Jesse says 'This stuff is nohthing more than a tarted up defense of bigotry, very archaic', as if Yoshie or I were arguing from a perspective that is ignorant of or precedes the impact of feminist critiques of the policing of sex crimes.
But really it is Jesse who is behind the times. The impact of the child sex abuse panics is now itself history; we have seen the terrible impact on people's lives that false accusations have had; and we are wiser about the errors that were committed in the name of 'listening to the victim'.
In Nottingham, the Orkneys, the McMartin pre-school case, we have seen how over-zealous social workers and health workers deceived themselves that they were hearing allegations of abuse, when plainly they were not. These were the subject of a recent BBC documentary, 'When Satan Came to Town', which features recordings of the interviewing techniques that were used to take children from their families for years, and put their parents in prison. Those children today are grown up, and express their hatred for the social services violently.
Jesse says "This is all quite preposterous, and takes place in a social vacuum." Jesse wants to look at the constraints on victims testimony in its social context, but is unwilling to see the panic over child abuse in its social context. Successive appeals and High Court judgements in recent years have freed parents in the UK, like Trupti Patel and Sally Clark, who were unjustly imprisoned because courts were predisposed to believe that parents were more likely to have injured their children than was in fact the case.
Jesse thinks that testimony alone is sufficient to jail someone, anywhere other than Pakistan. But it is just absurd to think that no woman has ever given false testimony of rape. The protections afforded defendants, like the presumption of innocence, are there because of the preponderance of power that the state holds. There is nothing radical of progressive about undermining the rights of defendants.
Jesse continues:
"speaking as historian I want to assure you that historians come to reasonable conclusions about causality etc. with less than perfect information. The standards being invoked here would eliminate historical judgement about just about everthing."
I am sorry, but this is not history, it is biography. Historical events are by no means unambiguous, but normally leave rather more confirming evidence than the testimony of one person. There is of course a species of historical biography that dwells on rubbishing the personal lives of public figures, but no historian takes that kind of Kitty Kelley stuff too seriously.
I'm off on holiday tomorrow, so I'll have to bow out of this argument. No doubt I have the wrong end of the stick, anyway and wiser minds than mine will prevail.