I’ve been meaning to blog this, but haven’t managed to pull together the enthusiasm to do it. But hopefully better late than never.
For those following the despicable “men’s rights” movement, one of the primary motivating beliefs is that women lie about, well, everything. But mainly rape and domestic violence. I’m not sure how many MRAs really believe that women regularly lie about these things, or if they just push that line because they know that as long as people believe it, they can rape and beat without much consequence. I don’t know. The human mind is a funny thing. People believe they are kidnapped by space aliens. Maybe they can hit their wives and later decide that it didn’t happen and she’s a lying bitch. I really don’t know.
What I do know is that the organized support for rapists, wife beaters, and sometimes child molesters is something that makes me sick to blog about, in part because it exists and in part because doing so tends to draw the MRA supporters out of the woodwork to scream and carry on in your comments. But I still think it’s important, because like many reactionary movements, the MRA movement works primarily by putting forward one face to the world and showing the other only to themselves.
Dean Tong is a prominent and professional “men’s rights activist”. He is the most repulsive of the repulsive, in that he works primarily in helping men beat the accusation that they’ve been molesting their children. That child molestation is a lie concocted by deceitful females intent on getting one over on men is the natural conclusion of the line of thought that posits that those bruises on your wife’s face got there all by themselves and that traumatized rape victim is just making shit up because she changed her mind after the fact. He helps men beat child molestation charges through a bunch of tricks and unscientific methods that seem scientific, and of course relying heavily on the supposition that a man’s word is worth more than a woman’s and certainly more than a child’s in court.
Well, he seems to attract people that are willing to “lie” about him, because he’s been arrested for beating his wife.
Tong got into the business of being an “expert” (sadly, one who has been allowed to testify in trials and has been presented as an expert on various TV shows) after he was accused of molesting his 3-year-old daughter by his ex-wife. After 10 years of litigation and $120,000 spent on lawsuits, he was able to receive visitation with his daughter.
74 Responses to “People sure like to “lie” about Dean Tong”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
Sounds like a lovely fellow. Hope he does serious time.
So, Dean…have you stopped not beating your wife?
[rimshot]
If I can be really shallow for a sec - Jesus Old Man Chrysler, what is with that forehead?!
It sounds bad, but the very first thing I thought when I saw his photo was “thank God he’s not Asian”. (I’m Asian)
atlasien:
best. comment. ever.
turned my frown upside-down.
For a minute I thought it was that hearing-impaired British DJ who got a movie made about him; then I recognized the M.O. from about five years of experience in dealing with parents (mostly men, but not exclusively) who were either made insane or had their insanity amplified by divorce and child custody proceedings.
A brief bit of good everybody can do: if, in your jurisdiction, you ever hear family court judges accept or seriously contemplate the bullshit “Parental Alienation Syndrome,” please point them to any number of websites and/or court cases applying the Daubert test which thoroughly debunk that nonsense. It’s essentially a blame-the-victim tactic that posits that informing your child about an abusive parent is as bad as the abuse itself. I don’t believe I ever saw a mother use it, though.
BWAHAHAHAH!
(um, me, too….)
I don’t get the joke about asians?
I don’t get the joke about asians?
It’s not a joke so much as relief….the name “Tong.”
I understand that. Every time I hear about a case of child sexual abuse I hope it’s not same-sex because that gives the fundies a bullshit case against us gays. Same thing. It’s not an Asian, but a white guy, who’s doing all this.
Not so much a joke as relief, as sad as that is. (welcome to white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal America)
It seems like every time I turn on the news, it’s another straight white guy beating his wife or molesting children.
Sounds like this guy:
http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/2406316/
Gross weasel strategy, too. Creepy on top of creepy.
during a custody battle, i was accused of being a sexual predator and a danger to our kids. the ex never presented any evidence just fears. no statements from teachers, neighbors, witnesses, police. three court psychs said there was absolutely no evidence and absolutely no reason to consider me a danger considering my ample history of being a good parent. but all three all decided the charges were so serious that even though there was no evidence whatsoever, their recommendation had to be to delay any change in custody for six months while i was sent to a court ordered psych eval.
this happened twice, and each time there was a 4-6 month delay as well as very costly court time, lawyer time, and psych eval time. added up to about 12,000.
finally the three psychs decided as they had a year earlier, that their recommendation was i should share legal as well as physical custody of the children.
the ex didn’t like that answer so the ex took the kids and moved to a different state.
over to you norbiz.
i apologize if this is a dup post. your site is not rendering properly in tonight’s update to firefox and I cannot tell if the first post went through.
during a custody battle, i was accused of being a sexual predator and a danger to our kids. the ex never presented any evidence just fears. no statements from teachers, neighbors, witnesses, police. three court psychs said there was absolutely no evidence and absolutely no reason to consider me a danger considering my ample history of being a good parent. but all three all decided the charges were so serious that even though there was no evidence whatsoever, their recommendation had to be to delay any change in custody for six months while i was sent to a court ordered psych eval.
this happened twice, and each time there was a 4-6 month delay as well as very costly court time, lawyer time, and psych eval time. added up to about 12,000.
finally the three psychs decided as they had a year earlier, that their recommendation was i should share legal as well as physical custody of the children.
the ex didn’t like that answer so the ex took the kids and moved to a different state.
over to you norbiz.
Oh they can totally convince themselves it never happened.
A friend just finalized a divorce caused by, according to him, her wanting to go out all the time and not appreciating how he tried to make a home for her and cherished her.
Clearly nothing to do with him trying to smother her with a pillow, choking her, throwing her into a doorknob, threatening to shoot her grandfather, not allowing her to leave the house and other more generalized abuse.
But see, he never got the chance to call her a liar because she, like most abuse victims, never really called him on it.
Clearly nothing to do with him trying to smother her with a pillow, choking her, throwing her into a doorknob, threatening to shoot her grandfather, not allowing her to leave the house and other more generalized abuse.
All signs of love and care.
I don’t see anything there about her being beaten with something wider than a thumb, so what’s the problem? It’s not like he kissed a boy one time at summer camp.
