Most people know that in legal systems that derive
from the British common law, an accused person is held to be innocent until
proven guilty. The burden of proof is on the accuser and the prosecutor—the accused
person should not have to prove that he or she is innocent of wrongdoing, and
of course in many cases it would be impossible to prove that something does not
exist or did not happen.
It’s less well known that the idea of the burden of
proof also applies in scientific investigation. The assumption is always that
an effect (like the outcome of a psychological treatment, for instance) does not exist, and anyone who claims that it
does must provide strong evidence that it does. The burden of proof that “something
happened” is on the people who claim that it did. Others do not have the job of
proving that there is no effect of a treatment or other event, and once again,
as with the legal system, it can be impossible to show that there is no effect.
Unfortunately, rather than accepting and working on
the burden of proof that their treatments are safe and effective, proponents of
alternative psychotherapies all too often rely on “proof by assertion”. They
repeatedly state that their diagnoses are correct and meaningful, or that their
treatment methods are effective, and rely on this repetition to convince not
only people in general, but courts in particular. Proof by assertion does not
yield evidence that a diagnosis is correct or that a treatment has good
outcomes, but as the advertising industry knows, it can be hard to resist
repeated claims, especially for anyone who has good reason to want to believe
them. If those claims are obfuscated by reference to apparently scientific terms
or methods, so much the more likely that they will be convincing.
Proponents of parental alienation (PA) concepts and
methods have made rather a specialty of proof by assertion combined with
obfuscation. Consider the diagnostic methods that are used, first of all. These
range from “scales” created by Craig Childress for the rating of normal parent
and child behavior to the use of various more or less standardized tests (some
of these, like the MMPI, are quite standardized; others, like the Bricklin,
much less so). Tests for any behavioral or emotional disorder must be reliable
(that is, give about the same results every time), but they must also be valid. A valid test is one that tests
what it is claimed to test, and there must be evidence that a test does this
before it is used for decision-making. The whole point of a psychological test
is that it should be able to determine quickly information that would otherwise
be time-consuming and difficult to obtain. But unless such a test’s result is
highly correlated with the information obtained in the more difficult way, the
test cannot be considered valid.
To show that any test for PA is valid, it would be
necessary to demonstrate that the test gave the same results as would be obtained
by interviews and observations of a family in which a child was rejecting
contact with a parent. By definition, PA is present when a child rejects
contact with one parent, that rejected parent has not behaved abusively, AND
the preferred parent has worked to create alienation by manipulating and
exploiting the child’s thoughts and feelings. Thus, anyone who claims that a
psychological test or set of tests validly diagnose PA would have the burden of
proof of showing that the tests are highly correlated with information that includes
the three factors just mentioned—including observational evidence that the
preferred parent’s actions have created rejection that would not have occurred
otherwise. It is certainly true that there could be cases in which all three of
those factors are present, but we cannot assume that psychological tests are
valid measures of PA until someone systematically demonstrates that this is the
case. An adequate test of PA must be able to discriminate between child
rejection of a parent with and without the intervention of the preferred
parent, but none of the tests in use have been shown to do that. In reality,
the tests used to claim PA are “validated” against the opinion of one or more PA proponents rather than
against empirical evidence—in other words, not validated at all.
PA treatments (including Family Bridges, etc.) have
been claimed to be effective by their advocates, but as was the case with
diagnosis, no one has accepted the burden of proof and done the work needed to
demonstrate this. (Once again, this is the job of those claiming the effectiveness
of a treatment; it is not the job of others to show that it is not effective.)
Given the nature of the family situations and treatments, it is probably too
much to ask that PA treatment advocates do randomized controlled studies, but
it would be quite possible to do controlled clinical trials in which outcomes
for children receiving PA treatment are compared to outcomes for children of
similar characteristics who receive no treatment or some conventional form of
psychotherapy. The burden of proof is not carried unless there is a
well-defined, transparent standard of comparison presented. Published research
on PA treatments so far has compared children’s attitudes and behavior before
treatment to their own attitudes and behavior ; this is not adequate because there
is rapid developmental change in adolescence and because even low-conflict
families go through many changes following divorce, with or without psychological
treatment.
When attorneys and family court judges meet arguments
about PA diagnoses and treatments, they need to think about the right questions
to ask and to realize that the burden of proof on these topics is on those
making the claims, not on those who deny the claims.
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