Nobody Should Believe Me - What We Get Wrong About Abuse and How to Prevent It with Dr. Jackie Campbell

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

In this bonus conversation, Andrea sits down with intimate partner violence researcher Jacquelyn Campbell to look at how complex issues like domestic violence and child abuse really are, compared to how simply they’re often portrayed. Together they explore what it might look like to intervene earlier and what it would take to build systems that recognize danger before tragedy strikes. *** Try out Andrea’s Podcaster Coaching App: https://studio.com/apps/andrea/podcaster Order Andrea’s book The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy: https://read.macmillan.com/lp/the-mother-next-door-9781250284273/ View our sponsors: https://www.nobodyshouldbelieveme.com/sponsors/ Remember that using our codes helps advertisers know you’re listening and helps us keep making the show!   Subscribe on YouTube where we have bonus content: https://www.youtube.com/@NobodyShouldBelieveMePod Follow Andrea on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreadunlop/ Buy Andrea's books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Andrea-Dunlop/author/B005VFWJPI For more information and resources on Munchausen by Proxy, please visit: https://www.munchausensupport.com/ The American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children’s MBP Practice Guidelines: https://apsac.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Munchausen-by-Proxy-Clinical-and-Case-Management-Guidance-.pdf Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

True Story Media. Today we're sharing a bonus episode that I think is a really crucial listen for this season. And that is my conversation with Dr. Jacqueline Campbell. Dr. Campbell is a world-renowned researcher who has dedicated her career to advocating for victims and survivors of intimate partner violence. She has published more than 300 articles, written seven books, and been the lead investigator on more than 15 major U.S. government research grants on the topic. Incredible. I wanted to speak to Dr. Campbell for this season because sadly, intimate partner violence plays a major role in many of the cases we're talking about. This was a fascinating discussion and it really deepened my understanding of the topic.

Take care while listening. We'll be right back with my conversation with Dr. Jacqueline Campbell. Insurance isn't one size fits all. And shopping for it shouldn't feel like squeezing into something that just doesn't fit. That's why drivers have enjoyed progressives name your price tool for years. With the Name Your Price Tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they show you options that fit your budget. Enough hunting for discounts, trying to calculate rates, and tinkering with coverages. Maybe you're picking out your very first policy.

Or maybe you're just looking for something that works better for you and your family. Either way, they make it simple to see your options. No guesswork, no surprises. Ready to see how easy and fun shopping for car insurance can be? Visit progressive.com and give the name your price tool, a try. Take the stress out of shopping and find coverage that fits your life on your terms. Progressive

Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Visit BetMGM casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus

to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Jackie, it's so wonderful to have you here with us. Again, we just really appreciate you being willing to share your expertise.

This is a difficult topic, and this is one that we haven't tackled previously on the show before, and we feel like we're in very good hands with you. So, again, thank you for being here. Can you start off by just introducing yourself and your work? I'm a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing. I'm a nurse, very proud to be a nurse, with a PhD, which gives me the credentials to do research. And a very long time ago, I say I was a mere puppy then, I did a small study of homicide of women in Dayton, Ohio. And I looked at all the police reports of women who were murdered or who murdered someone.

And I found from that study that when women were murdered, they were most often murdered by a husband, boyfriend, or ex-husband, ex-boyfriend. And the same when they killed somebody. They were most likely to kill a husband, boyfriend, ex-husband, ex-boyfriend. But the circumstances were very different. Women killed men far less often than men killed women. After I did my own study, of course, you have to set it in context so I read everything I could find on the topic. And when a woman was murdered by a husband, boyfriend, or ex, in most of the cases, there was domestic violence before they were killed. And so I said, well, if I'm going to prevent homicide of women, I clearly need to work with abused women. So I volunteered at shelters. Wherever I was working, I was first at Wayne State University in Detroit, volunteered in their shelters.

