Clearly, Tong and company have the potential to be involved in a noble fight. The prosecutorial excesses of the '80s and '90s aren't entirely forgotten (recall widely believed tales of underground tunnels and hot air balloon molestations) and in some cases, such allegations still happen. But unlike other noble movements in progress now -- say, matching DNA samples with convicted rapists to prove their innocence -- this one doesn't always stand on solid statistics.

Jim Hopper, a researcher and therapist at the trauma center of Boston University's School of Medicine, points out that Tong ties much of his work on the startling observation that roughly two-thirds of all child abuse accusations are "unfounded." The truth, Hopper says, is that two-thirds are unsubstantiated. Tong dismissed this difference in semantics as "six in one, half a dozen in the other," but the difference is huge. "Unfounded" implies allegations of abuse that simply didn't happen; "unsubstantiated," however, means that the relevant agency was unable to prove that the abuse happened.

The difference in the meaning of these terms is all the more significant given Tong's own critique of the child welfare agencies as overworked. Because workers can have up to 150 cases at a time -- a consequence, partly, of mandatory reporting laws -- they must drop the ones with some evidence for those with overwhelming evidence, Hopper explains.

"Either he's not thinking clearly or he's deliberately out to deceive people," Hopper says of Tong.

David Finkelhor, a sociology professor at the University of New Hampshire long involved with the issue, troubles Tong's understanding of the statistics further: "Two-thirds of the suspicions reported to the agencies are not confirmed -- that should be good from his point of view. It means a fairly high standard is in place."

A major national report in 1999 from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, a branch of the Department of Justice, brings further perspective to Tong's arguments: While innocent men and women may indeed go to jail sometimes, we're not so zealous that child molestation has been stopped altogether. Juveniles, like adults, only report 36 percent of all sexual assaults against them, according to the report.

But buried in Tong's bad math is a fundamentally sound point: Innocent men (and women) do get accused, and that shouldn't happen. There's no shortage of heartbreaking examples, but few are as well known as the case of the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, once pastor to Chicago's 2.3 million Catholics. In November 1993, a Philadelphia man named Steven J. Cook filed a $10 million lawsuit accusing the 65-year-old cardinal of molesting him 17 years earlier. Cook was a 17-year-old seminary student at the time, and through therapy and hypnosis he'd recovered memories of Bernardin -- then archbishop of Cincinnati -- sodomizing him.

Bernardin, himself a vocal advocate of investigating claims of pedophilia by priests, suddenly found himself accused of sexual abuse. Accusations against clergymen were already of interest -- just a month before Cook filed his lawsuit, a priest named James Porter had confessed to molesting 28 children in the '60s -- and now a man eligible to become pope had been named. Long before any trial, CNN fanned the flames in its breathless "Fall From Grace" series.

Bernardin, of course, never fell. Discrepancies in Cook's story began unraveling the accusation, and in March, four months after he filed the suit, Cook announced that his recovered memories were "unreliable," according to the Chicago Sun-Times. "If I knew at the time I filed the lawsuit what I know now, I would never have sued Cardinal Bernardin," Cook told the press, and he dropped his suit.

The cardinal chose not to countersue, though he said he'd been "publicly humiliated before the world." Instead, he forgave Cook, prompting a swift about-face within the media; stories with headlines like "A Lesson in Compassion" cropped up in the papers once awash in Cook's sordid accusations. Both men were dead two years later -- Cook, of AIDS, and then Bernardin of cancer. Newspapers solemnly reported that the pair prayed together toward the end.

Of course, recantations like Cook's are uncommon. Even when the truth does emerge, it rarely garners the same attention as the initial accusation; as dramatic as it is, vindication is largely a back-page phenomenon, and the smear never quite comes out.

Predictably, the specter of recovered memory looms over any discussion of false abuse. To those locked in permanent battle with the so-called pro-child establishment, recovered memory is their Berlin Wall. In the '90s, at the height of its popularity as a legitimate tool of psychic excavation, abuse victims came out of the woodwork. The popular press described countless cases of adult children recalling molestation that happened decades earlier.

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