"Psychic" Levies Bogus Accusations of Child Sex Abuse

Posted by PZ Myers, Pharyngula at 6:41 AM on June 19, 2008.

Colleen Leduc has an autistic child named Victoria who is enrolled in a public school. She recently got a terrifying phone call — her daughter was being sexually abused. We parents know well the fear and worry a threat to our children can cause, and Leduc was receiving an urgent, frantic phone call from school officials telling her that her daughter was being victimized in the worst way.

So she rushes in to this little meeting.

"The teacher looked and me and said: 'We have to tell you something. The educational assistant who works with Victoria went to see a psychic last night, and the psychic asked the educational assistant at that particular time if she works with a little girl by the name of "V." And she said 'yes, I do.' And she said, 'well, you need to know that that child is being sexually abused by a man between the ages of 23 and 26.'"

Let's make it worse. Reports of sexual abuse must be reported to Children's Aid, even if it is merely a stupid remark by a credulous gawp of an aid, built on the dishonest bilking of a con artist. So Leduc now has a file opened on her and is being investigated.

I am astounded.

That educational assistant who made such a ghastly accusation on the basis of no evidence at all should have been immediately warned that she would be fired for spreading false rumors like that. The administrators at that school who took such idiocy seriously ought to be removed from their position of trust — they are clearly unreliable. The government officials should not be harassing Ms Leduc — rather, they ought to hunt down and fine the creepy scammer with the pathetic letter-guessing psychic fraud scheme.

Or, if they aren't going to do that, maybe we should start our own stupid rumor that Terry Fox Elementary School has a network of secret tunnels where children are sodomized by teachers and shut the school down and put the personnel through living hell. Live by gullibility, die by gullibility. All's fair, right?

This is what happens when a culture tells people that reason and evidence are optional, and faith is touted as a virtue. I'm sure that educational assistant thought she was doing a good thing and was trying to protect Victoria…but the filters had been stripped from her brain, she had no tools to make rational assessments of the evidence, and so she charged in to do something vile and destructive, instead.

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Tagged as: sex, fake, abuse, disabilities, autism, psychic