Subject: Presumed Guilty

From: [email-masked] (aaron.l.hoffmeyer)
Date: Thu, 28 May 1992 06:44:35 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?'"

LOS ENDOS

			*	*	*

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 (who once had my ex-wife2b's attorney for her attorney)
	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

SOURCE:  Cynlobl Zntnmvar, Whar 1992

Aaron L. Hoffmeyer
[email-masked]