Long, but worthwhile read about the mechanisms of how abuse panics can be amplified by well meaning institutional actors, or weaponized by sufficiently connected individuals with an axe to grind.
Posted by happyposterofham
Long, but worthwhile read about the mechanisms of how abuse panics can be amplified by well meaning institutional actors, or weaponized by sufficiently connected individuals with an axe to grind.
Posted by happyposterofham
3 Comments
Now that’s a brutal read.
That’s such a hard needle to thread, because there are so many cases where people have protected a charismatic and harmless-seeming person who *was* a monster.
But it’s a life-ruining thing to be accused of if you didn’t do it.
On top of which, it’s hard to interview little kids about this stuff, because little kids try to figure out the “right answer” that the adults want to hear. So it’s easy to accidentally lead them to agree with a falsehood, without any intent on their part to “lie”.
The satanic panic stuff is wild to read about. Sounds like something Torquemada would have come up with, but turns out this all happened in the 1990s. I noticed with the recent Hockey Canada trial, there is a whole cottage industry of ‘experts’ that will explain away any gap or inconsistency in a complainants recollection.
On a lighter note, this is a crazy quote to give a journalist about your colleague’s alleged sex assault of children:
> “I heard about him being in the bathroom a lot,” says Alex Bailie, one of the few other men to work at the school, and whose tenure slightly overlapped with Silverman’s. “The guy was always so energetic, I just assumed he was off doing cocaine.” (Bailie seemed to be joking, and Silverman says he has never used cocaine.)