Sexual Abuse or Abuse of Justice?

By Richard Lacayo

The world fell in for Lawrence Spiegel in December 1983. After a bitter divorce and custody fight, Spiegel was arrested on a complaint by his ex-wife and charged with the sexual abuse of his daughter Jessica, 2 1/2. There followed a two-year ordeal during which Spiegel, a psychologist from Flanders, N.J., lost most of his practice, built up legal bills of $70,000 and worst of all, he says, was denied contact with his little girl. "I wanted to kill myself," Spiegel recalls.

In 1986 he was acquitted of the abuse charges, and today he has joint legal custody of his daughter. He also has a new book, A Question of Innocence (Unicorn Publishing; $16.95), in which he maintains that the increased determination by authorities to uncover child sex abuse has had a less wholesome consequence: a raft of false charges that devastate the lives of those accused. Spiegel is not the only one to complain. Three years ago, 24 adults in the small city of Jordan, Minn., were charged with sexually abusing children. But only one was convicted, while two were acquitted, and charges against 21 others were dropped. They are suing the county for, among other things, the damage caused when children were taken from their parents by authorities, some for a year or more.

This week jury selection continues in Los Angeles in the notorious McMartin Preschool case. In a trial expected to last more than a year, Peggy McMartin Buckey, 60, and her son Raymond, 28, face charges involving 99 counts of sexual molestation. But similar charges against the school's founder and four former teachers were dropped because of insufficient evidence. The five, who are pursuing a joint $50 million defamation and negligence suit, claim their lives were ruined. "It cost us our home," says Betty Raidor, 67, who spent three months in jail until she could make the $750,000 bail. "They pushed the panic button and went on a witch-hunt."

Just how common false charges have become is hotly disputed. The number of confirmed cases of sexual abuse has skyrocketed, from 6,000 in 1976 to 113,000 in 1985. But a recent study of 439 child sex-abuse reports in Denver found that 8% were plainly fictitious and another 22% unsupported by evidence. However, Captain Sharon Moody, the respected child-crimes-unit commander in suburban Atlanta's Cobb County, speaks for many police and pro-child activists when she insists, "I don't think it has increased. Blaming false reporting gives us an excuse, so we as a society don't have to deal with the problem."

If phony charges are up, what would account for the rise? Douglas Besharov, a child-welfare expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, concludes that three-fourths of false accusations come from adults, not children. Laws in every state require teachers, nurses and other professionals to report any suspicion of sexual abuse, with penalties for failing to do so. Also judges are increasingly less willing to assign children automatically to mothers. The result: some wives use false accusations as a weapon of last resort.

University of Michigan Psychologist and Lawyer Melvin Guyer reports that sex-abuse charges figure in about 30% of the state's contested custody cases, up from 5% in 1980. Such developments have helped fuel the nationwide growth of VOCAL, Victims of Child Abuse Laws, a lobbying and referral group that was started three years ago in Minneapolis because of the Jordan case. Some divorce lawyers routinely advise clients of the danger of such charges. "You're asking for trouble if you give your child a bath without someone else's being there," says Attorney Katharine Sweeney, who served as court- appointed guardian for Spiegel's daughter. "And you never, ever, sleep in the same bed."

In addition to angry spouses, critics blame inadequately trained investigators and overly determined psychologists who push the youngsters with repetitive and pointed questioning. "They stop only when they get the affirmative answer they want," says Daniel Schuman, director of psychiatry at the Norfolk County Probate Court in Massachusetts. Minnesota has already begun a program to set limits on appropriate questioning of children. But even experts who worry about false accusations agree there are grave risks in overreacting in the other direction. Real abuses are commonplace, as was dramatized last week by the revelation that President Reagan's son Michael was molested at the age of 7 by a day-camp director. Until a decade ago, child sex abuse was largely swept under the judicial rug. Says University of Miami Psychiatry Professor Laurie Braga: "It's taken so much to get people to the point where they would take a child's word."

With reporting by Bill Gannon/New York and Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago