That, coupled with courts that are content to ignore or minimize relevant contextual narratives about the dynamics between the complainant and the accused at the time the allegations are made (ie: custody battles, family disputes, parenting styles, volatile relationships, etc.), creates difficult hurdles for the innocent accused to overcome false claims against them.
Lack of Memory
Take for example a recent case out of British Columbia where the complainant – a teenage boy claiming his mother’s live-in boyfriend had physically and sexually abused him 9 years earlier – told the court he had no memory of sexual abuse when he complained to his custodial father that his mother’s boyfriend locked him in the basement and choked him one summer, nor did he complain of sexual abuse at any time to his mother.
In this case, the accused person, Mr. H., denied that he ever harmed or sexually abused the boy and testified that he was disciplining the boy and his sister with timeouts by separating them and isolating them in different parts of the house. While Mr. H.’s method of disciplining the boy by putting him in the basement instead of his bedroom may not have been ideal, the trial judge took his unconventional parenting style one step further by using it against Mr. H.’s credibility and to prove that he intended to isolate the boy to sexually abuse him, ultimately convicting him of sexual abuse and unlawful confinement.
With regards to the boy’s memory, the appeal panel unanimously found that the trial judge misused the boy’s varied testimony about not having a memory of sexual abuse at the time of reporting the timeout incident. They said the boy’s lack of memory was one of the primary reasons the defence argued the boy’s testimony was unreliable, and that the outcome of the trial could have been different had the trial judge not misapprehended the memory evidence.