Forensic Psychology For Dummies (105 page)

An active programme of one parent influencing the child’s opinion.

The generation of strong negative opinions by the child in the dispute.

Assessment of the existence of this syndrome is based on evaluating the child’s behaviour across the following areas:

Negative acts or statements towards the victimised parent.

Criticisms based on absurd generalisations.

Polarised emotions towards the parents.

Claims that the reactions are the child’s own ideas.

Total loyalty to the parent carrying out the disparagement.

No remorse for cruelty towards the victimised parent.

Imagined or rehearsed scenarios.

Extension of negative emotions to those associated with the victimised parent.

A central difficulty in accepting the existence of parental alienation syndrome in any particular case is that, although it claims to be a comment on the child’s state of mind, it’s really a way of indicating that the alienating parent is doing something pathological, that is, ‘brainwashing’ the child. As a consequence it’s highly suspect. It has not found its way into any of the diagnostic lists that I described in Chapter 10, such as DSM. Even though many experts have challenged whether this really is a scientifically valid syndrome, parental alienation syndrome has found its way into civil proceedings as a way of challenging children’s claims of physical or sexual abuse.

Premenstrual stress syndrome

Many syndromes that courts accept relate directly to women’s actions, often to help juries understand the apparently surprising behaviour of female victims (such as in the behaviour of abused wives that I describe in the earlier section ‘Battered woman syndrome’).

These women-behaviour-based syndromes generate lively debate as to whether they’re forms of misogyny in disguise and/or not really established medical conditions.

One such syndrome is premenstrual stress (PMS), (sometimes called Premenstrual Tension or PMT) in which women at a particular stage of the menstrual cycle may be more emotionally vulnerable and suffer a mixture of physical and psychological deficits. PMS has been accepted as a form of temporary insanity in a number of jurisdictions and also used as a defence in violent assaults (and even a few murder cases).

Although some evidence exists for monthly mood swings in males, this can’t be related so directly to major physiological changes. As a result, women have access to a legal defence that’s unavailable to men. Therefore, one of the basic tenets of the law, that all are equal before it, isn’t followed through by the acceptance of this defence.