Am I living in a world where Duke did not occur? Am I living in a world where Feminist Jeralyn Merritt, a defense attorney did not school us daily in false accusations? Am I living in a world where Amanda you didn’t daily weekly declare the Duke students rapists even as more and more evidence mounted that they were innocent?
Norbiz, people say you are the left, what are you doing here? The left I am proudly apart of believes in civil liberties, believes in innocent until proven guilty, tries to listen to both sides before taking a side, doesn’t believe in railroading or tar and feathering.
Norbiz, the left I associate with believes everyone deserves not just a defense, but a GREAT defense. We don’t believe in two Americas and two legal systems. We don’t believe in lynch mobs.
I don’t know if Dean Tong is guilty or not. All we have is one side and your sexist assumptions he must be guilty.
And regarding PAS, what do we know about people, men and women:
1. In jr. high and high school, were any of you girls mean girls, or threatened by mean girls?
2. Have any of you women ever “stole” someone else’s boyfriend or had a “friend” sleep with your boyfriend?
3. Have any of you women been harmed by malicious gossip, or engaged in gossip you later were ashamed of?
4. Have any of ever heard of two girls fighting each other?
5. Ever hear of women that steal, women that stab, women that shoot, women that kill others, or husbands, or even their children?
Men AND women can be vicious evil assholes. Why do we think that of all crimes, parents, women AND men, the one crime they would never commit is alienating a child against their ex-spouse?
Norbiz? You think PAS is complete hogwash. Sadly, I think it follows logically from all the other behaviors I see people, men and women, engage it towards each other. Why do you think it is complete bullshit?
I grew up in a “church” where beating was encouraged. They even had a “child rearing” pamphlet that explained how to “discipline” your 3-MONTH-OLD BABY so that they would SUBMIT to you.
Here’s the info on why you should do this: http://www.hoselton.net/religion/hwa/booklets/ptchild/part5.htm
Fucking bastards. Hey, RacyT, why do you still have terrible nightmares at 37? I wonder if this is involved: http://www.hollywoodjesus.com/wolverton01.htm
For the record, this is what my parents showed me as a young child.
derrp–
I know what you mean. When I first read this, I thought, “Well, thank goodness it’s not another straight, white…
…oh shit.”
It’s truly frightening that he got his visitation rights restored especially after such a long and costly legal battle — which suggests that the sex abuse allegations were most likely legit which necessitated the legal and financial blitzkrieg to get them restored.
Small children don’t lie about sex abuse. They just don’t. Even if adults prompt them to lie, a through investigation would reveal it. One of the blows to male power, I think, is the recognition by the authorities that kids don’t lie and make up abuse charges. Adult rape victims (women especially) do not get this consideration even when, statistically, women lie about being raped as often as they lie about being mugged (which is rarely). It’s always on the onus of the woman to prove she is not a slut or was not “asking for it”.
That’s is his whole goal: he wants to turn back the clock to time when children’s claims of abuse were ignored and so-called upstanding, white, Christian men can rely on their reputations to inoculate them against abuse charges. Meanwhile, they can abuse their wives and children with impunity.
Yikes, I meant to say “a thorough investigation”.
Also, “That is his whole goal” in the last paragraph.
I’m up past my bedtime. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
It reminds me a bit of the Bush administration on torture.
You had all the pro-torture conservative pundits like Charles Krauthammer saying that torture’s a good idea, you have John Yoo talking about how the president certainly has every legal right to torture, but to say that the U.S. government is, in fact, torturing people? That’s unpatriotic slander! Until, that is, the evidence became overwhelming that the U.S. government was doing just that.
Re comment 6 above - the British hearing Impaired DJ, called Pete Tong, has the honour of having become modern day rhyming slang - viz. “it’s all gone a bit Pete Tong” ie wrong. Might I suggest that you coopt the lovely Dean Tong for a US version? That’s got to be good for a laugh.
Beatricks: no, they don’t, not on either side of the scale. My ex-wife tried this one, and after the police and social workers interviewed my daughter (who, thank nyarlathotep, doesn’t take after her mother) there was - I’m told - very nearly a caution issued for wasting police time. Apparently, not only was she quite clear that I’d done nothing wrong as far as she was concerned, she’d said nothing to her mother and was quite offended by the idea that daddy might do anything to hurt her.
My sons, on the other hand, made detailed and indignant disclosures regarding my wholly unreasonable attitude regarding the eating of greens and not vegetating in front of the playstation and getting outside for some exercise, all of which the interviewing social worker recorded with evident amusement.
@BeaTricks
Children most certainly do lie about abuse especially molestation.
Ugh!! I just realized that in context I sound like I’m saying children make false accusations all the time…what I meant to say is that children sometimes cover for their abusers.
Children can be coached or bullied into lying - the McMartin Preschool case is the classic example, when the kids were practically hypnotized into thinking they’d taken part in Satanic rituals and other bizarre things like witches flying on broomsticks.
I don’t have an answer for how to get kids to talk about it - my mother found out all my sisters were being abused by a fine, upstanding member of my father’s congregation because one of them started talking about why she didn’t like that particular man. My wife didn’t tell her mother about her molestation by her father until she was an adult, and still won’t challenge her mother to leave the man. The fact that my mother-in-law can stay with a man that she knows raped her daughter is another example of how much this kind of behavior is accepted by large portions of our society.
One of the ways we can knock a hole in their armor is to stop treating scumbags like Tong with respect, and make sure that we have judges in the court system who won’t let them abuse it to their advantage.
Hey, it’s technically possible that Dean Tong is just a wife-beater and not a child molester.
It’s interesting that someone who makes his living helping men beat the rap—some I strongly suspect were guilty, because otherwise he could use the truth and not have to resort to deceitful methods to get them off—wouldn’t stop and think about how it hurts his credibility to beat his wife.
But hey, she could be lying, too. All women are liars, you know. It’s one big lieball conspiracy against men.
