Presumed Guilty

More than three years into what he describes as an "unimaginable ordeal," Tom Anson* decided to go public. Against the advice of his lawyer and almost everyone else who wished him well, he began writing letters. He wrote the heads of network news divisions, as well as producers and correspondents on individual shows. He wrote the ACLU and other organizations concerned with civil liberties. He wrote the student-body presidents of more than 100 colleges. He wrote local politicians and state officials, along with Congressmen and Senators in Washington, D.C.

In reply, there was mainly silence. The sole word of encouragement was a handwritten note from a woman who had received a copy of the open letter Anson handed out at shopping malls. She urged him to have faith, noting that her husband had gone through the same thing and had eventually been vindicated. The few other replies were perfunctory and dismissive.

Not that Anson, a soft-spoken administrator, was surprised. "I had learned by then," he says, "that not too many people want to be associated with a guy accused of sexually molesting his kids."

•

Dr. Richard Gardner, clinical professor of child psychiatry at Columbia University and one of the country's leading experts in the field of child sexual abuse, has never heard of Anson or his case, but he is familiar with how people react to such charges. He is so aware, in fact, that he prefaces his own views on the subject with a careful disclaimer: "Anyone who knows me at all," he says, "knows I've verified many bona fide cases of child sex abuse. It is a heinous crime and I've always tried to make sure that those who commit it get everything that they deserve."

Dr. Gardner pauses. "I also want to make it clear--and this is apparent in the way my daughters were raised--that my sympathy for women's rights is complete and deep."

He stops again, glancing briefly about the busy restaurant where our talk is taking place. "Here's the problem: We've reached the point on this issue where an accusation is tantamount to a conviction. Thousands of lives are being ruined in this country by baseless charges. What we're seeing now is a repeat of the Salem witch trials."

The Salem analogy is not haphazardly chosen. Gardner not only uses it in the subtitle of his recent book on the subject, Sex Abuse Hysteria, but it turns up with surprising frequency in conversations with mental-health workers, defense lawyers and even journalists identified with the "wrong" side of this volatile issue. Indeed, many of these professionals say that, having been drawn into what they initially believed would be a neutral process aimed at discovering truth, they now view it as one where the accused is routinely denied the most basic protections of law. Those who dare point out that fact are themselves subject to vilification.

One lawyer in Kentucky, working his first sex-abuse case, remembers the repeated challenges hurled at him: "People ask me, 'How can you justify defending a guy like that?' Only usually they don't put it that politely."

"The attitude," notes Kim Hart of the Ohio-based National Child Abuse Defense and Resource Center, which works on behalf of those it believes to have been falsely accused, "is that God and right and the Star-Spangled Banner are always with those who make the accusations--they are defending children. Those who ask the hard questions are pro-molestation monsters."

There are two basic assumptions about child abuse in America: that in recent years it has taken on epidemic proportions and that, overburdened as they are, the welfare and judicial systems are society's last, best defense against such abuse. These ideas are so routinely affirmed in the popular press that most of us accept them as facts. According to the Magazine Article Summaries index, 317 articles on the subject appeared in the 12-month period beginning September 1990. Many bear scare headlines, but only a few deal with the rights of the accused.

For an example of typical press coverage, look at the treatment given to Roseanne Arnold when she announced to the world that she'd retrieved childhood memories of being abused by her parents. Even those publications that were once critical of the comic now saw fit to embrace her new charges, which were vehemently denied by her parents. Nevertheless, they used her accusation as a high-profile spin on what has become a familiar syndrome. News-week's piece, headlined The Pain of the Last Taboo, opined, "In 1986, all of the nation's child protection agencies recorded 83,000 complaints against people responsible for the child's welfare. By 1990, the number had leapt to 375,000." Time's coverage, entitled Incest Comes Out of the Dark, noted that "during the past decade, the definition of incest has been broadened to include fondling, rubbing one's genitals against a child, and excessive or suggestive washing of a youngster's pubic area, among other sexual behaviors," and included a first-person sidebar by one of the magazine's reporters recounting precisely such abuse at the hands of her mother.

As I began researching this piece, my own presumption was the usual one: that, with accusations of this kind, smoke almost always means fire. It seems inconceivable, after all, that such heinous charges might be leveled without strong supporting evidence, or that those investigating and prosecuting those charged would ever be less than doggedly scrupulous.

Virtually every researcher and mental-health professional now uncomfortable with the existing system started out believing the same thing. Psychologists Karol Ross and Gordon Blush recall being confused in the mid-Eighties by the sudden increase in sex-abuse charges they were asked to evaluate by a court-connected clinic. In June 1987, they produced a scholarly paper, based on a study of 24 cases, designed to address the reasons for that increase. Entitled Sexual Allegations in Divorce, it presented profiles of situations where such charges are most likely to arise--and offered methods of evaluating the likelihood of their being valid. "Our approach was rigorously neutral," Ross says. "All we were saying is, Let's be rational about this, let's not get hysterical and assume every charge is automatically valid. I can't tell you how stunned we were when we'd do seminars, and people would boo and walk out."

More than anything else, the hostile reactions were prompted by Ross and Blush's conclusion that in such situations the word of children is not necessarily to be taken at face value. "People said, 'Children don't lie about these things,' " says Ross. "But in a messy divorce situation, with competing family politics and two- and three-year-olds who are being reinforced by an angry parent, we found that what the child had to say was often the least reliable thing."

Although they are quick to caution that it is hard to deal in certainties, Ross and Blush say that many of the charges they are called upon to evaluate are false.

Interestingly, their claim is supported by official figures. As Douglas J. Besharov, a former prosecutor of child-abuse cases in New York and founding director of the U.S. National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, points out, a recent four-year period saw the number of abuse reports in New York rise by more than 22,000, but "the absolute number of substantiated reports actually fell by about 100." One reason for the dramatic rise in reports of child maltreatment is the passage of the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974, which financially rewards those states that broaden their laws on the reporting of child abuse. What is seldom noted is that the number of provably unfounded reports of child abuse has also risen at essentially the same rate as bona fide reports.

Moreover, the closer one looks at these cases, the more one begins to see vital distinctions. One major group of abuse cases comes from apparently functional families. Typically, it is a case in which the father or another close relative abuses a daughter, often with the acquiescence of the mother, who acts out of some misguided sense of family preservation, or because she, too, is in the thrall of the abuser.

There is no reason to doubt that this sad scenario is played out any less frequently today than in the past. The most readily documentable cases of child sexual abuse, based on physical evidence and credible testimony, remain those involving intrafamily situations where the union is being preserved, rather than in families broken by divorce or desertion.

By contrast, according to some experts in the field, two categories of accusation should be approached with skepticism: those involving day-care centers and those that arise in the midst of angry custody battles.

The sensational day-care cases--McMartin in California, for instance, and the one involving the Little Rascals facility in Edenton, North Carolina (so vividly documented on the PBS show Frontline)--are cases in point. "You have to start with the matter of probability," says Gardner. "What every one of these cases has in common is that no adult observer has actually seen a molestation in progress. Supposedly, these abuses are going on continually over a period of months. Almost always, they supposedly involve a number of adults and many children, with outsiders constantly walking in and out of these (continued on page 160)Presumed Guilty(continued from page 76) centers. Yet we have no corroborating eyewitnesses. None." He pauses. "Throughout it all, these children somehow always come home in the right shoes and socks and underpants. Do you have kids? Do you realize how hard it is to dress two kids in a hurry without some kind of mix-up, let alone ten or twelve or twenty kids?"

Gardner vigorously argues that the methods used by social welfare agencies and prosecutors to investigate such charges are often so flawed--and so contaminated by the predisposition to find wrongdoing--as to be utterly worthless.

