When many of the men's groups now behind Tong first came on the scene in the '90s, they were taking back fatherhood -- putatively from a variety of sexist injustices and bum raps and crazed feminists. Some of these groups turned out to be impressive, insisting that fathers be recognized as vital participants in family life. Others spun out and veered into scary territory: Briefly, these more radical guys got a pass for their apparent concern, and took advantage of a slight opening in the cultural landscape for sensitive, proactive fathers. But once they had a platform, many of them revealed themselves to be bitter, paranoid fanatics.

"We automatically presume the dad's guilty. The fathers get cut off from all contact with the kid [after an accusation is made], giving the mom an opportunity to brainwash the kid," Stuart A. Miller, a senior analyst with the American Fathers Coalition, said in a phone interview. An occasional writer for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times, Miller has been one of the more vocal advocates for fathers' rights in recent years. "Perjury of any sort is not punished in courts of family law. I don't know of one case where a woman was penalized for false molestation charges. There needs to be consequences for losing [the case]. The incentives [for winning] are already there."

Miller, who survived a scandal of his own ("I went through a nasty divorce 15 years ago. My ex-wife accused my mother of abusing my son"), employs the kind of logic that degenerates into lunacy after a couple of minutes:

Miller: Most false accusations are done out of malice.

Me: I was under the impression the vast majority of accusations are made in good faith.

Miller: There's no data on this.

Me: Then how do you know most false accusations are done out of malice?

Miller: Listen, [the police] can't come into my home and tackle me and point a gun in my face.

In their current incarnation as false-accusation zealots, these groups anoint themselves with Truth -- their literature is invariably plastered with quotations ("That this is a rebellious people, lying children, children that will not hear the law of the Lord" -- Isaiah 30:9). But they're not very adept at maintaining the facade. Inevitably, they tend to rage against women.

"Misogyny" is a word that gets hurled around indiscriminately in otherwise nuanced gender discussions; in the case of men like Stuart Miller, it's entirely appropriate. Significant, too, is the fact that, despite all their militancy on the subject of molestation, these groups have been relatively restrained on the matter of priest accusations -- without a vindictive ex-wife in the picture, it seems these men find little to sink their teeth into.

Tong, perhaps to his credit, claims to be distancing himself from these groups, if only for professional reasons. "I can't be seen as connected with them -- it affects my objectivity in court [as a professional expert]," he says. "I don't think judges like that."

Nevertheless, the disintegration of the American family -- an obsessive theme for fathers' groups, often pinned directly on the mother -- has a place in any discussion of child abuse, according to Tong. The way he tells it, America set a course for our false-allegation problem three decades ago when we first allowed couples to divorce through mutual consent. In doing so, he argues, the law encouraged women to initiate a divorce, entangle their husbands in false accusations and walk away with everything. "No-fault catalyzed this feminist women's movement," he says. "There's been an escalation of [abuse] allegations ever since."

Common wisdom among the false-abuse set holds that angry wives routinely leverage molestation allegations in divorce custody cases. They call it SAID (Sex Abuse in Divorce) syndrome; Tong calls it "the ultimate weapon." In a culture that fails to give fathers equal footing in divorce court, the false accusation is yet another tool at the mom's disposal.

Strange, then, that research regularly refutes this thinking. Studies in the journals Child Abuse and Neglect and Child Sexual Abuse have demonstrated that allegations of molestation are not significantly more common around the time of divorce. "On the basis of research that has been conducted so far, it is difficult to support an assertion that there are high rates of false allegations of sexual abuse consciously made by mothers in divorce situations," write Kathleen Coulborn Faller, David L. Corwin and Erna Olafson in the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children Advisor.

Finkelhor agrees. "Most of the accusations that come out in the divorces -- and that get anywhere [in the courts] do tend to have some [merit]."

It almost doesn't matter what the data proves or the researchers say. SAID has symbolic, not statistical, currency. What it represents is standard-fare frustration about the collapse of the American family -- its cousin is family values -- and this always manages to bubble up to the surface in the passionate blurts of false-accusation types.

"You can see this gradual erosion of Ozzie and Harriet in this country," Tong says. "Now it's No-Touch-Rules America 2002." ("'Ozzie and Harriet' was just a TV show," I say. "In a lot of cases, abuse was going unreported back then." Tong replies: "I know what it was like back then -- I'm older than you.")

But Tong and company have a way of resuscitating the discussion just when they start muttering their way toward complete irrelevance. Fathers aside, some say, false abuse takes a toll on children. They propose a legitimate, if familiar, question: Has our increasingly child-sensitive justice system actually worked against children in some ways?

"The ramifications [of so many false accusations] are not benign or innocuous," Tong says. "We're creating a new class of victims."

Even experts outside Tong's camp acknowledge the possibility that America might be cultivating a damaging sense of victimhood in anyone who ever had a hand slapped away from the stove. Hopper agrees that "it does have a certain currency and power in our culture to cry abuse, and we do sensationalize it."

In fact, there's a good deal of what comes out of Tong's mouth that outside experts can agree with. Hopper -- one of the saner and more balanced voices in the field of abuse studies -- is willing to accept Tong's critique of social service agencies as employers of underpaid and undertrained workers. Finkelhor takes issue with the notion that we've grossly overcompensated in our historically new attentions to child abuse, but he concedes some merit to the complaint that "it's too easy to bring allegations against someone."

Looking at the various cultural alarms about molestation, it's not hard to see Tong's point about fear-mongering. "Predators are everywhere and they can strike at any time," warns Leigh Baker's new book, "Protecting Your Children From Sexual Predators." Baker's camp has gotten downright theatrical on the subject at times over the years, blowing whistles about the predator next door, or in the next parish, or in the master bedroom down the hall. It's not that child abuse isn't as bad as they say, of course, but the panicked demands for attention tend to distract from the actual problem.

But Tong and his cohorts can be just as hysterical with their anti-hysteria -- they even use the same rhetorical strategies. "Could you be next?" Tong asks, the implication being that the police might knock at any moment.

Tong is "addressing an important issue," Hopper says, "but he polarizes the issues and exacerbates the problems he addresses."

Yet Hopper stops short of categorically dismissing Tong. He describes a national debate where piling on has been the norm, and where the norm has resulted in few long-term solutions. Hopper proposes a rethinking of the way we handle false accusations, perhaps even hiring mediators in cases like Tong's. "You could take care of your needs without destroying the other person," he says. "It's all part of a larger tragedy."

Bernardin, and a few others like him, set a precedent for peaceful and open response to false allegations. To the extent that Tong and his colleagues add more hysteria to the molestation equation, they bury precedent under hostility and ignorance -- elements that they purport to despise in the so-called child molestation industry.

"I'm a strategist," Tong told me. "Think of this as a football game. I hand the ball to the attorney, and hopefully he runs it to the end zone."

The problem is that Tong and his colleagues don't seem to have figured out what the end zone looks like. If our mistreatment of the falsely accused goes as deep as they say, our larger understanding of molestation is in bad shape. But to the extent that reformers use distorted statistics to disguise a regressive, reactionary agenda, they only prolong any resolution of the child abuse problem in America.

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