"a voiceless cry is often the most powerful one"
November 6, 2015 3:35 AM   Subscribe

"Child sex abuse victims face a dilemma. To be recognized as victims, they cannot remain silent, but they must be silent enough to seem authentically hurt." -- US Federal prosecutor Sarah Chang talks about how expectations about how child abuse victims should act hinders prosecution of their abusers. Note: there are no explicit descriptions of abuse mentioned in this story, but this is still about child abuse, so take care.
posted by MartinWisse (13 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
About 9,600 victims have been identified (often, multiple images or videos exist of each child), though there are probably millions more suffering in silence.

If extensive investigation has identified 9,600 victims, why would you conclude that there are probably millions more?

It’s true that child sex abuse victims are rarely candid when they first talk about their experiences, but after repeated interviews — which are necessary in the criminal investigatory process — they can become well practiced and fall prey to accusations of having been coached. Unfortunately, this has come to have the opposite effect of the McMartin Preschool case, causing legitimate cases of abuse to be discounted.

Where is the evidence of this? In a 2001 report from the Department of Justice, only .5% of the cases brought to trial between 1992 and 2000 resulted in acquittals. A paper published by the Crimes Against Children Research Center in 2013 noted the increase in child pornography arrests between 2000 and 2009 and analyzed "Dilemmas and Challenges" faced by prosecutors. The issues Chang writes about weren't even on the radar.


Too often, our society implicitly uses this scale to judge abused children’s emotional pain. If they’re not crying, if their faces are expressionless, we assume they must not be hurting. We refuse to hear silence as anything but a vacuum of feeling, a void in experience.

Again, where is the evidence for Chang's assertion? She s a federal prosecutor who specializes in child exploitation crimes but doesn't give single instance to support the premise that expectations about how child abuse victims should act hinders prosecution of their abusers.
posted by layceepee at 6:04 AM on November 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


About 9,600 victims have been identified (often, multiple images or videos exist of each child), though there are probably millions more suffering in silence.

If extensive investigation has identified 9,600 victims, why would you conclude that there are probably millions more?

Because the research is approximately 20.7% of children experience sexual abuse in the U.S. so 9,600 filmed in child pornography who were identified and their abusers charged is a fraction of that.

And I'd be willing to be that Chang's talking about cases that don't get to the prosecution stage because they aren't "good" victims.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 6:20 AM on November 6, 2015 [11 favorites]


If extensive investigation has identified 9,600 victims, why would you conclude that there are probably millions more?

Most cases of CSA don't leave photographic or video evidence. Abusers usually ensure that it's nothing but the child's word against theirs, which makes the cases difficult to prosecute.
posted by zenzicube at 6:21 AM on November 6, 2015 [6 favorites]


Per the article, Chang's "probably millions more suffering in silence" refers specifically to child pornography rather than child sexual abuse. Though children featured in child pornography are almost always victims of child sexual abuse, it's certainly not the case that all child sexual abuse victims appear in child pornography. If you artificially inflate the cases of child pornography, there is the real chance that law enforcement and other government resources that would be better spent in dealing with offer forms of sexual abuse will be diverted.

Her mention of the McMartin case should be a cautionary reminder. The state of California spent millions investigating and prosecuting two innocent individuals. The fact that child abuse is real and widespread doesn't mean it's helpful to accept uncritically claims made by prosecutors.
posted by layceepee at 6:42 AM on November 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


"Again, where is the evidence for Chang's assertion? She s a federal prosecutor who specializes in child exploitation crimes but doesn't give single instance to support the premise that expectations about how child abuse victims should act hinders prosecution of their abusers."
As a public prosecutor I would hope that she would be this keenly sensitive to the privacy needs of the survivors she protects.
posted by Blasdelb at 7:10 AM on November 6, 2015 [5 favorites]


Her mention of the McMartin case should be a cautionary reminder. The state of California spent millions investigating and prosecuting two innocent individuals...

And many of the then children involved are yet convinced that they were the victims of horrendous acts. If, as I believe, the accused were innocent of the crime of sexual abuse of the children involved, who then is guilty ?
posted by y2karl at 7:56 AM on November 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


This comes up constantly in everything orthogonal to criminal law. People do not behave according to expectations: the falsely accused, the correctly accused, the victims, the witnesses. Even the police or the attorneys.

It damages every single step in the process. It's so frustrating. Everyone--from the cops, to the friends/family of the victim, other witnesses, the prosecutors, the defense attorneys, the judges, the jurors--they all believe that perpetrators or people accused of crimes or victims of crimes or witnesses to crimes behave Like This. Or that they personally Would Do This Thing in That Situation. And then the police, the attorneys, the fact finders cannot accept other behavior as truth or as proof of anything but lies or guilt.

The Innocence Project has done a lot to show us how this convicts innocent people. What no-one is yet good at doing (despite all the social activism around simply believing the stories of people who've been sexually assaulted) is showing how these warped expectations of who people are "supposed" to behave when victimized sabotage justice as well.

The older I get, the more I believe in a specific educational route for judges--an interdisciplinary, rigorous education in much more than the law and procedure--and for criminal prosecutors. I wish there were a way you could both ensure representative everyman juries while simultaneously creating specifically skilled in fact finding everymay juries.
posted by crush-onastick at 8:27 AM on November 6, 2015 [23 favorites]


There was a case I must have read about but cannot find where a child predator abducted, assaulted, and locked an 11 (?) year old girl in a toolbox in his van, and she managed to escape and report the crime to the police, who blew her off and sent her home because some pig thought she was too calm and articulate and not behaving like an 11 year old girl who had been kidnapped and assaulted.

