From: dgross@polyslo.csc.calpoly.edu (Dave Gross)
Subject: Presumed Guilty
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: Mousebat, Follicle, Goosecreature, Ampersand, Spong, Wapcaplet,                 Looseliver, Vendetta & Pang
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 01:01:15 GMT

			PRESUMED GUILTY

	The charge of sexual abuse of children is the dirtiest, deadliest
	trick in divorce court....

	by Harry Stein

More than three years ago in what he describes as an "unimaginable ordeal,"
Tom Anson (some names and places have been changed to protect people involved
in this story) decided to go public.  Against the advice of his lawyer and
almost everyone else who wished him well, he began writing letters.  He wrote
the heads of network news divisions, as well as producers and correspondents
on individual shows.  He wrote the ACLU and other organizations concerned with
civil liberties.  He wrote the student-body presidents of more than 100
colleges.  He wrote local politicians and state officials, along with
Congressmen and Senators in Washington, D.C.

In reply, there was mainly silence.  The sole word of encouragement was a
handwritten note from a woman who had received a copy of the open letter Anson
handed out at shopping malls.  She urged him to have faith, noting that her
husband had gone through the same thing and had eventually been vindicated.
The few other replies were perfunctory and dismissive.

Not that Anson, a soft-spoken administrator, was surprised.  "I had learned by
then," he says, "that not too many people want to be associated with a guy
accused of sexually molesting his kids."

			*	*	*

Dr. Richard Gardner, clinical professor of child psychiatry at Columbia
University and one of the country's leading experts in the field of child
sexual abuse, has never heard of Anson or his case, but he is familiar with
how people react to such charges.  He is so aware, in fact, that he prefaces
his own views on the subject with a careful disclaimer:  "Anyone who knows me
at all," he says, "knows I've verified many bona fide cases of child sex
abuse.  It is a heinous crime and I've always tried to make sure that those
who commit it get everything they deserve."

Dr. Gardner pauses.  "I also want to make it clear - and this is apparent in
the way my daughters were raised - that my sympathy for women's rights is
complete and deep."

He stops again, glancing briefly about the busy restaurant where our talk is
taking place.  "Here's the problem:  We've reached the point in this issue
where an accusation is tantamount to a conviction.  Thousands of lives are
being ruined in this country by baseless charges.  What we're seeing now is a
repeat of the Salem witch trials."

The Salem analogy is not haphazardly chosen.  Gardner not only uses it in the
subtitle of his recent book on the subject, _Sex Abuse Hysteria_, but it turns
up with surprising frequency in conversations with mental-health workers,
defense lawyers and even journalists identified with the "wrong" side of this
volatile issue.  Indeed, many of these professionals say that, having been
drawn into what they initially believed would be a neutral process aimed at
discovering truth, they now view it as one where the accused is routinely
denied the most basic protections of law.  Those who dare point out that fact
are themselves subject to vilification.

One lawyer in Kentucky, working his first sex-abuse case, remembers the
repeated challenges hurled at him: "People ask me, `How can you justify
defending a guy like that?'  Only usually they don't put it that politely."

"The attitude," notes Kim Hart of Ohio-based National Child Abuse Defense and
Resource Center, which works on behalf of those it believes to have been
falsely accused, "Is that God and right and the Star-Spangled Banner are
always with those who make the accusations - they are defending children.
Those who ask the hard questions are pro-molestation monsters."

There are two basic assumptions about child abuse in America:  that in recent
years it has taken on epidemic proportions and that, overburdened as they are,
the welfare and judicial systems are society's last, best defense against such
abuse.  These ideas are so routinely affirmed in the popular press that most
of us accept them as facts.  According to the _Magazine Article Summaries_
index, 317 articles on the subject appeared in the 12-month period beginning
September 1990.  Many bear scare headlines, but only a few deal with the
rights of the accused.