At times like this, it’s hard not to get furious. I get a handful of emails a year from rape victims or their friends, desperate for help. They’ve been raped, but of course, everyone’s too busy coddling the rapist to give a shit about his victim. And I see men who immediately assume that someone like Dean Tong is an upstanding person, because he has a penis, and that all women can immediately be assumed to be lying, and I see red.
It’s worth noting that the day care scare was not about men at all, but the result of the larger backlash against feminism. There was so much guilt in the air put on women who worked and put their kids on day care that it was eventually going to pour out in a moral panic.
Sex panics are rarely about individual cases that stay individual. The McMartin day care thing has very little in common with your workaday dad-rapes-daughter case, and more in common with moral panics that tend to center around punishing disempowered people that are seen as out of line. The current MySpace sex panic has a lot to do with judging working mothers and controlling young people.
The McMartin day care panic actually resembles nothing so much as the Salem witch trials. All but one of the falsely accused were women. As day care workers, they were the modern social symbol of women’s liberation. The original accuser was literally mentally ill and suffering from schizophrenia, which is not a made-up disease like Parental Alienation Syndrome.
Just FYI. I’m not arguing with you, Robbie. Just adding information. False accusations of child molestation are possible, but it’s important to remember that falsely accusing people of making false accusations is exponentially more common than false accusations of rape, child molestation, or domestic violence.
I’d bet 7 figures that if you got Dean Tong and his advocates together in a room with all the guys who’ve been caught on “To Catch a Predator” there’d be a lot of agreeing going on…
It’s a tiny bit off-topic, but this is a brilliant rant on using religion as an excuse to abuse women. I don’t think it’s a huge jump from “God says women are weak” to “women are by nature deceitful liars.”
Favorite line:
you do not brutalize women because God told you to. You do it because you think it’s easy.
The McMartin day care panic actually resembles nothing so much as the Salem witch trials. All but one of the falsely accused were women. As day care workers, they were the modern social symbol of women’s liberation.
Amanda, you’ve got to stop looking at everything through feminism-tinted glasses.
The McMartin case might be tempting to view that way because most of the accused were women, but it was a day care, and statistically women make up a greater percentage of day care workers. Just by the odds, if you were accusing day care workers totally at random, most of them would be women.
Note that the first accusation was made concerning men: the accuser’s husband and a male McMartin teacher. Things grew from there.
When you look at false accusations, men are just as commonly accused as women. This isn’t a feminism thing, this isn’t a male rights (snort, whatever that is) thing, it’s a thing about people being assholes, disturbed, deluded, or deluding others.
Robert @17: Sorry I missed your comment before. First of all, I didn’t comment on Mr. Tong’s upcoming criminal case at all; I have no opinion as to whether or not he did it and extend every presumption as to his innocence.
However, I can talk about PAS, because it was effectively debunked about 10 years ago… or rather, it was never “bunked” to begin with. Its origins are fairly easy to trace in advocacy journals in the early 90s and it’s failed every Daubert challenge for admissibility in a court of law. Therefore, using it as a surrogate for evaluating a child’s mental health in a family court proceeding are next to useless and harmful itself.
Obviously, one parent can poison their children against the absent spouse, but there’s no DSM-IV criterion that are met nor is it equivalent to the effects of actual abuse or neglect.
Keith,
Misogyny permeates our culture to the degree that everything is affected. Feminism addresses that structural problem. To say “feminism-tinted glasses” pretends that we as feminists can chose how the world is set up. We can’t. Every day we deal with misogyny. There is no way it wasn’t present in the McMartin case (with which I’m not familiar), because it is present in everything. You can pretend it isn’t there because you have the privilege to do so. Amanda cannot and neither can I. It isn’t about glasses; it’s about understanding the current (and past)realities of gender in our culture and responding appropriately.
I only heard about PAS last month, because one of my partner’s cousin was given a book on it by her dad. They have a shitty relationship because he is a selfish, immature, entitled jerk, not because my partner’s mom “alienated” his three kids from him, as he has convinced himself (yes, alienated his three teenage kids, who lived with him, from hundreds of miles away). Just to add some anecdotal evidence to PAS as the last resort of the douchebag dad.
Keith,The fact that day care has mostly female employees doesn’t negate the feminist issues at all.
WHY are day care employees mostly female and underpaid? Who profits from the services?
Day care allows women to work outside the home, and working and earning an independent salary is a very important issue to feminism and patriarchy.
The attack on the McMartin day care had to do in some part with the fear of leaving children with “strangers” instead of a stay-at-home mom. Not all of it, but it most certainly was an issue with it.
If there were no feminist issues involved, daycare would have an even distribution of genders in its employ. The fact that there are more women isn’t just a plain, unchangeable fact–it means something.
As for false accusations, I just read that studies show that it’s less than 2% of all allegations women make about men and 23% of all accusations made by men against women. (Sorry, don’t know the link) I think it’s much better to take the allegations seriously and investigate them.
Presuming innocence doesn’t mean we should ignore women’s testimony or attack it as presumably a lie.
Failure to prosecute doesn’t necessarily mean innocence either.
Keith, the historical context of the day care scare most certainly was a backlash against, if not feminism, then the increasing numbers of full-time working mothers. It was part and parcel of a widespread cultural anxiety about children being cared for outside their homes by people other than their mothers. For this aspect of it, at least, the sex of the accused isn’t terribly relevant.
Amanda, I was going to make the point that it was a literal witch hunt, (seriously - they were accusing these people of being witches and molesting the children in black mass rites), but didn’t want to hijack the thread to do a rant on that case. So, yeah, I totally agree with you.
My main question is, how do we get kids to talk about it when this happens to them? My sister let it slip in an innocent conversation when she was 9 - my wife kept her silence into her 20’s. It doesn’t help that most of the time the molesters are men in the family, and men who are authoritarian control-freaks to boot. Educating kids about sex at an early age - that right-wing bugaboo - could help, by letting them know that some things shouldn’t be done to you without your consent. But, I don’t have any real answers for what is a very big problem.
