Combatting a Dangerous American Export: The Need for Professional Regulation of Psychologists in the New Zealand and Family Court

What the paper says

This Article is the third in a series that explores the role that unreliable American pseudo-psychology plays in the New Zealand Family Court's inadequate responses to family violence. In "Endangered by Junk Science," I argued that the Court relies upon "expert" opinion evidence based on behavioral-science principles, forensic methods, and fallacious statistical reasoning that lack both foundational and as-applied validity to determine children's best interests and that the result has been entrenched pseudo-scientific mythologies that endanger women and children, immunize violent fathers, and silence children's voices. In "Sub Silentio Alienation," I argued that these failures are the result of implicit associations and cognitive barriers, gender bias, and the close relationship between Family Court Judges and court psychologists, which preculde internal reform. In this Artitcle, I advance a third cause of the failure of the New Zealand Family Court to respond adequately and appropriately to unreliable expert evidence: the inability of the New Zealand Psychological Board (NZPB) to regulate and address the pseudo-science of parental alienation (PA) in the same way that American psychology boards have. This inability stems from the insistence by the courts in Aotearoa, New Zealand that they possess a de facto monopoly on determining the qualifications, ethics, and reliability of their expert psychologists. The result has been the inundation of pseudo-psychology in the Family Court, much of it generated by for-profit American consultants who are not academic researchers, do not publish in peer-reviewed psychology journals, and some of whom have been disciplined by psychology boards in the United States for their professional misconduct.