For an example of the typical press coverage, look at the treatment given to
Roseanne Arnold when she announced childhood memories of being abused by her
parents.  Even those publications that were once critical of the comic now saw
fit to embrace her new charges, which were vehemently denied by her parents.
Nevertheless, they used her accusation as a high-profile spin on what has
become a familiar syndrome.  _Newsweek's_ piece, headlined *The Pain of the
Last Taboo*, opined, "In 1986, all of the nation's child protection agencies
recorded 83,000 complaints against people responsible for the child's welfare.
By 1990, the number had leapt to 375,000."  _Time's_ coverage, entitled
*Incest Comes Out of the Dark*, noted that "during the past decade, the
definition of incest has been broadened to include fondling, rubbing one's
genitals against a child, and excessive or suggestive washing of a youngster's
pubic area, among other sexual behaviors," and included a first-person sidebar
by one of the magazine's reporters recounting precisely such abuse at the
hands of her mother.

As I began researching this piece, my own presumption was the usual one:
that, with accusations of this kind, smoke almost always means fire.  It seems
inconceivable, after all, that such heinous charges might be leveled without
strong supporting evidence, or that those investigating and prosecuting those
charged would ever be less than doggedly scrupulous.

Virtually every researcher and mental health professional now uncomfortable
with the existing system started out believing the same thing.  Psychologists
Karol Ross and Gordon Blush recall being confused in the mid-Eighties by the
sudden increase in sex-abuse charges they were asked to evaluate by a court-
connected clinic.  In June 1987, they produced a scholarly paper, based on the
study of 24 cases, designed to address the reasons for that increase.
Entitled _Sexual Allegations in Divorce_, it presented profiles of situations
where such charges are most likely to arise - and offered methods of
evaluating the likelihood of their being valid.  "Our approach was rigorously
neutral," Ross says.  "All we were saying is, `Let's be rational about this,
let's not get hysterical and assume every charge is automatically valid.'  I
can't tell you how stunned we were when we'd do seminars and people would boo
and walk out."

More than anything else, the hostile reactions were prompted by Ross and
Blush's conclusion that in such situations the word of the children is not
necessarily to be taken at face value.  "People said, `Children DON'T lie
about these things,'" says Ross.  "But in a messy divorce situation, with
competing family politics and two- and three-year-olds who are being
reinforced by an angry parent, we found that what the child had to say was
often the least reliable thing."

Although they are quick to caution that it is hard to deal in certainties,
Ross and Blush say that many of the charges they are called upon to evaluate
are false.

Interestingly, their claim is supported by official figures.  As Douglas J.
Besharov, a former prosecutor and founding director of the U.S. National
Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, points out, a recent four-year period saw
the number of abuse reports in New York rise by more than 22,000, but the
"absolute number of substantiated reports actually fell by about 100."  One
reason for the dramatic rise in reports of child maltreatment is the passage
of the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974, which
financially rewards those states that broaden their laws on the reporting of
child abuse.  What is seldom noted is the the number of provably unfounded
reports of child abuse has also risen at essentially the same rate as bona fide
reports.

Moreover, the closer one looks at these cases, the more one begins to see
vital distinctions.  One major group of abuse cases comes from apparently
functional families.  Typically, it is a case in which the father or another
close relative abuses a daughter, often with the acquiescence of the mother,
who acts out of some misguided sense of family preservation, or because she,
too, is in the thrall of the abuser.

There is no reason to doubt that this sad scenario is played out any less
frequently today than in the past.  The most readily documentable cases of
child sexual abuse, based on physical evidence and credible testimony, remain
those involving intrafamily situations where the union is being preserved,
rather than in families broken by divorce of desertion.

By contrast, according to some experts in the field, two categories of
accusation should be approached with skepticism:  those involving day-care
centers and those that arise in the midst of angry custody battles.

The sensational day-care cases - McMartin in California, for instance, and the
one involving the Little Rascals facility in Edenton, North Carolina (so
vividly documented on the PBS show _Frontline_) - are cases in point.  "You
have to start with the matter of probability," says Gardner.  "What every one
of these cases has in common is that no adult observer has actually seen a
molestation in progress.  Supposedly, these abuses are going on continually
over a period of months.  Almost always, they supposedly involve a number of
adults and many children, with outsiders constantly walking in and out of these
centers.  Yet, we have NO corroborating eyewitnesses.  None."  He pauses.
"Throughout it all, these children somehow always come home in the right shoes
and socks and underpants.  Do you have kids?  Do you realize how hard it is to
dress two kids in a hurry without some kind of a mix-up, let alone ten or
twelve or twenty kids?"

