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A dozen years ago, Pamela Stuart-Mills Hoch was in a very troubled marriage. Already verbally abusive, her husband finally assaulted her physically in December 1989. Hoch went to the police, and her husband was arrested and jailed overnight.
Hoch had been very close to her four children, but after she had their father arrested, her kids turned against her. Her husband convinced them that Hoch was mentally unstable and part of a religious cult whose members used crystals to entrap those around them.
The marriage ended, and all through a grueling custody dispute, the father’s denigration campaign continued. In 1991, the superior court of Quebec, where the family had been living, found that her two eldest children were so alienated from their mother that they couldn’t be reunited with her at that time. The youngest kids still showed signs of attachment to Hoch, however, and were placed in her custody.
In the court’s judgment, Justice John Gomery wrote: “This is a most unusual case, not because the children express a preference to living with their father, but because they also want to have nothing whatsoever to do with their mother. It is unfortunately all too common, when a marriage breaks down, for the spouses to be left with mutual feelings of anger, bitterness and hostility, and they often have difficulty in hiding these feelings from their children. Usually, however, the children want to retain a close relationship with both of their parents, and prefer to avoid becoming involved in their conflict.
“And yet, in this case where there is no evidence of abuse or mistreatment of the children by their mother, all four of them totally reject her,” Gomery continued. “They have chosen to renounce and suppress their natural feelings for the mother they love, or loved until the marriage broke down, and to identify themselves totally with the hatred for her which animates their father.”
Psychological exams showed that Hoch was not mentally unstable, as her ex-husband suggested. In fact, the justice wrote, “Of the two parents, [Hoch] possesses a far superior emotional and mental health. Defendant’s hatred of her is obsessive and unnatural.”
On the day the custody judgment was handed down, Hoch’s ex-husband abducted all four children. The case generated a lot of media attention, and three weeks later, Canadian authorities caught him as he was preparing to leave the country with the kids. The ex-husband was convicted of kidnapping — but was still allowed to retain custody of the two older kids. Hoch, meanwhile, had to rebuild a relationship with the two youngest children.
Distraught, Hoch turned to the Bible for comfort. The book opened to this passage from Jeremiah: “A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping. It is the sound of Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because her children are no more.”
Finding no comfort in those words, Hoch closed the Bible. But an inner voice urged her to open the book again. It fell open to the same passage, which continues, “Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for the Lord is pleased with the work you will do. ‘They will return from the land of the enemy, so there is hope for your future,’ declares the Lord. ‘Your children will return to their own land.'”
Hoch had thought she was the only person suffering from alienation, but after her case was publicized, numerous people called and told her their stories. She started a support group for alienated parents but soon decided that she needed to do more: She wanted to help them rebuild relationships with the children from whom they had been alienated. So she traveled to Washington, D.C., to learn how to set up a research foundation, and in October 2000 she incorporated the nonprofit Rachel Foundation for Family Reintegration — named after the biblical mother who’d lost her children.
Hoch, her new husband and a staff of six now help alienated parents restore ties with children who have been either physically abducted by the other parent or, as she calls it, “mentally abducted.” Whenever she gets a case, she rents space in a residential treatment center in Maryland, where the Rachel Foundation is based, and she or one of her staff members guides the interaction between parent and child as they go through everyday activities. “We rebuild the relationship one simple step at a time,” Hoch says. “The parent and child cook together, go shopping together — whatever. This is done in a safe environment that is free of contact with the alienating parent. That gives the alienated parent a chance to rediscover his child and the child a chance to open up to the parent.”
Out of more than a hundred families that the foundation has helped, sixteen have been in Colorado. “I spent four weeks in Denver last year on an abduction case,” Hoch says. That case involved an eight-year-old child who had been abducted from his home in Europe by a parent and brought to Colorado, where authorities found him. U.S. District Court in Denver ordered the Rachel Foundation to handle the boy’s reintegration with the parent he’d been taken from; the boy and that parent are now back in Europe.
Depending on the severity of the case, reintegration can take anywhere from three days to a month and can cost the parent between $2,000 and $10,000. “We only deal with the worst cases,” Hoch explains. When she is contacted by parents involved in mild alienation cases, she refers them to one of about 200 professionals with whom she works nationwide.
Hoch would like the foundation to open a facility of its own, which she’d call the Rachel House. Even more fervently, she hopes to someday be reunited with all of her children. In 1999, Hoch’s oldest daughter, then 21, returned to her. But her oldest son, now 25, still lives with his father. She hasn’t spoken to or seen him since 1989.
