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 Adult sexual contact with children before puberty is a crime in virtually all countries today. When juveniles during or shortly after puberty are involved, the law is less uniform (see here). In any case, the general public is primarily concerned about adults seeking out prepubescent girls and boys. This concern is often heightened by sensational press reports when whole groups of people are arrested and accused of sexually abusing children. However, the most widely publicized mass trials of this sort in the USA, Germany, and France ended with acquittals (1). In these cases, vengeful or even delusional individuals had made false accusations, newspapers and television had fed public hysteria and created a general atmosphere of hostility toward the defendants, police work had been sloppy, the children had been subjected to leading questions and suggestions that invalidated their testimony, “experts” had turned out to be utterly unqualified etc.
As can be learned from these trials, the persecution of sexual offenses against children can easily become unfair to either side: False accusations may be too easily believed. The children may be victimized not only by sex offenders, but also by an inadequate legal system that keeps interrogating them over and over with differing results. This can distort or undermine the case so that, in the end, the innocent are punished and the guilty go free. (For a detailed discussion of these issues, click here). Fortunately, in recent years, the courts have become more effective in many countries. They try to improve the qualifications of their experts and also take great care not to “lead” their child witnesses. These are now usually interviewed only once by specially trained interviewers, and this is recorded on video. Thus, children can be kept out of the courtroom altogether and avoid being traumatized by repeated, inappropriate and aggressive questioning.
The complexity of the problems involved makes it impossible to do them justice in a general course like this. Learning to deal effectively with any one of them requires a number of special advanced courses.
(1) The McMartin Case, Los Angeles, USA 1983-90; the mass trial in Worms, Germany 1994-97; the Outreau trial, France 2001-05. These are just the most spectacular and notorious examples.
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