The Blogs: One Small Devious and Dangerous Bill

Let me begin with a story. About two decades ago I had the privilege of participating in a conference sponsored by The Van Leer Institute, The Baerwald School of Social Work of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Department of Social Services of the State of Israel. Sounds legit, no?

The Topic was child custody in high tension divorce. Sounds serious, no?

The conference featured none other than Judith Wallerstein, at the time the uncontested world expert in children of divorce. Both serious & legit, no?

I gave an opening introductory talk and then enjoyed her state-of-the-art presentations. Good enough.

The next day there was a more clinical, less formal meeting with Judy and the Welfare Officers responsible for child welfare in divorce cases (“pekidai saad lesidrei din”). It is a well-known sport in Israel to present to American experts cases that are impossible. The case presented was one of a boy who refused to visit a father whom he barely knew and trusted less, unpleasant abusive visitations. Judy asked the presenter why on earth were they so intent on forcing the visitations. The presenter explained that “the research” proves that children of divorce must see both parents. Judy asked, “What research?”. The reply was, “Yours.”

Nonplussed, Judy explained that her own substantial research had shown something quite different: that if the child has a good relationship with the noncustodial parent, the courts should help support a continued relationship despite divorce. (Once courts had forced sole custody even if the divorced parents and the children all had good relationships). But, she added, what research supports forcing a child into aversive visitations with an untrusted and perhaps abusive parent?

The answer, “Yours.”

Judy thought maybe there was a language problem, spoke more simply and less academically and repeated her point and her question. Just before the break she received the reply, “It is the research, your research, that proves that such a boy must see his father at all costs.”

Over lunch I suggested to Judy that more than a language problem was amiss. She was aghast, asking if anyone there had read her work and how could they misconstrue it so completely. From experience, I suggested that reading research in English was not the forte of these social workers, but there was a bias afloat in the department. Something about boys seeing all fathers, any fathers, even abusive fathers for the sake of their own welfare. Judy said, “No problem, I can address this misunderstanding.” But even she could not. The next session was spent with the social workers complaining that Judy was simply not helping them to find the “tools” to get the boy back to his father, and her approach was unacceptable, according the research, her research. Franz Kafka would have appreciated the dialogue.

The bias I had mentioned turned out, I discovered over the years, was the work of the infamous Richard Gardner, MD, who had produced a sensation in the USA that was imported to Israel. He had claimed that in his vast experience no child would ever refuse visitation with a parent unless he was being alienated by the other parent. Gardner even tried to sell a new diagnosis, The Parental Alienation Syndrome and of course since most refusals are towards father, the “syndrome” had a clear anti-woman bias. He even claimed that if a child refused based on sexual abuse, it was always the mother’s machination, and such a child should not be examined because he was brainwashed. (There were and will always be such situations which need to be identified. Gardnerians claim [actually scream] that only they can recognize this. This is nonsense, professionals have always considered the possibility, why wouldn’t they. And they sometimes err. How could they not? Hardly a justification for Gardner’s extreme claims.) Speaking of brain-washing, the proposed “treatment” was to immediately give custody to the father (in most cases) and re-brain-wash the child and the mother. Some professionals saw a goldmine here and proclaimed themselves “Parental Alienation Experts” to be appointed by the court to “discover” what they considered the only possible reason for the child’s refusal.

In America it ended badly. As best I can reconstruct Gardner was indicted and convicted of fraud because his “vast experience” was nil. While serving time some of the boy patients of this would-be celebrity child psychiatrist accused him of sexual relations. He ended his life with a knife through his heart (the family claims he was diagnosed with a terminal illness).

Such an ending did not affect the erstwhile experts in Israel who imported this obvious nonsense while it was riding high. For some reason I have yet to unearth, Gardner became the default understanding of the welfare officers who were responsible for making recommendations to the court regarding custody. This bias had little impact as long as the clinically excellent Clinical Assistance Unit, which was created together with the Family Courts, were responsible for managing high conflict divorces. I know the unit very well from its inception, it never applied the Gardner nonsense and many workers had never heard of it.

