[Abuse can be physical, sexual or emotional, or it can be neglect. There are thresholds for when harm reaches abuse. People should report concerns early and often, and allow child protection...
Exemplary
[Abuse can be physical, sexual or emotional, or it can be neglect. There are thresholds for when harm reaches abuse. People should report concerns early and often, and allow child protection workers to triage those and spot concerns that meet the level, or see where multiple agencies are reporting concerns. We need to correctly fund and train child protection workers to allow them to do this. We currently don't.]
This case feels like a bunch of different people using bad methods to draw conclusions all based on different evidentiary thresholds, combined with judges who lost control of the case.
In May 2018, the child’s clinical psychologist reported the boy had told her that his father hit him with a stick and that “dad touches his junk while he touches my penis.” (The psychologist noted to me that the child’s use of sexualized terms was indicative of an adult influence.)
Questioning children who have alleged abuse is really difficult. We have lots of strong evidence that it's easy to manipulate the statements made by children. When a child alleges abuse has happened it's best to leave the questioning to trained professionals to do things like "Achieving best evidence" interviewing.
The article is a bit confused when it talks about parental alienation. We know it happens, we have pretty good evidence of it. What we don't know is what drives it -- some people have said it's a standalone psychiatric diagnosis (and there's not much evidence for this), others have said it's a feature of other diagnoses (maybe anxiety, maybe so called "personality disorder"). To me the focus on it as a standalone disorder is a distraction - look at the behaviours, not the causes of the behaviours. "The mother has made 37 different allegations of abuse, all of them are unsubstantiated" is a statement of fact and it requires the other party to try to rebut it, but "the mother has made 37 allegations of abuse because she is mentally ill, and none of her allegations are substantiated" gives the mother an opportunity to introduce doubt by challenging the mentally ill part.
Bruce was arrested a few weeks later for violating the order and spent the night in jail. In January 2016, he was convicted of domestic violence and harassment. Bruce took an Alford plea, a guilty plea in which the defendant does not admit to committing the crime.
This kind of stuff in the US system is just baffling. It causes confusion. If he's guilty he's guilty, the prosecutors have met a very high bar. If he's not guilty that doesn't mean innocent, it means the prosecutors didn't meet the high bar. It then allows other courts to use whatever evidentiary threshold ("preponderance of evidence") for their hearings. A guilty, but not really guilty, but actually guilty conviction is bad for everyone. Also, court orders are orders. They're not suggestions or recommendations. They must be obeyed in full and to the letter. Don't break court orders. Stuff like this tanks his credibility to me.
His psychological test of choice is the Rorschach — a widely criticized method of analysis in which subjects interpret inkblots. (In 1999, several psychologists called for a moratorium on its use, citing the test’s incompatibility with the APA’s standards.) Unmoved by “hostile” skeptics, he said, “It’s a non-fakeable test.”
WHAT THE FUCK.
Near the end of the article there's some description of weight. The child is male, is 9 years old, is 4ft3inches or 130cm, and weighs 52 pounds or 23.5kg.
23.5kg at that age is something like 2nd centile. 130cm at that age is something like 25th - 26th centile. That is a very low weight for his age, but we don't know if that's got anything to do with malnutrition.
Coykendall was swayed by the first interpretation: that the reports of abuse were evidence of a hapless but well-meaning father, floundering under the scrutiny of an overcritical mother.
This feels like what's happening - the father is careless but not to the level of neglect; the mother is over-protective; there's a bunch of professionals who aren't talking to each other; there's interference from professionals who haven't made adequate assessments; the system is conspiring against joint working to protect the child; and there is a bunch of really terrible work from some of those professionals.
The standards of forensic evidence in the US (and probably lots of other places) is awful, and cases like this are the result.
Long read. Only made it about 3/4 before I had to skip ahead and see the outcome. I understand the arguments on both sides, but I don't understand why some of the father's history wasn't taken...
Long read. Only made it about 3/4 before I had to skip ahead and see the outcome.
I understand the arguments on both sides, but I don't understand why some of the father's history wasn't taken more seriously.
E.g., the admission that, as a teen, the father had sexually assaulted a 4-year old. It's a common admonition for example that extended wetting of the bed and abuse of animals, even as a young adult, may predict future violent crimes. This admonition isn't usually tempered by admission of the fact (that I've read anyway).
Does the fact that the father in the story admitted his sexual assault openly really mitigate it as a factor that much?
The quote from him in the article about it is even more egregious (emphasis mine): The idea that he is the victim because he sexually-assaulted a 4-year-old at age 16 because he felt bad about it...