Keith,
I really object to your tellling Amanda and her other commenters to “stop looking at things through feminism colored glasses.” You don’t get to tell other people how to understand the world around them. Especially, you don’t get to tell women how to grasp the history of %50 percent of the population. Amanda’s “salem witch trial” comparison is spot on. I know quite a bit about McMartin and anyone who has studied it or even looked at it with a modicum of historical and sociological perspective recognizes that it reflects a very gendered and historically specific set of hysterical reactions to working women leaving their children in day care. That was the interpretation put on it by opponents of daycare, by the way, as well as proponents of day care–by anti feminists as well as feminists. Amanda’s interpretation doesnt come out of the ether–its based on the fact that these situations happen over and over again in very select circumstances.
Its interesting to contrast the rapid dissemniation of public information and the handling of the McMartin scandal to the failures surrounding the quite similar scandal in the catholic church. Where the children were automatically believed, and even coached, in the mcmartin scandal adult victims and children in the catholic church pedophile case were routinely silenced and disbelieved or dismissed. At the asme time although the day care providers were almost instantly charged and railroaded into prison on no real evidence only one or two priests have ever served time for their crimes. The catholic pedophile scandal wasn’t exposed for years even though it was certainly an open secret. When it was exposed the fact that the majority of perpetrators (in this country) were male can’t be dismissed as merely an artifact of the fact taht catholic priests are male (as you dismiss the accusations against female day care workers as only accidentally about their sex). It was precisely because the priesthood was male and celibate and that pedophile priests used their easy access to male children (as pseudo fathers who were assumed to be sexually neuter) that the scandal involved who it did, and how it did. It was exposed *despite the fact* that it was men doing it and despite the fact that the male priesthood closed ranks. Exposing it also came about through conflict over how gender roles like “father” and “celibate” and biological parent were to be understood.
The McMartin case might be tempting to view that way because most of the accused were women, but it was a day care, and statistically women make up a greater percentage of day care workers.
That’s kind of the point, Keith. That’s what made it a target-rich environment, and therefore why a day care center was targeted.
When you look at false accusations, men are just as commonly accused as women.
Stats on that?
totally OT and probably not helpful to this conversation at all, but i wish to reiterate emphatically for the record that “Caren, Creator of Animorphic Pancakes” is the best web handle in the history of the internet. QED. [makes obeisance]
more on-topic, caren’s comment pretty much sums it up for me too.
I really object to your tellling Amanda and her other commenters to “stop looking at things through feminism colored glasses.”
And I object to people misquoting me.
I said “looking at everything”, not “looking at things”. The change in the word completely alters what I actually said into a strawman position I do not have, have never had, and am rather insulted as being implied to have.
Are there issue in which interpreting it through a feminist perspective is critical? Absolutely. But I reject the proposition that everything falls into that category, and thus trying to fit everything into it is wrong.
We can disagree over what should be inclusive. In this case, I disagree strongly. Reasons? Because I’ve seen (male) teachers, in high schools, falsely accused of sexual misconduct simply because the students were pissed off at them. There isn’t a feminism issue there because kids are off at school whether the mother is working or not. Daycares and preschools are so accepted (and demanded) by a such a large segment of the population that I think you’re really reaching to argue that McMartin represented a backlash against feminism (in that mothers were sending their kids there). Why women make up such a majority of the staff (and what they’re paid) is an utterly irrelevant issue in this case.
There is, in addition, something else which actually is relevant, three names:
MacFarlane
Heger
Rubin
MacFarlane was the Children’s Institute International social worker who conducted most of the interviews that led to allegations of the alleged abuse.
Heger was the doctor who claimed that medical examinations proved there was abuse.
Rubin was the prosecutor who pushed the case. If there is accusations of a witch hunt (as opposed to a general irrational panic and sincere, but wrong belief), Rubin deserves that label, withholding evidence at trial that would have indicated that the accusations were likely false. Rubin’s behaviour was so fanatical that the assistant prosecutor resigned in disgust at the travesty he was seeing happen.
And among those three people? Not one pair of testicles among them. All professional working women.
Keith, you’re conflating two different issues.
Yes, teenagers sometimes make false accusations. I haven’t seen statistics, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that age group was the most likely to be making such accusations. The fact that teenagers sometimes make false accusations is not the same thing as preschoolers making similar accusations.
Yes, a large segment of the population uses preschools and day care, but they’re not comfortable about it, and there’s at least one story every year that comes out and says that Daycare Is Bad For Your Child. Here’s a recent one.
Here’s another.
Here’s another.
I can do that all day, and they all say one thing: mothers should stay home with their children. Not that children do better with a full-time parent, but that mothers should stay home. Fathers aren’t good enough. In fact, one study claimed that you saw the same bad effects as daycare if the babysitter was the child’s father.
And you don’t see anything in there that could possibly be construed as feminist-bashing? Really?
Well, that settles it. Keith has spoken.
And among those three people? Not one pair of testicles among them. All professional working women.
My long response with links is in mod, but … you’re surprised that some women work against the interests of other women? You think that Beverly LaHaye and Phyllis Schlafly must be icons of feminism because they have ovaries?
The distinction that makes no difference. Keith, adding or subtracting the word “everything” from the quote doesn’t really make it any better or worse. You don’t get to tell other commenters how they should think about *anything* that includes “some” things and “every thing”.
As for your bizarre point that some people inlved in some legal cases are female, you have a very stunted and childish view of patriarchy and of society if you think that each and every gendered person performs one and only one kind of role in society. Are you going to tell me that when mothers-in -law in india set fire to their daughters-in-law in dowery murders that the murders aren’t, in some sense, “sexist” or derived from patriarchal structures of power and property ownership?
aimai
Speaking of tipping one’s hand - the salient feature of three women involved in the McMartin preschool case, in Keith’s mind, is that they don’t have testicles. They might as well not have skulls!
Admitting how many women were victims of the “Satanic panic”, how many men pushed it, or how it was fueled by anti-feminist notions about daycare centers simply doesn’t fit his All About Teh Menz worldview. So don’t expect him to do anything but play bros v. hos in his own mind.
