Fact or fiction? Women lie about abuse as a way to get even
- Details
- Category: Child sex abuse research
- Created: Saturday, 27 May 2017 16:33
- Written by Unknown author
Prevaricating adults, usually women, are claimed to routinely make false allegations (Faller, 2005). This idea is not supported by research. It has been suggested that there is a widespread misperception that intentionally false allegations of child abuse are made by mothers in order to gain a tactical advantage in custody battles, or to seek revenge upon their estranged partners (Trocmé & Bala, 2005).
The implications of such a myth have been highlighted, with one author warning that it functions to protect sexual abusers at the expense of children’s safety (Jenkins, 2002). Further, it has been posited that the dominant belief within the legal and psychiatric communities is that of a deeply-held scepticism that women and children who make allegations of sexual abuse are likely hysterical, mentally ill, or vindictive liars; a view which informs contemporary forensic assessment models used by experts in Family Court disputes (Foote, 2006).
In a contentious and complicated subject area such as allegations of sexual abuse in custody battles in Australia, perhaps it is understandable that even empirical research itself is inconsistent and disputed. It has been found that child abuse allegations in the Family Court were no more frequently false than abuse allegations made in other circumstances, the rate being about nine percent (Brown et al., 1998). However, that study has been criticised by Hirst (2005), who states that this figure was incorrect and the more accurate estimation is that only 22 percent of the allegations studied were substantiated by the child protection agency. Allegations considered to be deliberately false are not common, at one to two percent (Higgins, 2007).
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