When it is one person’s word against another’s, credibility is everything, and credibility can be manufactured and destroyed, and the person with more money and status and social capital will win that contest almost every time.

If all I had possessed was my account of what happened in that study, my parents would very likely have succeeded.

Their version, backed by their resources and my freshly ruined reputation, would have become the accepted truth, and I would have been the unstable daughter who attacked her father and injured herself in some drug-addled episode, and no one would ever have known otherwise.

That is the ordinary, sickening arithmetic of these cases, and it is why so many victims are never believed.