Testimony to the Idaho Legislature, Part 2

My Rebuttal to “Criticisms” that Consist of Typical Tropes Used to Enable Family Court Violence

When I first became aware of Family Court atrocities, I wondered how it was possible that such widespread violence of such magnitude could be so understated, in either academic or activist circles. I soon learned that, since Family Courts and their ancillary “beneficiaries” are fiercely protecting illegitimate profits, they will pursue, persecute, and attempt to eliminate anyone with any potential to expose them. This includes trying to discredit and defame me. I was offered an opportunity to rebut a criticism of me presented to the Idaho legislature, which I did briefly in my letter, below, with more extensive annotations against the original letter, far below:

Dear Honorable Members of the 2025 Idaho Child Custody and Domestic Relations Task Force:

I have been most grateful for your responsiveness to the troubling and obviously pervasive pattern of rampant Family Court abuses, which have risen to the level of a national emergency.

Ordinarily, I do not respond directly to criticisms of my work or testimony, but I will do so in Dr. Y.A.’s case, not specifically but as illustrative of a deep-seated culture and pattern that mimics domestic violence and abuse, of which I have claimed Family Courts are an “industry”.

First, the defensiveness, the sheer length of argument, and the ad hominem attacks should reveal that it is not a typical scholarly response. The attempt to overwhelm the opposition with false information, to attack the credibility of messengers (namely, truth tellers), and to project one’s own behavior onto others is rather behavior commonly seen with abusers. Family Court defenders should know that gaslighting, coercion, intimidation, and diversionary tactics when their “optics” are threatened is not a valid way to do “science”.

I did not start out with Family Court reform. My area of expertise is general violence prevention, using a public health approach, and I have spent most of my career in criminal justice reform. I have authored over 100 scientific articles and chapters, in publications as prestigious as the Annals of the New York Academy of Science. I am a scholar, practitioner, and policy advisor — but above all an outraged human being. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that there is something very wrong in the Family Court world that shocks the conscience. I therefore speak directly to the human rights violations, child murders, loving parents’ suicides, and the coverup of what is essentially a child slave auction that is going on in the so-called “Family Courts.”

My personal glimpse into the practices, through my own sister’s divorce in Bergen County, New Jersey, was essential, because of the tightly-guarded secrecy of the Family Courts. If not, there would not have been a way for me to know: Family Courts use their insider knowledge to “fix” their cases and to create a semblance of following evidence, when bias, conflicts of interest, and incestuous selection of “experts” and the creation of nonexistent “science” is endemic practice. “Parental alienation syndrome” has been discredited repeatedly over four decades but continues to have a life of its own because of Family Court demand.

If I had to explain what “parental alienation” theory is, I would define it as a reinterpretation of existing, well-established science to assert the opposite. It serves the purpose of denying real child abuse and buttressing the perpetrator’s wishful thinking that he (or she) is the victim and not the offender. But this is criminal psychopathology, which should be treated as such and contained, not encouraged and “serviced”, as in Family Court, for up to 175 billion dollars in profit per year.

This is the reason I rely on death statistics. Family Courts aggressively guard their secrecy so that scientifically-rigorous outcome studies and investigative reporting are virtually impossible, but the sheer number of deaths that they produce, or the conditions ripe for murders and suicides that they coerce, make it obvious for anyone who cares to look.

I deliberately avoid using well-worn language, so that people can have a fresh look without the filters, but the data I am speaking to are from well-known, credible sources. I also wish to state that it is typical for Family Court proponents to attack the United Nations special rapporteur, the Center for Judicial Excellence, and the Leadership Council, but these are tremendous sources of excellent scholarship, admirable raw data collection against the odds, and a clearinghouse for existing scientific research, respectively. The reason why Justice USA started a comprehensive survey in all fifty U.S. states, and invited me to analyze the data, is because of the paucity of research that is available from the secretive Family Courts.

They also obstruct: the attacks against scholars, counter-reports to discredit influential reports, and generation of noise, presenting pseudoscience for obfuscation, is not science. It is much like the attacks against journalists that have occurred, such as Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca of New Jersey, who has also been written up in the Washington Post for ordering news outlets to “unpublish immediately” fact-checked articles that expose inconvenient truths.

I am disturbed that there is not just a cottage industry of poorly-trained “experts” favored by Family Courts, but now a seeming industry of so-called “scholars” who churn out publications but on close scrutiny do not hold up to scientific standards at all. For this, I would simply say: follow the money.

In summary, Family Courts have been enormously harmful to society, and I maintain that the corrupt culture it engenders is not conducive to reform from within, which has been tried for decades without success.