Those same methods are routinely brought to bear in allegations of abuse that arise during child-custody battles, an area where any accusations aimed by one of the feuding parties ought to be seriously questioned. Again, there are many such charges that prove valid--harrowingly so. The problem is, in many cases, that the accused men (it is almost always men who are accused) tend to find themselves presumed guilty from the moment the charges are leveled.

"Simply in legal terms," says Dr. Melvin Guyer, a University of Michigan psychology professor who is also a practicing lawyer, "an accusation of child abuse is close to an ultimate weapon. It ends the custody battle. Even if the guy is eventually exonerated, by the time the social workers and courts have sorted it out, the custody question is moot."

There are a number of reasons for that. Government agencies are concerned, above all, with protecting themselves. In the current atmosphere, those charged with defending children are inclined to be overly cautious. Nor does the current wisdom in such circles, with its blind faith in the word of accusers and in small children, tend to engender concern for the rights of the accused.

"I don't think there's much active malice," says Lee Coleman, a child psychiatrist who has studied tapes of over 900 hours of interviews with small children conducted by caseworkers and psychologists involved in abuse cases. "Most of them honestly believe--they've been trained to believe--that if you care about children, it is your job to reach a finding that the child has been abused."

Then, too, some social welfare agencies hardly bring an objective world-view to the task. "This is a field that tends to attract people with a strong feminist bias," says Hart. "So what you basically find is women who don't like or trust men in a position of absolute power over men."

"For a lot of these people," adds a lawyer who has handled two dozen such cases for both accusers and accused, " 'Believe the children' is just code. What they really mean in an angry divorce is 'Believe the woman, no questions asked.' "

"The irony," says Guyer, "is that the guys who get hit hardest are those who have been most involved as caretakers. They're the ones who are interested in the custody of their children in the first place. Suddenly, that nurturing behavior is misrepresented and turned against them."

•

Tom Anson vividly recalls his lawyer's words over the phone: "You're not going to believe what she's done now."

True enough, the separation had been a messy business, and the divorce negotiations were even messier. The issue was money, but, of course, the bitterness had deep roots. In reflecting on the marriage now, Anson continually returns to his ex-wife's drinking and what he sees as her uncanny capacity for denial. He says she suffered such violent d.t.'s that she had to be hospitalized. Shortly after they were married, she went through a rehab program and stopped drinking for a while. In the following two years, 1981 and 1982, their daughter and son were born. But when he became convinced she was drinking again and urged her to seek treatment, she was outraged.

"She accused me of imagining it," he says. "She accused me of having some kind of vague, malicious motives." He pauses. "After you've been through something like that once, you know you're not imagining it. Finally, I gave up. I signed up for a program designed to help spouses of alcoholics."

The tension over the issue escalated until Anson moved out and initiated divorce proceedings. It is easy to imagine his wife's feelings when she learned that he would be seeking custody of their children, then three and four. (Anson claims he was aware that fathers are virtually never awarded custody. He was merely going through the motions so he could later demonstrate to the children that he had at least tried.)

At this point, says Anson, he imagined that he and his estranged wife had the kids' best interests at heart. His weekend visitation arrangement seemed to be going smoothly. Which is why, he says, he gave her his permission to send them to her mother's house in California for a visit to Disneyland. He says he would never have conceived that the children would return three weeks later, having never visited Disneyland, supposedly claiming that their father liked to play "dirty licking games" with them.

Charged with sexual assault, Anson wouldn't see his children again for more than four years.

Anson recalled a couple of past episodes that suddenly loomed as meaningful. He remembered his ex-wife's story, told with great emotion, of the night when her father sat on her bed and explained to her that he was leaving home. But she should stop crying, he consoled her, he would never stop being there for her. She didn't hear from him again for more than a decade.