All of this changed overnight in the summer of 2018. Then Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked suddenly transferred all of the Unit’s staff to the important task of encouraging mediation. This was a plan in the drawer that was supposed to be effected by enlarging the staff to add a new function without deleting the clinical work. But the Minister, with Heaven only knows what understanding or motivation, effectively erased the excellent clinical treatment, leaving decisions entirely in the hands of the Gardner-poisoned Welfare Officers. Since then hundreds if not a thousand women who have tried to protect children who reported abuse on visiting noncustodial fathers have had their children transferred without any examination to the purported abusers custody and themselves assigned to brainwashing treatments at the hands of the “experts” who so advised the court and their colleagues.

WAIT! No Way! This couldn’t be happening in Israel. That is the name of the novel I wrote last year, hoping by fiction to bring this unthinkable situation to public attention. Needless to say, I have not yet succeeded. I am still at “Ghandi 1” (First they ignore you..) I know personally of at least 20 such cases. When women call to ask what they should do when a child reports abuse at visitation, I am forced to say DO NOT report it, you risk losing the child and having the child lose you and be shifted to the locus of his complaints. The press, with a notable exception, has been silent (silenced?) about such overt perversion of children’s rights. I composed two books, about families and about child mental health, partly to put in print a response to this situation, together with several blogs here. Gornisht.

Up to today one could hope this was some sort of professional misunderstanding. But today the coalition is proposing a law to make such an approach mandatory! That suggests something far darker, some mysterious interest group that has been behind this all along. Otherwise why such a heavy-handed dangerous legal intervention in complex and controversial professional issues!?

The law. # 2237394, is proposed by no less than members of the coalition and is entitled “Proposed Law to Insure Contact Between Children and their Parents 2026. Its stated goal: “The purpose of this law is to insure the rights of every boy and girl to contact with their parents, in accord with the principle of the best interests of the child and the principles of the UN Compact on Rights of Children. Article 3 states “Every child is entitled to maintain direct, normative and regular contact with each parent in accord with [ambiguous language which could also mean on the condition that it also accords with] the principle of the child’s best interests.”

What interest could such a law represent? If the issue at hand is professional judgment, there is no need for a law. The admittedly ambiguous language also serves only the interest of forcing contact with both parents no matter what, as there is no need for a law stressing the best interest of the child – that already is the law. So my conclusion is that this law is meant to covertly enable or coerce courts to use the Gardner principle whenever a child refuses visitation by claiming that the courts knows that the child’s best interests is to see both parents, exactly what the welfare officers insisted to Judy Wallerstein that this was what her research proves.

I invite the casual reader to take a break here, with the punchline that this “law” is intended to force the court to apply the Gardner conundrum, making Israel an extraordinary outlier protecting child abuse by law!

If you want more details, here we go.

Another suspicious section defines the expert who may render an opinion for the court: “A psychologist or social worker that has undergone training in relations between children and parents, in the identification and treatment of cases where there are difficulties in maintaining contact refusal or interruption of contact between a child and a parent. and has at least five years of experience in treatment of children and families.”

The problems here are:

There is no such specialized training but anyone could claim they have given or received such unspecified training.
Usually people considered experts are people with at least a masters degree in clinical psychology or social work.
Oddly, psychiatrists (present company included) are excluded.
On the ground, the national self-proclaimed expert in alienation is a psychologist but not a clinical psychologist, she claims to have undergone and can provide “training” in parental alienation, and only her program could comply with the odd wording of the training, there are no psychiatrist that I know of who are Gardner groupies, and the most outspoken critic of this approach happens to be a child psychiatrist, namely me. According to this law, despite over 40 years of experience in treating, teaching and writing court documents, oops, I am out, even if I undergo the proposed training. Doesn’t smell good.