Gardner vigorously argues that the methods used by social welfare agencies and
prosecutors to investigate such charges are often so flawed - and so
contaminated by the predisposition to find wrongdoing - as to be utterly
worthless.

Those same methods are routinely brought to bear in allegations of abuse that
arise during child-custody battles, an area where any accusations aimed by one
of the feuding parties ought to be seriously questioned.  Again, there are
many such charges that prove valid - harrowingly so.  The problem is, in many
cases, that the accused men (it is almost always men who are accused) tend to
find themselves presumed guilty from the moment the charges are leveled.

"Simply in legal terms," says Dr. Melvin Guyer, a University of Michigan
psychology professor who is also a practicing lawyer, "an accusation of child
abuse is close to an ultimate weapon.  It ends the custody battle.  Even if
the guy is eventually exonerated, by the time the social workers and courts
have sorted it out, the custody question is moot."

There are a number of reasons for that.  Government agencies are concerned,
above all, with protecting themselves.  In the current atmosphere, those
charged with defending children are inclined to be overly cautious.  Nor does
the current wisdom in such circles, with its blind faith in the word of
accusers and in small children, tend to engender concern for the rights of the
accused.

"I don't think there's much active malice," says Lee Coleman, a child
psychiatrist who has studied tapes of over 900 hours of interviews with small
children conducted by case workers and psychologists involved in abuse cases.
"Most of them honestly believe - that if you care about children, it is your
job to reach a finding that the child has been abused."

Then, too, some social welfare agencies hardly bring an objective world-view
to the task.  "This is a field that tends to attract people with a strong
feminist bias," says Hart.  "So what you basically find is women who don't
like or trust men in a position of absolute power over men."

"For a lot of these people," adds a lawyer who has handled two dozen such
cases for both accusers and accused, "`Believe the children' is just code.
What they really mean in an angry divorce is `Believe the woman, no questions
asked.'"

"The irony," says Guyer, "is that the guys who get hit the hardest are those
who have been most involved as caretakers.  They're the ones who are
interested in the custody of their children in the first place.  Suddenly,
that nurturing behavior is misrepresented and turned against them."

			*	*	*

Tom Anson vividly recalls his lawyer's words over the phone:  "You're not
going to believe what she's done now."

True enough, the separation had been messy business, and the divorce
negotiations were even messier.  The issue was money, but, of course, the
bitterness had deep roots.  In reflecting on the marriage now, Anson
continually returns to his ex-wife's drinking and what he sees as her uncanny
capacity for denial.  He says she suffered such violent d.t.'s that she had to
be hospitalized.  Shortly after they were married, she went through a rehab
program and stopped drinking for a while.  In the following two years, 1981
and 1982, their daughter and son were born.  But when he became convinced she
was drinking again and urged her to seek treatment, she was outraged.

"She accused me of imagining it," he says.  "She accused me of having some
kind of vague, malicious motives."  He pauses.  "After you've been through
something like that once, you know you're not imagining it.  Finally I gave
up.  I signed up for a program designed to help spouses of alcoholics."

The tension over the issue escalated until Anson moved out and initiated
divorce proceedings.  It is easy to imagine his wife's feelings when she
learned that he would be seeking custody of their children, then three and
four. (Anson claims he was aware that fathers are virtually never awarded
custody.  He was merely going through the motions so he could later
demonstrate to the children that he had at least tried.)

At this point, says Anson, he imagined that he and his estranged wife had the
kid's interest at heart.  His weekend visitation arrangement seemed to be
going smoothly.  Which is why, he says, he gave her his permission to send
them to her mother's house in California for a visit to Disneyland.  He says
he would never had conceived that the children would return three weeks later,
having never visited Disneyland, supposedly claiming that their father liked
to play "dirty licking games" with them.

Charged with sexual assault, Anson wouldn't see his children again for more
than four years.

Anson recalled a couple of past episodes that suddenly loomed as meaningful.
He remembered his ex-wife's story, told with great emotion, of the night when
her father sat on her bed and explained to her that he was leaving home.  But
she should stop crying, he consoled her, he would never stop being there for
her.  She didn't hear from him again for more than a decade.

