why the porky?

This was a question the police asked of me during our videotaped and audiotaped interview. The question, asked by a plainclothes man who shared the interviewing with a constable, was put thus: ‘Can you tell me why xxxxxx would want to tell such a lie against you?’ My response was lame. I said that I’d often wondered about it and discussed it with friends, without of course knowing the precise nature of the accusation hanging over my head for so long. All I could come up with was that he was attention-seeking. The plainclothes man said that he’d questioned the boy and felt that he was embarrassed and reluctant about recounting the details of my alleged rape of him (supposed to have occurred in the toilet), so he didn’t see it as attention-seeking. He also said (and the implication was that this made his testimony more convincing) that the boy spoke warmly and positively about me, for the most part (!!). He then asked if I thought this accusation was out of character for the boy. After some reflection, I said that, though the boy was a bit of a bullshit artist (and I gave examples of his bullshit), this enormous porky did seem out of character, yes. This was probably impolitic of me, but there you go. So when he asked me to speculate further on the boy’s motives, I could only say that I was no expert in child psychology.
But during my sleepless night after returning from the police station, and after debriefing with Sarah, this absolutely key question kept recurring. I think I’ve worked out the answer.
The key to the boy’s accusation lies in his troubled, dysfunctional relationship with his mother. Some years ago, this woman put the boy into state care, citing his difficult behaviours and her own emotional and health problems. Previously she’d sent him off to live with her ex-husband, the boy’s father, in Coober Pedy. This had proved disastrous – a huge flair-up had occurred between the boy and his father’s new wife, and the boy had been sent packing back to the mother.
So there he was under the guardianship of the minister, having been rejected by both father and mother, and obviously very damaged by the experience. By the time he was in my care, he was staying with his mother on weekends, and the aim was to gradually effect a complete handover to maternal care. Many of the professionals involved had their doubts about the benefits of such a reconciliation to the boy, because of his mother’s hot-and-cold, love-hate treatment of him, but it was clear he was devoted to his mum.
Given this background, my theory is that the inevitable has begun to happen. After six months or so back together, cracks are appearing again in the mother-son relationship. There might even be hints being dropped about sending the boy back into state care. So, enormously fearful of being rejected and abandoned yet again, the boy hits upon telling a story so awful that it will win forever his mother’s sympathy, her assurances that she’ll never abandon him again. ‘Mum, when you send me out into that nasty world of foster-caring, you don’t know what danger you’re sending me into. I get raped, mum.’
As for my role, he’s just using me as the instrument. It’s nothing personal. And it would be easy to target me in this way, especially as he’s gotten away with a false accusation against me before. He claimed that I punched him on the back of the head while we were together in Victor Harbour, an outrageous claim, but clearly a minor one in comparison to rape. Also, this earlier claim was an exaggeration of a real flare-up, so it had greater plausibility. He got what he wanted out of that accusation – resettlement with his mother. This time, what he wants is to stay with his mother, in a working-class culture he feels comfortable with. Above all, he wants, desperately, not to be abandoned again. So he’s gambling everything on this story, and it’s unlikely he’s going to give it up. He knows, or he feels sure, that if he admits he’s lying, his mother will react badly and want to have no more to do with him, so he’s locked himself in.