They had me lead support group. I was also teaching my students because I was teaching nursing to ask about domestic violence. having found that this was such an important issue, important to women's health. So I also did some research in terms of the health outcomes of domestic violence. So all the way from injuries and the worst of it being homicide, but also abuse during pregnancy and how that affected women's health and their children's health. and, you know, I became more and more committed to this issue. And I also continued to talk to a lot of abused women in support group and women who came to me because I got to be, you know,

I had a reputation as the lady in nursing who knows something about domestic violence. At the same time, I realized that most of the women I was talking to, who they didn't want to leave the abuser. They loved him. They had children with him. They wanted, and they still do, want him to change. They usually believe he's capable of changing. And one of the things I think we as a society don't do very well is we don't provide

abusers the tools to change. the interventions at an early stage to change their behavior before things get really bad, before the risk of homicide is really high. So the whole thing is complicated. Well, there's so much in what you just said, and I really appreciate that thorough intro that gives me a lot of jumping off points in addition to the ones I questions I already wanted to ask, but I just want to say, too, that I really appreciate that framing because we talk exclusively about child abuse. this show. And I think we are very much a show that wants to talk about things holistically and talk about prevention where prevention is possible. And I'm very much of the same mindset that you are,

one of my colleagues in the psychiatry field, Dr. Mary Sanders, who we've had on many times, said people are not defined by the worst thing they've ever done. And I always think, nor should people be defined by the worst thing that's ever happened to them. And I think holding on to that compassion is so important. And so I really appreciate your framing of that. And first off, I just want to ask you, I mean, you've been, it's so interesting listening to you talk about this. When was this that you were doing this first initial research? Not to make you date yourself on the show, but I'm asking this for a reason, I promise. Yeah.

No, that first study that I did of homicide of women, the publication was in 1981. And interestingly, I titled that publication, Misogative. and homicide of women. Because when I first did that study, I was really, I was angry. I was really mad at these abusers that killed their partners. I didn't understand much about it then. And there are still people that talk about femicide and it being from misogyny. And I'm like, yeah, that's limited.

Yes, a cultural milieu of misogyny, of suspicion of women, of sexism, if not hatred of women, and it depends on how you define misogyny. That context helps produce a lot of domestic violence and a lot of domestic violence homicide. Again, it's not the whole answer. And if I had to do it over again, I wouldn't have called it that, but I have learned more. I have learned a whole lot more. And, you know, the overlap of child abuse and domestic violence is a really continuing issue. And it's both that children oftentimes experience both child abuse and witnessing domestic violence. We know all of the wonderful ACEs research, adverse childhood events. The strongest ones are abuse and witnessing domestic violence.

And way back when Jeff Edelson called that the double whammy that kids all too often are experiencing. And we know and have known for a long time that witnessing domestic violence is the number one risk factor for a person growing up to use violence against partners. Now, we used to think that was because they learned by observing a parent. That's what accounted for that problem, for that growing up to do that. I think now, one of the advantages of being in the 21st century in 2025, that we're understanding more and more the brain, that very incredibly complex brain that we all have, that this witnessing domestic violence is a trauma. and that trauma affects our brains and makes some real issues in terms of hypervigilance. I mean, we think about it as PTSD in adults and that repeated exposure to trauma rather than one big trauma. It's, you know, repeated.

Sort of like the complex PTSD framework. Right. It's that complex PTSD. Exactly. And when you think about it, I always think, okay, what does PTSD look like in a four-year-old? And we have kids that get labeled as being unable to regulate their behavior, emotional dysregulation. We have all kinds of names we call it. Sometimes we diagnose them as having ADHD.

Rather than thinking about how do we heal brains who have been traumatized, that have been traumatized. traumatized. What are the healing strategies we can do? When I think about what we can do for four-year-olds is we ought to use the arts. We ought to use nature, right? We know that these things can be healing. And yet, all too often kids who grow up in homes where there's violence between the parents, they are not able to have a whole summer at camp. Or their schools that are chronically underfunded decide what they're going to stop doing is providing art teachers and trauma teachers, right? And when you think about it, these things conspire to perpetuate domestic violence and make it worse. And more often, and more people, that we're, as a society, we are not providing the kinds of, interventions that we need to for, you know, there are exceptions to that. The Camp Hope, the Family Justice Centers provide this wonderful Camp Hope, but it's only in a few communities that have been able to put together the funding for that. If we could provide that for every

child in this country who has witnessed domestic violence at home, that could get us somewhere or has been abused by a parent. Yeah. But our resources are scarce. We need to think about how do we incorporate at least a little bit of this in every school, in every preschool in the country. How do we help preschool teachers recognize kids who are experiencing violence at home in some way and work with them?

