Latest / It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People / Child Abuse Allegations: Finding Truth and Safety in Family Court with Dr. Wendy Bourg
Transcript
- Speaker 1 (00:05): Welcome to, it's All Your Fault On True Story fm, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you with the most challenging human interactions, those involving high conflict people. I'm Megan Hunter, and I'm here with my co-host, bill Eddie. Speaker 2 (00:19): Hi everybody. Speaker 1 (00:20): We're the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute where we focus on training, consulting, coaching, and educational programs and methods, all to do with high conflict. Today we are really excited because we are joined by a guest, so all of you listeners, that it's very rare that we have a guest, so we're super excited when we have someone on with us and I know it'll be a special time. We're joined by Dr. Wendy Borg from Oregon, and we're going to be talking with her about a very important and serious topic, child sex abuse allegations in family court. Speaker 1 (01:02): Welcome Dr. Borg. We're really pleased to have you. I'm going to give you a brief introduction, but just thrilled that you've joined us and taken this time. Pleased to be here. Dr. Borg is a clinical psychologist with a private practice in Portland, Oregon. She has two primary areas of expertise helping families embroiled in a high conflict divorce and helping make sense of allegations of child abuse. Her work in child abuse began at Cares Northwest, where she worked as a child interviewer for 10 years and was the primary author of the first edition of the Oregon interview guidelines. The guidelines also were published nationally and internationally as a scientific and pragmatic training guide, a child interviewer's guidebook. We'll put the link to that in the show notes. She continues that work as an expert witness throughout the state of Oregon. In her trainings, and this is really important, she promotes her philosophy that these allegations need to be approached rationally rather than emotionally, and that a focus on repairing the child's attachment while maintaining safety is more helpful than a focus on punishment and retribution. So Dr. Borg, again welcome. Thank you for joining us. My first question is how did you get interested in this work? Speaker 1 (02:24): I Speaker 3 (02:24): Got interested in this work really kind of accidentally. What I found is I thought I wanted to be a therapist treating anxiety disorders, and I found that boring just sitting in an office talking to people. But this problems that are really complicated and difficult to solve and emotionally evocative, that's very endlessly interesting. True, Speaker 1 (02:51): True. Yeah. So if I recall, you came from Texas? I did. Yep. You came from, so you became interested in this work and I can relate because I kind of accidentally got into family court work as well, and I found the same things interesting, and it's going back in the history that Bill and I have together is in 2005, I came across an article that he'd written about family court and I had a lot of light bulb moments like this is this and this is what's happening. This guy's figured it out, has solutions. So I brought him to Arizona to do a training for our family court judges and then brought him back to train custody evaluators. And I know our listeners, unless you're, you're new with our podcast, you've heard us tell this story, but I brought him back to thinking that we'd have maybe 30 evaluators come to the training that was kind of the pool in that area and word got around about the topic and Bill, bill being there, and it was allegations of assessing true and false allegations of child abuse, child sexual abuse, and domestic violence. Speaker 1 (03:59): And we had close to 200 people and we had to close the registration and it was just across the board from advocacy to legislators to law enforcement, lawyers, mediators, all the stakeholders. So it was a big topic. It was really from that day that we decided we wanted to do this work together and really help family court professionals understand this. And it ultimately rolls down to the families and the children. And that's, I think we all share that common goal. So that's how our background worked. And I assume you did something kind of similar and became so interested in the work that you became an expert in it, and I would imagine that's thousands and thousands of hours of interviewing and Speaker 3 (04:47): Well, and court was also somewhat of an accident because it's linked to this field. And I'm an introvert. I was terrified of court. The way I calmed myself down was just thinking, gosh, this is just a conversation and these people are really interested in the information that you have, and so just stay calm and just share your information. And that really is effective. As it turns out, I just did it to calm myself down, but as it turns out, that's pretty effective in court. Speaker 2 (05:18): Absolutely. Speaker 1 (05:20): Yeah. So just as kind of an aside this morning, I was watching an interview of Lori Vallow, who you listeners have heard us talk about and done a couple of episodes about her. She's done a post-conviction 30 minute interview from prison, and she's been convicted four times of murder or conspiracy to commit murder with various family members, including her own two children. And her story is that one of her children who was 17 at the time, accidentally killed her little brother and then felt so badly about it that she committed suicide, which Speaker 2 (06:02): That was her story. Speaker 1 (06:03): That's her story, yes. Very different from what the prosecution laid out and the jury