Small children don’t lie about sex abuse. They just don’t. Even if adults prompt them to lie, a through investigation would reveal it.
[Winces]
No, small children don’t lie. They confabulate. And our country has discovered the hard way that investigations do not easily reveal adults prompting them to lie, where those adults are quite sincere. Child sexual abuse occurs, of course, but you have to be real careful in investigating it as it’s too easy to get bad testimony.
As a counter-point to Amanda’s comments on child worker panics, I point at the Peter Ellis case, which prompted changes in the way the NZ police and social authorities handled cases of alleged child abuse. Check out this section in particular. The whole thing was a huge clusterfuck because people were too credible given the emotional nature of the charges.
Why are you here, Keith? This is a known feminist blog. It should be fairly obvious that posts here will take a feminist slant or viewpoint, seeing as this is the point of the blog.
If you’d prefer a MRA pov, there are plenty of sites out there for you. But chastising Amanda for expressing *her* viewpoint and *her* opinions on her own blogis really stupid.
No, it’s not debating on the merits. It’s not adding to the dialogue. It’s insulting your host.
———
r@d@r! {blushes} I’ve thought about returning to just my name and dropping my title b/c it’s so long, but if it’s the best web handle on the net… =^O I’m keeping it.
Child sexual abuse occurs, of course, but you have to be real careful in investigating it as it’s too easy to get bad testimony.
For just one example, one book I read said that asking children the same question multiple times is extremely problematic. Why? Because we’ve trained children to know that if we ask a question again, they didn’t answer it right. So they come up with another answer, or expand on their answer, because it’s what they think the adult wants from them. It’s not a “lie” in that the child is deliberately making things up. It’s the child thinking s/he must have gotten it wrong and trying to figure out what the correct answer is.
This may already have been said, but Keith, you are the one in need of some historical context before accusing Amanda of viewing the McMartin case through “feminist-tinted glasses.” Amanda is right on in comparing the McMartin case to the witch-hunts of the early modern period, particularly in the invocation of Satanic rituals (lead by men, with their female minions) as a key component of the sexual abuse. I do not think it is hyperbolic to suggest that misogyny was one component of the moral panic that centered on that case.
I grew up in California with that trial in the background and was absolutely stunned when I found out the truth about what happened. While the children were coached to lie, their stories quickly began to unravel when pressed on details. Those kids were just trying to please the adults, but I doubt any of them ever actually believed what they were coached to say.
Speaking of tipping one’s hand - the salient feature of three women involved in the McMartin preschool case, in Keith’s mind, is that they don’t have testicles. They might as well not have skulls!
No, I don’t judge groups of people using criteria like that. I base my bad opinions on stuff they actually do.
Like make stupid leaps of logic such as the quoted example.
Yes, stupid. I did call your comment stupid. Moronic. Shitheaded, even. I don’t know if you’re female, male, transgendered or neuter, and I don’t care. I’m firmly of the opinion that stupidity is not constrained by mere matters of biology.
My point was that the salient feature was that it was women who were on the forefront of the accusations, which would be some evidence that it’s not entirely a slam dunk case that the McMartin thing was necessarily about an anti-feminist agenda.
That point can be debated, and some people have made reasoned responses as to why. Others, however, have assumed that, apparently because I happened to be born with X and Y chromosomes, and question some statements, that I’m obviously secretly a unrepentant sexist. And that I shouldn’t have an opinion on the matter that might differ from theirs, and heaven forbid I express it.
So kindly don’t engage in asinine attempts to read my mind.
Why are you here, Keith? This is a known feminist blog. It should be fairly obvious that posts here will take a feminist slant or viewpoint, seeing as this is the point of the blog.
If you’d prefer a MRA pov, there are plenty of sites out there for you. But chastising Amanda for expressing *her* viewpoint and *her* opinions on her own blogis really stupid.
Really?
I mean, really? You really mean that?
You know, not too long ago I recall a post on this blog, making a comment that was considered disparaging to women who either had naturally large breasts or had decided on cosmetic surgery.
I recall a great deal of complaining about that blog writer, arguing with her opinion, complaining she was viewing the world through her perceptions. They took issue with that perception. It was a lively debate involving many sides of the issue and took in statements of personal choice versus perceptions of cultural pressure, great stuff.
Why am I here? I’m here because there’s some good posts and by far I agree with many of the opinions expressed. I’m here because I like lively debate.
Apparently, I’m also here because I have a masochistic streak that involves having people telling me to go hang out with idiots, or that, basically, I’m a poopyhead because I don’t necessarily agree with anything.
I had thought that sort of thing was the provenance of the morons over on Redstate and the like. Please tell me I was wrong.
I’m here because I like lively debate.
“I’m here because I think feminists are a bunch of morons and I enjoy baiting and pissing them off.”
I mean, really. Here you go with the temper-tantrum, grade-school insults, the blather about how you’re being oppressed and silenced, how unfortunate that people misunderstand you, blah blah blah. It’s like that old Catskills joke; you might as well have said “Usenet standard pouty argument #249!
There’s no need to read your mind when I can read your words. If all you care about is that some of the people involved in railroading the McMartins are women, why emphasize they are “professional working women”? Because that’s so much worse than if they were unemployed women? Or just plain women?
To steal a line from Amanda, nobody’s fooled by your dogwhistle. And jumping up and down yelling “Stupid! You’re a stupid stupidhead!” like you were a first-grader isn’t exactly providing cover.
For just one example, one book I read said that asking children the same question multiple times is extremely problematic. Why? Because we’ve trained children to know that if we ask a question again, they didn’t answer it right. So they come up with another answer, or expand on their answer, because it’s what they think the adult wants from them. It’s not a “lie” in that the child is deliberately making things up. It’s the child thinking s/he must have gotten it wrong and trying to figure out what the correct answer is.
Yep. And then human memory being what it is, the child later convinces him/herself that what they said must have actually happened, which becomes a self-reinforcing situation.
