Daily Archives: December 30, 2009


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Jennie Bristow reviews “Researching Sex and Lies in the Classroom” in the Spiked Review of Books: One of the most pernicious prejudices of our time is that adults, given half a chance, will abuse the children in their care. This is the prejudice that lies behind the UK government’s out-of-control, increasingly unpopular mass vetting scheme, in which adults who want to spend time with, or take responsibility for, children other than their own must first be issued with a licence showing that they have no record of child abuse. It is also the prejudice that lies behind the ‘professional truism or working hypothesis or mantra that “children never lie about abuse”’: the subject of Pat Sikes and Heather Piper’s bold and disturbing investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct in schools. Of course, some adults do abuse children. Sikes and Piper, along with myself and other critics of the current ‘stranger […]

It’s not true that children never lie