TY - JOUR PY - 2009// TI - Evaluating PAS: A critique of Elizabeth Ellis's “A stepwise approach to evaluating children for PAS.' JO - Journal of child custody A1 - Neustein, Amy A1 - Lesher, Michael SP - 322 EP - 325 VL - 6 IS - 3-4 N2 - Comments on the approach by Elizabeth Ellis (see record 2008-02461-003), who proposed a three-step process for evaluating children for parental alienation syndrome (PAS). The current author suggests that critics of PAS theory have debunked its flawed assumptions, its self-serving methodology, and its inadequacy to assess allegations of child sexual abuse. Ellis, a defender of PAS theory, concedes the most damning of the objections, yet contends that the theory may be salvaged by standardizing the methods by which evaluators detect the elusive syndrome behind complaints of abusive behavior by a parent issuing from a sincere, non-pathological child. But, arming PAS evaluators with a refurbished "stepwise "methodology does not cure the fundamental defects of the theory; Ellis’s methods only put a new face on the old evils. In fact, nothing will fit PAS for the professional demands of forensic psychology or for the needs of the family court judges who claim to rely on it. We are left, finally, with the painfully familiar specter of an unworkable methodology that masks two of the family court system’s deepest institutional prejudices: that fathers know best and that family courts are always right. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)

LA - SN - 1537-9418 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15379410903084715 ID - ref1 ER -