Summer is upon us. Finally, and if you're looking to refresh your wardrobe with the change in seasons, Quince has got you covered. Cruise on over to Quince and check out their summer edit for a high-quality, expertly curated selection of warm weather essentials. Like the tensile jersey fit and flare dress, their linen vests, pants, and shorts, and even swimwear. I am a sucker for a good one-piece, so I just ordered the Italian Plunge One Piece in Cherry. it's giving Riviera. It's giving, I really need a vacation. They also have super cute shorts, shades, sandals, and totes, and you're getting the luxury without the markup because as with everything from Quince, they work directly with safe ethical factories to bring you these beautiful items. You know I love Quince and I love hearing from listeners who love Quince. So give me a shout and let me know

if you've been shopping over there. Are you into their maxi dresses, their sleek jewelry, their Italian leather handbags, tell me everything. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com slash believe for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash believe for free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash believe. And remember that shopping our sponsors helps support the show.

I wanted to ask specifically about sort of awareness because I think, that is where I feel that I and my colleagues in the media can really play an important role. And unfortunately, that overall is sort of going in the wrong direction at the moment. And so that's really something that I wanted to zero in on as a sort of like more holistic view because it's really interesting to hear you talking about, you know, doing this study that was published in 1981. I was born in 1982. And I am also a true crime podcaster. So I'm in this space. And like, I think this is such an accepted piece of conventional wisdom now that women who are murdered are going to be murdered by a romantic or former romantic partner.

It's just like such an accepted fact. But obviously that's because of people who did pioneering research like you did. I'm in this position where I'm trying to, again, based on a lot of data and research and experience from survivors, I'm having kind of a similar experience to what it sounds like you had when you were a nurse and you're, you know, you're talking to people in the, in the. field, you're talking to survivors, you're talking to people who've been through it, and you're doing this academic research, and that sort of is, I think, such a great and sort of holistic way to approach these things. And, you know, I'm in this position where I'm trying to help people understand that Munchausen by proxy is more common than what they have realized and all of these things. And of course, I'm encountering quite a bit of resistance to that idea. And I assume that when you first

introduced this research back in the 80s, and this was such an interesting time. in terms of like how we were coping with the whole picture of how violent homes could be that people abused children, right? I mean, you look at the 1970s, you had CAPTA, you had just this. And then we had a whole satanic panic about it to cope with our crazy feelings about it. And that's like a whole other rub, a whole week could go down. But like there is like a very, when we are telling people things that scare them, when we are telling people that your neighbor and a person that you is not a monster, right?

is not a Satanist who's performing crazy rituals or a person who's conspiring and evil and not a monstrous person, a person that you recognize, a person you see at school drop off, a person that you would be friends with, is doing something that you find unimaginable and horrific, like murdering their spouse or beating their spouse up or hitting their children, that we have so much trouble, even now still, you know, 40 years on past this, accepting that fact. And so I wonder when you were in this position, when you were in the 80s, in the 90s, when there was this huge movement towards, I mean, obviously we have come a long way in recognizing that these things happen and are real. What was that like when you were first rolling out that? That research, I assumed that there was a fair amount of resistance to what you were saying.

Absolutely. And that whole notion behind closed doors. So oftentimes, and part of educating the public in these issues, we've seen. sort of at first, everybody's like, oh, no, you know, it couldn't be. You know, this professional white middle class man couldn't possibly be abusing his wife. That just doesn't, you know, I know him, I work with him, couldn't possibly be. And so we worked really hard to establish it does happen. It happens way too often.

There are abuse of men from every different walk of life. You know, that was part of it at the beginning. I was trying to convince people. It wasn't a psychopath who was doing this, or it wasn't somebody who was also robbing people and being violent in other situations. So all of that was really necessary. And we all did it well.

We had great media. And, you know, I always think the O.J. Simpson case was part of the national consciousness. Right. Having to look at someone who was a beloved figure and then accept that they were capable of this. Right. Right. But it kind of, as things do, swung the other way. and where people thought that every abuser was a monster.

And every abused woman was beaten up within an inch of her life. You know, the why does she stay kind of thing. And so we were able and wonderful pioneers like Ellen Pence in the 1990s was able to establish that oftentimes she stays. because he's controlled her. And those kinds of conceptions were helpful. What I say now is, yeah, that was the 1990s. Let's get a little more sophisticated. Yeah. And so actually what that is, you know, one of my big questions, I think, when you look at, and especially where it's connected to possible abuse of the children, and there's a lot to unpack and sort of like maybe what those,

what women sort of go through with what they tell themselves about what their husband wouldn't wouldn't do. But even before we get to that, what are maybe some of our big misconceptions about the dynamics in terms of why women stay when they're being subjected to abuse and violence at home? Yeah. And I would say that most of the women that I know that stay is they're thinking about the long run. They're thinking about their kids. They want their kids to grow up with a father. They love this man. They didn't start up with him because he was a monster. They started up with him because he, most of the time, is wonderful. The sex most of the time is really good, which is something that that's really interesting. Is that like something specifically that people bring up a lot?