The quote from him in the article about it is even more egregious (emphasis mine):
“There was no victim in that situation except myself,” Bruce told me. “That alleged victim did not suffer and had no recollection of it. But I beat myself up for decades thinking that I was fucked up, right? The silver lining being I finally told everybody. And everybody said: ‘Dude, you were young and stupid and pubescent. … Don’t beat yourself up about that.’”
The idea that he is the victim because he sexually-assaulted a 4-year-old at age 16 because he felt bad about it and that she isn't a victim because she "did not suffer" (how does he know) and doesn't remember it is such an absolutely massive red flag that I'm horrified that he's allowed around children. How a professional can hear him confess to something like this and say he falls low on the "creep-o-meter" and that him being intoxicated somehow makes it okay? Like, this alone is absolutely fucking horrific and the lack of people giving a shit about it makes me really worries about their ability to handle cases of child abuse and neglect. Coykendall should be fired and lose any licenses she has for dismissing that behavior and not including it in her writeup, what the actual fuck.
Really difficult case. I feel as though the obvious conclusion from what is presented is that Bruce is the one lying and getting away with it due to biases in the system. I don't know if it only...
Really difficult case. I feel as though the obvious conclusion from what is presented is that Bruce is the one lying and getting away with it due to biases in the system. I don't know if it only appears obvious to me or if I'm reaching in that interpretation, and there is a good editor's note at the bottom that explains both parents got seemingly a fair exchange of opportunities to provide their perspectives to the reporter, otherwise my initial concern from reading it made it feel one-sided in the mother's favor.
Having said that, the remarks provided by the father feel very unconcerned in some ways and also very naive or lacking awareness of outside perception. It's possible the reporter left out any remarks that might indicate otherwise, but what feels off to me is a lack of self-awareness of always having some excuse here or there for things that happened with the child in his custody, so not even stating things didn't happen in his custody but rather admitting they did, and how that looks in comparison to things not happening outside his custody. Of course if the mother is over-protective as he claims then the child may not have the opportunity to get in such situations, but presumably the mother sleeps or takes a shower etc. and the child has time to himself, not to mention the times where he is at school, does he never injure himself just doing things that boys do, as the father explains that is what happens in his care.
Perhaps it's not possible, or perhaps not covered by the reporter, but it also strikes me as odd that neither parent seemed to try to prove a negative, which maybe you can't, but if you have limited custody, couldn't you record your full time of custody with the child in some way? Setting up surveillance cameras in and around the home for example would be a start, among other things. The amount of money these people have spent on attorneys and experts etc. just seems like it's strange they didn't put money into trying to prove their innocence more. For the bulk of the time, the mother had primary custody so it would be less feasible perhaps in her case as it would involve more time and resources to cover all of that, but the father seemingly could have been more proactive. I'm not a parent so I don't know, I just feel like if I was being accused of those things, I'd try to find a way to record every single interaction from the moment the child was in my care and then wait until the report comes in that I did something wrong and bust out the video footage for review that shows if the kid really did fall down and that's where the bruise comes from and nothing else occurred. I know it seems excessive, but again, if the father believes his kid is really being abused by the mother in the way hes saying, going all out to save your kid seems worth it.
I know there's a bit of a challenge there being that for much of this the kid was so young that he couldn't bathe by himself or even younger when he perhaps wasn't even potty trained, which I don't know how that might work from a privacy standpoint, but from what is presented in the ProPublica article, the father didn't seem all that proactive other than paying for specific people to give him good reports and their impressions of him. No mention of the father trying to set up physician evaluations immediately before giving the kid back to his mother etc.
From the mothers side now that she has limited time with her son, I wonder if she couldn't also be doing the same thing. Seems like she is more pressed for money than the father is so that could be a limitation. Also a little more difficult in some ways, but effectively she's accused of coaching the child, so if she were able to document all of her interactions, it could prove she's not coaching. Situation is of course a bit different though so I don't know.
Reading this whole thing for sure makes you wonder.
Honestly I don't know who to believe with the presented info. It seems like neither parent is to be trusted but the father clearly is prone to episodes of violence in physical and sexual ways and...
Honestly I don't know who to believe with the presented info. It seems like neither parent is to be trusted but the father clearly is prone to episodes of violence in physical and sexual ways and it could be directed to the kid, but the mom is also hyper vigilant now and will report ANY bruise or bump as abuse and it may truly be an injury. This is a horrible situation for the boy and I only hope he gets the help he needs as time goes on because it seems like the system has failed him in one way or another and it breaks my heart to know he will likely have lasting trauma from this even if this is a case of he said she said.
My mom displyed some of the traits as the mom here, like badmouthing my dad to anybody who would listen, which made it hard to "dad" when he could/needed to, especially with regards to...