Respectfully submitted,

Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div.

—

Here is my more detailed rebuttal, in annotations:

To the honorable members of the 2025 Idaho Child Custody and Domestic Relations Task Force:

My name is Yaakov Aichenbaum. I have coauthored three scholarly works concerning misinformation about parental alienation and I have consulted and provided testimony on this topic in many states, the United States Mission to the UN Human Rights Council, the British House of Lords and more. I commend your committee’s charge to improve the family court system. It should be evident that meaningful change should only be based upon scientific and substantiated factual information and not upon unsubstantiated anecdotal accounts and emotional appeals that ignore solid science.

Unfortunately, many advocates in the domestic violence community (even those with robust credentials) have created a false narrative to promote legislative change and these advocates engage in a science denial campaign to advance their agenda. Likewise, some litigants whose cases were not decided in their favor assume the title of “protective parent” and place unjustified blame on the family court system.

Anecdotal claims and scholarly citations need to be vetted for their validity.

This esteemed committee heard the testimony of Ms. Bandy Lee at the June 7th hearing. Ms. Lee presented an extensive list of qualifications and accomplishments and she emotionally described her own personal experiences in family courts. Based upon similar representations in AZ, AZ Senator Finchem expressed his approval of her testimony and granted Ms. Lee a considerable extended time when she similarly testified at the AZ hearing. However, if we scrutinize Ms. Lee’s testimony, we will see that her testimony contained considerable misinformation and disinformation. In fact, Ms. Lee is very much part of the aforementioned science denial campaign.

First, it should be noted that even though Ms. Lee certainly has considerable experience with domestic violence victims, her accomplishments do not indicate that she has knowledge or qualifications to render scientific opinions about shared parenting research, parental alienation, and parent child conflict issues. In fact, the questionable sources she cites indicate that she is not proficient in these issues.

Nevertheless, she (like Senator Finchem) declared that parental alienation is a pseudoscience that has been rejected by the scientific community. Lee fails to mention that:

· The 2022 American Psychological Association’s Guidelines for Custody Evaluations in Family Law Proceedings (https://www.apa.org/about/policy/child-custody-evaluations.pdf) mentions over 20 times the importance of addressing alienation. It also mentions the importance of input from experts from diverse areas of specialties and the importance of differentiating between valid and false allegations of all types.

· Kaplan and Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, Tenth Edition, discusses parental alienation as a form of child maltreatment on page 3829.

· The AFCC and NCJFCJ issued a Joint Statement on Parent-Child Contact Problems in 2022 which says that parental alienation and false allegations are factors that should be taken into consideration in custody decisions (https://www.afccnet.org/Resource-Center/Center-for-

Excellence-in-Family-Court-Practice/afcc-and-ncjfcj-joint-statement-on-parent-child-contact- problems).

·

Authors of the DSM-5 chapter on “Other Conditions” explain that prenatal alienation is included in the DSM-5 under the diagnosis of Child Affected by Parental Relationship Distress (code V61.29). (https://www.jaacap.org/article/S0890-8567(16)30175-7/fulltext)

· A study found that the concept of PA was found to be material, probative, relevant and admissible in at least 1181 US appellate court cases between 1985 and 2018 (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-3...).

Certain domestic violence advocates have engaged in a science denial campaign to discredit parental alienation science. They claim that parental alienation is a deception that abusive fathers use to deflect domestic violence allegations. They call parental alienation junk science. Kayden’s Law was written with this intent and it is designed to prevent any possibility of parental alienation claims being admissible in court. Unfortunately, people sometimes make false allegations of alienation just like they sometimes make false allegations of domestic violence. Instead of collaborating to address all forms of abuse and developing protocols to identify false allegations of all kinds, certain domestic violence advocates have chosen to try to discredit the whole science of alienation. Regrettably, as the science of alienation has developed, the science denial tactics of these critics have increased.

Kayden’s Law is being promoted by advocates who have a long history of denying established science and misleading policymakers. They will no doubt tell you about a study from George Washington University and other “research” that shows that parental alienation is pseudoscience and is misused in court. They will not, however, share with you the weakness and/or outright fraud of these studies. This is documented in The Illusory Correlation Between Parental Alienation and Other Forms of Family Violence (Varavei & Harman, 2024. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijsw.12692).

