Sexual predators are master manipulators. Nothing makes the point more clearly than Derek Jensen's treatment of convicted child sex offender Brett Bullock in his Sept. 18 article in the Deseret News.
Jensen reports not only on Bullock's theories about his flawed conviction but offers personal insights as well. "He's articulate and respectful and emits an aura of being above the whole prison experience." Actually, the less euphemistic term for Bullock's behavior is narcissistic. Jensen also found Bullock to be "devoid of much of the open bitterness usually found in most inmates claiming innocence."
Would that be excluding Bullock's unsubstantiated accusations that everyone from his ex-wife to a therapist with a "preconceived agenda" were responsible for his incarceration? Why hold Bullock to a standard of substantiation for what he claims when the Deseret News article doesn't.
The assertions of Bullock, his attorney Craig Cook and "supporters" in the article are blatantly false and without substantiation. I was never retained by Bullock's ex-wife to treat his children, nor had I ever met or talked with her prior to the allegations that were made against him by other children.
I have never met with or been interviewed by his stake president, and I was not "totally destroyed as a credible witness," having since testified in multiple criminal and civil cases long after Bullock was sent to prison. The Utah Supreme Court did not overturn any convictions in the Lehi case criticizing my interviewing techniques. That conviction has stood the scrutiny of appeal just as has Bullock's.
If I had had a "preconceived agenda" for Bullock I would have planned for the children's statements and recorded them. Instead, their disclosures were spontaneous and not recorded. It was also to my detriment that recordings were not made, because the defense repeatedly alleged that I was coercive. Coercion was defined as asking a frightened child a question more than once.
Now, a decade later I limit my private practice to adolescents and adults because of the sheer number of referrals as I can not respond to cases with children as they often require this type of extraordinary attention.
Am I fighting back? Yes. The children I represented are no longer children, and I can speak out without compromising their safety, confidentiality or my professional ethics.
The article states, "A recent 10th Circuit Court of Appeals opinion . . . dubbed Snow's interview techniques 'dubious.' " Dubious by what standard? I was not an investigative interviewer. I worked for a treatment agency, not law enforcement. Techniques were not designed to meet a forensic standard; they were designed to help children heal. Play therapy allows children to process overwhelming trauma. It is not purported to be an investigative interview.
The article also presents the statement of a parent that I "used questionable techniques." The statement reflects the reality the therapeutic techniques have been and are now in fact questionable by law enforcement standards. It is important to note that there were other parents who believed their children had also been abused by Bullock but were not included in the criminal complaint. They independently wrote the Utah Supreme Court and the Salt Lake Tribune in support of my efforts and his conviction.
Utah did not have an agency devoted to the treatment of sexually abused children until 1982, and I was a co-founder. As a member of the American Professional Society On the Abuse of Children, which is the nation's largest professional organization specifically addressing abuse, I helped draft national standards. Those national standards for the investigative interviewing of sexual abuse victims were not published until November 2001, 16 years after I was criticized for not adhering to them.
In a 1989 Utah Supreme Court dissenting opinion, Justice Daniel Stewart wrote, "The defendant was tried and convicted on an avalanche of hearsay." Bullock has used the Deseret News to try to do the same to the victims and those who supported them.
How does a former child victim who Jensen quotes as saying, "I don't really know if I want to talk about it too much . . . I just don't really know what to say," compete with an "articulate" adult supported by a Supreme Court justice who attends parole hearings and "prison officials who admit privately that Bullock may be one of the few inmates in Utah who is actually innocent."
We cannot have it both ways. We cannot decry child abuse publicly and tolerate it privately if the offender is a white, upper middle-class member of our religious congregation. We cannot demand minimum mandatory sentences for sex offenders and then doubt and ridicule those whose actions result in the justice systems administering those sentences.
Barbara Snow is a licensed clinical social worker practicing in Salt Lake City.