Have you ever been the subject or victim of a false accusation?
So, I was sitting in my grad adviser’s office one day. He also happened to the the department chair. Our conversation was interrupted by a phone call that he was told he had to take. Dr. A mostly listened, indicated engagement in the conversation with frequent “uh huhs,” “I sees,” and “yeses” interjections but wasn’t taking notes. I twiddled my thumbs and thought of a paper I was working on. At one point he said, “Dark hair and petite?” A few more “uh huhs,” and then he said, “She’s right here.” The caller continued talking and he continued listening. As I couldn’t imagine anyone knowing I was there – much less interested in where I was at that moment – concluded that he didn’t mean me but someone else that was in the office. When the call ended, he said that I needed to go see the Director of the Children’s Center about the police report I’d filed.
I said something like, “There must be some mistake. I’ve never filed a police report.”
He said that in that case I needed to go sort it out. I responded that I would do so later that afternoon. That wasn’t the response he wanted and in retrospect, he seemed not to want didn’t to say more. So, he asked if I’d been to the Children’s Center a few weeks ago. I had. To administer an IQ test for a course I was taking. Dr. A then asked if I’d filed a police report after that. I hadn’t. Why would I? You didn’t suspect parental sexual molestation of the child you tested? Good lord, no. It was an IQ test, not a psych eval.
Nevertheless, someone had filed a police report and the Director of the Children’s Center thought that someone was me. The report led to a full investigation of the parents by the authorities. They concluded that there was no evidence of probable cause. The parents had hired an attorney to sue the university. A very serious matter for all parties.
It was off to the Children’s Center right then for me. I was shaken and pondered the possibility that I couldn’t prove my innocence in this matter. Fortunately, the Director knew immediately after I arrived that I wasn’t the woman she needed to see. The problem was with the register. Part of a line had been skipped and it looked as if I’d tested two children. One of whom was the subject of the police report. The name of the person who tested that child was there on the subsequent line of the register.
How the lawsuit was resolved is unknown to me. The parents had been put through a nightmare, and an “oops” and an apology from the university hardly seems sufficient. However, it was the act of a single individual grad student and not any policy or employee of the university. A student that was dismissed from her grad program. It’s unsettling for me to consider that she could have gone on to one of the proprietary psych grad schools and ultimitately have secured a license in marriage and family counseling. Hypervigilence – yes, she had been molested as a child – in almost all areas of life, is rarely not cou nterproductive. It’s not only that it leads to too many false positives and destroys the lives of innocents, but also too often completely misses true positives. Hence, it was several people in the ordinary course of their non-national security jobs that observed squirrelly behaviors and/or characters to report them, and the NSA and FBI terrorist hunters not only didn’t see anything before 9/11 but also dismissed those reports from concerned citizens.