Anson also remembered the day when his wife was desperately ill in the
hospital and he picked up his mother-in-law at the airport.  "All she'd talk
about the whole way to the hospital was how everything bad that had happened
was the fault of my wife's father.  Twenty years and several husbands later,
and my mother-in-law was so bitter you'd think they'd been divorced yesterday."

			*	*	*

It is striking how uncannily similar most of these cases tend to be.  The
accusation invariably arises at a pivotal moment in the custody battle.
Almost always, the system responds to it in the same way:  by clamping down
first and asking questions later, if at all.  Moreover, the accusers also tend
to have a great deal in common.  Researchers Ross and Blush have come up with
a personality profile of the characteristic "presenting female" in such cases:

	* Typically, she has an unresolved relationship with her
	  father.  It is even possible that she was herself abused as a
	  child (or imagines she was) and thus tends to project that
	  abuse onto the current situation.

	* She is prone to exaggerating and distorting reality.

	* When her version of events is credibly challenged, she will
	  often seek to alter the terms of the argument.  In some cases
	  arising from custody battles, for example, she will move out
	  of state.

"I've had cases," adds the University of Michigan's Guyer, "where I've
examined the children and found no sign of abuse, and instead of being
relieved, the mother is furious.  It's like telling someone with headaches
that they are not caused by a tumor.  She refuses to accept it as good news."

Dr. Ralph Underwager of the Institute for Psychological Therapies in
Northfield, Minnesota, has been researching child sex abuse since the early
Fifties.  He puts the case in even starker terms.  In 1990, Dr. Underwager
presented a paper to the American Psychological Association in which he
reported in a sample of close to 100 custody battles where accusations arose.
Underwager found that 75 percent of accusers had a "severe personality
character disorder."  In a control group involving participants in equally
bitter custody battles where no sex-abuse allegations were made, "the numbers
were exactly reversed," he says.  "Only twenty-five percent of the women
displayed any psychological disorders.  What we have is a system that's a
dream for someone with a character disorder.  An angry woman can completely
ruin someone's life.  Not only is she unchallenged, she's considered a
heroine."

Dr. Daniel Schuman, a Massachusetts based psychiatrist with long experience in
evaluating child-abuse cases, is far more measured in his language, but he
offers a similar assessment of the means used to judge the accuracy of abuse
claims.  "In a clinical sense," says Dr. Schuman, "the procedures I've seen
employed are by and large completely useless.  These are very complex
situations, but the emphasis is very much on simple answers.  What happens is
that people will use tools that appear to be clinical in an effort to reach
what are, in fact, predetermined conclusions."

Indeed, the title often used by those who evaluate sex-abuse charges -
validators - itself suggests the level of objectivity likely to be brought to
the task.  While these people are usually credible in manner, with a full
command of the psychological terminology, they quite often have little
training beyond having attended a weekend seminar.  Since most states have no
formal standards in this area, and every court creates its own definition of
an expert witness, virtually anyone can be declared a validator.

Validators usually work in close conjunction with the accuser.  In the absence
of compelling medical evidence of abuse, their investigation tends to be
limited to enumerating the mother's charges and observing alleged victims.

Here, too, critics question the methodology. "It should be obvious," says
Schuman, "that the only way to properly conduct such an evaluation is to look
closely at all principals - mother, father and children, and if it's germane,
the extended family and social circle."

More distressing is the manner in which information is elicited from small
children by validators.  Even when there is the appearance of honest inquiry,
in innumerable ways - both overt and subtle - the search is always for
information that will confirm the charges.  It can come through leading
questions or subjective interpretations of drawings, dreams or modes of play.
Validation sometimes comes by choosing to ignore some of the child's comments
while stressing others, or by stimulating reaction through the use of
grotesque anatomically correct dolls.  Cleveland attorney Jay Milano, who has
been involved in more than 30 child-abuse cases, refers to it as "voodoo
science."

"What you have," says Elizabeth Loftus, a University of Washington
psychologist who specializes in the study of memory, "is people who are
looking for sex abuse bringing up many things, quite literally injecting these
ideas into the kids' heads, so that they often find what they are looking for."