The law mandates (section 4) emergency hearings within 14 days if a contact is interrupted. The only “professional” opinion available would be the Welfare Officers. The law states that there would be an exception “unless the court finds setting such a hearing would not be in the child’s best interest and supporting his treatment.” The only person who could advise the court of such would be the erstwhile Welfare Officer, who is committed to this procedure as always being in the child’s interests. A neat circle.

It gets worse. Second part of this section: If the court determines that any delays “would cause substantial damage to children or parents, the court may determine temporary delay” and can turn to the Welfare Officer (whose opinion is biased) or the Assistance Unit (a fake, as they no longer have staff to do this thanks to Minister Shaked) for recommendations (known in advance) about the relationships of parents with children and the causes for the difficulties in the relationship (the Welfare Officer is the only show in town and has predetermined the only possible cause is alienation), including after hearing the child. “Including” means it is optional, directly contradicting the UN Commission that requires the child’s participation when at all possible. The Gardner craziness rules out hearing the child because it is predetermined that since he is alienated what he says has no import.

Worse still (Dante goes deeper into the Inferno, guided by Virgil but still scared out of his wits). The next sections encourage using financial sanctions against a parent who doesn’t agree with whatever is recommended and enforcing treatment (“to require a parent to participate in counseling or treatment such as the court may determine”). If the parent does not comply, the court can make up new arrangements (covert language for taking the kid away from Mom and putting him with Dad without ever investigating if the child is or feels unsafe with Dad. This is precisely what the Gardnerians practice today in Israel. The trap is set. Kid refuses to see Dad and asks Mom for protection from abuse. The Welfare Officer is sure that refusal means alienation. The court declares emergency and rushes to hear – the Welfare Officer. The court then mandates a Gardnerian “expert” who affirms there is alienation and the court forces Gardnerian treatment on the mother (by same expert or colleagues). It is incidentally a dream of a business plan.

The Rackman Center’s MICHAL SELA FORUM has roundly criticized the proposed law. The content is more specific than I have written but follows the same direction.

And now for AI afficionados:

If you ask Claude about Parental Alienation in Israel you will get a highly skewed view (Gardnerian). If you ask Claude what is controversial about parental alienation in Israel, you will see all the points I have made.

(I also asked Claude what in his algorithm makes him not choose to seek controversy, he said (paraphrase): I am a bot. How should I know how I am programmed?

And if you ask which of the 14 coalition MKS have spoken about parental alienation, here’s the result (i.e. this is a clearly biased Gardnerian law):

Members of Knesset who have shown direct or indirect engagement with parental alienation / contact refusal

Keti Shitrit

Spoke in Knesset committees (mainly the Constitution Committee / Committee on the Rights of the Child) about
harm to the parent–child relationship in divorce proceedings.
Is cautious about using the term “parental alienation” itself, but acknowledges the phenomenon of
unjustified refusal of contact.
Emphasizes the best interests of the child and the need for therapeutic tools rather than punishment alone.

➡️ Yes – relevant engagement, though careful and institutional in tone.

Nissim Vaturi

One of the most prominent MKs to explicitly use the term “parental alienation.”
Claimed on several occasions that courts and welfare services
do not adequately address contact refusal.
Takes a critical stance toward professional authorities and favors a firmer enforcement-oriented approach.

➡️ Yes – clear and explicit statements.

Ohad Tal

Has dealt with issues of family, parenting, and parental rights.
Referred to the disconnection of children from a parent as a serious injustice,
even when not always using the formal professional terminology.
Positions align closely with discourse opposing parental alienation.

➡️ Yes – clear value-based and ideological engagement.

In sum, the proposed law weaponizes the court to facilitate a dangerous and professionally repudiated approach by misusing terms of children’s rights in order to trample children’s rights to protection from abuse and enable parents – mainly fathers – to gain custody by abusing a child and having the mother’s attempts to protect the child turned against her. The law is a clear attempt by Gardnerians and their supporters to enforce an already out of balance practice in some courts and make Gardner the default assumption and Gardnerian “professionals” the default choice for assessment and even treatment when a child tells Mom that s/he is being abused by Dad.

To quote myself – NO WAY!!