Child sexual abuse is one of the most horrible, unthinkable crimes out there. Most of us rightly know how wrong it is and how potentially damaging it can be. Of course, there’s more awareness about it now than ever before. It’s not something that just gets swept under the rug, and as a society, we’re better for that awareness in the long run.
There’s one unfortunate by product of that, though. When someone is falsely accused of committing child sexual abuse, the accusations itself can be extremely harmful and damaging, and there are obvious repercussions for the accused even if he or she is not found guilty.
I’ve been practicing family law for long enough to have seen cases where someone – more typically a man than a woman – is accused of sexual misconduct with a child. In these cases, it’s sometimes young children, whose brains are not developed enough to be able to know what they’re saying, describing an action that alarms us. It can even be a case of mommy or daddy tells me to say this and I want to make them happy.
I hasten to add here that there are a great number of children who report sexual abuse and it turns out to be true. But it’s something that needs to be investigated, especially if the accused is maintaining innocence and his or her parenting rights are at stake. And we’ve become involved in some of those cases, especially considering that it’s often an overworked, understaffed Child Protective Services that is relied upon to initially determine what actually happened.
When a client comes to the Law Office of Lisa A. Vance who wants to fight accusations of child sexual abuse, the first thing we do is listen. We want to make sure that we get that person’s side of the story completely, to better understand the case before us, and to help us determine what actually happened.
The one thing to keep in mind, if you’re facing these kind of accusations, is that you don’t have to reduce the case to a he said/she said. Those cases can be hard to win, especially if the welfare of a child is involved. What we do is work with professionals who can perform testing and evaluation, measuring electrical impulses to see what they do and don’t respond to. If we can show scientific evidence that a client isn’t aroused by children, that can help us make our case.
But we’ve also been able to successfully defend clients by determining that a story checked out. For example, if a client is being accused of a specific act, and what’s being described is physiologically impossible, we’ll make that part of the case. In some cases, people making false accusations don’t think through the false accusations, and what they’re describing simply can’t have taken place.
These are really challenging cases to try, and if you find yourself facing this sort of cases, know that the Law Office of Lisa A. Vance has seen and tried these kinds of cases before. The experience we bring to this unfortunate (but more common than you think) type of case can be invaluable in clearing your name and protecting your rights.