How to Destroy Someone's Life or They called me a child pornographer

"If we get down to the bottom line, there is no clear-cut definition," said Dean Tong, who wrote "Elusive Innocence: Survival Guide for the Falsely Accused," after being jailed and then spending 10 years and $150,000 to clear himself of abusing his young daughter. Now a forensic consultant in thousands of false-accusation cases across the country, Tong told me that even most police officers are not well enough trained to interpret the law, let alone photo lab employees. Tong said that when facing the slightest doubt, law enforcement officers "err on the side of the child," noting the potential results: "I see families stripped and ripped apart in the middle of the night."

It saddens me that for every ridiculous story like this, there is someone out there who really thought that trying to bring the case was a good idea.

Some things have improved in recent years. The incidence of bad therapy leading to false memory syndrome has been reduced, and with it the rate of false accusations. (There are also now improved odds for abused kids to be able to get information on what abuse is actually like, rather than getting detailed, unrealistic fantasies.) Others are worse. For instance in Miami the rule that sex offenders have to live at least 2500 feet from any school means that about the only place they could live was under a particular bridge. (As of April this year they have been transferred elsewhere, but which elsewhere that is I'm not sure. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Tuttle_Causeway_sex_offen... for more.)

I would be the last to trivialize abuse or its very real problems. But there is a world of difference between 50 year olds going after prepubescent kids and 19 year olds who dated 16 year olds. And there is little to be gained from treating them all like lepers. Certainly less than could be gained if we, for instance, took some of the energy that goes into following up on almost certainly bogus reports and instead put it into improving the foster care system.

Horrible story, and I totally empathize with their situation. yes, the US is practically insane sometimes in how they deal with sexuality and minors, and yes there's a history of witch hunts in this area. all horrible.

That said, they did make 2 very big mistakes, and if they hadn't done either or both of them, none of the rest would have happened. first, they took pictures of the kids naked. two, they let those pictures get into the hands of strangers, ones who can then misinterpret and/or be legally obliged to do certain actions which could start a witch hunt. These people knew they were innocent, that's fine, but the problem is that from a stranger's POV, what they see is that two adult men went into the forest with some some kids, some of the kids got naked, they took photos of it. Connect the dots. It paints a bad picture. They were incredibly naive to have not realized this ahead of time.

But yes, we have a horrible system, and we need to find some way to make it better so we can protect children while at the same time not persecuting innocent adults. I'm not quite sure how we can do that.

Everyone should read Franz Kafka's The Trial. This story and The Trial depict the helplessness anyone can feel with our legal system, or any big bureaucracy.

This is tremendously disturbing, but according to the article pretty common. It's a tough line.

On the one hand, nobody wants children to suffer. If at all possible, every child should be protected from abuse. I think the key, as the author elaborates on, is education. Knowing the difference between a crazy hippy family and pedophiles seems like common sense -- but if you, as an uneducated clerk at a crappy CVS in the middle of nowhere, saw something that offended your sensibilities and seemed perverse... Without education things like this will happen again and again. Once something like this gets into the bureaucratic pipeline it becomes an unfortunate problem of due diligence.