Getting to the truth

Children lie. So do adults. And when a child lies about sexual molestation, it's a false accusation. When they're not lying, it's a true accusation.

That sounds elementary but there are reasons why children make up allegations.

Susan Robbins, associate professor of Social Work at the University of Houston, said that clearly there are more true allegations than false ones. However, researchers don't know the true propensity of the problem with true and false allegations due to inconsistencies in statistics.

Part of the problem is that there is no single sign and there's no cluster of symptoms to indicate whether a child has been sexually abused, short of finding semen, or pregnancy or sexually-transmitted diseases.

"In some cases, children do lie," Robbins said. "In some cases, teenagers do lie. Kids know they can get people into trouble. I don't think they understand the severe nature of their actions, especially younger children."

Some of the reasons include the need for attention. Sometimes, the child's cognitive capabilities aren't that well developed. That could lead to situations where the child makes up allegations to get out of a family in which they were placed because of foster care.

Other times, when teenagers are involved, they have consensual sex with their boyfriend. They get caught by their parents or get a sexually-transmitted disease or get pregnant.

"Then they have to make up a story about how that happened," Robbins said.

Also, the accuser may have a custodial parent they're not happy with, and they'll lie, hoping to go back to the other parent, Robbins said.

She said there's not enough research right now that clearly identifies the most common reason as to why children lie about sexual abuse.

It's not always based on a lie by a child. Sometimes false allegations come about in custody battles between couples who are divorced or are getting a divorce.

"A custodial parent might want the other parent out of their life, out of their child's life, and they're the ones who make up the false allegation," Robbins said.

Robbins said she's seen many cases where a mother wants the father or step-father out of her life and uses the child to repeat a story filled with lies of sexual abuse.

The child is then pressured by the parent to make up allegations or tell a story that the parent wants him or her to tell.

Part of what happens in the scenario has to do with what Robbins called "suggestibility" where an idea or a story is induced into another person's mind without argument.

"Some children are more forgetful than others, and if some children repeat the same story over and over again, something they knew not to be true becomes true," she said. "By the 10th or 11th time they tell it, they really believe it, even though it's not factually true."

In other words, the child isn't making up a lie, they're just repeating the same story over and over again that someone has told them to keep saying.

Sometimes the opposite happens, and the child tells a parent the truth, that she was molested, but the parent doesn't want to believe it's true. The parent is in denial, Robbins said.

"One of the things we do see is that a child will make an allegation about a parent, and the other parent will support their partner and not the child," Robbins said. "They don't want to believe that it's real. It's really damaging to children when this happens."

Since 2005, the Bourbon County Attorney's Office has filed 24 sex crime-related cases.

There were four in 2005, five in 2006, 15 in 2007. As of 2008, there's been one. The ages of the alleged victims ranged from age 3 to 15.

There are no clear answer as to why there's an increase in the number of sexual abuse cases. Some people have expressed concern that some of the alleged victims have made up the allegations -- that there can't have been this many sex crimes going on in a county the size of Bourbon.

Bourbon County Attorney Terri Johnson told The Herald-Tribune two weeks ago in a interview that she doesn't charge a case that she believes someone has made up.

Robbins said the filing behavior of prosecutors may not have any relationship with the number of sex crimes that are being committed.

Robbins has worked for defense attorneys who have represented suspected molesters.

She reviews case files and examines interviews professionals do with accusers. Robbins looks for inconsistencies in the interviews and court testimony, and she's aware of times when innocent men go to prison because of false allegations.

But Robbins said that child abuse and sexual abuse do happen, abuse is a serious problem, and when there's an element of lying involved, it makes the process of defending and prosecuting a sex case much more difficult.