Divorced fathers use the Parental Alienation Syndrome argument to take children from mothers, the film says. A vocal critic says the documentary amounts to a “direct assault on fatherhood.” (Drawing from the film.)
Fathers’ rights advocates launched a blistering attack on a PBS documentary, charging that it unfairly vilifies fathers in its account of bitter divorce cases escalating into charred-earth custody fights.
One of CPB’s two ombudsmen, Ken Bode, raked Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories for failing to include the views of fathers [Bode's column]. PBS officials and the network’s new ombudsman, Michael Getler, said they would review the program, and at least three stations aired local follow-up programs as forums for the controversy. [PBS posted Getler's assessment Dec. 2. See link at right.]
Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories, by Dominique Lasseur and Catherine Tatge, aired Oct. 20 on most PBS stations. It quickly became a battleground in the acrimonious arena of family law, one in which fathers’ rights advocates seek more favorable custody arrangements and media portrayals for men, and advocates for domestic violence victims seek to strengthen protections for women and children caught in abusive relationships.
The filmmakers, a married couple who produced several films for Bill Moyers’ Public Affairs Television exploring the roots of hatred, co-produced the controversial program with Connecticut Public Television. It follows up on their 2001 PBS special profiling women who escaped domestic violence, Breaking the Silence: Journeys of Hope. Both programs were sponsored by the Mary Kay Ash Charitable Foundation. The foundation, backed by the founder of the Mary Kay cosmetics brand, aids projects that assist victims of domestic abuse.
At the center of the new documentary are heartbreaking, intimate interviews with children trapped in tempestuous custody disputes. The children recount tales of emotional or sexual abuse they or their siblings suffered in the care of fathers who won sole custody of them in court.
The mothers appear in interviews and in sequences filmed during a 2004 battered women’s custody conference. They describe their failed efforts to protect their children and the emotional devastation of being cut off from them after losing custody battles.
A family court judge, an abuse intervention specialist and a professor specializing in domestic violence cases are also interviewed.
The fathers involved in the profiled cases were not interviewed, identified by name or pictured in the program. Children who grew up in their care and later escaped describe how their fathers emotionally abused and manipulated them to believe the worst about their mothers.
Two prominent men appear in interviews to describe the emotional toll that domestic violence has on children. "Constant fear is always eating, eating away at you,” says Parade magazine Chairman Walter Anderson, who talks about being abused by his alcoholic father. New York Yankees Manager Joe Torre also describes being abused as a child.
A central factor in several of the profiled custody cases is Parental Alienation Syndrome, a hotly disputed theory used by a divorced parent to argue for changes in visitation or custody rights. Believers in the syndrome say it affects a child whose custodial parent, usually the mother, poisons the child’s relationship with the other parent, undercutting that parent’s standing in family court.
Sol Gothard, a retired federal appeals court, describes PAS as “junk science” in the documentary, which goes on to describe how abusive fathers have used claims of PAS in court to win sole custody of their children, sometimes denying them contact with their mothers for years. Mothers, children and their advocates outline the pathology of abusive parents who can present a respectable image in court and in the community while seeking sole custody to control, silence or force reconciliation with their ex-spouses.
"For the father to win custody of the kids over and against the mother's will is the ultimate victory, short of killing the kids," says one expert.
In one particularly wrenching sequence, a mother who lost custody of her
daughter to her ex-husband, whom she claimed was sexually abusive, plays
an answering
machine message of her distraught child’s pleas for help: “Mom,
I need you. Get me out. I don’t care if you have to break the law, just
get me out.”
The website that became the launching pad for thousands of e-mail complaints to PBS, CPB and local stations describes Breaking the Silence as “a direct assault on fatherhood.”
"The film portrays fathers as batterers and child molesters who steal children from their mothers,” wrote Glenn Sacks, a radio talk show host who led the campaign, on his website. “The film is extremely one-sided, and presents a harmful and inaccurate view of divorce and child custody cases.”
