Critics of family courts in the U.S. say the system has developed practices that protect abusers. Ironically, one of the worst is a test that’s supposed to detect when a parent is a danger to a child: a psychosexual evaluation.
When a judge orders such an evaluation, it’s a sign that claims of sexual abuse are going to be disregarded by the court.
“In my entire career, I’ve never seen a child custody case where the results of a psychosexual evaluation showed a problem,” said Lenore Walker, a forensic psychologist who has studied family violence issues for the past 40 years. “It is always within normal limits. It is used to show that there is not a problem with someone because he comes out clean on the testing.”
I interviewed three sexual abuse experts this week, all of whom have grave concerns about the use of psychosexual evaluations in child custody cases.
Psychosexual evaluations commonly involve testing of sexual disorders. In male subjects, a device called a penile plethysmograph is placed around the penis to measure arousal while the subject generally is shown pictures and listens to auditory scenarios. A separate Abel test includes having the subject complete a questionnaire and look at pictures.
“I would say that when sexual abuse is brought up in family court, about a quarter to a third of the time they use these evaluations even though they can't really tell you much at all, and most often they are used to rule out the possibility that the father abused the child even when evidence is overwhelming,” said Joyanna Silberg, the executive vice president of the non-profit Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence.
“Can you imagine if we treated other crimes like this? You don’t send a suspected bank robber to a psychologist to see if he robbed a bank,” Silberg said. “You look at the evidence: Was he at the bank? Did he have the money?”
Incest perpetrators, even those who have admitted guilt, may not register as abnormal using penile plethysmography or the Abel test, said Katie Gotch, the spokeswoman for the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers. “For intra-familial offenders, research has consistently shown that, as a group, they are at lower risk of recidivating than other sex offender populations.” Gotch explained that those who sexually abuse their own children often do not display a sexual attraction to children. “Sexual abuse within the family often happens for other reasons,” she said.
One mother who lost her children in family court said she believes her ex-husband took a drug to skew the test results. “The test showed he had no attraction to children but it wasn’t until much later that I found out that the test showed he also had no attraction to adults either,” she said.
Gotch said that a psychosexual evaluation in a family court setting often has very limited use. “Those situations are difficult because often the court wants a determination of risk,” Gotch said. “We can’t predict risk for a person who has not been arrested, charged or convicted of a sexual crime. A psychosexual evaluation is a piece of information, but it is never appropriate for determining guilt or innocence.”
Walker, whose 1979 book The Battered Woman won the Association for Women in Psychology’s Distinguished Publication Award, spends much of her time dealing with family court cases where children are not being protected. “I’m trying to get out of this business because these cases are just so difficult,” said Walker, adding that she gets several new calls each week from desperate parents. “It’s mostly women but some men too.”
Finding other psychologists willing to take the risks of protecting an abused child is difficult. “It’s hard because few people will take them. When they do they get grievances filed against them.”
Rather than ordering psychosexual evaluations, judges should pay close attention to what children are saying, she said. “With these little kids, when they are talking about being touched in places that they should not be, you have to take it seriously,” she said. “We can protect children. We just have to listen to them.”
This is the 13th in a series of articles for Daily Kos about the treatment of abused children in the U.S. family court system. M.C. Moewe is a former criminal justice and investigative reporter for several newspapers with a B.A. in journalism from the University of North Texas. Email m AT moewe.com or use this link.