"Almost always you find the kids are three or four years old," notes Gardner.
"The two-year-olds are no good because they can't speak well enough and are
totally unreliable in what they do say.  The five- and six-year-olds are
already old enough to say, `He didn't do that, lady, and nothing you say is
going to convince me of it.'  But threes and fours are perfect.  After they've
been worked over by a parent or zealous validator, they can be counted on
because they believe it and will testify accordingly."

			*	*	*

When Tom Anson was summoned to his county office of child protective services,
he was ushered into the office of the social worker who had filed the report
in response to his ex-wife's complaint.  Exactly what was said at the meeting
remains at issue.  The social worker later testified that Anson tacitly
acknowledged the accuracy of the charges.  He told her "that he was doing a
lot of thinking about it," she said, "wondering if perhaps he did these things
and was blocking it out or not realizing it.  And he was trying to face the
truth, even to himself."

According to the court transcript, Anson responded to the social worker's
testimony by shouting, "That's a damn lie."

"What really happened," he says now, "is that she leveled her charges at me
and I adamantly denied them.  I told her, `It's not even in my being to do
something like that,'  She didn't want to hear it.  She tossed a piece of
paper across the desk - an admission of the charges - and said, "Look, just
sign this and we'll arrange for you to start seeing a psychiatrist.  After a
while you'll be able to see your kids again."

If such an exchange seems implausible, there are lawyers experienced in
defending such cases who insist it is anything but.  "Quite often," as one
puts it, "the real object of these charges is to guarantee the woman custody.
Her lawyer knows it, even if the woman doesn't.  And as soon as she gets
custody, the record is expunged and the charges fade away."

Anson says he wasn't buying.  "How would I ever be able to explain that to my
children?" he asks.  "I told the social worker, `You can go to hell, lady, I'm
not going to admit to something I didn't do.  I'll see you in court.'"

Thus began a process that would be far more tortuous than Anson ever imagined.
"I really thought they would at least make some attempt at getting both sides
of the story," he says.  "That's how naive I was."

Already, the children had been examined by a female psychologist who had been
hired by Anson's ex-wife on a private basis and who had ties to the social
worker at child protective services.  Her evaluation of the case left no room
for ambiguity.  Her findings indicated far greater abuse then was cited in the
original agency report, which alleged that the "perpetrator licks [his
daughter's] cheeks, shoulders, chest and puts his tongue in [her] mouth and
ears."  She had found reason to believe, among other things, that he had
molested his three-year-old son "in the anal area, with probable digital
penetration," had masturbated on his four-year-old daughter and had her "dress
in women's black panties."

Later, on the stand, the psychologist explained how she had reached such
conclusions.  At one point, she noted, the little girl told her that she had a
dream about a bee.  "She was afraid that he was going to try to take her to
the bee house and put honey all over her."  Her hypothesis?  "It was possible
that the sexual activity involved ejaculation."  The psychologist also
observed that, when asked to draw on an outline of the human body, the child
at first moved the pencil in the air "around the genital area," and then
colored another part of the picture "as far away from the genital area as you
can get."  Her hypothesis?  "What it suggested . . . was that she had been
touched in that part of her body and that she felt anxious about it and she
was considering saying it, but chose not to, and she touched these other areas
instead."

Among the most poignant aspects of the psychologist's testimony came with her
belated acknowledgment that early on in the process, the little girl had
sought to abandon her story.  "She would say no, her father didn't do those
things.  He loves her in the right way.  But in saying those things, she would
get very confused.  Her denial was with a lot of confusion."

Through it all, the psychologist never felt it necessary to talk to Anson, the
alleged abuser.  Nor was the report from the head of a respected local clinic
that confirmed the accuser's likely abuse of alcohol at the time of the
allegations deemed admissible as evidence.  The children were never examined
by independent mental-health professionals.

"You're guilty until proved guilty," says Anson now, "and if you're not,
you're guilty anyway."

Several months after the charges were lodged, Anson was becoming increasingly
aware of how long and expensive the struggle was likely to be.  He took a
second job.  "It wasn't hard to figure out," he says, "that part of their
strategy was to drag it out in hopes of breaking me."

