UNITED STATES
Religion News Service
Boz Tchividjian | Aug 22, 2014
A Texas high school student named Greg Kelley was recently convicted of sexually victimizing a four year old boy. Despite the jury verdict, a small vocal group of supporters have been working hard to convince the public that this sexual offender is innocent.. Marginalizing the powerful voice of the child victim is often at the heart of this disturbing and all too common objective. In my years as a child sexual abuse prosecutor, I discovered that offenders and their supporters use three common strategies to try and convince others to embrace their distorted definition of innocence:
Making it up: In the Texas case, the defendant’s supporters initially argued that the 4 year old witness had made up the abuse allegation, with the hope that the public would believe that children are prone to make up false reports of sexual abuse. Unfortunately for them, the objective research indicates that children are no more likely to lie under oath than adults. In fact, these same studies have repeatedly found that false allegations of child sexual abuse are made only between one and ten percent of the time. Though any false allegation is a tragedy and should be dealt with accordingly, the reality is that such allegations are much more rare than offenders want us to believe. In fact, the research also establishes that children tend to minimize the extent of sexual abuse suffered. All of this tells us that the vast majority of abuse disclosures by children are truthful, and that there is a strong likelihood that the disclosing child was actually abused more than what has been reported.
It is not only research that pokes a major hole in this strategy. In order to believe this approach, we have to accept the illogical notion that little children make up details about a heinous act most have no knowledge about at that age. When offenders and their supporters realize that there is little hope in succeeding with this tactic, they often turn to the second strategy.
Mixing it up: When a child witness provides detailed and consistent testimony, offenders will question the child’s ability to accurately identify the perpetrator instead of attacking the credibility of the child’s allegations. This is best illustrated by the supporters of Greg Kelley when they write, “We are NOT saying that the 4-year-old boy was not sexual assaulted at some point in his young life. He very likely was, given that he had detailed knowledge of explicit sexual activity. However, we do not feel that there was enough evidence to name Kelley as the perpetrator.” With this approach, perpetrators and their supporters are ok with us believing every aspect of a child’s testimony except the part that identifies the perpetrator as the one who committed the offense. Not only is this argument blatantly self-serving, but it also lacks any common sense when the offender is known by the child. Is it likely that a child is capable of providing the details of horrific abuse, but incapable of accurately identifying the known individual who perpetrated the abuse?
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