convicted her of. So in this interview, now she's putting, her story is she's putting the blame on the 17-year-old daughter and that then the blame rolls downhill that her daughter had a long history that started with family court when Lori, the mom, went to the family court with allegations that her husband had sexually abused this young daughter. And there it is. There's that allegation that comes up in family court so many times. So that's what we want to talk about today. Yeah, one of the most difficult subjects in all of family court. Speaker 3 (06:46): Yeah, definitely. I think, I don't know, I assume your listeners are familiar with the Carman drama triangle. Speaker 2 (06:52): You should explain it. Speaker 3 (06:54): Perpetrator, victim, rescuer are kind of the three places, and it's a simplistic view of causality. There's a good guy and a bad guy and a person who's being victimized by the bad guy. And people land there when their anxiety's high, when their emotions are high because we want simple solutions and we want to be on the right team and we want people around us. And so there's nothing that'll throw you onto that Carman drama triangle like an allegation of child sexual abuse. And then it becomes really hard when you land in a forensic environment where the norms are that you stay calm, that you evaluate all sides, that you're factually based. And when there's complicated answers, you lay out all of the complexity. And so there's a mismatch between these concerns of child sexual abuse and where people go emotionally just naturally. And then what the forensic environment, family court, child dependency court, criminal court, what it demands of people who land in that environment. And so then you end up with a cartman drama triangle aimed at the practitioners. Often everyone hates CHS and gets mad at family court practitioners. So I think that's just an important thing to realize about this context and the emotional intensity for everyone involved. Speaker 2 (08:36): Well, and I want to mention here, my experience is that there aren't many cases of child sexual abuse allegations, therefore everyone freaks out when there is one. I know because I get to work and teach judges a lot, this is probably the worst thing for them because the last thing they want is their name and face in the paper for not protecting a child from being sexually abused by their parents. And so the judges in many ways, panic. The lawyers are outraged either this is absolutely true and why can't you see that? Or This is absolutely false, and why can't you see that? And family members line up on both sides Speaker 3 (09:27): On sides. Speaker 2 (09:29): So you have two opposing teams that become armies of professionals who often line up on one side or the other. But let me start with just saying how common are these? Because I became a family lawyer in 1992 after having been a therapist for 12 years. And 1990s was when this all really blew up and I got cases, but I also read research that said, we're looking at about 2% of divorce cases having allegations of child sexual abuse. And the research on that says about half are true, about a third or false and what's left a sixth, whatever's left Speaker 3 (10:16): Is unable to determine Speaker 2 (10:18): Exactly. So how prevalent is this? And then let's talk about what happens because it's not as common. People are so uninformed what happens. Speaker 3 (10:29): I think you're right about the tribal warfare aspect that gets going on this. And the fact that it's rare leaves us both unprepared emotionally for it kind of shocking because it's not something that you contend with on a regular basis. And again, the importance of it and something that's really important I think to pay attention to is also in family court. There's extra intensity around this. So in the nineties, which is when our guidelines were written in Oregon, and since then there are now national and international guidelines, the book tell me what happened by Michael Lamb is now kind of the leading guide. And again, I would say definitely supersedes the Oregon guide. We had the intensity of these things makes you move away from the facts and become part of a team. And now we have excellent standards for child interviewing and for investigating these things. But what happens in family court is the clear cases get resolved by DHS, by the child welfare system and by the criminal court system. Speaker 2 (11:44): So Speaker 3 (11:45): Clear cases where there's a very good child forensic interview that clearly lays out the facts and no one's been suggesting things to the child. No one has a motive to change the facts in any way. Those get adjudicated in a whole different system and the contact between the accused and the child is managed somewhere else. So then we get these unclear cases. Again, everyone is wanting these clear cut solutions, cut and dry did happen, didn't it happen? And they want to not have to worry about the uncertainty that remains. And I feel like one of the things that's important for us to wrestle with in family law is that it's the uncertain cases that land with us and that wrestling with that uncertainty is going to help the child and family more than lining up on a team. Speaker 2 (12:43): Oh, well put. Yes, I totally agree. It's interesting because in the 1990s I had a client accused of child sexual abuse of a 4-year-old. And so the judge immediately said, okay, no contact with dad until this gets figured out. It took seven months to figure out that we don't really have evidence that something happened. And then he gets to see her on alternate weekends again, and the judge says, mom must have just kind of overreacted and everything's back to normal. And in