He was fortunate in that his employers fully backed him.  Obviously, with sex-
abuse charges that is not always the case.  He was blessed, too, with a lawyer
who was nearly as outraged by the allegations as he was.  But, above all, it
was Anson's own mettle that was put to the test.

After two years away from his children, and after innumerable legal delays and
court postponements, Anson finally got a hearing in late 1987 on his claim
that the child welfare agency had mishandled his case.  Though the result
would not be legally binding, he knew he had to win.  If the charges were
deemed valid, he might face a criminal indictment as well.

To judge from the transcript, Anson's attorney relished the opportunity to
force the psychologist and social worker to justify their handling of the
proceeding.  In a devastating commentary on the social worker's attention to
detail, he quickly got her to admit that on the official forms, Anson had
actually been charged with the wrong offense: incest, instead of sexual
assault, the far lesser crime of which he was in fact accused.

Then, after quietly cautioning Anson to keep a straight face, the attorney
began probing the social worker's relationship with the ex-wife.  Then he
piped up with the following question: "Did you ever have any oral sex with her
while she was in your office?"

"The whole place went into an uproar," recalls Anson, grinning.  "Of course,
the other side immediately objected and we moved on.  But, and this was the
lawyer's point, for just that instant, they knew how it felt to have a filthy,
groundless accusation thrown at them."

In the end, the hearing officer's report repudiated all charges of abuse.
"The allegations," it concluded, "were contrived to deprive Tom Anson of his
parental rights to custody and visitation."

But this proved to be a limited victory.  The hearing officer's findings
carried little weight in the family court still charged with deciding the
custody issue.  And, in any case, before the report was formally released,
Anson's ex-wife had relocated with the children to her mother's home in
California.

An even greater effort was thus demanded for Anson's battle in family court,
which was going on at the same time.  He still faced the possibility of
criminal action.  He knew he had to overcome the court's sympathy for a
mother's right to seek the comfort and support of her extended family - his
ex-wife's avowed reason for moving to California.

So, when a court date was set and his ex-wife was recalled from California,
Anson and his attorney produced their big gun, Dr. Lawrence Spiegel.

It was likely that no other authority anywhere knew as much about false
allegations of child abuse.  Dr. Spiegel's recent history had been as
disturbing and complex as Anson's.  Four years before, the respected clinical
psychologist and college instructor had been similarly charged in the midst of
a bitter divorce.  Arrested and led off in handcuffs, deserted by old friends,
finding his career short-circuited and his freedom in jeopardy, Spiegel fought
for more than two years before finally being vindicated in a highly publicized
jury trial.

In the wake of that experience, Spiegel, who had previously given little
thought to the child-abuse issue - or, more precisely, had tended toward an
uncritical acceptance of the prevailing view - became a specialist in false
allegations of child abuse.  Spiegel prides himself on an approach that is
rigorously neutral and has no hesitation reporting findings of actual abuse.
"My own experience notwithstanding, I am a clinician," he says.  "It is my
role to do clinical evaluations based on the protocols developed to assess
these situations.  It is not, thank God, my role to judge guilt or innocence."

Nonetheless, Spiegel came to regard the experience of Anson as a perfect
example of what is wrong with the existing system.  Over the course of more
than a day of testimony, Spiegel reviewed the case in detail.  He paid
particular attention to the emotional climate on which the charges were made
and closely reviewed the children's videotaped interviews with the validators.
He cited studies on the extremely low reliability of dolls, which had been
used in the sessions with the Anson children, as tools in validating sexual
abuse.  Spiegel note that there is a strong tendency "for a child with a doll
or a puppet in his hand to assume that this is pretend, because that's what
children do with dolls."  He described the various "red flag indicators" apt to
signal a valid accusation or, just as frequently, a false one.  Anson's
children evidenced only one of the 13 indicators of abuse, and 12 that pointed
to false accusation.

The notion that children don't lie about abuse is "pretty much the truth,"
Spiegel noted, "except that it's the wrong question.  Children don't
premeditatively lie about sexual abuse unless they are encouraged to make up
pretend stories, or if they go through the repetition and reinforcement
process where they begin to believe.  It's very clear in the literature that a
four-year-old cannot distinguish between his internal reality and other
people's reality."

