#NSW police announcement that they had exposed a $1.3 billion scheme for making fraudulent child sexual abuse claims.#

Obviously, the NSW police missed out on a slice of the cheese; otherwise what was their motivation for getting involved in interrupting the Australian Mafia network?

One place I’ll take bets they didn’t look, among the Muslim racketeers in the Western suburbs. Silence is golden!

Another nasty and deceptive piece from Arndt.

The fraudulent fabrication of sex abuse claims is abhorrent. I hope the police uncover all the perpetrators – particularly the organisers - and they receive what they deserve in the courts. I also hope the unjustly accused individuals and institutions are exonerated and, where possible, compensated. And the rules should be tightened so claims are not paid until they are properly investigated.

But this is clearly an organised crime with financial motives focussed on historical abuse cases against institutions where access to redress funding is a juicy target. To describe this as “a mighty blow to the feminist narrative claiming false rape claims hardly ever happen” is nonsense. In the great majority of cases accusers have nothing to gain – and often much to lose – in bringing rape allegations. To imply that a subset of allegations arising from a particular set of circumstances casts doubt on all allegations made often in very different circumstances makes no sense.

Arndt similarly misrepresents the analysis of child sexual abuse data. The analysis by Nola Web did indeed find that 74% of fully contested cases were unsubstantiated, but “unsubstantiated” does not mean false, merely that the evidence did not convince the presiding judge. In uncontested cases, more than 70% of the time, the judge believed the accusation. And as the report Arndt links to makes clear, most of the researchers quoted in this analysis “believe that the existence of child sexual abuse continues to be denied or minimised” - in other words, the problem is not false allegations, but true allegations that are not believed.

In all cases, the Family Court should prioritise the welfare of the child, not the “rights” of parents. Sometimes they get it wrong, and the results are tragic. But where there is doubt, it is surely better not to place a child under the control of a possibly abusive parent.