Tearing the child apart: Free training in San Francisco

What motivates parents to -- either consciously or unconsciously -- damage or destroy their own children?

We know the complex psychological effects of high-conflict divorce, but how do we understand the contribution of narcissism, envy and perverse thinking?

This Saturday, Jan. 21, forensic psychologist Michael Donner, a psychoanalyst, child custody evaluator and ethicist, will take an analytic approach to questions usually considered part of the family court system.

Sponsored by the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, Saturday's event features H. Spencer Bloch, MD,  author of Adolescent Development, Psychopathology, and Treatment, as discussant.

The event runs from 10:00 a.m. to noon and is free. To register, call Aaron Chow at (415) 563-5815 or email him HERE. More information and online registration is HERE.

Donner authored an excellent article by the same title in Psychoanalytic Psychology. Contact him (HERE) to request a copy of "Tearing Children Apart: The Contribution of Narcissism, Envy and Perverse Modes of Thought to Child Custody Wars."

Our broken family court system: Free training in Arizona

Another free training geared toward child custody evaluators is coming up March 16-17 in Phoenix, Arizona. Co-sponsored by the National Alliance of Professional Psychology Providers and the Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Foundation, it features a cast of well-known experts, including:

• Dr. Lenore Walker (author of the classic, The Battered Woman’s Syndrome)
• David L. Shapiro, PhD
• G. Andrew H. Benjamin, JD, PhD, ABPP
• Judge Marjory Fields 
• John Caccavale, PhD (speaking on Business Ethics for Custody Evaluators)

More information and online registration is available HERE.

SEX PANIC: Highly recommended

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

-- Justice William O. Douglas 

The strands of modern American containment were woven so gradually that today's prison culture has come to feel almost natural. But imagine how the landscape might look to someone who was experimentally cryopreserved in, say, 1981, and thawed out 30 years later:

People cheerfully taking off their shoes and queuing up to be x-rayed by robotic agents of "Homeland Security," GPS satellite monitoring, DNA databases, civil detention for future crimes, online registries of drug offenders, surveillance cameras everywhere, "zero tolerance" schools where children are viewed as pint-sized criminals.

And, underlying it all, the new carceral state: A massive underclass of surplus labor (one out of every 99 adults) quarantined in prisons, with large swaths of the former industrial and agricultural laboring classes transformed into a security force of prison guards, parole agents and police working to generate yet more prisoners.

"By design this penal system churns the poor and marginal, rendering them all but unemployable, thus poorer and ever more marginal," writes anthropologist Roger Lancaster. "No legitimate theory of corrections, crime, or social order justifies this approach, which can only be understood as vindictive."

In Sex Panic and the Punitive State, Lancaster meticulously explains how 35 years of virtually nonstop panics over crime -- urban unrest in the 1960s, street crime in the 1970s, crack wars in the 1980s, predatory gangs in the 1990s, and terrorists in the 2000s -- have congealed into a durable regime dominated by irrational fear: "Power flows through the nervous system of a body politic paralyzed by dread. Ruled and rulers are equally trapped in fear."

Laying the groundwork for wave after wave of panics, Lancaster convincingly argues, is a synergy between deeply ingrained (but now covert) fears of black criminal-rapists and homosexual child molesters:

Sexual anxieties and fear of crime have come to form a dynamic feedback loop. On the one hand, it seems unlikely that revived sex panics would have put down such deep social roots except in the context of a wider war on crime. On the other hand, it also seems unlikely that crime fears could have become so finely woven into the fabric of everyday life without the element of sex panic.

The resulting system of social control is an amalgam of old and new elements. Its Puritanism, its paranoia about strange outsiders, its enactment of dramas of peril and rites of protection are as old as the United States itself; they are deeply embedded in the national psyche…. At the same time the resulting system of social control departs from long-standing liberal traditions that begin with a presumption of innocence, restrain the reach of law, defer to zones of privacy, and resist the application of excessive punishments or the tacking on of ex-post-facto provisions.

Lancaster sees the creation and privileging of a novel social category -- "the victim" -- as a powerful force in this new social order. In the name of this iconic crime victim, the enormously successful Victim's Rights Movement has led the charge to dismantle traditional legal protections, a trend that may be difficult if not impossible to ever reverse.

Perversely, increased repression of the American citizenry has arisen in tandem with the loosening of economic restraints on "capitalism’s most predatory forms" -- privatization, globalization and the corporations' relentless squeezing of what we now call the 99 percent.

In Lancaster's dystopic vision, America has degenerated into "a broken social order based on mistrust, resentment, and ill will," manifested in a mass addiction to dumbed-down, commercialized vengeance spectacles. We need look no further for evidence of this grim state of affairs than the vitriolic comments of YouTube viewers beneath the video of U.S. Marines urinating on the bodies of murdered Afghanis.

As with Abu Ghraib, we can safely bet that the four Marines will be sanctioned, while the structures that fostered their callous behavior will remain untouched. As Lancaster notes, this is all par for the course: "Any cultural system that equates punishment with justice will foster complicated forms of sadism. And any institutional system that inculcates intense fear and rage will produce technicians who periodically depart from standard operating procedures."

