See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

by Jess Hill

Gardner invented parental alienation syndrome in the mid-1980s, when society was reeling over what seemed like a sudden epidemic of child sexual abuse. In just ten years, reports of child sexual abuse had risen eighteen-fold.#24 What made the logic behind PAS especially incoherent was the fact that while Gardner claimed that 90 per cent of sexual abuse allegations in custody cases were false, he also claimed that adult–child sexual relations were ‘ubiquitous’.25 In his view, however, sex between adults and children was not problematic: the problem was the way society reacted to it. In his 1992 book True and False Allegations of Child Sex Abuse,26 Gardner condemned what he called ‘sex-abuse hysteria’, and outlined his staunch opposition to society’s ‘overly moralistic’ and punitive approach to paedophilia: ‘It is because our society overreacts to it that children suffer.’27 Gardner also advised therapists treating child sexual-abuse victims to work with the whole family to help older children ‘appreciate that sexual encounters between an adult and a child are not universally considered to be reprehensible acts’.28 As for any mother raising the abuse in court to stop contact between a father and a child, she should also be helped to appreciate that such child–adult sexual encounters are common.29 The father, on the other hand, should be reassured that ‘there is a certain amount of paedophilia in all of us’; however, in these modern, puritanical times, he must ‘learn to contr...