As a clinical social worker for 35 years I've been involved in child sexual assault investigations for over three decades, off and on, including five years exclusively assigned to an urban child welfare unit which specialized in child sexual assault investigations. My mentor is Dr. Wayne D. Duehn, a professor emeritus of social work of The University of Texas at Arlington. Duehn's work - as well as those of others including Ann Burgess, Suzanne Sgroi, and A. Nicholas Groth, beginning in the early 1980s - focused on among other things facilitating a turnaround in professional attitudes toward these allegations.
Prior to this period, conventional wisdom was one of hardened skepticism toward all such allegations. As with all crime, investigations must be evidence-based. It is standard practice to obtain medical examinations of alleged victims, but realistically, few such exams produce anything admissible in a court of law. The exceptions involve very young victims of repeated assaults and those where sexually trasmitted diseases are found in both the victim and offender. Other cases which are quickly greenlighted for prosecution include those with a third party eyewitness. The rest - the huge majority - are those where allegations are made and denied, and clear and convincing evidence is not forthcoming.
I use the term "child sexual assault" as opposed to "child sexual abuse" because to me the latter implies there may be some sort of appropriate adult-child sexual interaction. That is my preferred usage. In this area of practice, the term "abuse" is used more frequently, but they mean the same thing.
My purpose here is to discuss the evolution of such investigations, how these practices applied to this one, and how I developed my opinion of this high profile case.
But first, read Dylan Farrow's "Open Letter" published by Nicholas Kristof is his New York Times blog:
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/...
My thoughts below the Rosarsch Test.
Prior to the late 1960s, child welfare practice consisted primarily of treatment of child neglect. Child Physical Abuse came to national prominence with the publication of C. Henry Kempe's "The Abused Child" in 1965. Kempe was a emergency room physician who observed patterns of repeated injuries to small children caused by parental or caretaker assaults. As a part of feminism, incest arose to national consciousness in this period as well. Other forms of child maltreatment besides neglect - physical abuse, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse - were discovered to occur in all socioeconomic strata, whereas neglect was primarily found in households living in poverty. Conventional wisdom warned of "stranger danger" but in reality the most dangerous environments for many children were in their own homes.
By 1980 specialized child welfare units to investigate child sexual abuse developed in most urban areas. Much of professional training in the period was devoted to encouraging staff to accept that such things actually happened. Law enforcement followed suit. Interdisciplinary teams were developed. People who had tended to view all allegations as fabricated either changed their way of thinking or were replaced. It was an exciting time to be a social worker in this field. We were the envy of others in the agency for our confidence, our cameraderie, our professionalism, and our prestige. More children were protected. More prosecutions were brought forth. More relatives believed the victims.
Alas, such a golden age was not for long. Not much longer, the pendulum swung the other way, and quite rightfully so. Across the country - and indeed across the world as high profile mass cases of alleged sexual assaults of day care children by staff, mostly female, were brought forth not only in the U.S. but in Canada and Belgium among other places. The most famous of these was the McMartin Preschool Case in Los Angeles, where mishandled investigations resulted in a madhouse.
In a number of these allegedly multivictim cases, hubris occurred when ambitious prosecutors, and social workers and law enforcement officers aiding them, moved too far too fast and began rushing to judgment. Children were interviewed with agressively applied carrots and sticks - rewards were offered, the children were told other kids were "brave enough to tell the truth," and the whole concept of not asking leading questions was thrown out the window, Some profited from these ambitious maneuvers and others did not. At least one Los Angeles County District Attorney was defeated over the McMartin fiasco, but Janet Reno of Dade County, Florida, who prosecuted the Country Walk case, rose to become Attorney General of the United States.