By the end of Spiegel's bravura performance, it seemed clear that the case was
at last close to resolution.  (The youth services organization that supported
the charges tried to expunge from the record the testimony of the psychologist
who had done Anson such harm.)  The judge suggested to the lawyers for both
parties that a way be found to begin reintegrating the father into his
children's lives, and preliminary contacts were made with a local mental-
health professional to initiate such a process.

That is when Anson's ex-wife succeeded in having jurisdiction transferred to
California.

			*	*	*

Today, things seem at last to be going Anson's way.  In early 1990, a judge,
after reviewing the case, ordered that he be granted immediate supervised
visitation with his children.  In August 1991, he left his job and resettled
in California, just a few miles from where his daughter and son, now ten and
nine, live with their mother.  He is able to see them every other weekend.

But any sense of resolution is illusory.  His condominium is only minimally
furnished, the home of a man ripped from the life he has always known.  He
concedes that he is lonely.  He has no friends here.

He can see his children only in the daytime and, even then, his visits are
closely monitored.

"No matter what happens now," he muses, "I can never get back what's been
lost."  He pauses and looks away.  "My dad took ill last year.  He was
delirious, pleading to see his grandchildren.  He kept on for twelve hours,
begging me to have his bed put on a plane."

He stops.  "I couldn't take it.  I even had my lawyer offer that I'd go to
jail if she'd fly them in to see their grandfather.  But he died.  It was too
late."

Through it all, Anson insists that his primary concern has been his children's
welfare.  It eventually becomes clear that what is hardest for him to accept
is his loss of a relationship with his kids.  "The first time I saw them," he
says, "from a distance they looked so big.  My first thought was that it was
another trick, that they had been switched on me."

After a bit of standoffishness, his little boy has warmed up, some days
seeming to cling to him for dear life.  But his daughter has remained distant,
awkward and guarded, and he hasn't been able to pierce the armor.

"It hurts a lot," he says.  "Who knows what she's hearing about me?  What has
it done to them, being around people who may have been abusing them for five
years?"

Children caught up in such situations, says Underwager, "are taught to be
psychotic.  They learn to believe that reality has no meaning, that things
that didn't happen happened and that the world is full of monstrous people who
do unspeakable things."

Even a man of Spiegel's experience and training found the process of
reestablishing a bond with his child difficult.  "What finally saved my
daughter," he says, "was coming to understand that there was a safe harbor.
She couldn't talk to her mother, but over the years she began to unburden
herself to me.  It just takes a lot of time.

Spiegel will even venture that the ordeal has brought them closer than they
otherwise might have been.  "She's become the focus of my life," he says.

But for Anson, such consolation has been impossible to accept.  He has
repeatedly been admonished by the caseworkers chaperoning his visits with the
children, elderly women with whom he otherwise gets along famously, not to
keep bringing up the abuse charges, not to keep making a point to his kids of
his innocence.

"How can I do that?" he asks plaintively.  "What kind of man with any
integrity could settle for that?"

He stops, shaking his head.  In almost any other context, what he says next
would ring melodramatic, but its hard to imagine the words being more
heartfelt.  "I wake up every morning and I wonder, `Is this real?  Is this what
America has become?'"


			*	*	*

GETTING HELP

If you or someone you know has been wrongfully accused of sexually abusing
children, we encourage you or the accused to contact one of the agencies
listed below.  Consult with an agency and an attorney as soon as a charge is
leveled.  It may spare a great deal of legal, economic and emotional distress
later.

	Kim Hart
	National Child Abuse Defense and Resource Center
	P.O. Box 638
	Holland, OH 43528
	(419) 865-0513

	Ken Pangborn
	Men International
	5814 Riddle Road
	Holiday, FL 34690
	(813) 938-7911

	National Congress for Men and Children
	2020 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
	Suite 277
	Washington, D.C. 20006
	(202) 328-4377

	Dr. Lawrence Spiegel
	40 Baldwin Road
	Parsippany, NJ 07054
	(201) 334-2420
-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
	Ratio of men to women who are arrested on murder charges:  7.4:1
	Number of men executed in the U.S. since 1976:               175
	Number of women executed in the U.S. since 1976:               1

Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive