In this Mitchell Hamline Law Review article, Victor Vieth of the Zero Abuse Project describes (p. 888) how the balance has shifted in child protection forensic interviewing from a “sensitivity bias” to a “specificity bias”.
Previously, interviewers were sensitive to information indicating that maltreatment may have happened. They were careful to not miss information needed to protect children. Now, interviewing protocols are tighter so only information specifically proving abuse gets through the screen.
This echoes the child protection practice of deliberately avoiding fact-finding in Family Assessment cases. Here, like forensic interviewers, caseworkers make a conscious decision not to seek out information needed to protect the child.
These institutionalized practices of looking the other way while children are being harmed came to haunt the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church. We predict it will do the same in child welfare.
I am in complete disagreement. Child abuse, in its many forms is, and has been, a pandemic plaguing this world for centuries. It is underreported, protected by both family structures and civic institutions. Children need to be believed. It often takes a skilled investigator and interviewer to help them speak the truth. It comes down to protecting the most vulnerable in our society.
I cannot speak to this situation in Italy, but I do not and will not believe that an aberration, if it is true, means that we start from the vantage point of believing adults over children. All you need to do is look at the countless cases of children who are not believed and who are now dead, so wounded from years of sexual abuse they seem vacant, or permanently scarred in some other physical or emotional way to know that this is true. There isn’t enough “mass hysteria”.
Victor Vieth and the Zero Abuse Project do an amazing job preparing professionals to work on behalf of children. Their work and mission is heroic.
Please note that my comment should have been a reply to My Sister’s Keeper.
It should be harder to prosecute accusations of child abuse, considering the mass hysteria surrounding the issue. There has been a lot of research on the suggestibility of children, and that research does not even confront the extreme cases of children repeatedly threatened and otherwise mentally tortured to solicit accusations on abuse. Currently in Italy 24 state employees are on trial for soliciting false accusations of child abuse in order to take kids away from their poor parents and then traffic the children through the foster care system. That investigation may be only the tip of the iceberg.