Reddit reviews The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children

Why are you posting this in a feminist sub? Your premise is false. It's historically and scientifically inaccurate. Multiple studies since the time period show that children are no more likely to lie about being raped than are adult women. The issue that remains in contention is how best to handle their testimony in court given developmental status, how to balance their safety and psychological well being against the rights of defendants to a fair trial.

The phrase "Believe the Children" has roots in the Second Wave which had some success challenging societal denial and victim blaming in accusations of rape, with similar campaigns encouraging the public to believe women.

Read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Witch-Hunt-Narrative-Politics-Psychology-Children/dp/0190465573 Professor Cheit reviewed the court records and conducted interviews with primary sources in all of the major child abuse cases in the 1980's and '90's. Contrary to what is now conventional wisdom (thanks to the pedophile lobby), he found there was irrefutable MEDICAL EVIDENCE such as genital wounds and STDs, as well as physical evidence, and corroborative testimony in the majority.

Conversely, the people who invented the idea of false memory were themselves accused of sexually abusing their own daughter, who is a respected professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. She accused them privately and in response they launched an offensive public campaign. They invented the term false memory sitting at their kitchen table. False Memory Syndrome is not a clinically recognized condition and is not included in the DSM, it is purely political. The Foundation they started soon ballooned with members of accused parents, and others who claimed to be falsely accused by adult women, including at least one board member who turned out to be an admitted supporter of pedophilia.

Major players among those who invented the "satanic panic" or social panic theory of the first wave of the CSA movement formed another foundation that persists to this day. This foundation gives $100,000 annually to defense funds of convicted pedophiles. They believe laws against child sexual abuse are too stringent, and as with the FMSF above, a look deeper into their connections and published works reveals tacit, and sometimes outright support for pedophilia.

Unfortunately, the views of these backlash groups have been proliferated by sympathetic media, and welcomed by a public too traumatized to accept the horrors of CSA, to the point where it is now a kind of conventional wisdom, including, shamefully, among some radical feminists. Child sexual abuse is so widespread, it is going to take generations to contend. Child trafficking is a multi-billion dollar business. Until the narratives of the backlash groups—what I call the pedophile lobby—are thoroughly debunked, the work is going to be incredibly difficult.

Find yourself a properly apt analogy for the trans phenomena, as this one not only doesn't fit, it's false and harmful to CSA victims everywhere.

Well, if you feel like a creep for asking, then I should probably feel like a creep for how much I know about this. If you're not interested in a fairly descriptive discussion of this stuff, feel free to not read or respond to this comment. It's not a nice subject by any means.

The answer is "Yes, maybe." The science on child sexual abuse in the '90s when JonBenet was murdered is very different from the science on child sexual abuse today. For instance, one of the things founds in her autopsy that was thought to indicate child sexual abuse at that time was a slightly larger than 'normal' hymenal opening. This was thought to be very closely correlated with child sexual abuse in the '90s. Today, researchers and physicians don't think there's as much correlation between those things. What changed? An increasing amount of data on children who hadn't been sexually abused. In the '90s, most of the measurements of hymenal openings in children were taken from children who had been sexually abused, as part of the investigation. So you can see the data set (while it makes perfect sense) wasn't a very good one.

Likewise, there was an assumption in the '90s that most child sexual abuse left physical evidence. We know now that's not the case, and that a majority of CSA leaves no marks for various reasons (one is that most CSA isn't reported immediately after it happened, so any physical evidence heals or is washed away; a second is that a large percentage of CSA is non-penetrative, particularly when it involves younger children.)

So yes, if she had been abused by penetration, there would probably be some medical evidence, but interpreting that medical evidence is something else entirely. JonBenet's autopsy results are a mixed bag. Some people interpret it as evidence of ongoing sexual abuse; others don't. There's also the fact that she had been taken to a doctor multiple times for a vaginal infection or inflammation or something like that, but that's actually not uncommon among young girls (though of course, it could be the result of CSA.)

You can read about the medical evidence and different opinions on whether or not she had been sexually abused previously here. You can read about the changing science of CSA in Ross Cheit's The Witch Hunt Narrative. I have quite a few criticisms of this book, but it's a good starting point if you want to know about how people thought about child sexual abuse in the '80s and '90s. Cheit talks about several cases in detail that involved ambiguous medical evidence, which is helpful in thinking about a case like this one.