Before 1963 and 1993, reports of suspected child abuse grew from 160,000 to over 2.9 million cases reported annually.

Senator Walter Mondale's alleged child protection legislation has been the culprit!  The Mondale Act of 1974 or the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) was well intentioned: the CAPTA program matches monies to states which  comply with the those of its provisions requiring states to set up programs to identify and prosecute child abusers. But instead CAPTA created an epidemic of false allegations of abuse.

According to Austin, the flaw stems (1) from CAPTA's definition of child abuse (the definition is vague and ambiguous and allows the subjective discretion of either the person who reports the abuse or the investigator), (2) from the failure of Child Protective Service (CPS) workers to be properly trained (the author, Austin, appears to be less concerned with the training of law-enforcement officers, who also investigate abuse reports), (3) from the CPS workers having the authority to deny a parent access to the children even if there is a court order which allows them to have visitation with the children, (4) from the CPS worker's fear of lack of employment, and (5) from the CPS worker's fear of punishment or even imprisonment if the evaluator does not report suspected abuse and the child goes back to an abusive situation.

All-too-often consumed by vengeance, divorcing parents all-too-often forget that the children need to love and be loved by both parents.  "Children are being used as pawns to hurt or destroy the other parent. These false allegations of abuse, even if proven to be false, can ruin someone's life and have a devastating effect on the children."

Two syndromes have emerged into prominence during the last two decades.   The first syndrome is the Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS). It is controversial: some say "PAS does not exist" and others say it is used both by "courts to take the children from their mothers" and by "fathers and attorneys as an aggressive defense for physical and sexual abuse."

The Reverend Austin has delineated three types of alienators:

The Alienator's Weapons.

PAS is a form of parentectomy, or the removal or erasure of a parent from the child's life.

The second syndrome is Sexual Allegations In Divorce (SAID). "SAID is a false accusation against one parent, usually the father, for molesting the child," and according to Austin, is often used by women to and is used more often than an allegation of physical abuse, inasmuch as there is often no physical evidence.

As anticipated, Austin calls attention to the mass hysteria, the sensitivity or outrage, about child abuse and and bemoans the loss of the presumption of innocence when a sexual allegation is made: "Instead of being innocent until proven guilty, the accused child molester, especially fathers, are guilty until proven innocent." The immediate result of being deemed guilty is separation of child and father and the imposition of limited and supervised visitation. "Frank Zepezauer states that `in some jurisdictions, the accusation can send a man to prison for life. In others, it can incarcerated him for ten or twenty years or more and brand him, for the rest of his life as a sex offender. At the very least, it can immobilize him in custody proceedings by involving him in costly litigation.'"

According to Austin or Zepezauer (it is unclear), the accusing parent is motivated by:

Austin claims that SAID has spread worldwide, but gives only scant statistics.

Austin also claims that the false allegations coupled with leading questions or suggestive counseling result in children

Statistics of fatherless children. Attributing some statistics to a David Blankenhorn, whose affiliation and sources are not provided, Austin writes that "40 percent of American children will live apart from their fathers sometime before they are 18" . . . and attributes almost every teenage ill on the SAID phenomenon.

"`Children who are deprived of their natural fathers, compared to children in two-parent families, are more likely to go to prison by 8 times, to commit suicide by 5 times, to have behavioral problems by 20 times, to become rapists by 20 times, to run away by 32 times to abuse chemical substances by 10 times, to drop out of high school by 9 times, to be seriously abused by 33 times, to be fatally abused by 73 times and to have a 44 percent higher mortality rate.'"

It is unclear whom Austin is quoting below, although it does appear that the words might have originated from some researcher:

Adolescent girls whose parents divorced during their oedipal years, we postulate that particular coping patterns emerge in response to the absence of the father which may complicate the consolidation of positive feminine identification in many female children and is observable during the latency years. We illustrate both the existence of these phenomena and implication for treatment: (1) intensified separation anxiety, (2) denial and avoidance of feelings associated with loss of father, (3) identification with the lost object, (4) object hunger for males.

Indicators of sexual abuse as set out by Austin.

The indicators that CPS workers or validators use to determine abuse are actually quite common behavior which even normal children sometimes exhibit. Some of these indicators include, bedwetting, acting out, nightmares, whining, temper tantrums, thumb-sucking, and compliant and fearful behavior.

The grief of the target parent. In this section, Austin seems to be writing -- poignantly -- from personal experience.  "In essence, their children have died," he wrote. He speaks of all the heinous repercussions on the targeted parent, emotional -- including suicide of fathers -- as well as financial repercussions from an often unending battle for one's children and for the return of one's good name.