My mom displyed some of the traits as the mom here, like badmouthing my dad to anybody who would listen, which made it hard to "dad" when he could/needed to, especially with regards to school/admin stuff. I admit I went in with a bias and left confused and concerned.
It's possible the mom is exaggerating or even exhibiting something akin to Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, not to diagnose, but she is convinced something is happening and perpetuating it.
OTOH it's possible the dad is doing what he is charged with and is a Ted Bundy type character saying all the right things.
I don't have experience from the child's perspective being used as a source of truth on these, as the issues I was tied up in never made it to us kids, the parents usually hashed it out on their own, but the problem is Bruce isndealing with extreme charges in a situation that, nonmatter what the truth is, has made it extremely difficult to find the facts.
I'm suspicious about the sexual assault charge, but feel safe deferring to professionals, but if it happened once that is way more than the number of times most males have done that, so it is still suspicious. However if he is truly at absolutely zero risk of doing it again, it is still a potential lever for the ex to try to pull.
[Abuse can be physical, sexual or emotional, or it can be neglect. There are thresholds for when harm reaches abuse. People should report concerns early and often, and allow child protection workers to triage those and spot concerns that meet the level, or see where multiple agencies are reporting concerns. We need to correctly fund and train child protection workers to allow them to do this. We currently don't.]
This case feels like a bunch of different people using bad methods to draw conclusions all based on different evidentiary thresholds, combined with judges who lost control of the case.
Questioning children who have alleged abuse is really difficult. We have lots of strong evidence that it's easy to manipulate the statements made by children. When a child alleges abuse has happened it's best to leave the questioning to trained professionals to do things like "Achieving best evidence" interviewing.
The article is a bit confused when it talks about parental alienation. We know it happens, we have pretty good evidence of it. What we don't know is what drives it -- some people have said it's a standalone psychiatric diagnosis (and there's not much evidence for this), others have said it's a feature of other diagnoses (maybe anxiety, maybe so called "personality disorder"). To me the focus on it as a standalone disorder is a distraction - look at the behaviours, not the causes of the behaviours. "The mother has made 37 different allegations of abuse, all of them are unsubstantiated" is a statement of fact and it requires the other party to try to rebut it, but "the mother has made 37 allegations of abuse because she is mentally ill, and none of her allegations are substantiated" gives the mother an opportunity to introduce doubt by challenging the mentally ill part.
This kind of stuff in the US system is just baffling. It causes confusion. If he's guilty he's guilty, the prosecutors have met a very high bar. If he's not guilty that doesn't mean innocent, it means the prosecutors didn't meet the high bar. It then allows other courts to use whatever evidentiary threshold ("preponderance of evidence") for their hearings. A guilty, but not really guilty, but actually guilty conviction is bad for everyone. Also, court orders are orders. They're not suggestions or recommendations. They must be obeyed in full and to the letter. Don't break court orders. Stuff like this tanks his credibility to me.
WHAT THE FUCK.
Near the end of the article there's some description of weight. The child is male, is 9 years old, is 4ft3inches or 130cm, and weighs 52 pounds or 23.5kg.
Here's evidence based growth charts from the UK, based on WHO standards. https://www.rcpch.ac.uk/resources/uk-who-growth-charts-2-18-years
23.5kg at that age is something like 2nd centile. 130cm at that age is something like 25th - 26th centile. That is a very low weight for his age, but we don't know if that's got anything to do with malnutrition.
This feels like what's happening - the father is careless but not to the level of neglect; the mother is over-protective; there's a bunch of professionals who aren't talking to each other; there's interference from professionals who haven't made adequate assessments; the system is conspiring against joint working to protect the child; and there is a bunch of really terrible work from some of those professionals.
The standards of forensic evidence in the US (and probably lots of other places) is awful, and cases like this are the result.
Long read. Only made it about 3/4 before I had to skip ahead and see the outcome.
I understand the arguments on both sides, but I don't understand why some of the father's history wasn't taken more seriously.
E.g., the admission that, as a teen, the father had sexually assaulted a 4-year old. It's a common admonition for example that extended wetting of the bed and abuse of animals, even as a young adult, may predict future violent crimes. This admonition isn't usually tempered by admission of the fact (that I've read anyway).
Does the fact that the father in the story admitted his sexual assault openly really mitigate it as a factor that much?
The quote from him in the article about it is even more egregious (emphasis mine):
The idea that he is the victim because he sexually-assaulted a 4-year-old at age 16 because he felt bad about it and that she isn't a victim because she "did not suffer" (how does he know) and doesn't remember it is such an absolutely massive red flag that I'm horrified that he's allowed around children. How a professional can hear him confess to something like this and say he falls low on the "creep-o-meter" and that him being intoxicated somehow makes it okay? Like, this alone is absolutely fucking horrific and the lack of people giving a shit about it makes me really worries about their ability to handle cases of child abuse and neglect. Coykendall should be fired and lose any licenses she has for dismissing that behavior and not including it in her writeup, what the actual fuck.
