A humanities journal has retracted an article about the controversial theory of parental alienation after receiving legal threats from a group that supports the concept.
On May 19, the Integrated Journal for Research in Arts and Humanities (IJRAH) removed a review article by Robert Keith Head suggesting the theory of parental alienation is unsupported by research and fails “to meet basic validity requirements for psychological constructs.”
The move came after the Parental Alienation Study Group (PASG) — which describes itself as an international, nonprofit membership organization dedicated to the study and understanding of parental alienation — accused the journal of publishing “scientific fraud” and demanded the journal retract the paper or face legal action. The journal said the removal was not dictated by “external demands or threats” but followed a “comprehensive secondary evaluation” by its editorial board and independent psychometric experts who identified “critical methodological and structural flaws that undermined the paper’s scientific validity.”
“Following these internal findings, our editorial team engaged in a direct, thorough conversation with Mr. Head to address these granular scientific and data-verification concerns,” Raghvendra Pratap Singh, legal advisor for Stallion Publication, told Retraction Watch in an email. “Regrettably, the author was unable to provide satisfactory explanations or empirical validation to resolve our highly detailed peer-review inquiries.”
Head, a social worker and doctoral candidate at Capella University in Minneapolis, said he stands behind the work. The complaints against his paper consist of disputed scholarly interpretations, contested source counts and disagreements about how the literature should be characterized, none of which meet the COPE threshold for retraction, he told us.
“My own read is that this is about the cost of the ongoing legal fees rather than any genuine problem with the article,” he told us. “I think the expense of defending the paper, not its merits, drove the removal.”
Parental alienation (PA) refers to a mental condition in which a child allies with a preferred parent and rejects the other parent without justification. Supporters believe the condition is primarily due to manipulation of the child by the preferred parent and contend PA is a form of emotional child abuse. Critics say the theory lacks scientific evidence and is often weaponized in court to discredit legitimate domestic violence and child abuse claims.
We published a guest post in 2023 by members of PASG that discussed the group’s attempts to get a book with “misinformation” about PA retracted. The post drew many heated comments.
Head’s IJRAH paper, published in January, examined the empirical foundations of PA by synthesizing peer-reviewed research from 1985 to 2025. His analysis found major medical, psychiatric, and psychological professional organizations have “rejected PA as a legitimate concept,” and empirical data shows a “troubling correlation between PA allegations and documented domestic violence, with such claims frequently functioning as litigation strategies that redirect attention from abuse allegations.
PASG sent a letter to IJRAH on Jan. 26, requesting the journal retract the paper. The group outlined several parts of the article it found “unacceptable,” including that Head relied on “non-peer-reviewed and subjective sources rather than scientific data,” he included misinformation about parental alienation and estrangement and his characterization of Gardner was inaccurate.
“This false information gets propagated from one journal to another, from one author to another, and it’s a huge problem because it’s adversely affecting the worlds in which we work,” PASG president Phillip Hendrix told us. “Families get affected by these issues.”
When the journal did not respond, Mini M. Nair, an attorney for PASG based in Kerala, India, sent a legal notice to IJRAH on April 3 threatening to initiate legal proceedings within seven days if the journal did not immediately retract the article, permanently remove it from the journal’s website and publish a formal corrigendum on its homepage acknowledging the paper’s factual errors.
In an April 16 letter, PASG addressed a response from IJRAH that offered several options to address the group’s complaints, including a formal scientific rebuttal, letter to the editor or series of corrigenda, according to the letter. PASG’s attorney wrote that the group appreciated the proposals, but that retraction was the most “appropriate approach.”
“In an academic debate, you’re not allowed to make up statistics or facts that are simply untrue,” William Bernet, PASG founder, told us. “That’s what we’re trying to address: misstatements of fact.”
In an April 20 email, Singh replied the publisher would not be “coerced into summary censorship” by arbitrary deadlines.
Singh wrote that PASG’s “claim of ‘fraudulent data’ was legally and scientifically unsupported” and that under the COPE framework, data fabrication refers to the invention of empirical results, “not an author’s selection of secondary sources” in a critical review. The author “verified every claim made is supported by peer-reviewed citations,” Singh wrote.
She added: “It has come to our attention that your clients have a documented history of attempting to suppress critical scholarship through legal pressure on publishers rather than scholarly response,” referring to a book the group called for Routledge to retract in 2023 and its challenge of a National Institute of Justice-funded empirical study by Joan Meier. Both attempts were unsuccessful.
Following a rejoinder and notice served by PASG’s attorney on May 14, however, the journal changed course. “Pursuant to the demands” raised in PASG’s communication and “in compliance with the relevant statutory standards,” the journal stated it had “immediately taken down and permanently removed” Head’s article, according to a May 19 email to PASG.
Singh told us the removal followed a “comprehensive secondary evaluation by our editorial board and independent psychometric experts,” who identified “critical methodological and structural flaws that undermined the paper’s scientific validity.” According to the journal, this included lack of empirical and scientific backing, methodological conflation, and an unsatisfactory consultation with Head.
Singh denied “external demands or threats of litigation from advocacy groups” dictated the decision.
“We are aware of the systemic sensitivities, external debates, and localized legal friction surrounding the topic of parental alienation,” Singh told us. “However, we must explicitly state that our editorial and legal decisions were guided solely by academic integrity, psychometric quality standards, and our commitment to publishing rigorous research.”
Head believes otherwise. He told us he answered the journal’s questions and sufficiently addressed all of PASG’s allegations with supporting references in emails and calls.
“The message to every early career researcher watching is simple: publish something in a contested field that organized interests want gone, and you can lose the paper and your standing, even when no one shows you were wrong,” he said.
PASG has written rebuttals and letters to the editor about other works and influenced corrections in the past, but Bernet said Head’s IJRAH article is the first “successful” retraction the group has driven. They are also attempting to remove the IJRAH paper from Academia, Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar, he said.
ResearchGate has already removed the paper. A spokesperson for ResearchGate told us it withdrew the paper after receiving a report that the article had been removed from the publisher’s site.
“Upon investigation it was confirmed that this article is no longer available on the publisher’s site and the DOI no longer resolves to a live page. As a result the article’s page on ResearchGate has been removed,” the spokesperson told us. “Neither the article’s content nor its author were part of the decision process. As per [Digital Services Act] regulations, the authors of any removed article are informed of the removal and their right to appeal the decision.”
Head said he’s appealing the decision.
Bernet and Hendrix also sent a letter to editors at Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics with concerns about an opinion article Head authored. Published in April, the article documents an alleged pattern in which proponents of PA have responded to critical scholarship through organized campaigns to retract, withdraw or remove work rather than through scientific debate. Head explores cases where PA supporters have attempted to fuel retraction of critical papers, including the Routledge book. (The paper mentions Retraction Watch’s guest post by PASG about the subject.)
The Frontiers paper also discusses a campaign by PASG and Global Action Research Integrity in Parental Alienation to block a United Nations special rapporteur from presenting a report to the Human Rights Council that recommended states prevent the use of PA in family law proceedings. A response by an international consortium of scholars called the behavior “indicative of harassment campaigns aimed at suppressing and penalizing dissent.”
In their May 24 letter to Frontiers editors, Bernet and Hendrix wrote that “false statements” in the paper about “specific proponents of PA theory may amount to defamation.” They requested the publisher either correct the article with multiple corrigenda and publish only the corrected version where “Head can state his opinions and his conclusions without making any reference at all to the activities of PASG members,” or Frontiers editors should consider retraction.
“We realize that suggestion is somewhat ironic, since the entire message of the article criticizes peremptory and inappropriate retraction of journal articles and book chapters,” the letter reads. “A third possibility is for our colleagues and us to prepare and submit a commentary regarding Head’s objectionable article. We reject this option because Head’s article in its current form would continue to be available for citation by critics of PA theory, which propagates the misinformation.”
Defea Chan, a spokesperson for Frontiers, told us the publisher received a letter from PASG regarding the article and that it is “investigating in accordance with our editorial policies and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidance.”
Head’s paper is “really wrong” to claim PASG is “trying to suppress discourse” Bernet told us. He said the group believes in academic freedom and “adversarial collaboration.”
“We hope that the people who have an interest in parental alienation and the people who criticize it, [can] all get together and produce documents in which we can all agree on,” Bernet told us. “In other words, we hope to have collaboration rather than polarization.”
Head said he believes the removal of his IJRAH paper after legal threats by PASG illustrates the very pattern documented in his latest article.
“My Frontiers paper is about reaching for retraction instead of writing a rebuttal,” Head told us. “Then my IJRAH paper was removed instead of answered. I documented the pattern and then became an example of it.”
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I have seen PA used to force parents to share custody with abusers, against the will and testimony of their children, leading to serious harm. Sounds like PASG similarly engages in abusive bullying behavior.
Stallion Publication is based in India as is the attorney this advocacy group sent after the publisher. Anyone know if Indian courts are favorable grounds for this sort of action? Or perhaps it’s just that Stallion Publication is small and decided the potential legal fees from a zealous advocacy group were not in the budget. It’s not like a PhD student is going to sue.
Too bad publishers who fold to such pressure can’t at least be upfront, rather than claiming on second thought, it was a bad article. “In response to threats of litigation by an advocacy group, the publisher has made a business decision to remove this article.”
PASG — and every other organization that has ever requested the correction of misinformation — has never needed to resort to legal action until now. Head’s article was so egregiously inaccurate that it finally crossed the threshold where a formal legal response became necessary.
What’s important to recognize is that it’s actually the opposition that routinely relies on legal threats, intimidation, and the substantial federal funding they receive through VAWA to push unfounded claims about parental alienation. They continue to assert positions that lack credible empirical support, then accuse others of the very tactics they themselves use.
That pattern is classic projection — a common behavior among individuals or groups unwilling to acknowledge error or imperfection, even when the evidence is overwhelming.
This is transparent projection. I’ve not seen a single piece of evidence suggesting anything meriting a retraction, much less a lawsuit. You seem to be benefiting from the lack of anti-SLAPP laws in India, and have managed to push an Indian publisher into disrepute. I hope you’re satisfied. Meanwhile, researchers like Head will know to choose publishers in countries where academic freedom is actually respected.
You’re entire organization lacks credible empirical support.
Before y’all make further criticisms of hiring an attorney to request that the journal in India retract the Head article, please read the actual article published in the IJRAH (linked in the RW article above). It contains numerous absolutely false statements by Robert Keith Head. And please read the initial complaint sent from PASG to the journal editor (also linked in the RW article above), which methodically explains some of the false statements. It is correct that PASG could have responded by publishing a rebuttal or commentary to the original article by Head, but that would have left the original highly erroneous article online and available for critics of parental alienation theory to cite and promote.
You must really be hoping no one reads the actual materials. It appears that the original article says that studies of alienation lack controlled trials demonstrating the efficacy of their diagnostic and treatment techniques. The letter mentions a lot of studies that aren’t controlled trials demonstrating the efficacy of their diagnostic and treatment techniques, and none that are. I hope this gets Streisand-effected as much as possible–the original critique is clearly valid, regardless of any of the other details. The publisher clearly caved to legal pressure, not to any COPE-consistent criteria for retraction.
” It contains numerous absolutely false statements” – then surely you can identify some?
It is rather shocking to read some of the comments posted here, as the writers clearly do not understand the issues. The author of the article in question was espousing blatant misinformation and other factual errors, meaning the author was engaging in a disinformation campaign against parental alienation theory.
Parental alienation has been studied extensively for decades now and it has been accepted in courts, having passed multiple scientific thresholds. The article in question did not pass any scientific muster and, instead, lacked foundational support for its many inaccuracies and defamatory assertions against persons, organizations and intellectual capital. Attempts to reason with and to request correction of the article were scoffed at. Other intermediate steps were similarly ignored, leaving legal action as the only option.
Sadly, this Retraction Watch article seems to miss the point that the author of the original article was engaging in disinformation. This effort was not about censorship at all but about science denial related to the topic of parental alienation. As a colleague wrote elsewhere, some obviously “do not understand the difference between personal and scientific opinion.”
