Dr Kek Pung
President, LICADHO
Phnom Penh
Cambodia
29th Dec 2014
Dear Dr Pung
I
continue to be overwhelmed with information relevant to the activities of
Action Pour les Enfants this past decade. There is much more than I can deal
with but to whom could I give this information such that it would result in an
independent investigation? There is no-one. No body. No organization. No NGO. Fraudulent
NGOs know that no-one, including LICADHO, is interested in facts, evidence or
truth when it comes to men accused of sex crimes and they can and do capitalize on this knowledge.
I
have a suggestion as to how LICADHO could, if it so desired, set in motion an
investigation in such a way as to not target any one NGO.
Firstly,
I wish to quote from an article in an issue of the Phnom Penh Post last week
concerning allegation of sex abuse on the part of a Mr Johnson:
After Mr. Johnson’s arrest
in Cambodia, a separate investigation by anti-pedophile NGO Action Pour Les
Enfants (APLE) revealed numerous claims of abuse committed by Mr. Johnson at
his Home of Hope orphanage in Meanchey district’s Boeng Tompun commune, which
cared for at least 30 children and teenagers.
APLE country director
Samleang Seila said Tuesday that the abuses included touching of the five boys’
genitals as well as oral and anal sex.
During the course of the
trial, however, all of the victims either recanted or changed their statements.
Mr. Seila said he thinks this was because they were afraid to lose financial
support from Mr. Johnson.
“I also think the
relationship for some victims with Johnson is still quite close, and they did
not want to see Johnson deported,” he said.
The Phnom Penh Municipal
Court ultimately found Mr. Johnson guilty of committing indecent acts against
boys under the age of 15.
While sitting outside his
cell at the immigration department on Monday, Mr. Johnson said he was innocent
and accused APLE of intimidating and coercing the five victims to testify
against him. This, he said, was so APLE could use his conviction to court new
donors.
“At some point…they started
focusing on numbers, and when they started focusing on numbers they lost line
of sight with fact,” he said…
APLE’s Mr. Seila, however,
said Mr. Johnson’s accusations that his NGO pursued him for the sake of money
were baseless.
“This is ridiculous, there
is no reason at all we would do this,” he said.
Mr. Seila also said that
none of the boys or their families was intimidated or coerced during the
investigation.
Who
is telling the truth here? Mr Johnson or Mr Seila?
Allegations
such as this have been leveled against APLE many times this past decade –
namely they APLE has, through either financial inducements or threats, acquired
statements from children regarding alleged sexual abuse that are false, in
order to secure convictions.
It
must be acknowledged that men accused of sex crimes (or the lawyers
representing them) can also offer inducements to the materially poor families
of children they have been accused of
abusing - to get the children to deny having made their original complaint or
to change their complaint in a way that is to the advantage of the accused.
How
can we ever know who has made the threats and/or inducements – APLE or the
accused? The same applies, of course, to all NGOs involved in the investigating
of crimes against children whose funding is dependent of securing convictions.
Before
addressing this question, another must be asked:
How common, word-wide, are false
allegations of child sexual abuse?
The
following is but one of many descriptions of false allegations to be found on
the internet:
A false
allegation of child sexual abuse is an accusation that a person committed
one or more acts of child sexual abuse when in reality there was no perpetration of abuse by
the accused person as alleged. Such accusations can be brought by the alleged
victim, or by another person on the alleged victim's behalf. Studies of child
abuse allegations suggest that the overall rate of false accusation is under
10%. Of the allegations determined to be false, only a small portion
originated with the child, the studies showed; most false allegations
originated with an adult bringing the accusations on behalf of a child, and of
those, a large majority occurred in the context of divorce and child-custody battles. Another possible motive
is revenge by the person making the allegation against the accused person.
There is also evidence that the UK (and formerly the New Zealand) systems of
paying substantial compensation to alleged victims and their parents without
requiring proof of the allegation, can provide a motive for making false
allegations.