that particular case, we actually found out afterwards, about a year afterwards, my client ran into the mother's boyfriend who was in the car when the girl was picked up from visitation with dad. And the girl supposedly recited dad did all these things to me. And then that's what got it going. Well, the boyfriend said, what happened when the girl got in the car? It says nothing. She didn't say anything. So this was a case of knowingly false allegations by the mother. We didn't get that until a year after. It was already kind of resolved. Speaker 1 (14:07): Yes. Speaker 2 (14:08): Part of the problem here is in some cases that I've had, I think the parent honestly believed something had happened, although it was pretty clear nothing had, and in some cases actually knowingly and I actually got sanctions in a case I was able to prove it was knowingly false. So there's three possibilities. It seems that it's true, it's not true, but honestly, sincerely believed and not true and knowingly false. So I wondered if what your sense of that is. Speaker 3 (14:41): Yeah, exactly. If you look at the statistics, and this is in situations where they've looked at all of the DHS findings for a jurisdiction like for a county or for a state or a province in Canada that's been done two or three times and about 40% of cases are unfounded or unable to determine. And what you need to understand is even in those cases that sounds like it's a compelling resolution, unfounded. That's just a human judgment. And one of the issues with sexual abuse is the hard and fast facts are often not there because there's no witness. And oftentimes children don't say these things right away. So if you talk to a child right after an event has happened, even a little bitty child, if you don't lead them, their reports are very accurate. They're not as complete and detailed as our adult reports, but they're really accurate. Speaker 3 (15:42): And they'll even laugh if you try to suggest something to them sometimes because their memory's fresh, the event just happened and they know it's not true. So they think you're joking, right? Researchers have done these kinds of studies, but as their memories fade and little kids, their memories fade faster and they become more suggestible. All of us become more suggestible as our memories fade. So the fact that most people don't tell right away when something happens, by the time they tell the event is long gone and their memory has faded. And so we're in a compromise position in a lot of ways just factually in these cases. So we have a lot of unfounded, but that's just someone's judgment about it. And then there's about two to 5%, again, this number comes up over and over again with decades of research where it's intentional false allegations. Speaker 3 (16:31): The other piece to understand though is when a person, a layperson thinks false allegations, they're not thinking just malicious allegations. They're thinking, I've been accused or someone I care about has been accused of something they didn't do, that's not right. And so they're often throwing the unfounded in with the maliciously false and calling all of those false allegations. And so when you look at the statistics of malicious false allegations in divorces, it's like 10 to 15%. So it's like two to three times what it is in just a regular sample. But high conflict divorce, people are also often looking at the unfounded with that. And you'll get some people citing statistics in the 30 to 50% range of false allegations in high conflict divorce. Speaker 2 (17:20): It's such a gray area. Field. Speaker 3 (17:24): Yeah. Speaker 2 (17:24): I did a survey of family lawyers. I got 120 family lawyers to respond in 2006. And it roughly came out that they believed, and this was just beliefs, they, we didn't have provable evidence like you're saying, but their beliefs was that about a third were true. About a third were not true, but honestly believed. And about a third were not true and knowingly false. But here's the interesting thing that I saw as a family lawyer of the responses. There was one person that said a hundred percent are true. Speaker 3 (18:07): There are people that believe that, Speaker 2 (18:09): And another person said, a hundred percent are knowingly false. And I just pictured these two as opposing counsel in a case that would go on for centuries. Speaker 3 (18:22): Yes, exactly. Especially if there's money of Speaker 2 (18:25): That presumption, especially. Yeah, and I don't know, I guess I'm curious how you deal with when people do line up, especially if the lawyers line up so opposing to each other. How do you resolve that peacefully? Speaker 3 (18:44): Well, I don't know if you can always resolve it peacefully when they're that opposed, because as you know, you've written on this, people's brains shut down. They get into confirmatory bias mode. They don't even hear when you say something that doesn't line up with their beliefs when they're in that a hundred percent camp. So for me, I want to focus on the people in the middle, and oftentimes the driver of everyone's anxiety is care and concern about the child. Speaker 3 (19:14): And so that's often a place you can go to get people to calm down and try to find some rational solutions. And I think there's, what does the professional community need to do? And I have two buzz phrases, if you will. Safety first. So we have to make sure the child is safe. And hippocratic oath first do no harm. And you mentioned this a little while ago about DHS has gotten much better about this in Oregon, at least I know Oregon the best, but they used to, oh my gosh, we're going to investigate an allegation of abuse, nevermind that 40% are unfounded, but we're going to