I've mentioned that I've been reading up on the ritual sex abuse case of the 1980s. The victims included not only the wrongfully convicted, but the children who were fed false memories of abuse that never happened (and still to this day believe fantastic tales of ritual abuse), and others. The story that most affected me was of an eight year old girl subjected to a particular "expert" physician's physical "test" for sexual abuse. The physician told the girl she had been molested. She denied it. He then told the girl that to test her truthfulness, he was going to rub her anus with swabs, insert glass test tubes into her rectum, and take photographs of her genitals. Frightened and embarassed, she cried and begged not to be examined, but he insisted. He then once again insisted she had been abused. Years later, she remembered this as "the worst thing that ever happened to me." (Nathan & Snedeker, Satan's Silence 188)
The girl almost certainly wasn't sexually abused by the defendant, but she was by the physician retained by the prosecutor.
I'm just checking here, but is it clear that this was a threat to browbeat her into changing her story, or was it the normal physical examination one would do to determine if the child had been raped? (Generally, I absolutely agree that the Satanic ritual abuse cases were nonsense and usually characterized by prosecutorial misconduct -- this just doesn't sound that far off from a child's report of a doctor doing an exam for a rape kit.)
It was also apparent that if the therapist insisted that kid subject then PLAY with these dolls, more than likely, the play was going to involve, in some way, the dolls' most CONSPICUOUS (no, really, you have to see these to get the full effect; they all but had blinking strings of LED lights spelling out "GENITALS!" on 'em) features, since they were otherwise wholly unremarkable.
If a non-therapist had kept 'em around, and showed 'em to kids, they'd tar and feather him....
I'd like to see that applied to the physician and those who instructed him to act in that manner.
I'd also like to see people keep these stories in mind when they call for blood in cases like this.
Did the legal profession rise up against this abuse? Why not?
Can we expect similar silence if some frenzy once again hits the presecutorial class?
Such an introduction, even if to a perfectly ordinary physical examination of a child (or even an adult), immediately sets up the physician as an adversary challenging what the patient has said. An adult might (I know I would!) respond to that screwy introduction with "Touch me again and I'll test your face's modulus of elasticity under compressive impulse load. And when you wake up, you'll hear from my lawyer. You're fired! Step away from me, now!"
But a child would be entirely defenseless and helpless, and much more vulnerable to the physician's suggestion that changing her story would prevent her suffering further unpleasantness.
And that's assuming that the actual physical exam was routine for the purpose of detecting rape and was physically administered so.
But another conspicuous issue, the dog that didn't bark in Prof. Bernstein's account above, is the absence of an adult female observer or nurse during the physical examination of a young girl by a male physician.
Most male ob/gyns conduct such examinations with a female nurse present. One reason for that is to prevent false accusations of improper conduct. I believe there have been lawsuits in which that fact (or its absence) figured significantly. It seems reasonable that there would be even more reason to employ an adult female observer in a male physician's examination of a young girl.
As stated in the account, this "examination" sounds much more than just hinky. It sounds to me like the "expert" physician should be in the dock for sexual abuse of a child. As others have pointed out though, he probably wasn't prosecuted, since he was the prosecution's star witness.
This is why lawyers have approximately the same public approval ratings as the child molesters themselves.
As the Duke rape case shows, rogue prosecutors are essentially free to sow havoc in the lives of individuals. I can't find the study but there is one around showing that prosecutors are punished less than two tenths of one percent of the time prosecutorial misconduct occurs.
Again, generally the satanic abuse prosecutions were horribly irresponsible and baseless, and were almost certainly damaging to the children involved, let alone the innocent defendants. This story just doesn't seem like a clear reason to call the doctor involved a child molestor.
I would say that Mr. Nifong has become something of an expert on the subject.
While the Lacrosse players' lawyers are most responsible for the demonstration of their innocence, it is public awareness and pressure that has driven the punishment.
I'm not sure if this is what you're thinking of, but see 2 Samuel 12:1-12.
Until the Nifong matter, we had them beat by at least five percentage points, but now it's within the error range.
If the doc did that, I'd note that at least here the civil statute of limitations doesn't start ticking until a kid hits 18.