Anson also remembered the day when his wife was desperately ill in the hospital and he picked up his mother-in-law at the airport. "All she'd talk about the whole way to the hospital was how everything bad that had happened was the fault of my wife's father. Twenty years and several husbands later, and my mother-in-law was so bitter you'd think they'd been divorced yesterday."

•

It is striking how uncannily similar most of these cases tend to be. The accusation invariably arises at a pivotal moment in the custody battle. Almost always, the system responds to it in the same way: by clamping down first and asking questions later, if at all. Moreover, the accusers also tend to have a great deal in common. Researchers Ross and Blush have come up with a personality profile of the characteristic "presenting female" in such cases:

• Typically, she has an unresolved relationship with her father. It is even possible that she was herself abused as a child (or imagines she was) and thus tends to project that abuse onto the current situation.

• She is prone to exaggerating and distorting reality.

• When her version of events is credibly challenged, she will often seek to alter the terms of the argument. In some cases arising from custody battles, for example, she will move out of state.

"I've had cases," adds the University of Michigan's Guyer, "where I've examined the children and found no sign of abuse, and instead of being relieved, the mother is furious. It's like telling someone with headaches that they are not caused by a tumor. She refuses to accept it as good news."

Dr. Ralph Underwager of the Institute for Psychological Therapies in Northfield, Minnesota, has been researching child sex abuse since the early Fifties. He puts the case in even starker terms. In 1990, Dr. Underwager presented a paper to the American Psychological Association in which he reported on a sample of close to 100 custody battles where accusations of abuse arose. Underwager found that 75 percent of accusers had a "severe personality character disorder." In a control group involving participants in equally bitter custody battles where no sex-abuse allegations were made, "the numbers were exactly reversed," he says. "Only twenty-five percent of the women displayed any psychological disorders. What we have is a system that's a dream for someone with a character disorder. An angry woman can completely ruin someone's life. Not only is she unchallenged, she's considered a heroine."

Dr. Daniel Schuman, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist with long experience in evaluating child-abuse cases, is far more measured in his language, but he offers a similar assessment of the means used to judge the accuracy of abuse claims. "In a clinical sense," says Dr. Schuman, "the procedures I've seen employed are by and large completely useless. These are very complex situations, but the emphasis is very much on simple answers. What happens is that people will use tools that appear to be clinical in an effort to reach what are, in fact, predetermined conclusions."

Indeed, the title often used by those who evaluate sex-abuse charges--validators--itself suggests the level of objectivity likely to be brought to the task. While these people are usually credible in manner, with a full command of the psychological terminology, they quite often have little training beyond having attended a weekend seminar. Since most states have no formal standards in this area, and every court creates its own definition of an expert witness, virtually anyone can be declared a validator.

Validators usually work in close conjunction with the accuser. In the absence of compelling medical evidence of abuse, their investigation tends to be limited to enumerating the mother's charges and observing alleged victims.

Here, too, critics question the methodology. "It should be obvious," says Schuman, "that the only way to properly conduct such an evaluation is to look closely at all the principals--mother, father and children, and if it's germane, the extended family and social circle."

More distressing is the manner in which information is elicited from small children by validators. Even when there is the appearance of honest inquiry, in innumerable ways--both overt and subtle--the search is always for information that will confirm the charges. It can come through leading questions or subjective interpretations of drawings, dreams and modes of play. Validation sometimes comes by choosing to ignore some of the child's comments while stressing others, or by stimulating reaction through the use of grotesque anatomically correct dolls. Cleveland attorney Jay Milano, who has been involved in more than 30 child-abuse cases, refers to it as "voodoo science."

"What you have," says Elizabeth Loftus, a University of Washington psychologist who specializes in the study of memory, "is people who are looking for sex abuse bringing up things, quite literally injecting these ideas into the kids' heads, so that they often find what they are looking for."

"Almost always you find the kids are three or four years old," notes Gardner. "The two-year-olds are no good because they can't speak well enough and are totally unreliable in what they do say. The five- and six-year-olds are already old enough to say, 'He didn't do that, lady, and nothing you say is going to convince me of it.' But threes and fours are perfect. After they've been worked over by a parent or zealous validator, they can be counted on because they believe it and will testify accordingly."

•

When Tom Anson was summoned to his county office of child protective services, he was ushered into the office of the social worker who had filed the report in response to his ex-wife's complaint. Exactly what was said at the meeting remains at issue. The social worker later testified that Anson tacitly acknowledged the accuracy of the charges. He told her "that he was doing a lot of thinking about it," she said, "wondering if perhaps he did these things and was blocking it out or not realizing it. And he was trying to face the truth, even to himself."

According to the court transcript, Anson responded to the social worker's testimony by shouting, "That is a damn lie."

"What really happened," he says now, "is that she leveled her charges at me and I adamantly denied them. I told her, 'It's not even in my being to do something like that.' She didn't want to hear it. She tossed a piece of paper across the desk--an admission of the charges--and said, 'Look, just sign this and we'll arrange for you to start seeing a psychiatrist. After a while you'll be able to see your kids again.' "

If such an exchange seems implausible, there are lawyers experienced in defending such cases who insist it is anything but. "Quite often," as one puts it, "the real object of these charges is to guarantee the woman custody. Her lawyer knows it, even if the woman doesn't. And as soon as she gets custody, the record is expunged and the charges fade away."

Anson says he wasn't buying. "How would I ever be able to explain that to my children?" he asks. "I told the social worker, 'You can go to hell, lady, I'm not going to admit to something I didn't do. I'll see you in court.' "

Thus began a process that would be far more tortuous than Anson ever imagined. "I really thought they would at least make some attempt at getting both sides of the story," he says. "That's how naive I was."

Already, the children had been examined by a female psychologist who had been hired by Anson's ex-wife on a private basis and who had ties to the social worker at child protective services. Her evaluation of the case left no room for ambiguity. Her findings indicated far greater abuse than was cited in the original agency report, which alleged that the "perpetrator licks [his daughter's] cheeks, shoulders, chest and puts his tongue in [her] mouth and ears." She had found reason to believe, among other things, that he had molested his three-year-old son "in the anal area, with probable digital penetration," had masturbated on his four-year-old daughter and had had her "dress in women's black panties."

Later, on the stand, the psychologist explained how she had reached such conclusions. At one point, she noted, the little girl told her that she had a dream about a bee. "She was afraid that he was going to try to take her to the bee house and put honey all over her." Her hypothesis? "It was possible that the sexual activity had involved ejaculation." The psychologist also observed that, when asked to draw on an outline of the human body, the child at first moved the pencil in the air "around the genital area," and then colored another part of the picture "as far away from the genital area as you can get." Her hypothesis? "What it suggested ... was that she had been touched in that part of her body and that she felt anxious about it and she was considering saying it, but chose not to, and she touched these other areas instead."

Among the most poignant aspects of the psychologist's testimony came with her belated acknowledgment that early on in the process, the little girl had sought to abandon her story. "She would say no, her father didn't do those things. He loves her in the right way. But in saying those things, she would get very confused. Her denial was with a lot of confusion."

Through it all, the psychologist never felt it necessary to talk to Anson, the alleged abuser. Nor was the report from the head of a respected local clinic that confirmed the accuser's likely abuse of alcohol at the time of the allegations deemed admissible as evidence. The children were never examined by independent mental-health professionals.

"You're guilty until proved guilty," says Anson now, "and if you're not, you're guilty anyway."

Several months after the charges were lodged, Anson was becoming increasingly aware of how long and expensive the struggle was likely to be. He took a second job. "It wasn't hard to figure out," he says, "that part of their strategy was to drag it out in hopes of breaking me."

He was fortunate in that his employers fully backed him. Obviously, with sex-abuse charges that is not always the case. He was blessed, too, with a lawyer who was nearly as outraged by the allegations as he was. But, above all, it was Anson's own mettle that was put to the test.

After two years away from his children, and after innumerable legal delays and court postponements, Anson finally got a hearing in late 1987 on his claim that the child welfare agency had mishandled his case. Though the result would not be legally binding, he knew he had to win. If the charges were deemed valid, he might face a criminal indictment as well.

To judge from the transcript, Anson's attorney relished the opportunity to force the psychologist and social worker to justify their handling of the proceeding. In a devastating commentary on the social worker's attention to detail, he quickly got her to admit that on the official forms, Anson had actually been charged with the wrong offense: incest, instead of sexual assault, the far lesser crime of which he was in fact accused.

Then, after quietly cautioning Anson to keep a straight face, the attorney began probing the social worker's relationship with the ex-wife. Then he piped up with the following question: "Did you ever have any oral sex with her while she was in your office?"

"The whole place went into an uproar," recalls Anson, grinning. "Of course, the other side immediately objected and we moved on. But, and this was the lawyer's point, for just that instant, they knew how it felt to have a filthy, groundless accusation thrown at them."

In the end, the hearing officer's report repudiated all charges of abuse. "The allegations," it concluded, "were contrived to deprive Tom Anson of his parental rights to custody and visitation."

But this proved to be a limited victory. The hearing officer's findings carried little weight in the family court still charged with deciding the custody issue. And, in any case, before the report was formally released, Anson's ex-wife had relocated with the children to her mother's home in California.

An even greater effort was thus demanded for Anson's battle in family court, which was going on at the same time. He still faced the possibility of criminal action. He knew he had to overcome the court's sympathy for a mother's right to seek the comfort and support of her extended family--his ex-wife's avowed reason for moving to California.

So, when a court date was set and his ex-wife was recalled from California, Anson and his attorney produced their big gun, Dr. Lawrence Spiegel.

It was likely that no other authority anywhere knew as much about false allegations of child abuse. Dr. Spiegel's recent history had been as disturbing and complex as Anson's. Four years before, the respected clinical psychologist and college instructor had been similarly charged in the midst of a bitter divorce. Arrested and led off in handcuffs, deserted by old friends, finding his career short-circuited and his freedom in jeopardy, Spiegel fought for more than two years before finally being vindicated in a highly publicized jury trial.

In the wake of that experience, Spiegel, who had previously given little thought to the child-abuse issue--or, more precisely, had tended toward an uncritical acceptance of the prevailing view--became a specialist in false allegations of child abuse. Spiegel prides himself on an approach that is rigorously neutral and has no hesitation reporting findings of actual abuse. "My own experience notwithstanding, I am a clinician," he says. "It is my role to do clinical evaluations based on the protocols developed to assess these situations. It is not, thank God, my role to judge guilt or innocence."

Nonetheless, Spiegel came to regard the experience of Anson as a perfect example of what is wrong with the existing system. Over the course of more than a day of testimony, Spiegel reviewed the case in detail. He paid particular attention to the emotional climate in which the charges were made and closely reviewed the children's videotaped interviews with the validators. He cited studies on the extremely low reliability of dolls, which had been used in the sessions with the Anson children, as tools in validating sexual abuse. Spiegel noted that there is a strong tendency "for a child with a doll or a puppet in his hand to assume that this is pretend, because that's what children do with dolls." He described the various "red flag indicators" apt to signal a valid accusation or, just as frequently, a false one. Anson's children, he said, evidenced only one of 13 indicators of abuse, and 12 that pointed to false accusation.

The notion that children don't lie about sexual abuse "is pretty much the truth," Spiegel noted, "except that it's the wrong question. Children don't pre-meditatively lie about sexual abuse unless they are encouraged to make up pretend stories, or if they go through the repetition and reinforcement process where they begin to believe. It's very clear in the literature that a four-year-old cannot distinguish between his internal reality and other people's reality."