Then, the next morning, her mother brought her back in to fill out some paperwork or something, and only then did someone notice her injuries and entertain the notion that she might be telling the truth. You know, after she'd gone home and cleaned up and her abductor spent a day doing whatever child predators do.

I'm always wary of people who think they're such keen observers of human nature that they can assign credibility to people based on their own biases, but it's absolutely horrifying when it's someone like a cop or a prosecutor whose opinion actually carries some weight.
posted by ernielundquist at 10:08 AM on November 6, 2015 [5 favorites]


It seems that a fairly straightforward solution to the problem of seeming coached after having to answer the same questions repeatedly in different settings is to require that all such interviews be recorded, and to enter the recordings as evidence. Then the fact-finders (whether judge or jury) can see how a complainant became jaded through repeated questioning, rather than leaving the door open for the defense to suggest coaching. Admittedly, it makes disclosure more cumbersome, but the same can be said of *all* evidence.
posted by kiwano at 5:35 AM on November 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


Kathleen MacFarlane: Mr. Monkey is a little bit chicken, and he can't remember any of the naked games, but we think that you can, 'cause we know a naked games that you were around for, 'cause the other kids told us, and it's called Naked Movie Star. Do you remember that game, Mr. Alligator, or is your memory too bad?
Boy: Um, I don't remember that game.
MacFarlane: Oh, Mr. Alligator.
Boy: Umm, well, it's umm, a little song that me and [a friend] heard of.
MacFarlane: Oh.
Boy: Well, I heard out loud someone singing, "Naked Movie Star, Naked Movie Star."
MacFarlane: You know that, Mr. Alligator? That means you're smart, 'cause that's the same song the other kids knew and that's how we really know you're smarter than you look. So you better not play dumb, Mr. Alligator.
Boy: Well, I didn't really hear a whole lot. I just heard someone yell it from out in the _ Someone yelled it.
MacFarlane: Maybe. Mr. Alligator, you peeked in the window one day and saw them playing it, and maybe you could remember and help us.
Boy: Well, no, I haven't seen anyone playing Naked Movie Star. I've only heard the song.
MacFarlane: What good are you? You must be dumb...

MacFarlane: Can I pat you on the head for that? Look what a big help you can be. You’re going to help all these little children, because you're so smart…OK, did they ever pose in funny poses for the pictures?
Boy: Well, it wasn't a real camera. We just played…
MacFarlane: Mr. Alligator, I'm going to…going to ask you something here. Now, we already found out from the other kids that it was a real camera, so you don't have to pretend, OK? Is that a deal?
Boy: Yes, it was a play camera that we played with.
MacFarlane: Oh, and it went flash?
Boy: Well, it didn't exactly go flash.
MacFarlane: It didn't exactly go flash. Went click? Did little pictures go zip, come out of it?
Boy: I don't remember that.
MacFarlane: Oh, you don't remember that. Well, you're doing pretty good, Mr. Alligator. I got to shake your hand.
Sample Interviews by Investigators with Former
Students of the McMartin Preschool

posted by y2karl at 4:08 PM on November 8, 2015


What has that got to do with this FPP?
posted by billiebee at 4:16 PM on November 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


The McMartin case was horrific. And I've been personally involved in cases where there's been sexual assault and it wound up without prosecution, where the victims got blamed and evidence got lost. Basically the justice system in many countries sucks when it comes to handling something as complicated as child sexual assault.

The FPP here is about how perceptions of an appropriate victim should act are a dangerous bias, and that abused children in RL don't act like Lifetime movie victims. It's an interesting discussion and has very little to do with false accusations in the McMartin case or even more broadly sexual assault numbers.

I think we could have a better discussion about how survivors cope. Here's an interesting thing I found out recently - there's no reliable metric to screen out children who are survivors of childhood sexual abuse now. Adults, yes, but not for children. We were looking for a screening set like for depression or domestic violence with some reliability, and while for adults you have some decent evidence for eating disorders, PTSD symptoms, etc, with kids, there was nothing strong enough to hold up as a reliable screen except fresh physical trauma, a history of abuse, or a child's own statement of abuse. Things like nightmares, bedwetting, awareness of sexual behaviour - they all had strong alternative possible sources often enough that you couldn't rely on them to tell who was a sexually abused child and who was a child getting bullied at school.

One good thing was a study that showed that a lot of sexually abused kids became pretty much indistinguishable for a bunch of psychological metrics from non-abused kids after a while, if they received therapy and the abuse was stopped.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 5:41 PM on November 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


There was a case I must have read about but cannot find where a child predator abducted, assaulted, and locked an 11 (?) year old girl in a toolbox in his van, and she managed to escape and report the crime to the police, who blew her off and sent her home because some pig thought she was too calm and articulate and not behaving like an 11 year old girl who had been kidnapped and assaulted.

I recognized this story because it was an episode of Forensic Files (Season 11 Episode 21: Van-ished) which told the story a girl who was abducted and the police thought she was lying and trying to get out of trouble for sneaking off somewhere because her demeanor was so calm and collected.
posted by LizBoBiz at 7:40 AM on November 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


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