As far as inflicting a similar punishment on the doc, the problem is that he might enjoy it.
In the Arabian Nights, a story like this appears as The Tale of the Jar of Olives. I've heard it in ancient Chinese literature (I forget where), and in tales of various wise kings in Europe.
It's a wonderful cautionary tale for those who would raise posses.
Second, not only were those that prosecuted these cases never punished, several of them used the prosecutions to bolster their careers. Scott Harshberger became AG of Massachusetts, and almost governor, and Janet Reno became AG of the U.S.
I submit that there is an important difference between the recovered memory people today and those who tried women for witchcraft in 17th century Salem. In the 17th century, few people understood scientific method, and even the elite of Salem, some of whom were fairly well educated by the standards of their time, were mired in primitive superstition and cannot reasonably have been expected to understood how silly their belief in witchcraft and how to detect it was. In contrast, in the United States of the latter 20th century, the "therapists", police officers, and prosecutors involved in the "repressed memory" scandals were almost certainly exposed to the basics of scientific method and to intense skepticism about religion and other forms of superstition. Moreover, they had ready access to psychologists and others more knowledgeable than themselves. In using ad hoc investigative techniques, pursuing intrinsically dubious hypotheses, and failing to consult people with real expertise, they behaved in a way that was at the very least reckless. Bottom line: Cotton Mather didn't know any better. The "repressed memory" people did or should have.
The primary motivation to believe stupid stuff is that it would be really neat if it were true. Selection bias does most of the work.
And why people would be really, really pleased to find some of this awful stuff is true is....icky.
I've been a psychiatric social worker for 30 years, and I remember well the numerous young women we received, unraveling to the point of suicidality because their therapists were pressing them to recover memories that they were sure must be there.
I would add to Bill Poser's comment that the advantage we in the 21st C show over the 17th is indeed scientific rather than moral. If we believed others were capable of inflicting damage on our loved ones from a distance in some way we would still punish them severely. (See Alar, secondhand smoke, breast implants)
Papers always cooperate with prosecutors. In the Duke story, the local papers cooperated with DA Nifong, and so did the NY Times. (On the first day this story hit the national news, I, 1000 miles away, could tell a friend that this story had a fishy smell to it--but the local papers in Durham went along with the DA for months.) Up here in Boston in the 80s, the Boston Globe went whole hog with the Amirault prosecution, and years after the fiasco was a national scandal, its editors were still telling visiting reporters (like Rabinowitz) how correct they had been.
My pet peeve on the subject of P.A. is the deadbeat dad stuff you also see on the front page of your newspapers reguarly. ("DA shames top ten deadbeats") If you give a close look at the stories, you will see there is no checking on the facts by the reporters. Most of the dollar figures the DAs use in these press events are extremely unlikely (a Mexican landscape worker owing $70,000 in back child support?) but no one ever checks. Note that. No one ever checks.
All that said, I'm lucky that I have a clearly defined role in the system (to give the accused the benefit of the doubt). Deciding whether a sepecific child has been sexually abused is an awesome task. The child's testimony will often be vague and imprecise. Older kids can lie.
If you wrongly decide that a kid was not abused, the kid is denied the treatment and care that the kid needs. A child molester stays free, and you've increased the chance that the victimized kid will victimize others.
If you wrongly decide that a kid was abused, you've subjected the accused to the only thing worse than being sexually abused--defending himself against a false allegation of sexual abuse. You've wrongly forced a man from respectable society to a position of the lowest of the low. You've also sexualized the child by coercing him or her to say things no kid should say.
And the scary thing is, if you routinely handle child sex cases, you will eventually be wrong.
One possible solution is to rotate people in and out of handling these kinds of cases. It should not be your career. These cases gnaw on everyone who handles them.
"Touch me again and I'll test your face's modulus of elasticity under compressive impulse load.
I'd be testing for the yield modulus myself. I'm interested in the non-linear part of the curve. I think a permanent elongation of 10% would be sufficient. However that could be adjusted up or down as circumstances require.
"Older kids can lie"
So can younger ones. Remember that most of the day care sexual abuse hysteria cases in the 80s revolved around kids aged 3-6 at the time of the supposed abuse.
