Firstly let me say that I abhor child abuse of any kind. I know all too well what appalling consequences can follow from it.
At the moment, in the UK, there seems to be an epidemic of people from the entertainment industry being accused of child abuse with the (alleged) offences dating back to the '60s and '70s. Many are found guilty.
This post has been prompted by the news that the folk singer Roy Harper has been charged with child sex abuse.
What I don’t understand is what evidence can be produced after forty years? Surely it must be one person’s word against another’s?
As you say, there are certainly challenges. However, it is not always just “he said she said”. Quite a few times (especially where there is a pattern of abuse) you will see that complaints were in fact made at the time, or that there were people in the know or people were confided in. In one case I know about, the victim actually was photographed. You might have evidence and its not uncommon to find corroborating evidence.
Especially where the original investigation had uncovered evidence it is easier for the prosecutor of the day.
At the end of the day. It is just another case. You have to prove to the trier of fact an issue beyond reasonable doubt using probative and admissible evidence.
Of course, in this day and age, anyone who claims to have been abused by so-and-so several decades ago automatically has their word taken as gospel, with no corroborating evidence necessary, especially if the accused person is recently dead. Sadly, there are certainly a few genuine claims of abuse, but who is able to tell the difference?
This is one of the things that a lot of men are concerned about, especially as it relates to sexual abuse. After all, if someone comes up and claims I molested them in 1995, how am I going to come up with a defense? I certainly don’t remember abusing anyone then (or in any other year), but I wouldn’t know where to begin in terms of trying to prove my innocence. Where was I on July 6? Who saw me that can verify that I wasn’t anywhere near 563 Main Street on that day? I really have no idea who to call or even where I actually was.
There was a big deal about “recovered memory” about a decade ago - women suddenly realizing they had been horribly molested by adults when they were quite young, but had conveniently forgotten the facts until it was revived in their mind by the proper therapy; often by therapists who specialized in ensuring their clients would discover whatever lost memories to ensure they could accuse someone.
Generally, when someone is behaving badly long ago, there is a long trail of offenses. When Bill Clinton was in the news, there were no end of people willing to say that they too were acosted, they knew of similar situations involving him, etc. (This is why I find the Clarence Thomas story so unconvincing - if he was that much of a dick, so to speak, there would be a lineup of secretaries and other lowly functionaries he’d also victimized coming foward).
Similarly, wheen a priest or scoutmaster makes the news over allegations from 30 years ago, there is usually a long list of victims who tell pretty much the same story with a decent amount of detail. As mentioned, this also often involved third parties who heard the allegations, even documentation fo complaints hushed up.
Plus, before charges go forward (or at least, court cases) he victims will have to tel their story in detail - why were you there, how id he get you alone, how long, what time of day, what was happening at the time, what did he say that you did not tell your aprents, etc.
If a woman (or man) made allegations about what you did once 30 years ago, without any other corroborating evidence, odds are they would not charge you. Plus, if the If two people get together and have it in for you, well, you’re screwed.
And as you see, once you’re dead, there is no need for proof or anything. People can say what they like. IIRC you cannot slander the dead, so they don’t even have to prove anything.
This is a huge problem for people who find themselves in this situation. Ostensibly this shouldn’t be so much of an issue because the burden of proof is on the prosecution, and it should be correspondingly difficult for them to prove the accusations. But as a practical matter the jury tends to go with who they think is more believable and if the accuser is compelling on the witness stand, you could get convicted with no other real evidence. (This is especially true if you get sued civilly, where the standard of proof is lower, but it’s also true in criminal cases as well.)
In a more recent case, a false accusation could crumble under the weight of the evidence. In a more distant case, that’s not so. Leaving aside you not remembering where you were on such-and-such day - the accuser is also not going to remember these details and will be impossible to pin down. No one could expect someone who was abused as a kid many years ago to remember exact dates and places. So all they need to do is to describe in vivid terms the horrors of what you put them through and that could be enough. You won’t get a chance to impeach them on details even if you could.