remove the child from their attachment relationship. Well, one of the important things to understand abuse is harmful because it threatens your attachment safety. You're unsafe in a place where you're supposed to be safe. So 40% of the time, people were rushing in saying, I'm going to take you away from the person you're attached to because I think they might've harmed you doing a harm to your attachment relationship because that person has now abandoned you. Speaker 3 (20:24): And often when you're little, no one can really fully explain to you why that person left. So you've produced attachment, damage and unsafety in the name of child protection again, they've gotten much better about the first do no harm part, at least in my jurisdiction, and providing some kind of parenting time while they figure it out. It's that balance. And I've had cases where it was an unresolved allegation DHS did unable to determine, so it wasn't even unfounded. The criminal court couldn't prosecute because obviously there wasn't enough of a standard of proof, but one parent continued believing that it was happening and continued making the allegation and making the allegation and making the allegation Speaker 2 (21:08): And publicly, publicly and Speaker 3 (21:10): Publicly, Speaker 2 (21:11): My ex-husbands, everybody in his neighborhood needs to be warned, Speaker 3 (21:16): Putting posters out in the neighborhood, Speaker 3 (21:19): Posting it online. Absolutely. And there was never any evidence, and I'm now talking about a subset because malicious ones where it's malicious, that's a different solution. But ones where it really remains unresolved. I've been able to sit down with both parents and just say to the dad, I know your rights are that you should be free from all this. That's your right. But this other person over here is terrified and can't let go of it. And that's understandable too, because there's not a definitive answer. And how would you like to send your child to a place that you think is unsafe and to have to do that over and over and over again. So I've had parents record themselves, just put cameras all over their houses and make sure that every move with the child is recorded and they have someone with them and then they can parent in a reasonably normal way without any doubt. So there's solutions when you just can sit down to we need to balance that the child needs to be safe, and we need to prove that the child's safe and balance that the child needs, their attachment with both parents if no harm is occurring in that relationship, and what are the ways that we can meet both of these goals and get into problem solving about it solving instead of fighting camps, which actually really is just another layer of harm to the child. Speaker 2 (22:44): And I like to use the term tribal warfare because this is probably the most tribal warfare issue that there is. So it's not uncommon that the courts say no contact while we try to figure this out. What is the best solution if it's gray area, do you have supervised contact? I've often recommended better to have supervised contact than no contact. The child is safe because there's a visor and that attachment isn't destroyed. Speaker 3 (23:18): Exactly. Yes. Supervised contact is often a solution. It can be super expensive. So again, if it's unresolved for a very long period of time, sometimes there's a family member that both people at least reasonably trust, and you can have a non-professional kind of supervision so that the parent can have real parenting time, like some overnight parenting time, et cetera. Speaker 2 (23:42): Yeah. Has it increased the 1990s? My experience was big deal in the 1990s, a lot of public cases. I'm in San Diego, there was a couple horrible cases that were false that cost the county of San Diego a few million dollars for mishandling it. A guy was in prison for a year who clearly did not kill elephants in the Sunday school classroom, and there was no blood on the rug, and they investigated it thoroughly. So these kinds of false things were starting to get figured out better, and interviewing got better. So by the two thousands, this stuff just really became much, much more quiet. And I wondered if it decreased or it was just being handled better. And I wonder now if it's increased again or if we're just becoming aware of it again. Speaker 3 (24:40): So I think that in the nineties, part of what happened was, again, before the nineties, children just didn't appear in court. They were assumed to be unreliable. And then child development research was advancing. And we discovered that in fact, many circumstances, children can be reliable and reliable enough to come and present to a court and assist in a decision-making process. But then we didn't recognize in the nineties that you can suggest things to a child that they, especially if they're under the age of seven, the border between fantasy and reality is not super clear for them. And so hysteria would occur with adults that activated emotionality and then they would question kids. Another piece of this is that adults don't recognize this, but they ask almost all suggested questions when they're talking to children. It's not a bad thing. Leaders of children, we teach them that a truck is a truck and that red is bread. So by leading them, we're teaching them. But when you're asking questions in a forensic context and you're leading them, there was this study by Corman and colleagues where parents were calling into 9 1 1 and these parents had recorded themselves speaking to their children about these allegations of abuses. Speaker 2 (26:01): I had one of those. Speaker 3 (26:02): Yep. And I'd like you to try to guess the percentage of time that every single bit of information came from the parents, the percentage of those recordings that Corman and colleagues found, all of it was suggested by the parents. So what's a guess? Speaker 2 (26:18): Oh, I don't know. 60%. Speaker 3 (26:21): Megan, you have a guess. 