My wife used to work for an agency a few years ago that helped kids who were suspected of being sexually abused with the pyschologist, doctor, police officer, social worker, and prosecuter all sharing the same office to make the process easier on the kid and the family since if the kid was abused they need to meet with all these different people. She did occasional intake interviews with familes and almost inevitably the abuse was committed by a blood relative, step-father, or by the mother's boyfriend. I don't think a single person in her office believed in recovered memories and they had a good procedure including chaperoned medical exams to try to determine if the child had been abused and tried to avoid suggestion.
Suppose you were that poor kid's father? Even supposing you weren't going to be Nifonged.
Getting my thumbs out of the doc's larynx might be difficult.
I'll probably tick some of you off, but I'm afraid that global warming has the potential to be another one!
I've always assumed it was under the influence of these ideas that lots of innocent people went to jail and that children were abused, not by the defendants, but by those who assumed they had been abused.
Simon, your suggestion to move well out into the non-linear portion of the curve is an excellent one, of course. And
when performing stress-strain analysis, I always recommend multiple trials, so as to generate a high-confidence dataset.
CPS. "Shild Protective Services". You know, the ones who put out th guideline saying never to leave your child alone with anyone, then come up to school without the parents' knowledge and perform a physical exam on two of their children ALONE in a room.
Did I mention that was done entirely on the 'evidence' of hearsay of hearsay? (No, not to my kids, but to a friend's.)
Yeah, a pedophile with half a brain would work for CPS; there's no accountability for those people... they are their own oversight.
I don't think you have to smear all religious belief as superstition to discount so-called "recovered memories."
Maybe not, I suppose, but that was my thought reading it.
As a side note--does a parent generally have to consent to a minor's being subjected to a rape examination? Obviously it gets complicated where one or both parents are suspected of being directly or indirectly involved in the abuse--but in general?
In the 1980s and 1990s there were many people testifying as experts who would testify about what they perceived to be trauma caused by sexual abuse--when in reality the genitalia was "normal."
I add the caveat that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (that the lack of trauma does not mean that sexual abuse did not occur)--but Dr. Joyce Adams, a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego has testified regarding this change in the "science" (as have various local experts on child sexual abuse).
That said, it is true that it has only been in the past 10 years that people have been systematically studying normal female prepubescent anatomy; before this doctors tended to diagnose abuse based on what they thought it "should" look like. There turns out to be a very wide range of , and things heal very quickly. One recent study of prepubescent girls who presented with known rape with bleeding, after 2 weeks, only 6% had any diagnostic findings.
I don't disagree -- if an accusation has been made by a victim. But in this case it wasn't. The examining physician made the accusation before he even examined the alleged victim.
From Prof. Bernstein's account above:
I have a Ph.D. in materials engineering and a J.D. - I understand you just fine.
On the topic of this thread, many if not most diagnoses of sexual abuse are based on hunches, not science (I've won a new trial for a guy whose conviction was based partly on a non-scientific "diagnosis" of sexual abuse.)
All that said, it looks like some who have posted here don't understand that some kids really are abused. And the system has to do its best to identify the guilty.
What we need is some real science on what demonstrates sexual abuse and what does not. We need to couple the science with a respect for the right of the defendant to confront his accuser.
I have not read this book but I followed the cases very closely. The fact is that children were told htey were abused, rewarded if they confirmed it and harassed if they denied it. After months of theraphy like that a child has memories installed.
Why does this happen? They abuse experts start out with an assumption that abuse has happened and that they must get the child to confess for the child’s own good. If a child says it happened, it did. If they deny it that probably means it did happen. They can’t be proven wrong. And once they know what has to be found it is just a matter of time before they get it.
I had an adult friend who almost got caught in this false memory issue through intensive theraphy. He told me he was Satanically abused. Only when I started questioning him did it become clear it was the therapist telling him this and reinterpreting his memories. He was convinced his brother had confirmed it by mentioning “a deep, dark family secret.” I challenged him to actually ask what that secret was. He was sure it was Satanism. He asked and the brother said: “You know, our mother’s affair.” He left that therapist and found another.
It should also be noted that with false memories when they are induced the children suffer the same mental trauma then that would have had the abuse really happened before.