After reading everything here, it is clear the article never met the criteria for retraction in the first place. Setting that aside, it appears Mr. Bernet and Mr. Hendrix either do not understand what retraction is for or understand it perfectly well and do not care. Retraction corrects the scholarly record. It does not erase the work. A genuinely retracted article normally stays accessible and simply carries a notice explaining why it was pulled, which is the mechanism doing exactly what it is meant to do. So demanding it be permanently removed, and then pressuring Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar to scrub every remaining trace, is not a misreading of some obscure rule. It runs directly against the entire purpose of retraction. Once the aim stops being to rebut a paper and becomes erasing it from the record altogether, that is not correction, and it is not the academic freedom they claim to defend.
Mr. Hendrix, you say intermediate steps were “ignored, leaving legal action as the only option.” But the article reports the journal did offer those steps—a rebuttal, a letter to the editor, corrigenda—and PASG’s own attorney acknowledged and then rejected them. Legal action wasn’t the only option left; it was the option chosen after scholarly alternatives were refused. Dr. Bernet’s comment clarifies why: a rebuttal would leave the paper citable, and that was the outcome PASG wanted to prevent. That’s suppression, not a last resort.
It’s interesting how PASG seems more concerned with trying to silence criticism of their unsubstantiated theory than trying to prevent it from being used to force children into close proximity with abusive parents. Look up “reunification therapy” on ProPublica and you’ll find many horrific stories about what addressing “PA” actually looks like.
Good article. The correctness or not of the scientific hypothesis called “PA theory” should be addressed only by “evidence in print”, not by our ardent emotions, and certainly not by the courts. Mr. Head has contributed some evidence; PASG’s threat of legal action is a clear violation of the scientific process, whether or not the theory they support is correct. Their action suggests to me that they doubt that their “evidence in print” would be sufficiently persuasive.
Mr. Bernet and Mr. Hendrix saying they support academic freedom is hard to take seriously.
Academic freedom means criticism gets answered in public, with evidence. You write a rebuttal. You submit a commentary. You correct the record where needed. You do not pressure a journal, push for retraction, and then try to chase the paper off other platforms.
The most revealing statement is the concern that the article would still be available for citation. That is not open scholarly debate. That is reputation control with footnotes.
If PASG believes the paper is wrong, it should make the argument and let readers compare the evidence. Trying to make criticism disappear while calling it “collaboration” is exactly the problem.
Scholars debate. Advocacy groups suppress. PASG, Mr. Bernet and Mr. Hendrix should decide which one they want to be.
The irony is hard to miss. PASG says it supports academic freedom and collaboration, but at the same time rejects a commentary because a critical paper would still be available to cite. That is exactly the problem Head is describing. The academic answer is rebuttal, not legal pressure.
Dear readers,
No authority or organization compelled Stallion Publications to retract the article in question. The decision was made solely after a rigorous peer-review process and a one-on-one audio and virtual conference with the author. Following the author’s inability to satisfactorily address our concerns, we concluded that immediate removal of the article was necessary.
Could you point to a specific concern the author was unable to address?
The article you removed was a narrative literature review. You claim your editorial board and independent psychometric experts found “critical methodological and structural flaws that undermined the paper’s scientific validity.” That is language for evaluating empirical research, not a literature review. The article performs no psychometric analysis, develops no scales, and computes no reliability or validity testing. Psychometric expertise has no bearing on the article you were supposedly evaluating. Either your reviewers didn’t understand what they were reading, or this explanation was constructed after the fact. Anyone familiar with the difference between a literature review and an empirical study can see that.
In my experience with academic publishing, journals don’t show up in comment sections, let alone to defend a removal alongside the organization that sought it.
Jennifer: “In my experience with academic publishing, journals don’t show up in comment sections..,” (not that this disproves your experience), meet Oncotarget:
https://retractionwatch.com/2026/05/11/elsevier-retracts-the-least-and-reinstates-the-most-new-analysis-finds/#comment-2384816
With multiple legal accusations against both the journal and the editor personally, I find that hard to believe.
PASG’s conduct here is very disturbing. They appear to be using institutional pressure against both Mr. Head and Dr. Doley, the editor of IJRAH. They state they contacted Capella University to have Mr. Head retract the article. I don’t see them involved except where Mr. Head appears to be a student. They also appear to make veiled threats against Dr. Doley and their position at Haldia Institute of Technology. This appears to be exactly what is discussed in Mr. Head’s article in Frontiers. Neither the academic freedom or the collaboration PASG professes to support. Quite the opposite actually.