The filmmakers began research for the film because they wanted to examine the “vicious cycle of kids who are raised in domestic violence situations,” Lasseur said. After completing the 2001 film on domestic violence, he said, “we felt there was great denial among mothers about the effect on the kids.” They decided to allow children to speak for themselves. “We set out to tell the individual stories of kids who have been victimized by the system.”
When the filmmakers learned that Parental Alienation Syndrome was helping fathers counter allegations of abuse and win custody of children, they decided to focus on these highly contentious cases.
“This is a very small universe of cases,” said Larry Rifkin, executive producer for Connecticut Public TV. “It is very, very small in terms of batterers getting custody of children.” But producers found the situation occurring frequently enough to warrant coverage. “We considered it reporting on something that’s not being covered,” Rifkin said.
Critics of the film jumped on producers’ handling of PAS and on the estimate by one interviewed expert that 75 percent of the fathers contesting custody arrangements have histories of abusive behavior. In letters and e-mails to PBS and stations, fathers’ rights advocates challenged numerous statements made in the film and offered evidence to contradict them.
"The obsession with child custody in Breaking the Silence is an open admission that the hysteria over domestic ‘violence’ is being fanned not to apprehend criminals but to further disadvantage fathers in custody cases,” 20 fathers’ rights advocates wrote in a Nov. 2 letter to PBS President Pat Mitchell.
Efforts to challenge Breaking the Silence began months before broadcast, when the father of one of the children featured in the doc, California physician Scott Loeliger, presented documents to producers that he said were evidence that his ex-wife had abused their daughter. Loeliger threatened to sue if they did not drop his child’s story from the program.
His daughter, Fatima Loeliger, now a teenager, and his ex-wife, Sadiya Alilire, appear in the film. The daughter, who describes her father as manipulative and abusive, is now active in the Courageous Kids Network, a group that debunks PAS and supports children living with abusive custodial parents.
Loeliger hired an attorney to represent him in a potential libel suit and took his story to Sacks, who initiated an e-mail campaign against Breaking the Silence and reported on the controversy on his website. Sacks also published court documents from the Loeliger case that report instances of alleged abuse by Sadiya Alilire. In the film, Fatima alludes to some of these documented injuries as minor.
"My biggest problem with the film is that this really hasn’t happened,” Sacks said. Mothers win custody of their children in the vast majority of cases. The filmmakers “cherry-picked a few cases and portrayed them as a national epidemic,” he said. Sacks also objected to the producers’ decision to include Fatima Loeliger’s story and depict her mother heroically.
Breaking the Silence “portrays fathers who wish to be involved in the lives of their children as batterers,” said Ned Holstein, president of Fathers and Families, a group that speaks up for shared parenting custodial agreements. “What [producers] are saying now about this being a very small problem of highly selective cases is not what they imply in the movie.”
“We have dug very deep into the literature to see if there’s support for this gender-based slander and we don’t see it,” Holstein said. He questioned the methodology and objectivity of studies cited by the producers and experts in the program, particularly the views of Joan Meier, a law professor at George Washington University Law School and director of the Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project.
"Everyone is framing this as a fathers’ rights issue, but it’s a domestic violence issue and an issue of misportrayal of domestic violence,” said Marc Rosenthal of Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting. “It’s about the distortion of what’s happening in the real world.”
In a Nov. 14 letter to House Telecom Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), RADAR requested a congressional investigation into whether the Breaking the Silence violated CPB mandates to ensure balance and objectivity in controversial programs.
Producers of Breaking the Silence say they sought to avoid political agendas while presenting compelling real-life stories. “The women that we interviewed and featured have no feminist agenda,” said Lasseur. “They’re not anti-father. They’re just struggling for their kids.” He said he considered including a father who lost custody of his child in the film but decided that it would misrepresent what he found was happening in the courts.
"The side we wanted to take was the side of the children,” Lasseur said.
"There is reporting where you come to conclusions based on looking at all the facts and talking to people off camera,” Rifkin said. “... That’s not liberal or conservative or fathers versus mothers, it’s about reporting what goes on in this system.”
