The scientific war on child abuse - the business of alleged child abuse danger of the plethysmograph test for alleged child molesters

National Review, Feb 15, 1993 by K.L. Billingsley

The war on child abuse began in earnest in the 1980s, and the casualties are piling up, among them James Wade, an enlisted Navy man who had spent over $125,000 defending himself from false charges that nearly destroyed his family. A San Diego grand jury, drawn into the fray by Wade's case, found that social workers had lied, falsified evidence, and disobeyed court orders, and that such actions were typical.

On the flimsiest of grounds, social workers can seize children, an action known in the trade as a "parentectomy." The children are then farmed out to pliable therapists and foster parents. The grand jury confirmed that many foster parents are warehousing children to get federal money. Foster parents receive $484 a month for a child between the ages of 5 and 18, almost twice the amount a welfare mother receives for her own offspring. "Special-care" cases can bring up to $1,000 a month. All funds are tax free. The grand jury called it the "baby-brokering business."

The nation's current "child protection" system began in the early 1970s with Walter Mondale's Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which created the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. As documented by Richard Wexler's Wounded Innocents, the system is corrupt, incompetent, and motivated by anti-family zealotry. Wexler estimates that some one million Americans are falsely accused of child abuse each year. The child police, says Wexler, know these figures but do not cite them. Their jobs depend on the perception that child abuse is, as the National Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse (NCPCA) puts it, "an American tradition."

Certainly, the current standards for molestation would indict most, if not all, American families. Incorrect behavior includes: romping with the kids on the floor, showering or bathing with children, almost all forms of hugging and cuddling, and having a girl sitting on her father's lap. In 1988 the NCPCA - a private organization - spent more than $2.5 million promoting the notion that parents are guilty of neglect if they allow their children to eat breakfast at McDonald's too often, or if they are late picking children up after school.

If the accused abuser denies the charge, that only proves his guilt: it means he is "in denial," a psychobabble incantation the child police use as a substitute for the Bill of Rights. Indeed, Minnesota prosecutor Kathleen Morris declared herself "sick to death of things like the presumption of innocence."

Not that that presumption exists any longer in cases of alleged child abuse. It is the parent who must prove his innocence, which is why so many fathers accused of sexual abuse have subjected themselves to the penile plethysmograph test, used in San Diego County and in counties in a dozen other states in the Union.

In this test, which seems more in tune with A Clockwork Orange than with the principles of American jurisprudence, the man goes into a booth and attaches a mercury strain gauge to his penis. The gauge is designed to test the subject's "erectile response," and the machine then calibrates a "phallometric score." What happens next can hardly be described in a family magazine, but an abbreviated account of a couple of cases will give the general idea.

Chris Friend, a computer specialist with a background in educational development, was skeptical of the test; but, having been accused of molestation in a family dispute, he was willing to do anything to clear his name and regain access to his children.

One of the tests used on Friend was a series of vignettes, narrated by the counselor over a musical soundtrack. One vignette dealt with a father performing oral sex on his daughter. In another, an adult male picks up several boys for sex. After every two or three molestation scenes, the counselor would throw in a vignette of normal sex. The counselor had told Friend to buzz him on the intercom after every story and tell him how he felt, but Friend, soon in tears, was unable to respond. The social worker, unmoved, warned him that if he didn't give "the response we are looking for," sound effects would be added. (This particular counselor - who claims not only to evaluate but also to offer "orgasmic reconditioning," to help the subject "learn to become sexually responsible" - is currently trying to talk the Navy into letting him treat the Tailhook offenders. His material would probably have shocked most of the Tailhookers.)

The test offered to San Diego truck driver Reggie Germann had a video portion. After he had hooked up the plethysmograph, his testers lowered the lights and started flashing slides depicting various sexual activities, which Germann described as "ugly and degrading." He was also asked to reply to more than seven hundred true/false questions, some of which he found rather startling:

"I get more excitement and thrill out of hurting a person than I do from the sex itself."

"I got the idea to rape while burglarizing apartments or houses."

"I have had sex with an animal."

"I have beaten a person during a sexual encounter."