A headline article in the latest newsletter of the NZ Psychological Society expresses delight that the number of complaints reaching the Psychos’ Board has fallen dramatically. This has enabled an insurance company to reduce professional indemnity premiums for Family Court psychos. However, don’t imagine this indicates any improvement in Family Court psycho assessments. Don’t imagine they have become anymore ethical, less feminist or less male-bashing. Quite the reverse from what many fathers report; often such reports are now required only to assess whether a father is feminized enough to allow his children to have him as a father.As usual, many psycho reports simply amplify and give undeserved credibility towards all manner of allegations women make against ex partners.

The reason complaints are not getting to the Psycho Board is that a cosy little agreement was made between Boshier and the Board. This produced a “practice note” that ordered all complaints about psychosto be dealt with in the first instance by the Family Court judge, who would decide whether the complaint should be referred on to the Board. The judges are now so effectively stifling complaints that hardly any get through to the psychos professional body for proper scrutiny.

The previous rule simply disallowed the psychos board from considering any complaints about psychos until the case had been completed by the Family Court. That meant that a report that did not reach professional or ethical standards would still be treated as a kosher psycho assessment by the Court in its decisions. That’s like stopping the engineers’ supervisory body from assessing claimed faults in an engineer’s plan until (for example) the bridge, airliner or nuclear power station based on that plan was completed.

The new Family Court trickery is even more bizarre. Now it might be compared to allowing a tradesman who was already being paid to build the bridge to assess any challenge to the adequacy of the engineer’splan,and to suppress that challenge permanently if he so desires.

If judges are capable of assessing the professional adequacy of psychos work, one wonders why judges don’t simply do their own psychological assessments?

If a psycho report is ordered in your Family Court proceedings, you will just have to take whatever crap you are given and you have almost no recourse if that report is full of lies, imbalance, bias or misandry. Unfortunately, reports without such flaws seem to be rare.

Men would be well advised to seek advice from others in the men’s movement about any psycho appointed to their case. If that psycho gets a thumbs down, challenge the appointment and ask for another one. Remember also that you don’t have to meet the psycho at all if you don’t want to, though this will probably inspire the psycho to write even worse things about you and the Court to hammer you.

A really good idea is for all concerned men to write to the Psychologists Board, PO Box 10-626, Wellington 6143, or email them at [email protected], expressing your concern, disgust or otherwise that the Board is not meeting its legal duty to consider complaints about psychos but instead has delegated that role to someone untrained in psychology. You might want to state that you used to trust the profession when you knew there was a suitable body that would consider any complaint about unethical or substandard work, but now that trust has gone and you would not feel safe in participating in any Family Court psycho assessment.