80. It was right between you 70. See, Speaker 3 (26:29): You're a high conflict people, so you got in the right ballpark. Some people don't even get in the right ballpark. So 70% of the time. So these people are calling in and what they're saying to 9 1 1 is my child with this spontaneous disclosure. And in 70% of the cases, all of it came from the parent. In the totality of the sample, 1% of the information was elicited with the kinds of good quality questions that you're going to get when you go in for a child forensic interview. And so one of the big takeaways from this is that hysteria and being really careful about that. And then another big takeaway is get your child as quickly as possible to a professional. If this comes up, listen, be empathic. I really thank you, sweetheart, for telling me about that. We're going to get some people here to help us figure this out and help us know what to do, but try not to ask any questions at all. And if an adult has to ask questions, just ask questions. Tell me what happened. Tell me more and nothing else. Speaker 2 (27:35): Right? Speaker 3 (27:36): Because then Speaker 1 (27:37): You get into the leading right. Speaker 2 (27:38): Yeah. I think of a case I had that it was proved to be false, knowingly false. The mother had the child interviewed 25 times. Speaker 2 (27:49): Oh no. Starting with her own interviews of the child and then taking the child to the doctor and saying to the doctor, my daughter said such and such with the child sitting there. So the child's being trained in what to say. And I remember we had a doctor who I think he testified or we interviewed him, he said that the girl said nothing the first time. Then the second time the girl starts saying things, but they were like what the mother said the first time. And then they took to the sheriff and then they took to, and after 25 times it was useless information. But because of depositions I took and stuff, I was able to, all of her witnesses turned out to be supporting false statements, and they didn't know what to say when I did depositions, I said, and what were you told? What did the mother say to you? Oh, the mother just said, I'm concerned. Then I would say I'm this and that. And then they would answer questions. Oh yeah, the mother told me to say such and such, and so all put together. I mean, the court sanctioned her for false allegations because right around 2000, the California had a law saying knowingly false allegations of child sexual abuse can be sanctioned by the court. And I think ours was one of the first cases like that, but it did seem to calm down. So do you think the percent of cases is higher or you think it's about the same? Speaker 3 (29:20): I think we're handling it better, and I think we have cycles of hysteria. Can I come back to the cycles of hysteria though? There's one thing you said that I really think is really important about that, the laws and sanctions, and when you can tell that it's a malicious allegation doing something because that is a child protection issue as well. So from the adult literature from the 1980s when a book called A Courage to Heal came out, and a lot of therapists were using that book not realizing that you can be suggestible with adults as well. And some adults had suggested into their minds that they had been sexually abused as children. It's important to understand that all of our reality comes from two sources, it comes from our direct experiences definitely. But it also comes from our social constructions of our direct experiences. And our social constructions have to do with what groups do we bond with? Speaker 3 (30:18): Are we Democrat or Republican? Are we conservative? Are we liberal? Are we people of faith or not? Those things matter in terms of the meaning that we make out of events. Little kids, again, especially under the age of seven, they're deriving all of that from us. We are giving the social construction to them as adults. And so if we tell a child they've been sexually abused, they're likely to come to believe that they were sexually abused. And the trauma of not being safe in a place where you should be safe happens to them because what causes the trauma is not being safe, not being able to find a safe space and not being safe where you're supposed to be safe. And so when you cause a person to falsely believe that they were sexually abused, you are traumatizing them. And so Speaker 3 (31:11): That's what happened. There were therapists that were sued in the eighties because they planted false memories of abuse in their clients' minds. And then now in family law, there've been some parents that have been held to account because they've planted false allegations in their child's mind. And it's super hard because I think as us practitioners of family law, we see more of these malicious allegations than other people see. And I think that our human minds don't want to see malice, most of us. And so there's definitely a desire to close your eyes and see no evil. And so it takes an awful lot. There's a really high threshold, but before people will be willing to see this is false and this is harmful. Speaker 2 (31:57): It's so important than not questioning. And you're saying that for parents, and that's one thing I say, don't immediately get to an expert and don't ask questions. But I think it's important for the therapist who listened to our podcast to know also they are not investigators if they are the therapist. Speaker 3 (32:21): Exactly. Speaker 2 (32:22): I've had some cases that were messed up in court. I had a case with therapists saying, I totally believe what children tell me. And I was going to say, then you're out of touch with reality right there. That's the hard Speaker 3 (32:37): Part because if a therapist, and it goes back to your 90% rule belt, the majority of the time when people come to you, they're coming to you in good faith. They're coming to you earnestly and therapists accept what a client brings them, which is what they should do, but don't go into a forensic context and then say that's the truth. Because you didn't look at multiple data sources and you didn't critically evaluate the reliability of each of those data sources, which are what forensic people do. And then we decide how much weight to place on each of these sources. So yes, it's a whole different ball game, and it's like we're speaking different languages when a clinical person and a forensic person tried to tell you why they believe or don't believe something. Speaker 2 (33:27): And I think a therapist in the middle of a case where a parent or the child says something happened that's questionable, that they need to call CPS if there's a concern rather than questioning the child. And I think that was one of the big things that I got out of the 1990s cases and research is that therapists should not be investigators. Investigators could be mental health professionals, but their job is as an investigator, not as the therapist when they're doing these investigations. Speaker 3 (34:04): Even therapists still think they're highly trained because they're a child therapist and they know how to talk to children, and they're right about that. But the forensic way to talk to kids is really, really different. And drawing factual information from kids is a really different enterprise. And I wanted to speak just briefly too about what you mentioned about going in and out of phases. I think we do have hysteria. There's the Salem, which trials, and there was the whole eighties courage to heal thing, and there was the nineties suggestibility of children in the Kelly Michaels case and the McMartin preschool case. There are all these cases where things were done really poorly. And I sort of had an idea from the nineties and into the two thousands that maybe we had put this to rest because our child forensic interviewing guidelines are so good and our systems around them, the child protection system particularly got more educated about how to approach these cases. And so they're just better done. But hysteria is a part of human nature, and we do have hysteria where it's almost like we forget things we've learned and we start going reverting back to old ways of thinking. And so sometimes I feel like we're in one of those moments right now. Speaker 2 (35:17): Maybe it's generational. We always have to learn anew, Speaker 3 (35:21): Relearn what we already learned. Yes. Sometimes I do feel that way. And I'll say this too, I think we set up these systems around allegations of abuse and they function reasonably well. I still think there's even some more to do. There's a system, for example, in Montana where there's a child abuse interviewer as a nurse that can do the physical exam as well. And basically if a child makes a peep of abuse, you go straight to the hospital, your county hospital, and 12 hours a day there's someone trained. Because one of the flaws in our current system, as it's practiced in most jurisdictions, you still have to wait a week or two weeks or three weeks to get an appointment. And ideally, just like with the rape kids, the child makes a peep of abuse and you realize evidence is starting to degrade and is open to contamination. Get that child straight to someone waiting in a county hospital who's a skillful, and then make a public education campaign around it just like we did with Women in rape. Go straight to the hospital. There's trained people who will help you. So Speaker 1 (36:34): That's fascinating. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. I have a question about a parent who honestly believes fiercely, honestly believes something's happened to their child. There's a forensic interview that investigation's been done and there's just no evidence to support it. Have you ever seen a parent come around to accepting that as reality? Speaker 3 (36:58): Yeah, I've got some parents on my caseload that that has occurred. I don't know that I would say they fully accepted. It's sort of these were people where harsh judgments came, they lost custody, they still had parenting time, but they lost custody and a lot of rules were placed around their ability to seek medical care. The best I have seen is they will be able to say, I'm not sure it really happened, but I do know it hasn't happened since then because my child has been okay. And that's often when the child's older and they know the child could speak up. And so sometimes they'll think, well, maybe he did it, but he stopped. So it's really hard to let go once you come to a belief like that. But I've seen some resolution of situations like that again, when safety guardrails are put into place and when time has passed and the child has apparently remained safe and healthy and strong. Speaker 1 (38:05): Yeah. Okay. Speaker 2 (38:07): I want to ask a quick question and then let Megan have a chance to speak. We, that's all. Lemme give Bill. That chance is, I'm just curious about statistics. You said 40% were unfounded, two to 5% were knowingly false. And in divorce cases 10 to 15% knowingly false. What's the true, in other words, we're talking a lot about confusing cases and the false cases, there are true cases. Is there a sense of what the percent of