Why don’t you give the benefit of the doubt?

Actually, we do. Some people choose to give the benefit of the doubt to the powerful. We choose to give it to the oppressed. Generally, when there’s any doubt, we give the benefit of the doubt to the victim.

One of GRACE’s primary jobs is to erase doubt as much as possible and to sort out the cases in which there is no doubt, or an extremely small possibility of doubt.

It is a matter of fact that in many situations, there is no doubt. We know what happened, there is verification—- in some cases even police records and court cases.

Again, we believe we’re seeing a pattern established over decades. If one victim, for example, says that she received counseling of such-and-such a type that was harmful and traumatizing, we might think she’s exaggerating.

But when we hear it again and again and again, from people who don’t know each other (some of us have personally spoken with a number of victims who do not know one another), then we become overwhelmed by a weight of evidence that to a reasonable person would seem to be true.