Anyone who thinks an adult telling about being molested as a child is a liar --

[Igel]

23. Not a liar.

It's more complicated.

Back in the '00s when there were all the priest/abuse scandals breaking there was a rather loud one. It dealt with a high-ranking official in, IIRC, Los Angeles.

She was very specific. Where. What. When. How many times. It was a Big Deal for a couple of days.

Until the photographs and records started to surface. He wasn't in the same state as her when these things happened. On the specific days he was even photographed being in other states. There was no evidence he'd been in California for the year she claimed he abused her. And there was something funny about it--she wasn't in the state or in the city for the years he *was* there. Until recently.

She didn't consciously make the story up. She wasn't lying--she believed it, with absolute confidence. Said this had ruined her life. Human memory is very fallible. Sometimes you remember things as they happened. But every time you remember something, you have the chance to embellish it, to change it. It's easy to plant false memories.

So there was a school in the '90s that was shut down because the adults and teachers had mass-abused so many of the students. Except that it turned out that the kids weren't remembering what happened. They were prompted, prodded, and asked so many times that they finally gave the answers that the investigators wanted. Then they remembered these as though they were their own personal memories.

I was railroaded at a job once. I was playing bridge over a friends and as we talked during a break I said that there was no backup for the computers. If something happened, we'd lose years of data. We needed to get a backup system.

Three days later I was yelled at and told I was planning to erase years of data. When I finally talked to the people, there were three witnesses. This was strange, because one guy that had been there wasn't a witness and we only had 4 people for bridge--him, me, and three witnesses made 5. I asked one of them for details, and finally she and her sister started to fight--until the one woman remembered that her sister was in the bathroom, the reason for the break, and so couldn't have been a witness. To confirm this, they called over their brother, who said that they were all three present when I threatened sabotage. This worked until the brother's sister asked when this was--and said they had spent that night setting up for *her* brother's anniversary party, and pulled out her planner to prove that he hadn't been anywhere near the bridge game.

Three people swore they were eyewitnesses and provided blow-by-blow details. One wasn't present, but taking a leak. Another was 15 miles away in a different town.

It's the same with a lot of eyewitness testimony in courts. Two or three witnesses ID a person. Only to find that the person couldn't have been the perp. They're not lying. They're simply mistaken.

Survivors of sexual abuse aren't liars. They typically believe exactly what they say is true. In some cases--and for this there are no stats, so it may be very rare or it may be more common--their memories are fallible. This means a single witness shouldn't be enough to convict.

As for the stats on how frequent sex abuse of minors is, this results from surveys where they ask the population to recall their past. Some will have blocked out the events and underreport. Some will have created events and that makes for overreporting. But there's no independent confirmation so I think most people assume it's a wash and the stats are fairly reliable. In any event, no more reliable stats are forthcoming.