYE-BYE: Mothers Against Unjust Law
7831 Enola Street, #TA7, McLean, Virginia 22102
VWyvell@patriot.net

MAUL (Mothers Against Unjust Law) Goals:
Rebuttable PRESUMPTIONS Against Custody for Batterers
PPAs (Parenting Plan Agreements) before Litigation
Moratorium on CCEs (Child Custody Evaluations)
MINIMUM Parent-Time Schedules (UTAH Code)
JURY Trials (in Domestic Relations Cases)
PROTECTIVE Parent Reform Acts
DIGITAL Courtroom Records
ALI's Approximation Rule
TERM LIMITS for Judges