Human memory is very, very malleable. True story from my youth: I grew up on the Bay of Chaleur in New Brunswick and there’s a centuries-old story about a fiery phantom ship that can be seen on the bay. I’ve seen it twice. The second time, when I was in my teens (and beginning to be more skeptical about the world when it came to popular myth), I saw only an indistinct glow. Could have any number of explanations.
When I saw it the first time, I was maybe 10 or so. I can still vividly see a three-masted ship flowing and burning, with what looked like the dark shapes of men running along the side and jumping overboard. Had nightmares for years about it.
However, as the years passed, I began to wonder about that memory. See, things didn’t make sense. I recall it happening when much of the family was gathered at my grandfather’s farm to bring in the hay, that it was in the early evening, and it was dark and story and raining, and the ship was just offshore.
The only problem was, if it was dark and story, we wouldn’t have been bringing in bales of hay. And at the time of year we did, it doesn’t get dark in the early evening.
A few years ago, one day, I asked my parents what we’d seen that night (as it had been the first time they’d seen it too). It was an indistinct fuzzy glow on the far horizon, not a clearly defined three-masted ship burning a few hundred meters offshore.
I’d taken the memory, combined it with other stories of what the ship was supposed to be (the appearance and the running men), added a touch of classic horror (the dark and stormy night), and voila. Instant ghost story that I can still clearly picture even though I don’t believe any more in the supernatural, ghosts, god or goblins.
Getting a really young kid to believe they’d been satanically abused? Easy.
What the McMartin case represented, I think, was a perfect storm of elements. You had a prosecutor who was fanatical in her efforts to the point of doing things of questionable legality, let alone morality. You had a doctor, an acknowledged expert on sexual abuse of children, let her devotion get the better of her and impair her objectivity. You had well-meaning social workers who truly cared about children and didn’t realize what they were unintentionally doing. You had a popular culture where things satanic and bad influences on children were popping up everywhere (remember the complaints about the evil of Dungeons and Dragons from the same time, or how heavy metal was making kids throw themselves off buildings and sacrificing goats?). And that same popular culture which the problem of child abuse was (finally!) becoming recognized as a problem. And you had a woman with some psychological issues acting as the trigger.
That’s why I’m arguing that the interpretation that it was primarily a backlash against feminism, or that that even played a significant role, is possibly incorrect. All sorts of things came together at the right moment (well, wrong moment, really) with all sorts of contributing factors that had their own baggage.
For just one example, one book I read said that asking children the same question multiple times is extremely problematic. Why? Because we’ve trained children to know that if we ask a question again, they didn’t answer it right. So they come up with another answer, or expand on their answer, because it’s what they think the adult wants from them. It’s not a “lie” in that the child is deliberately making things up. It’s the child thinking s/he must have gotten it wrong and trying to figure out what the correct answer is.
Yep. And then human memory being what it is, the child later convinces him/herself that what they said must have actually happened, which becomes a self-reinforcing situation.
Human memory is very, very malleable. True story from my youth: I grew up on the Bay of Chaleur in New Brunswick and there’s a centuries-old story about a fiery phantom ship that can be seen on the bay. I’ve seen it twice. The second time, when I was in my teens (and beginning to be more skeptical about the world when it came to popular myth), I saw only an indistinct glow. Could have any number of explanations.
When I saw it the first time, I was maybe 10 or so. I can still vividly see a three-masted ship flowing and burning, with what looked like the dark shapes of men running along the side and jumping overboard. Had nightmares for years about it.
However, as the years passed, I began to wonder about that memory. See, things didn’t make sense. I recall it happening when much of the family was gathered at my grandfather’s farm to bring in the hay, that it was in the early evening, and it was dark and story and raining, and the ship was just offshore.
The only problem was, if it was dark and story, we wouldn’t have been bringing in bales of hay. And at the time of year we did, it doesn’t get dark in the early evening.
A few years ago, one day, I asked my parents what we’d seen that night (as it had been the first time they’d seen it too). It was an indistinct fuzzy glow on the far horizon, not a clearly defined three-masted ship burning a few hundred meters offshore.
I’d taken the memory, combined it with other stories of what the ship was supposed to be (the appearance and the running men), added a touch of classic horror (the dark and stormy night), and voila. Instant ghost story that I can still clearly picture even though I don’t believe any more in the supernatural, ghosts, god or goblins.
Getting a really young kid to believe they’d been satanically abused? Easy.
What the McMartin case represented, I think, was a perfect storm of elements. You had a prosecutor who was fanatical in her efforts to the point of doing things of questionable legality, let alone morality. You had a doctor, an acknowledged expert on sexual abuse of children, let her devotion get the better of her and impair her objectivity. You had well-meaning social workers who truly cared about children and didn’t realize what they were unintentionally doing. You had a popular culture where things satanic and bad influences on children were popping up everywhere (remember the complaints about the evil of Dungeons and Dragons from the same time, or how heavy metal was making kids throw themselves off buildings and sacrificing goats?). And that same popular culture which the problem of child abuse was (finally!) becoming recognized as a problem. And you had a woman with some psychological issues acting as the trigger.
That’s why I’m arguing that the interpretation that it was primarily a backlash against feminism, or that that even played a significant role, is possibly incorrect. All sorts of things came together at the right moment (well, wrong moment, really) with all sorts of contributing factors that had their own baggage.
Well, Keith, I don’t see it as you arguing with Amanda’s post as much as arguing with the entire purpose of the blog. You posted that Amanda shouldn’t get carried away thinking that feminist stuff is everywhere.
I’m guessing you are either too young to remember the mommy wars of the 80s or were priveleged by your sex not to notice them. McMartin-gate fed into and out of that part of the culture war.
If you are actually interested in a debate, fine. But the whole “feminist-tinted glasses” comment wasn’t debating. It was flaming. I guess I’m a little tired from the creepy dad troll from last night and wondered if you were interested in talking or just wanted to come over here and condescendingly school Amanda and the rest of us about how feminism/patriarchy isn’t actually a part of everything in our society, regardless of our personal experiences.
