Gardner replied: "What would she say? Don't you say that about your father. If you do, I'll beat you."

EXCERPTS FROM:

Child psychiatrist who developed the theory of Parental Alienation Syndrome

Dr Richard A. Gardner

Originally posted
Saturday, 31 May 2003

And he suggested there was nothing much wrong with paedophilia, incestuous or not. "One of the steps that society must take to deal with the present hysteria is to 'come off it' and take a more realistic attitude toward paedophilic behaviour," he wrote in Sex Abuse Hysteria - Salem Witch Trials Revisited (1991). Paedophilia, he added, "is a widespread and accepted practice among literally billions of people". Asked once by an interviewer what a mother was supposed to do if her child complained of sexual abuse by the father, Gardner replied: "What would she say? Don't you say that about your father. If you do, I'll beat you."

It beggars belief that such a figure would be taken seriously by family court judges but, in an adversarial system where fathers often have more money to spend on divorce cases, Gardner's theories have proved remarkably persuasive. The journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry wrote in 1996 that a book of Gardner's, Protocols for the Sex-Abuse Evaluation, was "a recipe for finding allegations of sexual abuse false, under the guise of clinical and scientific objectivity. One suspects it will be a bestseller among defence attorneys." And so it has proved.

Gardner's work has created a generation of mothers and children scarred psychologically and, in many cases, physically by the court rulings he has influenced. In one of his earliest cases, a Maryland physicist he labelled a "parental alienator", unfit to retain custody of her children, was subsequently shot dead by her ex-husband. Still Gardner did not change his view that the wife was the true villain; her lies, he insisted, had made the husband temporarily psychotic.
Richard Gardner's background was surprisingly conventional. Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1931, he studied medicine and psychiatry at various prestigious New York universities, and served a stint as a US army psychiatrist in Germany. Appointed to the Division of Child Psychiatry at Columbia in 1963, where he became Clinical Professor of Psychiatry in 1983, he was respected for many years as an expert on childhood experience of divorce.
Andrew Gumbel
http://parentalalienationfraud.blogspot.com/2008/11/child-psychiatrist-who-developed-theory.html