“I’m not sure you could do a documentary such as this and have it be ‘he said/she said’ balanced about it and be meaningful,” said Bob Port, a reporter for the Albany Times-Union, who wrote an op-ed praising Breaking the Silence prior to its broadcast. Port covered family courts for the New York Daily News for five years, including high-profile cases involving PAS legal arguments.
"There is some right and wrong in the world and we can’t reduce everything to a Fox News treatment from the right and left,” he said.
Mental health professionals are reluctant to discredit PAS theories publicly—and few journalists will report on it—because they put themselves at risk for the kind of attacks Breaking the Silence engendered, Port said. Lasseur “basically lobbed a hand grenade into the middle of the fathers’ rights movement, and I don’t think he intended to do it at all,” Port said. He credited Lasseur for “doing something courageous.”
But Bode didn’t celebrate the resulting program Nov. 29 in the first critique of his seven months as CPB ombudsman that addressed an ongoing program controversy.
"My conclusion after viewing and reviewing the program and checking various websites cited by critics is that there is no hint of balance in Breaking the Silence,” Bode wrote. “The father's point of view is ignored, as are new strategies for lessening the damage to children in custody battles .... The producers apparently do not subscribe to the idea that an argument can be made more convincing by giving the other side a fair presentation.”
Getler, a veteran Washington Post journalist who became PBS’s first ombudsman Nov. 15, [wrote about the controversy] in his first column for PBS.org.
PBS officials said they will independently examine the program by Dec. 8. After airing the doc, HoustonPBS, WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, and WVIA in Scranton, Pa., broadcast local follow-up programs after airing the doc to address some of the concerns raised by critics.
Producers' letter about Parental Alienation SyndromeTatge/Lasseur Productions, maker of Breaking the Silence: Children's Stories, posted this letter on its website. It has come to our attention that some PBS stations are receiving comments from individuals and organized groups involved in domestic violence and child custody regarding the issues raised in Breaking the Silence: Children's Stories. We want to clarify our approach to this work. When we began this project over a year ago, our goal was to produce a documentary about domestic violence and children. We had no preconceived notions about the issue...no specific agenda to prove or disprove. The finished documentary is simply a result of where countless hours of extensive research and interviews took us. These are the real stories of real women who lost custody of their children when Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) was used as scientific proof in their family court cases. These were the stories we found over and over again. There have been a number of concerns raised regarding Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) and how it is addressed in the piece. We do not make the assertion that the phenomenon of alienation does not exist, simply that PAS seems to be wrongly used as scientific proof to justify taking children away from a protective parent. We as filmmakers are in no position to determine the scientific validity of PAS. However, the fact remains that the American Psychological Association (APA), the American Medical Association (AMA), have not recognized PAS as legitimate science. Some individuals have expressed concern that the documentary only features the stories of women as the victims of domestic violence. Research shows that "while women are less likely than men to be victims of violent crimes overall, women are five to eight times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate partner." (U.S. Department of Justice, Violence by Intimates: Analysis of Data on Crimes by Current or Former Spouses, Boyfriends, and Girlfriends, March 1998). If we had featured the stories of one man and five women who had been victims of domestic abuse, statistically we would have overstated the problems of men in this area. Nevertheless, we recognize that men are also victims and men are also sometimes victimized by family courts, but the fact is that many more women are victims. In all cases, the children suffer. Tatge/Lasseur Productions has decided to post some of the studies and documentation we used in the program on our web site at http://www.tatgelasseur.com beginning on Oct. 12. The documentary will be released for the first time on Thursday, October 20, 2005 and we believe that the comments and concerns that have come in so far are often not based on the full and complete content of the program. These are difficult and controversial issues that stir human emotions. Nothing can galvanize one's passion like the welfare of a child. We understand certain individuals will never be completely satisfied with the information presented in the documentary. All we can do is offer, in the most open and transparent manner, the reasoning and research that went into this program. Sincerely, |
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posted Dec. 5, 2005
Copyright 2005 by Current Publishing Committee