Fathers Not Guilty of Child Abuse

December 3, 2003

We've known about it for many years. Even before the old media began debating racial profiling, fathers were under attack. No matter what ailment families and society suffered, from divorce and out-of-wedlock births, to government over-spending and poverty, it was fathers and "patriarchy" that were to blame. Not only that, but with seemingly super-human skill, clever men could commit crimes against women, psychologically manipulate their victims, and avoid prosecution through reliance on a vast male conspiracy. "All men are evil and all women are victims." Through much of the last quarter century, such bizarre social politics gave way to the surrealism of legal reforms aimed at dealing with "the problem."

Probably the most degrading accusation that can be made against a father is the abuse of his own children. It's an odd experience going through the statistics and comparing them with much of the late 20^th century propaganda. The relatively high percentages of child abuse by fathers often reported could only be true if a very loose definition of "father" is used; one in which any man in any kind of relationship with the mother is labeled the father. Biological fathers (i.e. real, actual fathers) accounted for an insignificant percent; smaller it turns out than the rate of error in convictions.

Prejudice creates self-fulfilling prophecy. This fact about anti-father propaganda was discovered in a relatively small Norwegian town recently when more than 20 fathers had child abuse convictions overturned, many of them years after their sentences had been completed.

Many of the fathers had been convicted primarily on the testimony of doctors who determined from medical examinations that their children had been sexually assaulted. Review of the cases in light of modern medical knowledge revealed that the conclusions were wrong. Not only were the fathers not guilty, they were convicted in the absence of any real evidence that abuse had occurred.

Attorney and retired judge Trygve Lange-Nielsen called the cases the greatest fraud against the justice system since the witch trials of the 1600s. But this is only the tip of a great ice-burg in an international culture that sports "repressed memory" syndrome, makes arbitrary paternity assignments, and jails fathers because they are unable to meet arbitrarily high "child support" payments. When wives and mothers are murdered, husbands are often the only suspects, because police have no suspects based on real evidence.

Roger F. Gay

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