By the end of Spiegel's bravura performance, it seemed clear that the case was at last close to resolution. (The youth services organization that supported the charges tried to expunge from the record the testimony of the psychologist who had done Anson such harm.) The judge suggested to the lawyers for both parties that a way be found to begin reintegrating the father into his children's lives, and preliminary contacts were made with a local mental-health professional to initiate such a process.

That is when Anson's ex-wife succeeded in having jurisdiction transferred to California.

•

Today, things seem at last to be going Anson's way. In early 1990, a judge, after reviewing the case, ordered that he be granted immediate supervised visitation with his children. In August 1991, he left his job and resettled in California, just a few miles from where his daughter and son, now ten and nine, live with their mother. He is able to see them every other weekend.

But any sense of resolution is illusory. His condominium is only minimally furnished, the home of a man ripped from the life that he has always known. He concedes that he is lonely. He has no friends here.

He can see his children only in the daytime and, even then, his visits are closely monitored.

"No matter what happens now," he muses, "I can never get back what's been lost." He pauses and looks away. "My dad took ill last year. He was delirious, pleading to see his grandchildren. He kept on for twelve hours, begging me to have his bed put on a plane."

He stops. "I couldn't take it. I even had my lawyer offer that I'd go to jail if she'd fly them in to see their grandfather. But he died. It was too late."

Through it all, Anson insists that his primary concern has been his children's welfare. It eventually becomes clear that what is hardest for him to accept is his loss of a relationship with his kids. "The first time I saw them," he says, "from a distance they looked so big. My first thought was that it was another trick, that they had switched them on me."

After a bit of initial standoffishness, his little boy has warmed up, some days seeming to cling to him for dear life. But his daughter has remained distant, awkward and guarded, and he hasn't been able to pierce the armor.

"It hurts a lot," he says. "Who knows what she's hearing about me? What has it done to them, being around people who may have really been abusing them for five years?"

Children caught up in such situations, says Underwager, "are taught to be psychotic. They learn to believe that reality has no meaning, that things that didn't happen happened and that the world is full of monstrous people who do unspeakable things."

Even a man of Spiegel's experience and training found the process of reestablishing a bond with his child difficult. "What finally saved my daughter," he says, "was coming to understand that there was a safe harbor. She couldn't talk to her mother, but over the years she began to unburden herself to me. It just takes lots of time."

Spiegel will even venture that the ordeal has brought them closer than they otherwise might have been. "She's become the focus of my life," he says.

But for Anson, such consolation has been impossible to accept. He has repeatedly been admonished by the caseworkers chaperoning his visits with the children, elderly women with whom he otherwise gets along famously, not to keep bringing up the abuse charges, not to keep making a point to his kids of his innocence.

"How can I do that?" he asks plaintively. "What kind of man with any integrity could settle for that?"

He stops, shaking his head. In almost any other context, what he says next would ring melodramatic, but it's hard to imagine the words being more heartfelt. "I wake up every morning and I wonder, 'Is this real? Is this what America has become?' "

*Some names and places have been changed to protect people involved in this story.

" 'What you find is women who don't like or trust men in a position of absolute power over men.' "

Getting Help

If you or someone you know has been wrongly accused of sexually abusing children, we encourage you or the accused to contact one of the agencies listed below. Consult with an agency and an attorney as soon as a charge is leveled. It may spare a great deal of legal, economic and emotional distress later.

Kim Hart

National Child Abuse Defense and Resource Center

P.O. Box 638

Holland, OH 43528

419-865-0513

Ken Pangborn

Men International

5814 Riddle Road

Holiday, FL 34690

813-938-6911

National Congress for Men and Children

2020 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Suite 277

Washington, D.C. 20006

202-328-4377

Dr. Lawrence Spiegel

40 Baldwin Road

Parsippany, NJ 07054

201-334-2420