true cases is where there's an investigation where someone reports this and says, we need to figure this out and it's true. Any sense of that? Speaker 3 (38:53): Yeah, I would say putting those statistics together, it's in the 55 to 60% range. Again, if you're looking at a whole DHS sample, and so if a child makes a statement to you that sounds like sexual abuse, you don't want to be doubting them. You don't want to convey skepticism. You want to just get them to a professional so you don't mess it up by the way that you talk to them. And part of what I want to convey too though, is all of this is judgments because we're not there. We don't have a recording. And so one of the challenging pieces about this is we may argue about these statistics forever because there's not compelling 100% smoking gun kind of evidence in most cases. Sometimes there is, but most often there isn't. And I want to speak to that reluctance to see malice. I've had people say to me, there's no way children would know to make a false allegation. There's no way that a child could think this way. And there's actually, you can look this up online. There's a video, a song called Get a New Daddy, Speaker 3 (40:15): And it is a kind of catchy rap song. And there's kids about ages eight to 10 dancing around the guy who's singing, it was a parody show called The Whitest Kids. That was, I think 10 years ago or so. But he's singing about Get a New Daddy and just tells you two ways to make a false allegation, shows a child pointing to private parts on a teddy bear, speaking to what probably is a caseworker. Or you can take a naked photo of yourself and slip it into your dad's sock drawer so that your mom will find it. Oh, holy cow. And it is a catchy tune. It's got over a million hits and you look down in the comments, and right now the person who sang the song passed away. So a lot of the comments are about how funny he was and memorializing him. But long ago when I looked at this, because it's been out for over a decade, you would see some people who admitted that they did this. And so not only does it happen, but there's an instruction manual online. Yeah, Speaker 1 (41:24): That's really sad and scary. Shocking. Shocking, shocking. Very shocking. Yeah. So kind of wrapping this up, I think we could talk about this probably for days. Well, I'm pretty sure we'll have you back Dr. Berg because it's just such a fascinating area to talk about. But I'm wondering, is there any best practice tips you would give to Family Loft and the court practitioners and stakeholders when they hear an allegation like this? Speaker 3 (41:55): Yeah, stay calm. Figure out who can gather the best information and have a problem solving attitude toward it. And then finally mixed in with the problem solving attitude. Realize you may be in a situation that's unclear that at the end of the day when DHS exits stage left and no one's going to criminally prosecute there, you sit with a family where one person believes they're sending their baby, their precious child into the arms of an offender, and one person who thinks they've been accused of the most heinous, awful thing. There's nothing meaner than to accuse someone of that. And so there you sit in this intense situation, you can problem solve that. You can focus on child safety and first do no harm and merge those perspectives into a solution for this family if you try. So I think the bottom line of that is accept the uncertainty, accept that you don't know some of the time, and that's okay. Speaker 3 (43:09): You can still problem solve not knowing in a manner that is good for the child, which is the bottom line and the main point. And that will help you avoid hopefully confirmation bias, confirmation bias, tribal warfare, and again, becoming another layer. So this conflict is harmful to the child. And again, divorce is an ace, an adverse childhood event, traumatizing. And then when the professionals are fighting with each other, it's just war upon war upon war landing on this child's soul. And if everyone can just focus on problem solving and staying calm and figuring out how can we do what's right, as much right as we can, given that we don't know for this child Speaker 1 (43:56): And reminding ourselves it's not. I suppose the lawyers and mental health practitioners and judges didn't ever contemplate this when they went to law school or school education to become a psychologist. Like, well, I'm going to be the arbiter of this at some point in my career and I'm going to have to really understand this. So it is a tough position. So if you're a parent listening to this, just understand that and no one has all the answers, and we have to go towards the best that we have, and that's the best we can do. Yeah, exactly. Speaker 3 (44:28): And the law is a place you come for clarity, and it's especially challenging when the law can't give you clarity. Speaker 1 (44:37): Yeah. A question that's just kind of jingling around my head is, is there a certain point that you've observed, a common thread of when allegations are made in a case? Is there a common trigger point? Speaker 3 (44:52): No, I think that, again, that's where people's biases, you will sometimes see an allegation come up that causes the divorce. Sometimes you'll see an allegation come up after the divorce, and it might be because the child finally feels safe, or it might be because a malicious parent isn't getting what they want in court, and this is the Trump card, this is the ace if the case go your way if you want to make one of these statements. And so I think these allegations can come up at any time. They can also come up way down the line in a divorce case where there's research on people who offend children and they're