I was part of an international team of researchers and clinicians that wrote three books which expose the vast misinformation and public policy deception that is espoused by many of the stakeholders who are promoting Kayden’s Law across the country, including Idaho. To date, the perpetrators of this misinformation have offered no rebuttal other than more ad hominem attacks and further science denial tactics. The books are available at:

· Child Safety First Report: https://bit.ly/3t5VuYx (Lee referenced this study from the Center for Judicial Excellence in her testimony)

· Challenging Parental Alienation: https://bit.ly/3NnYMgp

· Report of UN Special Rapporteur on parental alienation: https://bit.ly/3GHbgMG

Ms. Lee mentioned the Report of UN Special Rapporteur on parental alienation in her testimony. However, she failed to mention that this report is not the official policy of the UN Human Rights Council; rather, it was an unscientific report that was presented to the HRC and was subsequently critiqued for its many flaws at the link above.

Ms. Lee’s testimony was more benign in her Idaho testimony than in other states. In AZ she also accused the AFCC (the most prestigious US organization of judges, attorneys, mental health providers and more)

of being in collusion to highjack the family court system for monetary benefits. This science denial tactic conspiracy theory is preposterous and an afront to the many dedicated judges and other professionals who work in this very difficult field.

In AZ, Ms. Lee related that she is almost always excluded from providing testimony in family courts (see https://bandyxlee.medium.com/testimony-to-the-arizona-senate-de6013ea7be2 ). She opines the reason for this is the corruption of the family courts and their intransigence to permit Ms. Lee to expose this corruption. Ms. Lee does not entertain the possibility that her testimony is excluded because she lacks the necessary credentials to be an expert witness on areas of parental alienation, child custody and shared parenting and that she is outspoken in her misinformation as we will shortly see.

In Idaho, Lee cited various dubius studies and far-fetched facts:

Lee stated that if child abuse is alleged or suspected, custody is transferred, sometimes immediately, to the abuser (Silberg and Dallam, 2019). According to some studies, this happens up to three-quarters of the time (Leadership Council, 2023), but in my experience it has happened 98 percent of the time.

Silberg’s study is a very weak and controversial study. The Leadership Council is an advocacy group and does not conduct peer reviewed research that is reliable. It is also preposterous to think that when there is a concern of child abuse that in 98% of cases custody is transferred to the abuser.

Lee also cites Project Justice USA, which is a grassroots advocacy group that conducted an unscientific survey that is fraught with many biases, contradictions, and unscientific practices.

In other states Lee testified that:

A vast majority of contested custody cases are actually domestic violence cases involving the most dangerous individuals.

FACTCHECK: This is widely claimed by the DV community, but I know of no source for the claim. Advocate (and author of Kayden’s Law) Danielle Pollack frequently quotes this in her testimony from {(Jaffe, P., Zerwer & Poisson, Access Denied: The Barriers of Violence & Poverty for Abused Women and their Children After Separation (citing four studies, all of which found 70–75% of cases in litigation involved allegations of domestic violence)}, but this source does not mention this at all!

· Many fathers involved in contested custody cases kill their children, such that almost 20% of the nation’s child murders by parent have been the result of placement by the family courts (Center for Judicial Excellence, 2022).

FACTCHECK: The data from the Center for Judicial Excellence was not computed in a scientific manner. It has been greatly criticized in Child Safety First Report: https://bit.ly/3t5VuYx. This statement also demonstrates the logical fallacy known as baseline neglect.

· More than 58,000 children a year are ordered into unsupervised custody by their physical or sexual abuser following divorce in the United States (Silberg, 2008).

FACTCHECK: This figure was not based upon any empirical research. It was released by Silberg in a press release and has no factual basis. Its flaws are discussed in Child Safety First Report: https://bit.ly/3t5VuYx.

· In a disproportionate number of cases, the “protective parent” — usually the primary attachment figure for the children — loses custody.

FACTCHECK: This is based upon a study by advocate Joan Meier. This study has been widely criticized for research fraud and has failed replication at least three times.

A careful reading will demonstrate that Ms. Lee’s testimony (like that of many other advocates in the domestic violence community are presenting to legislatures) is fraught with science denial tactics such as attributing nefarious intent, conspiracy theories, slippery slope arguments, logical fallacies and more. I urge this committee to carefully scrutinize advocates like Ms. Lee and not take their word as gospel just because they have impressive credentials.

Family courts do need reform, better evidence-based practices and training. In our rush to improve the system, we must nevertheless be careful not to take rash and unjustified actions that accepts science denial tactics and lets emotional appeals override fact checking. Without careful deliberation and consideration of all expert opinions, Idaho children will be harmed in our efforts to protect them.

Yours,

Yaakov Aichenbaum Baltimore, MD

info@childsafetyfirstreport.com

https://www.childsafetyfirstreport.com/

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