Issues In Forensic Psychology - False Allegations of Sexual Abuse

ISSUES IN FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY
False Allegations of Sexual Abuse

Parents who worry that their child has been sexually abused experience elevated anxiety levels while contending with considerable ambiguity -- they do not know exactly what happened.
If a child continues to deny having been sexually abused despite a worried parents growing convictions to the contrary, the parent's anxiety level remains elevated. Without the child acknowledging what the parent assumes, the anxious parent struggles with his or her own unsubstantiated assumptions.
Young children often respond to questions in a vague, open-ended manner that invites considerable interpretation. These kinds of ambiguous responses invite worried, anxious parents to leap to plausible sounding, but ultimately ill-advised interpretations.
When attempting to recall conversations with their children, parents' reports also may be incomplete, and they omit important details.
Leading and suggestive questions - asked by a worried, anxious parent - can profoundly distort a child's memory to the degree that she reports imaginary events as if they happened. In most cases of false allegations of sexual abuse, therefore, children do not lie. Instead, they genuinely believe having experienced events that - in fact - they only imagine.
Because children use their imaginations to embellish their reports of fictional events with persuasive sounding details, their accounts of these "non-memories" sound very compelling.
When interviewing children in cases of alleged sexual abuse, it is imperative to videotape - or at least audiotape - the interview. Without an electronic recording of the interview, we can never know whether the interviewer directed leading and suggestive questions to the child that could have further distorted and confused her memory.
The professionals who interview children in these cases too often rely on anatomically detailed dolls, and assumptions related to behavioral indicators of child sexual abuse. These kinds of practices lead to an inordinate frequency of false positive classifications -- mistakenly assuming that a child has been abused; when in fact, the child was not abused.
Children who are thought to have been sexually abused are often placed in play therapy. The "pretending" activities of play therapy, however, can further confuse these children regarding what is real, and what they only imagine.

If you are interested in false allegations of sexual abuse, you may want to order any, or all, of the following publications authored by Dr. Campbell.

False allegations of sexual abuse and the persuasiveness of play therapy. Issues in Child Abuse Accusations, 1992, 4, 118-124 (Order article #4, Cost $10.00).

False allegations of sexual abuse and their apparent credibility. American Journal of Forensic Psychology, 1992, 10 (4), 21-35 (Order article #6, Cost $10.00).

Allegations of sexual abuse II: Case of a criminal defense. American Journal of Forensic Psychology, 1992, 10 (4), 37-48. (Order article #7, Cost $10.00).

Indicators of child sexual abuse and their unreliability. American Journal of Forensic Psychology, 1997, 15 (1), 5-18. (Order article #13, Cost $10.00).

Smoke and Mirrors: The Devastating Effect of False Sexual Abuse Claims. Insight Books division of Plenum Publishing, New York, NY, September 1998. Order from Amazon.com.

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