Sorry if I misunderstood. But I still think slamming the discussion of feminism on a feminist blog kinda stupid. If the feminist part of the discussion is boring you, there are other places to play. Telling the host and everyone else we shouldn’t consider it as relevent isn’t really debating.
I had wondered if his name “Tong” referred more to a history with someone as a blacksmith. Blacksmiths used tongs to hold metal they were cooling. That’s always what I thought it meant.
If you are actually interested in a debate, fine. But the whole “feminist-tinted glasses” comment wasn’t debating. It was flaming.
If it was taken that way, I apologize. It was unintentional.
Here’s my rationale for why I believe the interpretation that anti-feminism was a primary motivation, or even a significant one, for the McMartin case is not true. McMartin was a perfect storm of different cultural and personal issues.
There was an overzealous prosecutor who rigged the case to try and get a win, hiding evidence that would have made people question the case. There was a sincerely devoted expert in child abuse who allowed her compassion to get the better of her and used methods that, in retrospect, turned out to be wrong. There were social workers who honestly were concerned about children and didn’t have the knowledge to realize what they were doing when questioning them. There wasn’t sufficient understanding about how memory could be manipulated, even unintentionally. There was a growing cultural awareness (finally!) of the problem of child abuse. And there was a cultural paranoia about satanism. Remember at the time people were screaming about how Dungeons and Dragons was going to corrupt kids, and how heavy metal was causing them to jump of buildings and sacrifice goats or whatever.
Add in economic factors with the American economy being in the doldrums, it looked like the Japanese were going to own everything, saber-rattling between the US and USSR was getting louder, the US was still recovering from an ass-kicking in Vietnam and being humiliated by a bunch of gun-toting students who captured an embassy, all of which adds stress to a society, and you’ve got a bad energy looking for an outlet.
Mix well, and add the trigger, one woman with psychological issues making an accusation against her husband and a teacher.
Kaboom.
All of those elements of a “perfect storm” can exist without diminishing the element of anti-feminism.
Apologies for bringing this up or if it’s not an exact comparison, but a certain lacrosse case can also be looked at as a “perfect storm” (backlash against liberal professors and PCness, race, prosecutor seeking re-election, OHNOEZ JESSE JACKSON AND AL SHARPTON!!!11!! etc.) But that doesn’t negate the fact that there was an anti-feminist bent in much of the “let them walk and let them sue the hell out of the city and the school so that innocent Durham residents have to pay higher taxes and innocent students have to pay higher tuition on top of the 50k/year to defray the costs!” crowd.
Oh I agree that there are many factors that led into the “perfect storm”, but feminism is one of them and certainly more important than the Japanese or Soviets.
The mommy wars between moms that work and moms that don’t (in which day care plays a crucial part of the debate) were at least if not more relevent as the D&D fears.
I just don’t see how you can dismiss feminism when day care STILL is a big issue. No less than the NYT ran an article last year about how day care kids are more aggressive than home-care kids. The results were actually almost even and perhaps even within the margin of error, but it got played in the “nations’ newspaper” as news fit to print.
I also think the comment about how the McMartin case was treated vs. the priest pedophilia cases is pertinent. Child abuse by women or in women-run businesses or businesses that enable moms to work outside the home means major prosecution. Child abuse by a major patriarchal power, not so much.
history_mom:
Some of them did actually come to believe it because of all of the adults who kept telling them that it happened. So first they had years of therapy to deal with the trauma of their supposed Satanic abuse. Then they got to have years MORE therapy to deal with the trauma of finding out that it was all invented by overzealous adults who took the stories of kids taking hot-air balloon rides to be molested a little too seriously.
Keith:
Except that the “perfect storm” was quickly followed by a wave of nearly identical cases, all of which were prosecuted using the same bad methods. So, clearly, it can’t be written off as one anomalous case that just happened to have the right set of circumstances.
You also seem to be misunderstanding the use of “primary motivation.” Did the prosecutor and the shrink sit down and say, “We really don’t like that women are putting their kids in childcare, so we’re going to railroad a few childcare workers with trumped-up child molestation charges”? Of course not.
But everyone “knew” that putting your kids in childcare was bad, so when the accusations came up, hysteria set in, because here was proof that putting your kids in daycare was directly harmful to their well-being while they were in daycare.
You don’t get a fucked-up case like McMartin unless the cops and prosecutors go into it with unexamined assumptions. Daycare was bad for kids, ergo it must all be true, because everyone knew daycare was bad. And it snowballed from there, not just through California, but nationally.
Phoenician —
Thanks for the links. I should have been more specific when I said that children don’t lie about sex abuse. What I meant was that children, especially young children, don’t have the capacity to concoct some abuse story to frame an innocent person. My argument is that small children are not brilliant criminal masterminds, therefore their claims of sex abuse should be taken seriously. Not too long ago, children were often ignored when they mentioned sex abuse perpetrated by adults. Society has come along way in recognizing the devastating impact of child abuse. Authorities are more likely now to investigate allegations made by children than in the past. This greater willingness to investigate the claims of children gives them a little more power at the abuser’s expense. This shift in power is resisted by Tong and others of his ilk.
Having lived in L.A. through the McMartin era, I recall numerous times where letters to the editor and even editorial columns brought up the working mother angle. Along with the other elements already mentioned in this “perfect storm” was a lot of hand-wringing about “latch-key kids.”
Yes, there was a cultural explosion of paranoia over satanism, with speakers crisscrossing the country giving presentations to church and police groups on the supposed imminent danger. That certainly was an essential part of this but I don’t think the explosion of shaky day-care abuse cases is primarily due to that — it served as fuel for the resulting paranoia, but it doesn’t explain why preschools and day-care centers served as the loci of that paranoia.
Except that the “perfect storm” was quickly followed by a wave of nearly identical cases, all of which were prosecuted using the same bad methods. So, clearly, it can’t be written off as one anomalous case that just happened to have the right set of circumstances.
