Comment by tivert

This is spot on. This psychological barrier is probably the number one obstacle to a wider recognition of the existence and extent of this problem.

People like me who challenge the science behind the diagnoses of SBS face an absolutely unprecedented and unreasonable pushback, like I've never seen in any other area. Basically everyone who has worked on this side has faced threats, insults, personal attacks, cancellations, boycotts, and so on. The "cognitive bias" you mention (does it have a name? perhaps cognitive dissonance?) is a likely reason for this amount of antagonism.

It's hard to understand something if your salary depends on it being false.

It's much, much harder again to understand something if it makes your life's work ignoble.

Interestingly enough, no bigger offender then the psychiatric and mental health community. There's a very sophisticated system for shutting down criticism and lashing out at patients that have civil rights concerns.

They do a lot of mental gymnastics trying to run from the idea that their main function is to imprison and take away peoples rights, often without due process.

Medical industry is rife with abuse. They routinely kill people out of spite, torture dying people and their families, and want to be shielded from any criticism... so fuck all the patients and look for reasons they're "not righteous", etc, so you can dismiss them.

It's quite interesting (and disturbing) to see how much culture evolves around deflecting blame and victim blaming.

There's also the normalization of seeing and hearing awful things. After a while of being exposed to the wretches of humanity you begin to see the signals for the wretches everywhere.

As the warrior poet Maslow put it, "if the only tool you ever have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail."

Thanks for this insight, I'd never thought about it this way.

That actually happened to me, not with the police though, but with social workers. I explained the situation in a very calm, concise, and perhaps emotionally detached manner because this is just my personality. They wrote in their report that they found it strange that "I almost did not cry during the interview", which they said was the main reason they would recommend to put David in foster care. The guilt of knowing that I, with my personality, was responsible for losing his care, was devastating.

I also found this argument absurd: I was suspected of losing my temper on my child, and it's my calmness that was interpreted as a sign of danger!

It reminds me the Robert Roberson Texas death penalty case that John Grisham recently wrote about [1]: "He told hospital staff that she had fallen out of bed, but they didn’t believe him. They didn’t know he was autistic and decided he didn’t show the proper emotions given the dire situation."

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-may-execute-a-man-based-o...

It gets really obvious when this becomes not just a matter of personal experience but culture. Had the fortune to watch the news about an airplane crash without survivors on a TV channel in Asia. They had a video of grieving relatives from Western Europe who looked utterly gutted and in pain. But since they werent crying and screaming the news anchor had to explain that this was cultural differences.

What happens if the cops are called, rather than child services?

This is how I ended up in foster care over a false accusation against my parents (in the US). I'm told that if the accuser had called child services directly, they would have done their investigation first and only taken me if they determined I was in danger (which I was not).

But because the accuser called the cops instead, the cops took me without investigating first and handed me over to child services. Thus I spent the entire investigation period in foster care, until a judge ordered me to be sent back to my family. Even though they failed to produce any evidence of abuse, it still took many months.

It was an extremely traumatizing and harrowing experience (honestly even harder on me and my parents than when my brother got sick and died) and remains the worst thing I have ever experienced. But I find it hard to even talk about because people tend to assume that if a child is seized from a home, the parents must have been abusive. (My parents are extremely not abusive, not even in the mildest sense of the word.)

What's fucked is that I actually know two other families who went through this exact same experience: false accuser calls the cops, the cops give the kid to child services, child services puts the kid in foster care while investigating, the investigation turns up no evidence of abuse, the court forces child services to send the kid home, and the kid finally returns home with lifelong trauma.

Yeah in my dealings with child welfare workers (in America at least), they are the first to understand how "the system", and they as a key component, can cause harm.

In America the system is split between people who say we should do everything we can to keep children safe in their own home, and people who think it is wokeness gone mad that a parent can test positive for drugs and not have the kids immediately removed. It is, as you’d expect, a calm and reasonable debate filled with claims that “I’m the only one who is thinking about the best interest of the kids!” and “you hate foster care so much you prefer babies to DIE instead of going to a safe foster home!” (As a foster parent, I have unfortunately found that this kind of idiocy is all too common among foster parents.)

How does this play out in Aboriginal communities?

In the US we have strict laws regarding how social services interact with native populations.

Priors should never, ever factor into it like this.

I was a foster child who was taken from my parents wrongly. A third party (not connected to child services) made a false accusation to the cops, who took me and turned me over to child services without any investigation. Even though I insisted nothing had happened and even though child services failed to produce any evidence (beyond aforesaid hearsay) over the course of their investigation, child services nonetheless fought extremely hard against letting me go home to my family.

In the end, a judge had to order them to return me to my family because they refused to accept that the accusation had been a lie.

In the meantime, I went through three different foster homes. I was a very difficult kid to foster (I cried and screamed a lot, demanding to go home) and so I unfortunately experienced abuse and neglect in two of the three homes. (My first foster home was particularly severe, which was strange because they were otherwise great parents to their biological kids. At least the other abusive home treated their real children equally poorly.)

It is easy to think bad things of others that you know to be true of yourself.

Another example is that a lot of anti-gay crusaders turned out to be closet gays who hated themselves.

Do you ( or anyone else ) have an idea about how to deal with that? Not just on a group level but also on an individual one?

The willful ignorance of the dissonance between proclaimed intention and consequences is one of the scariest phenomenons i have experienced and its among proper mob mentality turning in a charged violence prone environment.

Being a bit of a smartass (OFCOURSE just as a teen :) i prodded a bit when some family friend got into some superficial moral signaling about the evils of child labor. I asked how exactly the alternative looks without social safety nets in the relevant regions. Being convinced of having the moral high ground an emotional fever set in and it went as far as a "Well maybe then they should all starve!". Pretty sure i saw the realization of what i just goaded out and if hateful stares could kill i would have been a goner. It has been almost two decades now and the relationship has never recovered. I know some seriously scary people but this is up there.

edit: Sorry for the late edits, was hard to read.