If
false allegations in the ‘developed world’ run to 10%, to what percentage do
they run in Cambodia? Is it possible to find out? Is LICADHO interested in
finding out?
Now,
to the question of who is to be believed in the case mentioned above? Mr
Johnson or Mr Seila?
Suggestion:
Talk to the children who have
made statements against the accused.
There
are highly trained professionals in (for want of a better expression) the ‘developed
world’ who know how to elicit information from children who may have been
sexually abused but who may also have been coached by parents, NGOs, police or
others to provide answers that suit an accuser’s particular agenda. A wife may,
for instance, induce a child to accuse her father of sexual abuse in order to
gain custody or as a bargaining chip in a divorce proceeding. And a father may
coach his daughter to accuse her mother’s new boyfriend of sexual abuse in
order that he can acquire custody. And so on.
An
untrained amateur may be inclined to believe the child whereas a trained
professional would (and should) be as close to 100% sure as possible that the
child is speaking the truth and has not been coached.
Such
a university-trained professional, trained in child psychology, child welfare,
could, without causing trauma to a child, make an assessment as to the
reliability of the child’s testimony. This happens all the time in Britain, in
Australia, in the US and so on. It does not happen in Cambodia. Why not? Why is the assessment of the
reliability of children’s evidence left up to amatuers?
Is
it appropriate for any NGO to investigate an allegation of sex abuse, be
actively involved in prosecuting the alleged perpetrator, without any
independent trained professional (with no vested interest in the outcome of the
case) interviewing the children? All too often, in Cambodia, the children are interviewed by no-one other
than the NGO with a vested interest in the outcome of the case. And all too
often the children themselves are not available to be cross-examined in court
or to have their testimony tested in any way by defense counsel.
My
suggestion is that LICADHO (perhaps in conjunction with ADHOC, SISHA, CEOP and
other NGOs involved in the investigation of sex abuse) pool their financial
resources to employ some highly experienced, totally independent child welfare
experts to talk with children whose testimony has led to men being jailed or
acquitted under contentious circumstances. By this I mean, men who have been
acquitted as a result of children changing their testimony and men who have
been found guilty despite the children denying that any sexual abuse took
place.
Such
an independent investigation would provide some solid evidence as to whether or
not the coaching of children is widespread or takes place in isolated instances
only. Or perhaps not at all.
Whilst
my immediate concern is with the multiple allegations that have been made
against APLE I suggest that such an independent investigation not be limited to
any one NGO but be applied to a cross-section of sex abuse cases from the last
few years – regardless of which NGOs may have been involved in the
investigations, and which NGOs may have been providing legal assistance to the alleged
victims. Perhaps the cases to be looked at could be chosen in a random way,
since this exercise, at least at the outset, is not to accuse any particular
NGO or accused person of ‘coaching’, intimidation or bribery, but to ascertain
what percentage of convictions involve false alletgations.
It
is hard to see how any NGO committed to justice and the protection of human
rights (in practice as well as theory) could possibly object to such an
independent investigation. Given that participation in such an investigation
would be voluntary it would be interesting to see which NGOs are happy to go
along with it and which would refuse to participate.
If
an independent investigation of the kind I am suggesting were to reveal that
20% of allegations of child sex abuse in
Cambodia were false, would this be of concern to LICADHO? What about 30%? Is
there a percentage at which LICADHO would respond with, “This is a serious
problem and needs to be addressed.” If so, I am sure that such a sentiment
would be shared by the 10%, 20%, 30% (or whatever the percentage might be) of
men who are in jail in Cambodia for long periods of time for crimes they did
not commit.
As
it stands at present, there is no way to determine, independently, whether Mr
Johnson is lying or Mr Seila. The impossibility of knowing leaves men accused
of sex crimes open to being convicted for crimes they did not commit and to men
being found not guilty for crimes they did commit.
The
testimonies of the children, given to trained professions with no vested
interest in the outcome is, I believe, the place to start.
best
wishes
James
Ricketson