Somehow I'm more confused after reading the article than before
Really difficult case. I feel as though the obvious conclusion from what is presented is that Bruce is the one lying and getting away with it due to biases in the system. I don't know if it only appears obvious to me or if I'm reaching in that interpretation, and there is a good editor's note at the bottom that explains both parents got seemingly a fair exchange of opportunities to provide their perspectives to the reporter, otherwise my initial concern from reading it made it feel one-sided in the mother's favor.
Having said that, the remarks provided by the father feel very unconcerned in some ways and also very naive or lacking awareness of outside perception. It's possible the reporter left out any remarks that might indicate otherwise, but what feels off to me is a lack of self-awareness of always having some excuse here or there for things that happened with the child in his custody, so not even stating things didn't happen in his custody but rather admitting they did, and how that looks in comparison to things not happening outside his custody. Of course if the mother is over-protective as he claims then the child may not have the opportunity to get in such situations, but presumably the mother sleeps or takes a shower etc. and the child has time to himself, not to mention the times where he is at school, does he never injure himself just doing things that boys do, as the father explains that is what happens in his care.
Perhaps it's not possible, or perhaps not covered by the reporter, but it also strikes me as odd that neither parent seemed to try to prove a negative, which maybe you can't, but if you have limited custody, couldn't you record your full time of custody with the child in some way? Setting up surveillance cameras in and around the home for example would be a start, among other things. The amount of money these people have spent on attorneys and experts etc. just seems like it's strange they didn't put money into trying to prove their innocence more. For the bulk of the time, the mother had primary custody so it would be less feasible perhaps in her case as it would involve more time and resources to cover all of that, but the father seemingly could have been more proactive. I'm not a parent so I don't know, I just feel like if I was being accused of those things, I'd try to find a way to record every single interaction from the moment the child was in my care and then wait until the report comes in that I did something wrong and bust out the video footage for review that shows if the kid really did fall down and that's where the bruise comes from and nothing else occurred. I know it seems excessive, but again, if the father believes his kid is really being abused by the mother in the way hes saying, going all out to save your kid seems worth it.
I know there's a bit of a challenge there being that for much of this the kid was so young that he couldn't bathe by himself or even younger when he perhaps wasn't even potty trained, which I don't know how that might work from a privacy standpoint, but from what is presented in the ProPublica article, the father didn't seem all that proactive other than paying for specific people to give him good reports and their impressions of him. No mention of the father trying to set up physician evaluations immediately before giving the kid back to his mother etc.
From the mothers side now that she has limited time with her son, I wonder if she couldn't also be doing the same thing. Seems like she is more pressed for money than the father is so that could be a limitation. Also a little more difficult in some ways, but effectively she's accused of coaching the child, so if she were able to document all of her interactions, it could prove she's not coaching. Situation is of course a bit different though so I don't know.
Reading this whole thing for sure makes you wonder.
Honestly I don't know who to believe with the presented info. It seems like neither parent is to be trusted but the father clearly is prone to episodes of violence in physical and sexual ways and it could be directed to the kid, but the mom is also hyper vigilant now and will report ANY bruise or bump as abuse and it may truly be an injury. This is a horrible situation for the boy and I only hope he gets the help he needs as time goes on because it seems like the system has failed him in one way or another and it breaks my heart to know he will likely have lasting trauma from this even if this is a case of he said she said.
My mom displyed some of the traits as the mom here, like badmouthing my dad to anybody who would listen, which made it hard to "dad" when he could/needed to, especially with regards to school/admin stuff. I admit I went in with a bias and left confused and concerned.
It's possible the mom is exaggerating or even exhibiting something akin to Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, not to diagnose, but she is convinced something is happening and perpetuating it.
OTOH it's possible the dad is doing what he is charged with and is a Ted Bundy type character saying all the right things.
I don't have experience from the child's perspective being used as a source of truth on these, as the issues I was tied up in never made it to us kids, the parents usually hashed it out on their own, but the problem is Bruce isndealing with extreme charges in a situation that, nonmatter what the truth is, has made it extremely difficult to find the facts.
I'm suspicious about the sexual assault charge, but feel safe deferring to professionals, but if it happened once that is way more than the number of times most males have done that, so it is still suspicious. However if he is truly at absolutely zero risk of doing it again, it is still a potential lever for the ex to try to pull.