I know. But just like that one woman was the trigger for McMartin, McMartin was the trigger for others. Well, actually Kern County was first, which led into the rather overzealous “investigation” into McMartin, which gained the most national media attention and it took off from there.
In the Kern County case both sets of parents (and then others) were accused, the step-grandmother doing the initial coaching of the children, and it took off from there. The fact that it had nothing to do with day cares leads me again to wonder about the feminism aspect being claimed.
Day cares are convenient places for such rumors and stories to start because the kids are away from home for a while, but it certainly wasn’t limited to day cares. Satanic abuse allegations and sex rings were claimed to be all over the freaking place.
Everyone at that time around that issue became, well, nuts. When I was in university in the early 90s there was one professor in the psychology department who had done some work on the witchcraft frenzy in Europe and saw the similar kind off mass hysteria in the satanic abuse nonsense of the 1980s and studied it. When you talked to him and read some of the documentation, years after it had calmed down, you wonder how freaking gullible people were. Some of the “experts” who went to schools to warn about the evil satanic influences (snerk) were practically certifiable.
I also think the comment about how the McMartin case was treated vs. the priest pedophilia cases is pertinent. Child abuse by women or in women-run businesses or businesses that enable moms to work outside the home means major prosecution. Child abuse by a major patriarchal power, not so much.
DING DING DING DING DING!
Yep. While Middlesex County, MA prosecutors were persecuting the Amaraults in the Fells Acres case - giving the sole male involved the nickname “tooky” and looking for “tunnels” that didn’t exist on the property, Cardinal ScoffLaw was hiding out and reassigning numerous “Father McFeeley” cases without nary a whisper.
No patriarchy involved there, nope!
You left out the fact that the kids involved in the Fells Acres case never recanted. Not even after they grew up.
The fallout was widespread propaganda discrediting the testimony of children and blaming interviewers, and another step forward for the organized pro-pedophile movement.
Who may have an interest, as well, in using a group of disgruntled fathers as a wider tool to discredit disclosures of child sexual abuse.
As far as wild disclosures are concerned, do look up the case of the Philips Exeter (Andover?) teacher who wore a Pumpkin Mask while molesting retarded children. Who would believe a story like that? You say you were molested by a Pumpkin? Nonsense.
” They claimed they were railroaded by questionable testimony from child witnesses who they said were badgered by well-meaning therapists until they concocted their tales of abuse.
“We invite scrutiny,'’ Amirault said “We’re not afraid of the truth.'’
But their accusers - now young adults - insist that Amirault is the monster they said he was during his trial. Their testimony, which included stories of Amirault dressing up as a clown and raping children with knives, and the ritualistic slayings of animals, made up the bulk of the state’s case.
His sister and mother, Violet Amirault, were convicted during a separate trial and were released from prison in 1995. Violet Amirault died in 1997.
Amirault victim Jennifer Bennett, now married with two children of her own, said earlier this week that her stomach was in knots just thinking about his release. She said she still has flashbacks, wakes up in a cold sweat and is terrified by clowns.
Larry Hardoon, the chief prosecutor in the case, said he continues to believe Amirault committed the crimes. He defended the interviewing techniques used by investigators, which were later criticized as leading and suggestive to the children.
“Anybody that takes the time to understand and pay attention to what the actual facts were - not the mischaracterization of facts that gets spread by the defense - the convictions have always been upheld as sound and fully supportable,'’ he said. ”
Compare dressing as clown with earlier reference to David Cobb dressing up as Mr. Pumpkin — easy to do things that make little kiddies sound like idiots.
Cui bono?
The other factor in the Catholic Church scandal was this: Nobody gave a flying fuck when the victims were girls. When boys started reporting or started getting attention, then it became a big huge scandal. The boys weren’t treated like lying little Lolitas, either.
My thoughts on the abuses of patriarchy in relation to abuses by the whole of humanity in summary ; Bad people can be everywhere, but some bad people have the /power/ to do more bad things than others, and are therefore, a greater danger. Some bad people are systemitically tolerated and encouraged, and some bad things are accepted as okay.
Not all men are abusers, not all women are saints, hardly that. …but the patriarchy enables men who abuse, to abuse and get away with it, the patriarchy tolerates men who abuse, encourage harness and division.
The patriarchy must be brought down. There would be no happiness, no true love, between men and women so long as they are not equals and am able to speak and act /freely/ with one another.
sp;
/harshness/ The patriarchy, has an inflexible addiction to harshness.
The other factor in the Catholic Church scandal was this: Nobody gave a flying fuck when the victims were girls. When boys started reporting or started getting attention, then it became a big huge scandal.
Well, sure. Because those priests might have given one of those little boys TEH GAY!
I wrote a letter to Glenn Sacks (a leader in the fathers’ rights movement) once, in an attempt to dialogue about male abuse of children and women. He actually refused to believe my true life tales, wherein nearly half my male relatives have sexually abused me or someone else. He told me I was lying. I said, look, you can ask X state penitentiary about my Mormon uncle who was convicted of molesting his five-year-old granddaughter, but he didn’t follow it up.
What in the world would I have to gain. It’s just depressing, is all. Of course, my friends all know someone who was sexually abused by a male, some were abused by female relatives… it’s all over the place. What makes it so unbelievable???
privatechaos wrote “I wrote a letter to Glenn Sacks (a leader in the fathers’ rights movement) once, in an attempt to dialogue about male abuse of children and women. He actually refused to believe my true life tales, wherein nearly half my male relatives have sexually abused me or someone else. He told me I was lying.
I doubt it went down like that and I would be interested to see what it is I actually wrote–perhaps if you share the email address I can look it up. As for believing you, understated that I get thousands of letters a month with dramatic tales in them, usually from men but sometimes by women.
Just today I got a guy who told me that he reported that his ex-wife is alienating his children from him and now the CIA is spying on him because of it. I am skeptical about what I’m sent, whether it’s a man telling me his ex is starving and beating his kids or it’s a woman who tells me that half her family has committed sexual abuse. If you were in my position, you’d be skeptical, too.–GS