To onlookers it was just a group of children playing in a sunny California park, but to child sexual abuse expert Dr. Claire Reeves it was the highlight of her career.
“To watch them play and laugh like normal children — it was glorious,” said Reeves, 73, remembering a day when she met nine parents and 15 children for a going-away party before she moved from California to South Carolina in 2000.
Reeves founded Mothers Against Sexual Abuse (MASA) in 1992 in response to the number of children being returned by the courts to parents accused of abusing them. As a psychologist, she testifies in family court cases involving these allegations.
For Reeves, the day in the park was a rare moment to meet and interact with a few of the hundreds of children she had worked to free from sexual abuse. In her professional duties, Reeves doesn’t meet face-to-face with children. Instead she prepares an overview of the evidence before the court — including testimony, court pleadings, expert reports and police interviews — and puts the information in perspective for a judge.
I spoke to Reeves on the phone this week about her 22 years running the oldest organization in the United States fighting to address this crisis.
“Things are worse now in the family courts than they were when MASA started,” Reeves said.
Characterizing the attitude of the courts, Reeves said, “Mother is always lying, social service agencies are a big part of the problem and no one is listening to the children. It is very disheartening.”
Reeves testifies in the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom. “The courts are not any better in those countries,” she said of officials handing children over to sexual predators. “It happens so frequently it’s beyond belief.”
While most of her cases get no media coverage, a Canadian case last year was a notable exception. Supreme Court of British Columbia Judge Paul Walker found that a faulty police investigation wrongly determined that a mother was crazy after she accused her children’s father of molesting them. “[O]ne professional described it: ‘Kafkaesque’ is the best term that comes to mind,” the mother told CBC News. “It's as if the people involved were just twisting everything.”
After reading the voluminous filings in the case, Reeves said she traveled to Canada and testified for two days on the stand. Preparation for one case can take months. “I usually have a 10-inch stack of documents to go through,” she said. “Collecting everything the child has ever said is the most important part. Often these children are very young and they are speaking in a three-year-old’s voice. You have to be able to interpret that.”
A complicating factor in these situations is that children often change their stories. “According to Dr. Reeves, it is not uncommon for children who have been sexually abused to recant their previous disclosure at some point,” Judge Walker noted in his ruling. “Dr. Reeves said that recanting occurs in at least 70 percent of cases.”
Reeves does not take cases of a parent who has been falsely accused of sexual abuse. “That’s not because it doesn’t happen; it definitely does happen,” she said. “But many of these perpetrators are sociopaths as well. They fool a lot of people but underneath, I guess, they are just evil. I can’t take the risk that I would be a party to putting a child in harm’s way.”
Despite her organization’s name, Reeves is quick to point out that women are being identified more often as sexual predators than in the past. “In a case I am working on now a mother has custody of her boy even though she is a registered sex offender,” Reeves said.
When a child makes an outcry of sexual abuse, it is rarely a lie, Reeves said. After reviewing hundreds of cases in the past 20 years, she concluded that only four involved fraudulent reports of child abuse. In most cases, clear evidence of abuse is being ignored by the authorities. “I think we are still stuck in the old mode of ‘the man in the over-sized raincoat who flashes children is the problem,’” Reeves said. “The problem is most likely in the family.”
Police are often reluctant to make an arrest when the perpetrator is a parent. “I am working on this one case where this little boy has been telling and telling,” she said. “There are no criminal charges anywhere at all. I am wondering why.”
It is in cases like this that she often calls in Charlotte Blasier, a private investigator in El Dorado, California. The two met at a crimes against children conference in 1991 in Washington, D.C., and have been working on cases together ever since. “She does whatever needs to be done,” Reeves said of Blasier finding evidence that can be brought before the court.
Blasier, who started her career in 1981 as chief investigator with the Alaska Juvenile Crime Commission, said in a phone interview that if you believe your child is being sexually abused, do not expect a lot of help from the police. "Law enforcement is understaffed and underpaid," said Blasier, adding that she works with them whenever possible. “Before you leave [the house], if you can safely obtain proof of felony crimes against the child, take that.”
But in the cases Reeves takes, often the protective parent has already been removed from the home. So Blasier does extensive background checks and interviews anyone with knowledge of the accused abuser — relatives, friends, neighbors and ex-neighbors. “I have set up an easel outside of someone’s home, knocked on the door and told them I’m an art student who has to paint a tree in front of a house and they have the perfect tree,” Blasier said. “Pretty soon they’re letting me use the bathroom and bringing me drinks.”
While MASA engages in awareness campaigns and trains professionals on how to respond to abuse, Reeves spends most of her time focusing on saving the children in her cases. At the peak of her career she handled 13 cases a year, but today she is able to do about four. “It is hard to stop doing this job,” she said. “If you can help save one child from a bad situation, you’ve done more than most people will in their entire lifetime.”
This is the 10th in a series of articles for Daily Kos about the treatment of abused children in the U.S. family court system. M.C. Moewe is a former criminal justice and investigative reporter for several newspapers with a B.A. in journalism from the University of North Texas. Email m AT moewe.com or use this link.