Many of you blog readers will have read other fine books on sex panic and the carceral state. But this meticulously researched and eloquently written analysis goes deeper and wider, masterfully integrating disparate historical, economic, religious and social trends. Lancaster delves at length into the complex interplay of racism and homophobia, even weaving in personal experiences as a gay man that helped to shape his thinking.

Bottom line: Read this landmark book; I guarantee it will enlighten.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

-- Martin Luther King Jr. 

MANY THANKS TO BLOG READER JAMES H. FOR DONATING THIS BOOK.

AND THANKS TO THE ANONYMOUS BLOG READERS FOR THE OTHER BOOK DONATIONS.

As usual, if you appreciate this review, I will greatly appreciate your visiting the Amazon site (HERE) and clicking on "yes" (this review was helpful). 

Martin Luther King Jr. on maladjustment

Last year, in honor of Martin Luther King Day, I excerpted a large portion of a keynote speech the visionary civil rights leader delivered at the 1967 convention of the American Psychological Association, just seven months before he was gunned down and at a time when he was drawing larger connections between racial oppression and the Vietnam War. This year, I am excerpting only one short section, but I have made the entire speech, "The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement," available for download (HERE). It's 45 years old, but still remarkably relevant today.

There are certain technical words in every academic discipline which soon become stereotypes and even clichés. Every academic discipline has its technical nomenclature. You who are in the field of psychology have given us a great word. It is the word maladjusted. This word is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is a good word; certainly it is good that in dealing with what the word implies you are declaring that destructive maladjustment should be destroyed. You are saying that all must seek the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.

But on the other hand, I am sure that we will recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will. We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence....

Thus, it may well be that our world is in dire need of a new organization, The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. Men and women should be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, 'Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream'; or as maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who in the midst of his vacillations finally came to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free; or as maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery, could scratch across the pages of history, words lifted to cosmic proportions, 'We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. And that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' And through such creative maladjustment, we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

I have not lost hope. I must confess that these have been very difficult days for me personally. And these have been difficult days for every civil rights leader, for every lover of justice and peace.

Emboldened DSM-5 critics issue public challenge

In October, I reported on the Society for Humanistic Psychology's online petition urging the American Psychiatric Association to reconsider the mental illness expansions and biomedical emphasis proposed for its new diagnostic manual, due out in 2013.

Since then, the effort has taken off like wildfire. More than 10,000 people have signed the petition, and the fledgling Coalition for DSM-5 Reform has mushroomed to include 41 concerned mental health organizations in the United States, Britain and Denmark.

Now, the Coalition has posted an open letter calling upon the developers of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to submit controversial proposals in the DSM-5 to an independent group of scientists and scholars with no ties to either the DSM-5 Task Force or the American Psychiatric Association for an independent, external review.

"We respectfully ask that you not respond again with assurances about internal reviews and field trials because such assurances, at this point, are not sufficient," says the letter. "We believe an external, independent review is critical in terms of ensuring the proposed DSM-5 is safe and credible."

As the critics gain ground and the battle heats up, it will be very interesting to see how the beleaguered DSM-5 Task Force responds.

More developments on the sex offender front

Study finds problems with real-world reliability of Static-99

Evaluators differ almost half of the time in their scoring of the most widely used risk assessment instrument for sex offenders, the Static-99, according to a report in the current issue of Criminal Justice and Behavior. Even a one-point difference on the instrument can have substantial practical implications, both for individual sex offenders and for public policy. In by far the largest and most ecologically valid study of interrater agreement in Static-99 scoring, the research examined paired risk ratings for about 700 offenders in Texas and New Jersey. The findings call into question the typical practice of reporting only a single raw score, without providing confidence intervals that would take into account measurement error. The study, the latest in a line of similar research by Marcus Boccaccini, Daniel Murrie and colleagues, can be requested HERE.

California reining in SVP cowboys

Psychiatrist Allen Frances has more news coverage of a memorable state-sponsored training at which Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) evaluators were cautioned to be more prudent in their diagnostic practices. Ronald Mihordin, MD, JD, acting clinical director of the Department of Mental Health program, warned evaluators against cavalierly diagnosing men who have molested teenagers with “hebephilia” and rapists with “paraphilias not otherwise specified-nonconsent,” unofficial diagnoses not found in the current edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. California evaluators have come under fire in the past for billing upwards of $1 million per year conducting SVP evaluations of paroling prisoners. The PowerPoints of the 3-day training are now available online, at the DMH's website.

The neuroscience of sex offending

In preventive detention trials of sex offenders, forensic evaluators often testify about whether an offender lacks volitional control over his conduct. But how much do we really know about this? In the current issue of Aggression and Violent Behavior, forensic psychologist John Matthew Fabian explores the neuroscience literature on sex offending as it applies to civil commitment proceedings. The article can be viewed online, or requested from the author HERE.

