In his article Dr Michael Naughton discusses the different key discourses surrounding allegations of child sexual abuse, with fall into two broad polarised camps: the Child Protection Discourse (CPD) and the False Allegation Discourse (FAD).
CPD works on the basis that alleged victims of sexual assault are telling the truth, while FAD takes the stance that those who say they have been falsely accused of child sexual assault should be treated as though they might be innocent.
The article sets out to establish an understanding of how such discourses inform the existing debates about allegations of child sexual abuse, and considers the negative impact these can have on individuals, families, communities and across society:
“Drawing attention to the forms of harm and injustice that are generated in the push and pull between CPD and FAD highlights the need for a rethink of the way that such allegations are currently dealt with.”
The article’s conclusion reflects on possibilities for a ‘an interactional belief perspective’, which ultimately guards against “prematurely or too readily closing investigations into allegations, which can, and does, fail both genuine victims of CSA and genuine victims of false allegations of CSA”.
The article’s abstract reads:
“This article shows that the competing discourses on uncorroborated allegations of child sexual abuse (UACSA) each rests on unreliable epistemic assumptions, meaning that in any given case it is uncertain whether the individual making the accusation is a genuine victim or the perpetrator of a false allegation against an innocent individual.
It argues that this presents a fatal challenge to the existing fields of knowledge and practise on either side of the discursive divide in terms of how alleged victims in UACSA cases are conceptualized and measured and how they are acted upon.
It concludes with a call for an open-minded approach, which prioritizes the pursuit of truth in investigations to try to ensure that criminal justice system interventions in such an inherently problematic area are just and that they do not cause or compound the forms of harm and injustice currently at play.”
Read the full article on the British Journal of Criminology website.