Congressional Testimony

WRITTEN TESTIMONY OF ADVOCATES FOR CHILDREN IN THERAPY, DELIVERED BY LARRY W. SARNER, ACT LEGISLATIVE DIRECTOR, AND JEAN MERCER, PRESIDENT, ACT BOARD OF PROFESSIONAL ADVISORS, TO THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES, COMMITTEE ON WAYS AND MEANS, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, UNITED STATES CONGRESS.

(ORIGINAL HEARING HELD ON NOVEMBER 6, 2003)

Advocates for Children in Therapy thank the chairman and members of the Human Resources Subcommittee for holding this hearing and offering us an opportunity to discuss a major factor in the abuse of the Collingswood children and many other foster and adoptive children. Our organization, ACT, is a non-profit group dedicated to fighting abuse of children in putatively therapeutic care.

Unlike some other witnesses in the present hearing, we believe that the Collingswood case was not primarily a consequence of overburdened caseworkers, poor supervision, or inadequate budgets. Although those problems need to be addressed, a more important factor in this case was a belief system followed by the Jacksons and apparently condoned by caseworkers.

The belief system we refer to is the basis of a form of quasiprofessional mental health intervention called Attachment Therapy (or AT) by its proponents and sometimes termed Coercive Restraint Therapy by its many professional critics.Spreading by means of the Internet and the mass media, this form of intervention targets foster and adoptive children. AT itself is a physically intrusive and potentially dangerous practice. It is often accompanied by a parental approach called “therapeutic foster parenting” and this appears to have occurred in the Jacksons’ case, resulting in serious mistreatment of the four boys.

Attachment Therapy is a pseudoscientific and pseudotherapeutic approach to childhood behavior problems, especially among foster and adopted children. It postulates that the bad behavior of “difficult” children comes from their failure to attach to their current caregivers. Thus, it seeks to “treat” these children by quite literally trying to force the children to love and obey their caregivers unquestioningly. It does this by brutalizing the children and trying to break their wills, both in the therapy room and at home. The more children try to hold on to their dignity and individuality, the more severe treatment they receive.

At a time when there is a national demand for evidence-based medical and psychiatric treatment, AT and its adjunctive treatments exist without an evidence basis. Indeed, its practice and the assumptions about child development which underlie it run completely counter to established facts about children’s lives. The AT-therapeutic foster parenting approach is mental health quackery at its worst and most disturbing. We urge you and your staff to read a recently published book for a complete discussion of this complex matter, Attachment Therapy on Trial: The Torture and Death of Candace Newmaker.

Brutality is brutalizing to its practitioners as much as to its victims. In the case of AT, parents in particular become desensitized to their child’s suffering as their brutality continues week after week, year upon year, because good outcomes are forever elusive. Many cases of parents “going too far” using AT parenting techniques have been reported, with growing frequency of late.

As you and your staff investigate this case further, you will see telltale signs of Attachment Therapy and its parenting techniques in this case:

• The control of food to a child is an important AT parenting technique. There have been several instances of starvation or near-starvation associated with AT parenting, most recently in highly publicized cases in Utah and Texas. AT parenting specialists specifically counsel diets of nothing more than peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches and/or cold oatmeal for weeks or months on end.

• Until relatively recently, locking doors of certain rooms in the home, such as a child’s room, has been a common recommendation by AT parenting specialists. Now they recommend putting alarms on them.

• AT parenting directs that parents require children to sit, usually on the floor, unmoving, for long periods of time. They call it “strong sitting,” or sometimes “power sitting.”

• AT parenting specialists recommend establishing authority over children by requiring children to unquestioningly perform long hours of useless tasks, or do them in time-wasting ways. Cutting a lawn with garden shears, or washing clothes in buckets, would be examples of such. In other settings it has been removing fallen leaves by hand or shoveling manure.

• AT parenting specialists commonly prescribe keeping childrens’ rooms bare and devoid of mental stimulation. Children are allowed very few, if any, toys, and playing with the ones they may have is considered a privilege that must be earned. In Catch-22 fashion, such privileges are rarely earned.

