“We believe the children” became both the unofficial motto of advocates for the prosecution and a catch-all response to those few who asked whether the accusers had completely lost their minds. The approach was based largely on the work of psychiatrist Roland Summit, who claimed that, of every 1,000 children who say they were sexually abused, only two or three are guilty of inventing or exaggerating. He also said it was normal for children who had been sexually abused to retract their claims and say they made it all up. The upshot: No matter what children said, they were sexually abused, and if you didn’t believe them, something was wrong with you.
Yet “believing the children” glossed over the fact that, often, adults believed only what they wanted to hear. In the McMartin case, the social workers who interviewed children not only considered Summit’s theory as gospel but interrogated (not too strong a word) the children repeatedly, becoming more bullying with each session. When one child denied seeing a game called “Naked Movie Star” played at his preschool, the therapist replied: “Well, what good are you? You must be dumb.”
There are two steps
ReplyDelete1) If you're going to deprive a man of his freedom for the long term, then you have to have a fair trial and an intensive examination of the evidence. No question.
2) If you're going to protect society from danger, you're going to have to overcall it sometimes and arrest people who turn out to be innocent. The public's safety requires such steps because otherwise you're endangering them.
That's why cops aren't judges and judges aren't cops.
But here's the thing - a cop can arrest anyone as long as he has a good enough reason but he can't hold him in jail for very long unless he has a really good reason. That really good reason might not be good enough for a guilty verdict at trial but it's enough to keep the guy jailed until then.
We were at that stage with Walder. The cops had a really good reason to put him in jail. that's enough to say that there was something horribly wrong and we need to listen to the victims, not his enablers.