Challenge to sex offender registry

Although the sex offender niche is by far the most partisan and contentious in forensic psychology, one thing that just about all informed professionals agree about is that sex offender registration laws do more harm than good. By permanently stigmatizing individuals, they hamper rehabilitation and reintegration; as Elizabeth Berenguer Megale of the Barry University School of Law explores in an essay in the Journal of Law and Social Deviance (full-text available HERE), they lead to a form of “social death.” Now, the California Coalition on Sexual Offending (CCOSO) and the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) have filed a joint amicus brief in a challenge to California's "Jessica's Law," which bars registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of any school or park. The amicus contends that the restriction is punishment without any rational purpose, in that it does not enhance public safely or deter future criminality. The challenge was brought by Steven Lloyd Mosley. After a jury found Mosley guilty of misdemeanor assault, a non-registerable offense, the sentencing judge ordered him to register anyway, ruling that the assault was sexually motivated. The 4th District Court of Appeal granted Mosley’s appeal, and the California Department of Corrections has appealed to the state's supreme court. We'll have to wait and see whether the high court will tackle the issue of registration laws directly, or will sidestep with a narrow, technical ruling.

Civil commitment petition against Butner, NC prisoner dismissed

 Federal judge discounts sex offender's confessions as fabricated

Sex offenses are upsetting, and their perpetrators creepy. Understandably, it's easy for jurors and even judges to brush aside legal technicalities and burdens of proof in the interest of keeping women and children safe.

But it is disturbing when forensic psychologists collude in this endeavor, disregarding the limits of science by overstating the accuracy of risk assessment instruments, inventing pretextual disorders to justify preventive detention, and even claiming omniscient truth-telling powers regarding ancient, unprosecuted allegations.

In an environment replete with such folie à plusieurs, it was refreshing to read the recent federal decision in the case of Markis Revland, a habitual criminal who faced civil detention after serving time for child pornography possession.

Senior U.S. District Judge Bernard A. Friedman systematically analyzed and rejected the evidence as failing to meet the government’s burden of proof. Not only did the government fail to show that Revland had a serious mental disorder that put him at high risk of molesting children if released, it even failed to prove that the convict had engaged in any hands-on child molestation in the past, the judge ruled.

Child abuse claims imaginary

In addition to his conviction for child pornography, Revland had two prior convictions for indecent exposure. But the most damning evidence against him was his own admissions, made during sex offender treatment at the federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, that he had committed 149 additional incidents of sexual abuse of children of various ages.

However, the keen-minded judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina wasn’t buying those confessions:

The court finds that all of the 149 incidents reported by respondent … were the product of his imagination, not actual events.

He explained that Revland was desperate to enroll in Butner’s treatment program in order to escape the infamous federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, where he feared for his life after being beaten and raped at knifepoint by fellow prisoners. Once at Butner, he felt compelled to fabricate “a long list of sex offenses,” lest he be deemed uncooperative and returned to Leavenworth.

The offenses that he described in great detail were implausible, in that he was serving a prior, 10-year prison term for cocaine at around the same time that he claimed to be running around molesting children, the judge determined:

The reported incidents were not only too numerous to believe but also recounted – years afterwards – far too precisely, with respondent providing the age of the victim, the time of day … when each offense occurred, and the location where each incident allegedly occurred…. And yet the government offered no evidence to independently verify that any of these incidents occurred or that any of them – even one – ever resulted in investigation or prosecution.

As a group, Butner offenders – most of them incarcerated on child pornography charges -- have confessed to an unusually high number of undetected sex offenses, leading many observers to suspect that the widely publicized numbers are unreliable. Critics say treatment providers at the federal institution pressured prisoners to report as many offenses as possible, lest they be accused of not cooperating.

No bona fide sexual disorder

Likewise, Judge Friedman was unconvinced by the government's claim that Revland suffered from a mental disorder, pedophilia, that would justify civil commitment by making him likely to engage in future child molestation if released.

Friedman conceded that the convict met the criteria for antisocial personality disorder. But he found that such a diagnosis was irrelevant:

The essence of this disorder is that the patient “fail[s] to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest.” Dr. [Jeffrey] Singer testified that the vast majority of prison inmates have this disorder, as they are in prison for breaking the law and failing to conform to social norms. Dr. [Joseph] Plaud testified that there is no documented causal link, in this case or in general, between antisocial personality disorder and sexual dangerousness. The court credits these experts' opinions.

Finally, the judge rejected the claims of two government psychologists that two so-called actuarial instruments, the Static-99R and the MnSOST-R, showed Revland to be at high risk for recidivism.

Judge Friedman said the risk assessments by both Dr. Manuel Gutierrez, a Board of Prisons employee, and contract psychologist Jeffrey Davis were "particularly unreliable in the present case because they both assumed that [Revland] is a pedophile with numerous 'hands-on' victims, whereas the court has rejected both of these premises."

Increasingly, cutting-edge researchers are coming to the consensus that by and large, with a few exceptions at the extreme end of the continuum, sex offenders are not a distinct group worthy of the level of special attention they are getting these days. Rather, they are garden-variety criminals who violate social norms, take what they want, and eventually burn out as they enter middle age.  

The judge's bold language in cutting through the empty psychobabble about mental disorder and risk harkens back to the little boy in the Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Emperor's New Clothes, who was not afraid to declare out loud that the emperor was naked.