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the Backlash

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The Anti-Father Backlash in Various State Legislatures

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As of 2025, the Anti-Father Backlash proposes state legislation that would…

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  • Ignore and undermine the American Psychological Association’s Guidelines for Custody Evaluations in Family Law Proceedings.

  • Circumvent the Daubert legal standard on evaluating expert testimony and limit who qualifies as an expert witness in custody cases to a narrow pool of ideologically-tainted, anti-science, so-called expert domestic violence consultants and staffers.

    • The Daubert case introduced a comprehensive approach to evaluating expert testimony that requires judges to scrutinize not only the expert’s methodology but also the underlying scientific principles. This shift aimed to curtail the admission of pseudoscientific or unreliable expert testimony. — Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute

    • The Anti-father Backlash thus seeks to exclude crucial and relevant experts such as forensic scientists, experts in personality disorders and attachment styles, mental health specialists and more.

    • The 2022 American Psychological Association’s 2022 Guidelines for Custody Evaluations in Family Law Proceedings mentions over 20 times the importance of addressing Parental Alienation. It also mentions the importance of input from experts from diverse specialties.

  • Limit who can design curriculum and be an instructor to the same limited group of faux domestic violence “experts.”

  • Ignore psychological abuse.

    • “I’m not sure emotional abuse is best dealt with in the criminal justice system. I think actually the prosecutions of women would skyrocket.”
      — Leigh Goodmark, professor of Gender, Prison and Trauma in an address at the University of Maryland School of Law in an address at the University of Maryland Social Work, October 2, 2015

    • “I’ve been representing victims of violence for about twenty-five years and my clients have consistently said emotional abuse is worse than physical abuse. It is so much more destructive. It is what dismantles you as a person. No one wants to get hit, no one wants to get hurt, but the emotional abuse is worse so my heart goes out to anybody who is experiencing that.”
      — Leigh Goodmark, professor of Gender, Prison and Trauma at the University of Maryland School of Law, May 7, 2020 in an online seminar

  • Ignore Parental Alienation as a form of psychological abuse.

    • The 2022 American Psychological Association’s 2022 Guidelines for Custody Evaluations in Family Law Proceedings mentions over 20 times the importance of addressing Parental Alienation.

    • The Association of Family and Conciliation Courts and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Courts issued a joint statement about the importance of addressing Parental Alienation.

  • Ignore research about parental alienation and parent-child contact issues and dismiss it as unscientific and merely a “belief system.”

  • Ignore false abuse allegations and the need for training in how to differentiate between valid and false allegations of abuse, this encouraging and incentivizing false allegations of abuse, and inevitably increase wrongful convictions.

    • The Association of Family and Conciliation Courts and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Courts issued a joint statement about the importance of addressing false allegations.​

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Compiled by Maryland activist Rabbi Yaakov Aichenbaum,  based in part on information from National Parents Organization.

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