Trust But Verify

(1350 Words)

If there is one thing that we at GFZ all agree on, it is that child molesters are despicable and should be dispatched with as much pain to them as possible. For all the media’s yelling about how many women are sexually assaulted, it seems pretty hard to say “not all men”. It is also incredibly disheartening to read that many, if not most, of the people incarcerated for violent crimes were themselves the victims of child abuse.

Some of the statistics that we are given don’t pass the sniff test. “1 in 4 women will be raped while in collage.” That may be true, but it is unlikely. If it was true, it means that sending your daughter to collage is more likely to get her raped than sending her to some third world shitholes.

That particular number comes from a bogus study which I’m not going to look up. Short story from memory, the study was done at a community collage with many of the women reporting having been raped not living on campus and often times having been raped before coming to collage. I.e., many of the self reported victims were older women.

I have a “paladin complex”. That is, I have a tendency to attempt to rescue people. It is how I ended up with my first wife. She needed me to rescue her. During our time together, I learned that she had been abused by her father as she was growing up.

She wasn’t sure it was real or just a bad/fake memory. When our 3-year-old daughter told us that grandpa redacted had her touch him inappropriately, we took it seriously. A licensed therapist that specialized in young children did the evaluation.

She reported that it was highly likely that sexual abuse did take place. My daughter had identified where grandpa had her touch him. She wasn’t traumatized, as she didn’t know what had happened. The problem was that it would be impossible to prove in court.

We informed the rest of my wife’s family of the event. Explained why believed and what we had done to verify. We told them this, as well as informing my wife’s parents that my kids would never be in his presence again.

When we got divorced, it was not pretty. We are in the end part of the divorce where we are going over what has been agreed to. I say, “And my children will have no contact with their maternal grandfather.” My estranged wife says “Agreed”. The lawyers, judge and other officials all look at one another with that “WTF?” look. They all knew there was something there.

Did I believe that my wife had been abused as a child? Not really. It was more of a, “OK Hun, I believe you.” It wasn’t until I had that independent verification that I believed.

I had a few girlfriends after that. All of them were abused as children.

One of my friends had a very physically abusive mother. As a child, her mother had poured boiling water on this friend’s shoulder and arm. The mother claimed it that the friend had pulled the pot off the stove. The friend remembered it as an angry mother doing it on purpose.

I believed her. She had some scars from the event. That wasn’t the proof. It was the things that would cause her to have horrible reactions. Reactions that happened so fast after the event that there wasn’t time for a faker to figure it out and have the correct response.

Was she abused? Yes. Not my problem, though. She had a boyfriend.

My second wife was sexually abused as a child. If he had still been alive, I’m pretty sure I would have killed him. My wife’s bedroom had a walk in closet. There was a second door in that closet to the main bathroom. Her father would leave his wife to “go to the bedroom” then go through the closet to my wife’s bedroom.

His thing was using sex toys on her. “Because he wanted to see how she reacted”.

He pushed her into golf. She became good. On weekends, he would take her to the club to practice. And somewhere along the way he would find time for a quick BJ. He made sure that the golf outfits she had to wear were reveling.

He was a monster, and J.Kb.’s pedophile chopper would be far too fast for him.

My wife’s mental issues were a good match for somebody suffering from that sort of abuse. I believe her.

My current wife suffered physical abuse at the hands of her father. She still denies it. Listening to her talk about the “punishment” her father would give the children is heart-wrenching. Yet, she is unwilling to describe it as “abusive”.

She talks about getting between her father and her siblings to stop the “punishments”. Nothing about that sounds like “punishment” to me. It was physical abuse.

To hear how much abuse happened to these women as children hurts.

My childhood was free from abuse. I do not know if I got lucky or if my childhood is more representative.

When my aunt died, my mom found out that my great Uncle had abused her as a child, sexually. That is why my mom and her younger sister were kept away from the Uncle by my mom’s eldest sister.

Did my grandparents know? We don’t think so. As far as we know, the eldest sister was satisfying Uncle’s “needs” to protect the younger girls.

Again, it makes me sick to know that I knew this person and by the time I knew what sort of monster he was, he was dead.

In more modern times, a friend was staying with us with her daughter and husband. The husband had stormed off to “live with his mother” because my wife called him a lazy bum for not attempting to get any sort of job.

The daughter finally told Hagar and her mother that she had been abused by the husband, her step-father. I was asked to come talk with her.

I did not know what was happening. So I came in and was told that my friend had been abusing his step-daughter.

Who do I believe?

It doesn’t matter. I support her. If she is telling the truth, that will come out. If she is lying, that will come out as well.

With support from her mother and Hagar, she went to the police and reported the step-father. Whatever she had to say was strong enough that they got warrants to search his mother’s home for his stuff.

They found at least a dozen USB thumb drives next to his bed. They started the forensic analysis of those drives. The very first one was enough to charge him.

At least one was corrupt. It didn’t matter. He called the prosecutor to tell him that the drive with the video of redacted was given to him by the victim, to make sure that a third party didn’t do something bad.

Yes, he was that stupid. He was so used to manipulating everybody around him, myself included, that he just expected the prosecutor to buy the stories he was selling.

There was enough of this evidence that the accusation the daughter gave me was verified.

Unless she reads this, I doubt she will ever know that on that night I was thinking, “Bullshit, my friend wouldn’t do that.”

You have to put on your big boy pants and support the supposed victim. Then verify. If they turn out to be lying scum, make sure that they are properly punished.

Which is the really hard part about all of this. When some woman falsely accuses a man of something as heinous as a sexual crime, there is nothing in the law that will punish that woman as much as she harmed him.