Fiction Not Always Stranger Than Truth

One frequent complaint about the mainstream media is that it has a tendency to sensationalize humanity’s foibles. It’s not uncommon for an historic or current event to be portrayed with a grain of truth along with a healthy dose of melodrama and contrived plot lines.

That said, fiction is not always stranger than truth -- truth is OFTEN stranger than fiction.

I address this topic after watching my weekly dose of the NBC franchise-series, Law & Order (L&0). In this particular instance, I was watching a rerun of L&O SVU (Sexual Victims Unit).

The intro to each edition of SVU stresses that crimes of sexual victimization are particularly heinous and, as with all versions of L&O, the baseline for each story is ripped from the headlines.

To be certain, every week the SVU team seems to deal with some of the most heinous (there’s that word again) sex crimes. In real life, these would be interspersed with more run-of-the-mill types – though to each individual victim NO case is run-of-the-mill. Still, what is portrayed in a 60-minute format on the TV screen often pales when compared to reality.

I’m not speaking here of my theoretical conception of what reality might hold. For over 5 years, I worked for state social service agencies in Arkansas and Missouri as both a caseworker and child abuse investigator. It should not come as a surprise to anyone, in this day and age, that a significant number of my cases involved sexual abuse.

My caseload was often even more sensational than anything depicted on television or movie screen. I investigated allegations pertaining to father-daughter incest, brother-sister or brother-brother incest, stranger/acquaintance rape and sodomy, indecent exposure and voyeurism, prostitution and pimping, and one case involving suspected mother-son incest.

The most disturbing case I investigated concerned a father who was alleged to have raped and sodomized his 9 month old daughter (that’s no misprint – 9 MONTHS old). Actually, I shouldn’t say this was merely an allegation; the guy freely copped to it. It was definitely the strangest interrogation I ever participated in.

In a subsequent entry, I’ll tackle the issue of why some people commit these heinous acts. It’s certainly not as cut-and-dry as many in the general public might think. For now, I think it’s enough just to reiterate that truth is often stranger than fiction.