Let me at this point mention professional opinion is divided about the high profile day care provider cases of the 1980s. I tend to believe, for instance, that McMartin was initiated due to paranoid ideations of a disturbed, neglectful mother, and things went to hell from there. Belief in the statements from children that they were sexually assaulted on airplanes and in zoos and that secret tunnels existed under the preschool for purposes of satanic abuse, to me, requires a suspension of one's logical facilities. Some experts in the field such as Dr. Roland Summit who made off the cuff statements implying anyone skeptical of the official McMartin party line was probably in on the conspiracy, lost all professional credibility. Yet my informed opinion here is not universal among my peers. Once, while attending training from a national institute dedicated to improving practice, I spoke with the trainer during a break and let slip my skepticism of the McMartin orthodoxy. She looked at me in askance for several seconds, probably thinking I was a newbie to the practice, though at the time I had more years in the trenches but less letters after my name than she did. She responded that the concerned parents who believed their children had actually bought up the old McMartin School properties - the prosecutions had driven the once highly respected McMartins out of business, as similar spurrious prosecutions across the landscape did to many others - and they hired bulldozers to excavate and lo and behold, found the tunnels. If that is so, I have yet to find credible documentation of it. One would think if such had actually occurred the media would be all over it. The only verification of this version of events I was ever able to find was in a desktop-published newsletter of a parents' support group dedicating to believing the children.
For all interested in further reading on the subject, I would highly recommend Debbie Nathan's and Michael Snedeker's wonderful book, "Satan's Silence," which explored these overzealous prosecutions. Yes, at the time, the McMartin and similar cases were being sold as evidence of "Satanic Abuse," or "Ritual Abuse." A Canadian psychiatrist, Laurence Pazder, had written a potboiler called "Michelle Remembers" about a woman with memories of abuse by a satanic cult. He later married that patient and some analysis of the episode outed him as a grifter with credentials. At one other training, I spoke to the instructor (do you see the pattern here how I don't accept spoonfed ideology? My parents taught me to question authority, God Bless 'em!) who warned of satanists ever ready to snatch children for sacrifice, prostitution, or increased welfare, and asked her if she believed dangerous cult members outnumbered transgenders - who at that time were believed to be 1/100,000th of the population. "Oh, it's much more than that!" she sniffed haugtily. I later complained about that presentation to the for-profit entity which sponsored it. That particular presenter did not appear again at their monthly series. If she's still around, I doubt she's giving these sort of conspiracy-laden screeds anymore, unless, of course, she joined a fundamentalist church and gives them there. For what it's worth, Nathan and Snedeker documented some conspiracy-pushers in social work and law enforcement circles having ties to the religious right. Yes, dear Kossacks, for a brief time, there was indeed a firm feminist and religious right alliance on such a thing but the feminists involved - mumble memble Gloria Steinem - would prefer you had not been informed of that sordid history.
Of course, sexual assault of children can and does occur - but most cases involve an offender known to the child, often a family member or trusted adult - a Sunday school teacher, youth group volunteer, and so forth. But most often it is something on a small scale. The big multivictim cases tend to be outliers. I'm aware of one regarding a religious youth leader who offended against both boys and girls, often involving some elaborate and bizarre episodes. The "short eyes," to use the usual prison slang in this case, was a sexual addict who frequently had "sex for one" in addition to his offenses against children but no significant relationships with agemates. Like many in the practice in the 1980s, I got a "paradeomania" when assigned to a case which could possibly turn out to be the next McMartin, only to be shot down every time. The closest I came involved a tribe of old-school-bus dwelling "Jesus People," whose own children were reported to come to school dirty, one smelling of urine according to a teacher. We brought in a consultant who had lost a wife and child to the Moses David "Children of God" cult, who assured us we were one step away from bringing the whole cult down as some other practitioners did with the Warren Jeffs-Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints in West Texas, but that one turned out to be a burst balloon as usual. These folks were innocent street preachers who lived in voluntary poverty to spread the gospel and may have been slightly neglectful but that was the extent of it.
I was aware of the Allen-Farrow case twenty years ago but not much interested. That it did not result in prosecution was not surprising. Many cases are referred for prosecution but few reach the grand jury.
It seems to me that the sexual assault did happen. Her disclosure fits a common pattern. Her details appear to be things which she would recall.
Often family and friends rally in such cases - around the offender. Often the community blames the victim and in this case the mother. It does not detract from Allen's work any more than the slaveowning of the four Virginians among our first five Presidents detracts from their place in history.
Groth categorized offenders as "regressed" and "fixiated." The latter are often referred to as pedophiles. If Dylan was victimized, Allen would have been a regressed offender as he is well known to have had relationships with adult women. His victim's anger at his being celebrated for his achievements is normal. All persons commit good and evil in their lives. We just know more about what Allen is said to have done than we do about our next door neighbor's little secrets.