In a webinar (“Parental Alienating Behaviors and Coercive Control: The One and the Same” [sic]) sponsored by the “family access” organization on Nov. 21, Jennifer Harman, the parental alienation proponent, named a number of critics as Science Deniers (her caps). I was one of those who received this label, among whom were Bob Geffner, Joan Meier, Madelyn Milchman, Linda Neilson, and Joy Silberg.
The statement that we are Science Deniers, as she puts
it (with initial caps), is yet one more example of the “reversing” pattern of
addressing criticism so characteristic of parental alienation proponents. Like
abusers, who respond to accusations with DARVO tactics (deny, attack, reverse
victim and offender), the PA group has come to the point of using criticisms
they receive as allegations against their critics. You say they don’t
understand demand characteristics, they respond that YOU don’t understand
demand characteristics. You refer to PA ideas as a belief system, PA proponents
refer to your positions as a belief system (Harman actually did this). This
reversal is reminiscent of the playground response, “I’m rubber, you’re glue,
what you say bounces off me and sticks to you”, or to the kid-witty rejoinder
“I know you are, but what am I?”.
The Science
Deniers label is presumably a “reversal” response to the many published and
presented criticisms of research work otherwise claimed to support the parental
alienation belief system. For a number of years, critics of PA have been
pointing out that there is no established way to identify (much less quantify)
parental alienation, and that as a result there is no way to compare children’s
attitudes before and after a PA intervention like Family Bridges or Turning
Points. In addition, when PA proponents have attempted outcome research on the
effects of their intervention programs, they have always used designs yielding
low levels of evidence, so that their conclusions cannot be given the weight
that is assigned to evidence-based treatments like Coping Cat or PCIT.
Nevertheless, Harman and other PA proponents have
continued to claim that PA interventions and evaluations meet the Daubert or
Frye standards for admissibility of
scientific evidence. As critics contradict this claim, PA proponents like
Harman do not argue point by point why their work is adequate, nor do they
address the specific criticisms supplied, or attempt to design research that
meets higher standards. On the contrary, they simply re-assert that their work
is “scientific”, and like Harman a few days ago, declare that anyone who is
critical is therefore a Science Denier ( and to be classed with people who do
not accept the reality of global warming). Thus, they seem to state, they are
rubber and we are glue, and our criticisms of research failings prove that we
refuse to take a scientific stance on PA issues.
It seems to me that there is no problem here of anyone
“denying science”. The problem is that Harman and her colleagues are Science Claimers.
They assert that their views “are science” and therefore anyone who rejects
those views is “denying science”.
Harman, as a Science Claimer, said not a word about
the nature of the scientific enterprise, about research design, or about any of
the reasons why PA evaluation or outcome research should or should not be
regarded as meeting scientific criteria. She did not for a moment address the
criticisms of PA work that have been widely discussed by psychologist, psychiatrists,
social workers, lawyers, and judges. Instead, she spent much of the
presentation instructing her audience about professional journals and wowing
them with how complicated it is to publish in a peer-reviewed journal. She
introduced and contrasted peer-reviewed scientific journals and scholarly
journals, asserting that she and other PA proponents have published scientific
work in highly-rated journals, and comparing impact factors and other metrics
in a way that was probably of little interest to her audience (but did sound
important.)
Harman spoke with pride (as indeed she deserves to do)
of publishing an article in Psychological Bulletin, a major professional
journal with a high impact factor. She denigrated critiques of that article on
the grounds that they were late and were published in less prestigious
journals. She did not, however, note that her article was not “scientific” in
the usual sense, in that it did not report or analyze any new empirical data. Harman’s
article was a review or commentary article, discussing other people’s empirical
work, just as were the published critiques of the Psychological Bulletin paper.
Harman also failed to address any of the criticisms of her article’s claims and
conclusions. For example, rather than discussing the criticism that her
comparison of parental alienating behaviors to family violence should be considered
an analogy, she stated firmly that in her “scientific opinion” the equation of
the two was a correct and real one rather than a matter of reasoning by
analogy. The two terms, she said, meant the same thing, had the same referent. She
equally firmly restated her conviction that abused children protect and do not
reject their abusive parents, a common assertion of PA proponents but one that
has been critiqued and should be discussed in all its complexity and
implications. Although there are both empirical and logical factors that Harman
should have addressed if she wanted to support the PA belief system as
scientists do, she failed to speak to any such points. She simply acted as a
Science Claimer.
Of course, I am using the term Science Claimer only to
mirror the term Science Denier. There is already a perfectly good word to
describe the act of saying that one has scientific evidence for a position when
there is in fact no adequate evidence. This is called pseudoscience.
Identifying a set of claims as pseudoscience is not denying science, but
clarifying the difference between an evidence-based position and one that is
largely speculative but is asserted to be otherwise.