• Formal education, too, is considered a privilege and not a right. AT tells adoptive parents that these children are budding sociopaths not fit to be in the company of others, especially at school. Homeschooling is a growing option chosen by parents, which is not to say that they are actually schooled.

• Denial of medical care is a frequent occurrence. In the AT world-view, children’s physical complaints are considered false, attention-getting, and manipulative. Treating ailments appropriately is regarded as allowing the child to “win” the all-important control battles. Moreover, caregivers following AT fear that medical professionals, after seeing a child, might report them for neglect or abuse.

• AT demonizes children and dismisses any complaints they may express about their caregivers. Thus, it is a common occurrence that parents caught abusing their children with AT techniques call the children liars when they detail the abusive treatment they have received.

• AT universally demonizes birth families of adopted children. AT proponents urge a complete break of contact between children and their birth parents, regardless of circumstances. During “treatment,” they demand that children agree with an unfavorable assessment of the birth parents by requiring the child to discard or distort any favorable memories they may still have about their former families.

Unfortunately, the adoption/foster-care agencies of many states and counties around the United States, including those in New Jersey, actively promote this pseudoscientific and pseudoprofessional nonsense. New Jersey, for instance, distributes a 32-page pamphlet to foster and adoptive parents that teaches foster and adoptive parents to misdiagnose their children with attachment disorder and then tells them what supposedly they can do about it. The pamphlet, part of a home-study course, urges parents to put children into treatment with Attachment Therapists, where the children are not only maltreated during their time with the Therapists, but the parents are also taught how to continue treatment at home, with abusive techniques such as you’ve seen in this case.

Caseworkers, meanwhile, are given the message that AT parenting techniques are acceptable, no matter how abusive they appear on their face. One caseworker in Utah recently investigated a report that a ten-year-old was being kept home from school in a bare bedroom for days at a time and allowed to say only “Yes, Mom,” “No, Mom,” and “May I go to the bathroom?” The caseworker, after being told these were AT techniques, saw nothing wrong with any of this, and even counseled the mother on how to avoid being reported in the future. It is not surprising, then, that caseworkers in New Jersey had no alarm bells go off about the treatment of the Jackson boys.

It is essential to address the question of what the Federal government can do about this. We can be sure that there will be calls by other witnesses for additional federal aid to child-welfare agencies to provide more workers for better oversight. Whatever the merit of such calls, there is an even better way for the federal government to prevent cases like this: root out AT from the child-welfare system in every state. That is something that the House of Representatives last year endorsed doing with the passage of HCR 435 by a 397-0 vote. And it can be accomplished by doing four simple things:

First, the federal government can severely restrict the use of an attachment disorder diagnosis for the classification of children as “special-needs” and thereby entitle adoptive parents to an adoption subsidy. This will remove the financial incentives to misdiagnose and maltreat children, as well as free up scarce federal dollars for the truly needy.

Second, the federal government can tighten up its authorizations for medicaid payments and other subsidies to mental-health providers, to assure that payments aren’t made for attachment therapists and attachment parenting specialists. For the most part such payments would be in violation of PL 106-310, the Children’s Health Act of 2000, but regulators implementing that act should be alert to the subterfuges and non-disclosures that AT practitioners use to prevent detection.

Third, there should be a tightening of controls on federal grant money for the study of therapies and interventions. We have identified several grants to “study” AT and allied practices. Invariably these are not studies to determine safety and efficacy, but rather for identifying means of integrating AT seamlessly into the adoption and foster-care systems. Controls should assure that federal grants are spent wisely, and only on scientifically validated interventions (which AT certainly is not).

Last, but certainly not least, the federal government must use its aid to state agencies to assure that caseworkers are not either surreptitiously or negligently ignoring signs of child-abuse just because parents are following the advice and practices of so-called therapists or parenting specialists. Abuse is abuse, regardless of the source of the advice encouraging it, or whether the title “therapy” is attached to it.

It probably does not require additional legislation to achieve these four simple things. The bureaucratic mechanisms are already in place. Perhaps Congress in its oversight function can persuade the executive branch to issue the rules and establish the controls that can save a lot of suffering — and ironically a lot of money, too.

Thank you for your attention.