A Denver mother spent time in jail for blocking court-mandated reunification therapy between her children and the kids’ allegedly abusive father. The judge has now suspended the jail sentence of Rachel Pickrel-Hawkins after her lawyer argued the therapist has a tragic work history that includes encouraging a mother to trust an abusive father who later killed his children before taking his own life.

Reunification camps are a solution family courts propose when they believe a protective parent is coaching their children to make false allegations against the other parent. A law passed last year was intended to minimize the use of reunification therapies to restrict the parenting time of the protective parent.

Michael Hawkins is a retired Aurora police officer and the father of the children in this case. Felony charges were filed against him in July for rape and sexual assault against his biological daughter and two adopted daughters. Hawkins’ son has also accused him of pushing him underwater to the point he thought he was drowning. The son believes it was retribution for witnessing the sexual assault of his sister. Hawkins said the incident was in response to his PTSD, which was triggered by the son jumping in the pool and scaring him. Hawkins was one of the first officers on the scene of the tragic Aurora movie theater mass shooting in 2012.

Christine Bassett, the therapist for the children, previously encouraged Erica Bethel to allow reunification therapy between her children and father Adam Zipperer. Bethel told the court that Zipperer had a volatile temper, severe depression, and suicidal ideation. Pickrel-Hawkins’ lawyer, Heather Broxterman, said in court, “The second he had unsupervised time, the children were murdered by their father. My question goes to whether or not her judgments about parents in a reintegration therapy setting are trustworthy or dangerous.”

Based on this line of argument, the judge agreed to suspend the jail sentence of Pickrel-Hawkins, but not before she served two weekends in jail. She was originally sentenced to seven weekends in jail for blocking the reunification therapy. Now, the judge has put the reunification on hold pending the outcome of his trial. Hawkins posted a $50,000 bail, but a trial date has not yet been announced.

Tina Swithin is an advocate for protective parents as she went through her own experience in the family court system 15 years ago. She has been attempting to inform the public of the inherent problems with the “alienation industry” and created a website that shows the profitable motives of people involved with pushing reunification between children and abusive parents.

Swithin said, “You have this industry that has been created by unscrupulous professionals who are forcing children into very dangerous situations with a variety of different types of abuses, because they’re making ungodly amounts of money.”

The HighWire also reached out to Dr. Catherine Barrett, a licensed forensic psychologist with a Masters degree in marriage and family therapy. Dr. Barrett has been a consultant, an expert witness, and also a therapist for parents who have lost custody of their children after being accused of alienating the other parent.

“The second the family court hears alienation, we get what’s called an anchoring bias,” Dr. Barrett said. “Now, every single piece of information that comes after this alienation claim is essentially compared to the alienation claim, which weighs the heaviest. Rather than having to prove parental alienation, the preferred parent or the victim in this has to prove that they’re not alienating, which is impossible. It’s really a he said she said. The weight of that term minimizes and sort of erases the initial concern, which is the abuse.”

Dr. Barrett and Swithin both say that judges are not properly trained in domestic violence and mental health which clouds their ability to make reasonable determinations when accusations of abuse are countered with claims of parental alienation. The profit motive of the reunification industry also seems to be keeping the parental alienation theory alive in the family court system despite Kayden’s law, which was passed last year.

“If you look at reunification camps and therapy and the amount of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars that these camps and clinicians bring in by forcing the child to reunify with a parent that they have stated has been abusive towards them,” Dr. Barrett explained. “There really is no incentive to stop this theory. This keeps attorneys longer on these cases. It’s almost like its own industry. It’s corrupt. I’ve seen it and been seeing it for 6-7 years. The second that term is dropped, it’s very hard to convince the court that it’s not happening.”

Narcissistic abuse and coercive control are the underlying conditions of the abusive parent that utilize the parental alienation theory to rip custody away from the protective parents. When abuse allegations are brought forth, it is difficult to prove or not prove. When it cannot be definitively proven, then the court often sides with the alienation theory.

“You get courts that say, well ,we’ve investigated it and it’s unfounded, meaning we can’t prove it,” Dr. Barrett said. “It’s really hard to prove sexual abuse. It’s also incredibly difficult to prove emotional maltreatment because abusers in domestic violence are very very good at putting on fronts so it comes off as unfounded. The court equates unfounded with false. The burden of proof almost always falls on the victim, which puts them on the defense, which shoots the whole case. No longer are they in a position to be on the offense, but they are now put on the defense to defend something that they haven’t done. And the abuser gets to hide in plain sight.”

“There are no accurate psychological measures that actually assess domestic violence,” Dr. Barrett continued. “The only violence risk assessment tools that are out there are normed on workplace violence, school shooters, things like that. That’s because domestic violence perpetrators hide in plain sight. They can turn it on and off. They can be very charming, very regulated, very cool, calm and collected to the outside world. The second that door shuts, they’re monsters. They play that up in the courtroom.”

The primary concern is for the health and safety of the child, but the parental alienation theory claims that children can be easily coached to make up allegations about the other parent. Credible allegations of abuse may, therefore, be regarded as made-up stories fed to the child by the protective parent. Dr. Barrett said children should be more comfortable in the family court system, but it doesn’t mean that everything said by a child needs to be accepted as absolute truth.

“Kids are oftentimes props and pawns, triangulated, and it becomes a war between parents or we have one really abusive person and the child becomes collateral damage,” Dr. Barrett said. “I think we need to spend more time allowing the child to talk to express without there being this automatic shutdown of you said this, therefore you are being coached.”

Dr. Barrett explained that kids are told that they cannot talk about abuse on the stand because it is unfounded. She said that the judges and opposing attorneys have said nasty things to children, which leads to serious mental health issues and shame.

“The child is clearly communicating something,” Dr. Barrett said. “There needs to be this middle ground before we just throw them in a room with a parent that they fear expecting them to carry the burden. What happens in these reunification sessions is the child is told that they need to apologize to their abusive parents, that they’ve never been abused, that they really are hurting the abusive parent’s feelings. The moral responsibility falls on the child. Anytime the child has to carry the moral responsibility of parents, that turns into shame. That’s the early development of shame. What I tell courts is that if reunification is even on the table, that needs to be way down the line.”