not one group. There's pedophiles, and that's, we think of the big, evil, bad pedophile. But there are people who will just lose boundaries in a moment of emotional weakness. Sometimes you'll see that they're alone with the child, they're sad and upset and disconnected, and they do something really wrong and really out of character. So sometimes that is the scenario. There's various scenarios that can come up. Speaker 1 (46:06): No one hard straight line path to it. Bill, any last questions? Speaker 2 (46:12): No, I think that covers it. I think what's important is we talked about what parents need to know, what therapists need to know, what lawyers need to know. I don't know if there's any comments on what judges need to know. Do you have any thoughts on that since we often speak to judges? Speaker 3 (46:31): No, I think what I said already, just trying to stay calm and rational and again, trying to problem solve on behalf of the child that this is not forgetting. There's a kid down there Speaker 2 (46:43): And it's really about where do we go from here? It sounds Speaker 3 (46:46): Like, Speaker 2 (46:47): Especially when it can't be figured out. Speaker 3 (46:50): Exactly. Those are the hard ones. When it's figured out, there's a whole system. There's a criminal law system, there's a DHS system, and again, they're functioning reasonably well, not perfectly, but reasonably well. It's really hard in family law because those uncertain cases come our way. Speaker 2 (47:04): And it sounds like you're saying the certain cases don't even make it to family court as an argument Speaker 3 (47:10): Many times. Speaker 2 (47:12): And so the cases that are argued over in family court are more likely to be the ones that are just unfounded, undetermined or false. Speaker 3 (47:24): Exactly. Exactly. So we're in a subset of the cases because the clearly valid ones are off our table. They're taking care of it. Speaker 2 (47:34): I'll just mention I had two cases like that where the police were involved, they got a recording of the guy admitting what he did, and a guy went to prison for 90 days or something like that. Then he came back and sued for custody. Fortunately he didn't get it. But when the police are involved and there's evidence, it's really, you're right. That doesn't get argued about in family court. Speaker 3 (48:01): And those cases will sometimes come to our attention when they arise in the post-divorce context. So it's not like we never see a clear case like you just mentioned. You've seen some clear cases, but they're usually ones that arise later, and even then they get passed off to this other system that is well set up to manage. Speaker 2 (48:18): Yeah. One last thing I want to say is the possibility that dad is not molesting or sexually abusing the child, but that's somebody else is. Speaker 3 (48:28): Yes. Speaker 2 (48:28): And I've had some cases like that new boyfriend and one was a guy at a park. Anyway, so that's important to know so that you don't rule out, Hey, there may be actual abuse going even though it's not dad that's in San Diego in 1990s, the county of San Diego, everybody assumed dad did it, and it turned out it was somebody from the park who got arrested and his DNA is what matched the case and that it wasn't dad. And they almost adopted the child out because mom supported dad and said he didn't do anything. So anyway, that was 30 years ago. Speaker 3 (49:09): That was an especially hard position. Yes, if you don't know and you love your partner and you don't want to break up your whole family, but boy, people get in that Carman drama triangle and you become part of the perpetration system if you're not going to believe right away again, I think that the response to that's getting better, but it used to be a very bias driven automatic. You're a bad guy too, if you dare to think. I'm not sure about this. Speaker 1 (49:38): Yeah. Well, it's a complicated, very complicated area, and we're grateful for the work that you do on behalf of the families in Oregon and all the people who have read your book and heard your trainings, and we're so grateful that you've dedicated so much of your whole life to this and really helping everyone involved with these really challenging cases. So thank you for that. And thank you for joining us today. And listeners, thank you for as always listening in. I know it's a little bit different topic than we typically will talk about, but it's a very important topic, so we're grateful to all of you Speaker 3 (50:17): And thank you for having me and for all that you do to help resolve conflict and to help people to come to a more problem solving peaceful resolution in so many areas. Speaker 2 (50:30): Well put. Speaker 3 (50:30): We Speaker 1 (50:30): Keep trying. We're not short of work for sure. Right, bill? For sure. Alright, well, thanks again for listening today. We're going to put Dr. Borg's website in show notes and lots of other information. I was taking notes about some of the other books that you talked about. We'll put all those in the show notes as well. Give us wherever you're listening to this and leave us a review. If you have questions, send them to podcast@highconflictinstitute.com or on high conflict institute.com/podcast. Until then, keep learning and practicing skills. Be kind to yourself, be kind to others while we all try to keep the conflict small and find the missing piece. It's All Your Fault is a production of True Story FM Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music by Wolf Samuels, John Coggins and Ziv Moran. Find the show notes and transcripts at True story fm or high conflict institute.com/podcast. If your podcast Apple allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.