“It’s a huge chunk of the industry,” said Dineen, who has dedicated much of her career to exploring and exposing the limitations of her profession. By 1993, after more than twenty years in the field of psychiatry, Dineen had become so disillusioned that she closed her practice and began work on her contrarian book, Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry Is Doing to People. “My focus on the shortcomings of the psychology industry is much broader than custody, but when my book came out, by far the majority of the responses I got to it were about custody.” Dineen criticizes the psychology industry for selling answers it doesn’t have. “There’s a mythology that psychologists have tools and ways of assessing which parent is the better parent, and that’s a very prevalent mythology within the court system itself. It basically lets judges off the hook, frees them up from owning their decisions,” she told me. “And yes, these are very hard decisions to make. There is just no way to say that this parent is better than that parent. So you hire someone to say who is better. But there’s no reason to believe that the hired opinion is accurate, true, or helpful in any way.”
“These people are so powerful,” said Todd. “They are way too powerful.” A year ago, when his custody evaluation had just begun, Todd took his children for a bike ride to a nearby park. “It’s a short ride, maybe ten minutes at the most,” he recalled. “So we get there and the kids are playing, the park is full of other people, parents and kids. Everything is fine. Then I realize I forgot the snorkeling gear, and this is a real disappointment, because when you’re a dad, and you get three hours at a time with your kids, every single minute counts. So I know my son is going to be very disappointed. And yet to go back to the townhouse is going to take awhile, because my son had just learned to ride his bike, and there are hills to climb on the way back. I just don’t think there’s time to do this. So I ask the mother I’ve been chatting with for an hour now, I ask her if she would mind keeping an eye on my son while my daughter and I go back to get the snorkeling stuff. We’ll be back in ten, fifteen minutes. No problem.”
For a married or already-single parent, maybe it would have been no problem. But for the divorcing parent involved in a custody dispute, virtually everything is a problem. Todd’s decision to leave his six-year-old son under the supervision of a relative stranger at the park was brought into the custody evaluation, and the evaluator recommended that Todd be put on supervised visitation and enroll in parenting classes.
“When I got placed on supervised visitation, things really started unraveling,” said Todd. “It sucked. It’s virtually impossible to do supervised visitation, it’s a huge hassle, and it made it very difficult. My point is that we all as parents make mistakes. Some are more serious than others. We’re not perfect human beings. Now I agree I shouldn’t have left my son with the lady even though he was comfortable with her, even though there were other adults there, even though my son knows what to do if he were to be abducted by a stranger. But I realize there are differing opinions on this. Some people I ask say they think it was fine, others say no, they would not have done what I did. But still I say the punishment doesn’t fit the crime.”
Undoubtedly Todd’s ex-wife and the evaluator would tell the story differently. But Dineen and Mason have both filled their books with example after head-shaking example from the annals of case law and psychology of the profoundly stupid, deceitful, hurtful, and, in the worst cases, fatal applications of forensic psychology in both child custody evaluations and the broader child welfare system. They document cases in which children are torn from loving parents and handed over to known abusers and criminals; they describe how results are presented for studies that never actually took place of populations that do not exist, and they identify how syndromes that are the brainchild of a sole practitioner with an ax to grind can be accepted by experts and judges across the country as valid with little or no scrutiny.
Carla’s story certainly raises similar questions, from the opposite side of the gender gap, and with more serious ramifications. “When it comes to family court,” she told me, “there is no judgment. There are decisions, but no judgment.” Carla (not her real name) and her ex-husband divorced in 1995 and agreed at the time to share joint physical custody of their son and daughter, then five and nine years old. Both parents were past substance abusers who’d been clean for years, or so Carla thought. But in 1999, Carla’s ex-husband overdosed on heroin in his bathroom while the two children were in his care. Paramedics carted him out of the house on a stretcher and took him to an emergency room, where he was treated for the overdose. Carla moved the court to modify their divorce decree by awarding her sole physical custody and placing her ex-husband on supervised visitation. The court ordered both of these modifications on a temporary basis, until an evaluation could be conducted.
“The whole ordeal took about two years and cost me about seventeen thousand dollars in legal fees,” she said. “And although he was the one who overdosed—the one who was the criminal, if you want to put it that way—I had to undergo all of the same things that he did. If he had to have a psychological test, so did I. If he had to have a drug assessment, so did I. Even my current husband was required to take tests.”
Seven months after the overdose, the two county professionals involved in the process—an evaluator and a guardian ad litem—submitted reports to the court that recommended the temporary order be reversed and the couples’ original every-other-week joint custody arrangement be restored until final judgment was ordered. The court’s final judgment to uphold joint custody came in August 2001 and has remained in effect since, despite Carla’s growing concern over her son’s reports that his father is drinking again. The court order calls for the father’s custody to be conditioned upon his continued sobriety, and states that “in order to insure continued sobriety, the Respondent shall undergo random urinalysis or other testing as requested from time to time by the guardian ad litem or by Hennepin County Family Court Services.” To date, there have been no calls for any testing since the original order.
“But when people say I should go back to court, I say there’s no way I can afford to do that. I can’t put another nickel into this system. It’s a simple matter of who has more money and who has the bigger gun,” Carla said. “The fact is, their father is a highly paid white man and has the money and clout to get what he wants out of the system.”
Despite the shortcomings of the current custody-evaluation model, probably most people working in the field are dedicated, altruistic, and knowledgeable professionals doing their best to help in situations that are often impossible to decipher. The question is whether these mere humans, with clunky tools and very limited information, can set all biases aside and provide genuine help based on credible science.
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