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From: "Steve Finley"
To: father09@IDT.NET
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 1997 09:59:41 +0000
Subject: (Fwd) Re: Boston Globe Story - Amirault's (LONG response)
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From: Self
To: WITCHHNT@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: Boston Globe Story - Amirault's (LONG response)
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 1997 09:58:41
>From Mark Hall:
> Dr. Judith Herman MUST be challenged on this absurd statement....
> If she expresses such a "learned" opinion and contributes to even
> more innocent people being convicted, she is a worse CRIMINAL than
> those she falsely accuses.... Her public statement in the face of
> ONE THIRD OF DNA TESTS proving innocence amoung such accusations
> proves that she is a liar, an idiot, or a criminal, and she should
> be treated accordingly.
I certainly understand the outrage behind the vehemence in Mark's
post, but I'll bet Dr. Herman is neither a liar, nor an idiot, nor a
criminal, but rather someone who got into the business out of a
genuine and admirable desire to help children, but who has allowed
the agenda of extremists to skew her perception to the point where
it is completely selective and completely driven by the need to
align herself with the highest available statistics for abuse, to
confirm nearly all accusations whether there's any evidence, etc.
There's definitely an inbreeding effect that happens with people who
have no contact other than with those who are in their agenda loop
(an effect I've warned against for the folks on this list, BTW). I
think of my own estranged wife and how she had virtually NO
off-the-job contact with anyone but her family for all the years we
were married. In six years of marriage, we had people over to our
place twice--that's two times in six YEARS--and I had some really
close friends that had been like brothers and sisters for years
before this marriage; they'd invite us over multiple times, she'd
finally accept, and then when I wanted to reciprocate I'd suggest it
several times over a period of months, and every time the response
would be, "I had something going with Mother and Daddy this weekend"
or "Mother and Daddy were coming over" or "Pam and Paul are coming up
from Austin." It was like nobody existed but her folks and her
sister.
She and her family, the most clannish I've ever been around, are the
kind who construct their skewed versions of reality without any
apparent ability to figure out how those little stories come off to
people on the outside, without any perception of how their "reality"
either fits or clashes with what might be called "common reality"
(what I'd define as the largely overlapping and similar perceptions
of a larger group of people that allow those people to have a common
basis for discussion and transaction). In fact, it seems to me that
their sense of this "common reality" (whatever that's worth) has
declined to the point of near-extinction. That inability of theirs
to see things from other people's perspective, to understand how what
they're saying compares to reasonable sensibility, has been good for
us in the case, because they've done things that are totally
outlandish and then acted clueless why anybody would object to them,
or why (for instance) a judge or a psychologist would have anything
negative to say about them.
The point is, I really think their increasing detachment from
common ways of thinking and reasoning is a direct result of their
clannish little world, a world that leaves them without the benefit
of any input or cross-checking or cross-pollenation from anyone else.
Sound familiar? I think this same thing happens to a large extent in
many social agencies, with self-confirming loops that become almost
unbreakable; when anyone threatens them, they're shouted down with
cries of "Don't you love the children?" and "Are you in favor of
child abuse?" and "You're trying to deny that child abuse exists!"
BTW, did anyone else see the irony in what Dr. Herman (and at least
one other person in the article) said about how those who disagree
with them are doing so out of a desire to ignore reality, deny that
child abuse exists, etc.? Aside from the obvious disingenuousness of
such nonsense (again, anybody here say child abuse doesn't exist,
raise your hand!), it seems to me more that people like Dr. Herman
are doing exactly what they accuse us of: minimizing, almost
trivializing, the existence of false accusations.
I tried to mail Dr. Herman a copy of the response to the article, but
couldn't locate her email address on the Web. I found a "Victims of
Violence" (or whatever that was) in Canada on a website (at a
"Cambridge Hospital," also listed in the article, but one I'd
assumed was in the Boston area), but when I tried to send email to
the address listed there to ask whether it was the right place, I
got a message that said the server didn't have a DNS entry. Anyhow,
I thought it was only fair that Dr. Herman know that a discussion
about her was going on, first because I know what it's like to
find out that people have been discussing you without the benefit of
your input, corrections to misquotes, etc. (there's always the
principle that the quotes we see in newspaper articles are not
unmediated), and therefore that I thought she should have a chance to
respond, but also because I'd really like to hear what she has to say
and how she defends such statements.
For starters, I'd like to know whether the "victims" in the "Victims
of Violence" are "victims" because they say they are, or because
there's any sort of corroboration that they are. I mean, if you're
going to go with somebody's self-claim that s/he's a victim, a
practice that comes clearly out of a therapeutic sensibility, you've
really created a whole structure for the story by implication, and
that's where the escalation starts. That is, if there's a victim,
there has to be a perpetrator, and there should be some kind of
intervention or even prosecution, and now something that started with
a therapeutic-style confirmation for operational purposes has
escalated to the point of legal action, prosecution, children being
removed, etc., and at ground zero was simply the accusation,
sometimes completely unsupported. And the "alleged perp" is put in
the position of proving innocence, because accused is as good as
guilty when the standard for "truth" (at least operationally defined)
is a mere claim.
Makes you wonder just how much of this problem of false accusations
can be seen as an inappropriate mixture of one kind of world, with
its standards and practices and consequences (the therapeutic), with
another (the forensic and legal). "Truth" in one world (taking a
client at his/her own word for the benefit of the therapy) slides
dangerously into the next, where "truth" should mean disconfirmable,
tested, proven, but instead becomes a mere story that has had the
advantage of a head start on creating a veneer of truthfulness (in
the grey transition area between therapeutic and forensic) for the
people who will decide the fate of the accused. If you're lucky, as
I've been, you get people along the way who are open to
disconfirming; if you're not, by the time you know what's going on,
everything you're saying and doing is framed as the words and deeds
of a guilty person. And it's well-established that virtually
anyone's actions, framed a certain way, can be seen as indications of
guilt. (Here's the accused murderer at trial, acting agitated: He
must be guilty! You can see it in his face! Or, showing no emotion
or anxiety: Look at that heartless killer! You can tell he's the
kind who would kill without remorse, who'd commit a murder just like
this one.)
This is why I really believe the heart of the matter, something that
MUST change before any real progress is made in increasing the
accuracy of investigations, is the abhorrent lack of characteristics
that are generally accepted by people in the business as being
disconfirming. As it is now, all you hear is "not inconsistent with
abuse" or "does not mean that abuse did not happen," which is
the kind of language that sends either malicious or merely
mistaken accusers on a rampage. To the child protective industry, is
there anything--ANYTHING--that means abuse probably or almost
certainly did not happen? If not, then the mere fact that one has
been shoved into the system, even falsely and unfairly, means that
there is no way, ever, to remove the cloud of doubt. And accused
equals guilty, or at least maybe guilty, and there's no such thing
from that point on as being seen to be innocent--only _maybe_
innocent. Would that be good enough for the people who perpetrate
such things?
sf
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