>Lastly, when a person makes a statement, how might others take it?
>The choice is not either she is telling the truth or she is
>consciously lying -- there is a third alternative: she sincerely
>believes that what didn't happen actually happened.
No, that's my point. You have to claim she's consciously lying in this case, or telling the truth. You can't claim she sincerely believed what happened didn't happen because then you can't account for the description of the discussion of it with her father. I suppose you could claim, as you seem to be suggesting, that she initially truly thought it happened and now is lying to bolster her story. Either way there's no way you can (patronizingly, I think) claim she is just honestly mistaken.
The general estimate I heard in the '80's among people working on child sexual abuse is that one in four girls and one in five boys experienced some form of sexual abuse, harassment, etc. including the whole range--from an uncle exposing themselves to sustained abuse. Not all of those occurances are within families, but an overwhelming majority is.
Stephen P. and others are right that there is incredible hysteria about child sexual abuse in the U.S. But it's important to note that this hysteria is mainly around non-family members. Try raising charges of father sexual abuse in court and you will find, as many mothers have when they tried to restrict visitation rights because they saw signs of abuse, that the courts are very biased against mothers speaking out on this issue. There are quite a few cases of mothers being punished by the courts for daring to charge sexual abuse--the punishment being to give sole custody to the fathers. In many cases mothers went to jail for refusing to give up their children to fathers who the children said were sexually abusing them. I worked in an activist capacity on several of these in the 80's. (The most famous is probably Elizabeth Morgan in DC, probably because she was a high-end lawyer and got locked up for refusing to turn over her children. But working class moms also go through this, like Karen Newsom and Dorrie Singley in Mississippi. After one jailing for contempt of court, Dorrie went underground to protect her daughter, and died underground of a brain aneurism. The state gave custody of her daughter, Chrissy, back to the man Dorrie (and Chrissy) said was abusing her. Chrissy was 3 when the abuse started.)
So I think child sexual abuse is basically treated like marital rape has been--within the family, it's not regarded as rape, outside the family it's a source of hysterical attacks, often directed at an oppressed group (i.e. Blacks or gays). So you can't really lump the preschool abuse idiocy or gay-bashing prosecutions together with the attempts to stop child sexual abuse within the family. They are different politically because they are related to which males have what rights to the bodies of what females and children.
Jenny Brown