That said, the likelihood of any individual person getting accused of child abuse is low, although it varies greatly by type of person. IME there are two types of people who tend to get accused of child abuse (whether truthfully or falsely).
“Kids” people. This includes both professional kids people, whether teachers, camp counselors, or coaches or the like, but also amateur kids people meaning people who like kids and hang around with kids a lot.
People in divorce/custody or other family disputes.
If you are not in one of these two categories the likelihood of you being accused of child abuse are minuscule, IME. So not to worry. (Unless you actually abuse someone, of course. In that case, worry a lot.)
Sometimes, there are things that the victim might know only as a result of the abuse. If memory serves, the child abuse case involving Michael Jackson asked the victims to identify which picture of a penis was Jackson’s. That’s not slam-dunk proof of abuse, but it’s a step up from he-said/she-said.
I dated a woman about 20 years ago who was seeing a therapist who convinced her that her father, who was dead at the time, had abused her. The therapist’s arugment was that many people who had been abused exhibited the same behaviors as my girlfriend, ergo, my girlfriend must have been abused.
No amount of explaining to her the solipsism that effect doesn’t equal cause would convince my girlfriend. “It all makes sense now,” she said. Except for having no memory of the supposed incidents.
Her poor, poor father. Maybe it was better that he was no longer around.
The flip side of that is that if you are accused you could be forced to pose for this type of picture, which will then be circulated among all sorts of people involved in the case.
Yes, Michael Jackson was forced to strip so they could take pictures of his dick for this “photo line-up”. Afterward, Jackson publicly described the photo session, calling it “the most humiliating thing” he had ever experienced in his life.
If they are going to do a dick pic photo line-up, I wonder how that works. First, do they need to get a collection of other similarly-posed dicks? That should be fun. And this means they need to get the alleged victims to look at the photos? If they are still children? Do they show a line-up of pics and ask “which one do you recognize”, or do they just show the one pic and say “do you recognize that?” If the latter method, you can see how unreliable that would be.
Who remembers anything about that nasty but relatively short-lived fad? Here are some details I think I remember reading, when it was all in the news:
Adult females, who had found such “recovered memories” with the help of dubious self-styled “therapists”, sometimes sued their fathers or got the DA to prosecute them. There actually were some men convicted and thrown in jail, IIRC. However, “recovered memories” was much ridiculed in the press, and there were lots of snarky editorial cartoons about it. Still, even without convictions, some men had their marriages, their careers, and their reputations ruined.
It all came crashing down when one man fought back. In the California wine country (Napa County, or possibly Sonoma County?), an executive with one of the big-name wineries got caught up in this. His wife left him (IIRC), and he was fired from his job.
He fought back with a novel legal strategy: He sued the therapist for malpractice. This created much buzz in the popular press, and apparently in legal circles too, and was closely watched nationwide. Normally, a malpractice suit is only brought to redress damage to the patient – either by the patient or by someone on behalf of the patient (who might even be dead). In this case, it was a third party – the parent, not the patient – who claimed damage by the therapist’s malpractice, which was an novel and unheard-of kind of malpractice complaint.
The father won the case and was awarded a major judgement. (I have no idea whether he ever collected anything.) But he was vindicated, and the therapist was put out of business. The entire “recovered memory” industry promptly crashed, and was pretty much never heard of again.
Okay, here is one cite I just found for the “Recovered Memory” malpractice lawsuit I mentioned just above. In this article, the authors make the explicit claim that the common public perception of the case was not very accurate. In particular, there had been a session with the therapist in which the father participated and was confronted by the daughter, and which the father paid for. This created a doctor/patient relationship between the therapist and him too; thus, he had a case to make a malpractice claim, that wasn’t a “third party” claim as popularly described.
