(3 of 4)
Maybe Jackson is, emotionally, a preteen, getting his wish of an intimate slumber party. His behavior onstage suggests as much: the infamous crotch- grabbing seems as spontaneous as an infant investigating itself. But he is also an adult, 35 this week, and any boy's mother might foresee problems of propriety in letting a man bunk with her boy. Then again, the rich are different, and these are rich, nearly famous people. The mother's second husband is a rental-car magnate. The father is co-author of the script for one of the summer's sillier comedies, and supposedly the idea for the film was suggested by the boy himself. In one aspect, though, this brood is like many other postnuclear families: last week a judge ordered the father to pay $68,804 in overdue child support.
The allegations also speak to the modern preoccupation with child abuse. In an age when lurid lyrics, sniggering sitcoms and trash-talking stars work hard to rob children of innocence, the sexually abusive parent, guardian or family friend is not only a predator in his own right but also a stand-in for all the gaudy malevolence of pop culture. "There's a social hysteria about child abuse," says Professor Melvin Guyer, a psychologist and lawyer who teaches at the University of Michigan. "It began with the McMartin Pre-School case and continued with Woody Allen. There has been a feeding frenzy, in which the ordinary presumptions of innocence are not applied. The allegations are treated as evidence." And the public reacts with wide eyes and a bit of drool at the corner of the mouth. "The public gets to be puritanical and voyeuristic at the same time. Their attitude is basically, 'This food is terrible, and there's not enough of it.' "
In custody cases, charges of child abuse can be the useful tool of a vindictive parent. "A contested custody battle provides fertile soil for false allegations of sexual abuses," says Guyer. "There are therapists who interview children in ways that are leading, suggestive and coercive; they are the validators of sexual abuse charges." The charges in the Jackson case smell fishy to Lynne Gold-Bikin, a Philadelphia family lawyer and chairwoman- elect of the family-law section of the American Bar Association. "You're looking at a 13-year-old child in the middle of a bitter custody fight," she says. "These children are the least reliable witnesses of all, because they're being torn between pleasing two parents. They're trying to protect themselves. Often children side with one parent or the other and say what that parent wants to hear."
Stephen Ceci, professor of developmental psychology at Cornell University, says abuse accusations in custody cases appear to be less prevalent now than they were five years ago. Moreover, a 13-year-old is less likely to be coerced into imagining abuse than a pre-schooler is. Still, Ceci cautions, "there is no Pinocchio test. The child's nose doesn't grow longer when he tells you something that is factually untrue." Absent physical evidence -- bruises, photographs -- only the adult and, perhaps, the child know if the charge is true.