Still, the case did exist. He was awarded $500,000 for a case that cost $1,000,000 so it’s not like he actually came out ahead.
ETA: Just read a bit more of this article. The authors are defense lawyers who are in the business of defending therapists like this, and their stance in the article is to use the case as a learning experience, from which to develop practices and strategies for these therapists to protect and defend themselves from false recovered memory lawsuits of this sort.
How in the world did they ever list and enumerate that many specific individual incidents over that period of time? Did the victims somehow maintain a detailed daily journal describing every incident? What exactly constituted the 512 counts of kidnapping?
If it had actually been heard at trial they would have had to prove each one beyond a reasonable doubt. I don’t know how they were going to do that. They obviously had enough to convict for life without a guilty verdict on all counts. We will probably never know since it will never have to be disclosed in discovery or at trial now.
A large number of convictions (not just sexual) have hinged mainly on the testimony of one witness. Add to that a pattern of behaviour, and instances where one of the three backs up the other in some cases… of course, each such incident is corroboration that the witness is reliable - as is the physical evidence like restraints. Given evidence he did restrain the girls; the one girl on Dr. Phil mentioned her room being ankle-deep in garbage; do you think they could find semen stains if they needed them? I’m not sure how they arrive at the individual charges, but the girl mentioned what happened the first day, the first weekend, at Christmas the first year, etc.
I suspect if rape/sexual assault required more proof than the word of the victim, the majority of US or Canadian convictions would not have happened. We’ve gone from 50 years ago when it was almost impossible to convict without physical evidence, to today where it’s almost impossible to defend yourself.
The recovered memory phenomenon followed IIRC the infant abuse phenomenon. In case after case, child sexual abuse was suspected. When the possible victims were interviewed by “experts”, it resulted in charges of abuse during dark satanic rituals and murder and cannibalism of babies. (when interrogated by non-experts, they were led to the answers the interrogators fed them) It seems that children are easily led; they lack any understanding of sex and sex drives, and sensing that their interrogators want to hear that the adults did “horrible things” the only horrible things they can think of involve killing, mutilation, and dark ceremonies like the cackling evil witch in Snow White. Of course, the authorities often ignored the fact that there were no missing babies…
“I suspect” is not a good basis for a GQ answer. I am a detective in a SVU unit. I can tell you that cases must be stronger than that to bring an indictment let alone a conviction.
You answered a slightly different question than what I asked, saying that you doubted they could have convicted Castro of a lot of the counts. (Well, I wondering about that too.) But what I really was asking was: How did the investigators come up with that long list of specific charges in the first place? And how specific must those charges have been, to have come up with so many distinct counts? Like, did they somehow list each specific calendar date on which a rape allegedly happened? Do you, as an SVU investigator, have any ideas (based on your general knowledge of this stuff) how they would have come up with that?
(ETA: I confess, I didn’t actually go and read the charges, although I believe the entire indictment has been posted on line. It’s hundreds of pages long! I’m hoping Loach can give some sort of generic summary answer.)
From cases I’ve read about it* is* a challenge to find specific dates on which to base a case. A person may allege frequent abuse between certain ages but, as a child they would not have been making a note of the dates. However some dates are more memorable than others so the charges that are eventually put to the accused relate to birthdays, Christmas, known historical events (like royal weddings) and so on. Thus an historic abuser in the UK may only face half a dozen or so specific charges.
In one non historical case a legal precedent was set where a specific date was not necessary if a regular day of the week could be given. The victim had Downs syndrome and didn’t know dates but was familiar with the days of the week. Her accusation was that one of the carers at her day centre regularly abused her on Fridays, when he brought her back from swimming. The judge allowed the prosecution to establish the young woman’s capacity as to days of the week and left it to the jury to decide. Irrc the care worker was found guilty.
I am going to be very busy next day or so I’ll try to give a complete answer when I can. Reading quickly through the dope right now is just me procrastinating. Just ignore me.