Is there something about maybe like a combustible dynamic there? I mean, I guess, you know, I'm just curious. Only if you know to ask. And because in those, you know, the studies I did about health effects, you know, one of the things that you see with women who are abused by partners is more sexually transmitted diseases. You see more urinary tract infections. So if you, like me, if you're trying to figure out, okay, why would that be? We need to talk about sex. don't we? And being a nurse, doing those kinds of studies, we learned a lot. And one of the things we learned is that dangerous abusers will physically force her to have sex sometimes, not all the time. And, you know, and this is one of the things that for these women is very confusing and very, you know,

wait a minute, what accounts for this? Let me try and figure this out. So like I say, women are strong and smart and resourceful and they're trying to make this relationship, this marriage, this co-parenting relationship work. They know it will be healthier for their kids. If there's not a breakup, I had one woman say to me, It was about six, eight months ago. So we were talking, and I had done the danger assessment with her, and we were talking about the whole situation. And she had called the police.

She was black. She was scared. She had called the police. One of the things, one of the intersections here with the criminal justice system is, we know that our criminal justice system has biases in it, that young black men will be arrested for things that young white men would get a slap on the wrist. You know, they'd get a talking to. So young black men end up with a rap sheet or priors or however you want to describe it,

much more often than young white men for doing, having the same adolescent stupidity experiences is what I call. So when it comes to domestic violence, this woman said, the thing I regret is I call the police and he had some priors and they threw him in jail. Now, if it had been his first domestic violence offense, if he was white, if he had no priors, no way he would have gone to jail. And her son and his son, seven years old, said, Mommy, why did you put daddy? in jail. And she's like, that will haunt me for the rest of my life. Yeah. And I think that really, that to me speaks to this thing that I think about a lot in these cases, where people are sort of faced with an impossible situation once the incident happens. If you could catch it earlier and because once something terrible happens, then you're an impossible situation because now you're

either, and I, you know, these sort of women are faced with, okay, there's going to be obviously a whole bunch of terrible things that could happen to my child either way, right? Because if I report my partner to the police and he ends up in prison or we end up divorced, and then you also talk about how there's an escalated risk of harm upon the woman choosing to leave, right? So then you're also escalating your own risk and your children's risk. And then on the other hand, if you don't do anything. Or if you don't report, if you don't, they could hurt you worse. They could kill you. They could harm your children, even if things don't get to a horrible extreme. Now your children are having this complex trauma situation that they're in and they're more likely to go and harm their

partners. And it's like, what a horrible set of decisions to be faced with. Exactly. And my contention is we as a society and our media portrayals of this issue have to somehow reflect the complexity of it. Our National Domestic Violence Hotline is awesome. But their advertisements are, you know, a bloodied and bruised woman. Here's where she can call for help. Well, that firmly puts in the public mind. that abused women are bloodied and bruised and horribly beaten all the time. And why would they stay? What does it look more like? Like if we have a better, if we have sort of a more representative

avatar, I guess, like what, what does that look? Because I think, I think that is right. We think about like the woman with a black eye saying, I fell down the stairs and like that's the sort of archetypal idea, right? So like what does it look more like? It looks. more like a relationship that has problems. Maintaining a happy, healthy, intimate relationship is hard. Raising children together is hard, especially if there's economic troubles. It's hard. And you're going to have disagreements. And for some women, as sometimes I've had women say to me, well, sometimes it does get physical. We fight a lot. And sometimes it does get physical. But, and I've had women say this to me, but it's not domestic violence. I don't need to go to the police or call a hotline or go to one

of these shelters. In Baltimore, we have the House of Ruth. Full service, wonderful, domestic violence organization. And I said to one woman, I said, would you like for me to get you in touch for the people at the House of Ruth? You know, I know them. I can do a warm handoff. I can dial the phone and let you talk or whatever you want to do. She said, no, they're just going to want me to leave. And I'm like, not necessarily. She says, I've talked to them. I've been there. That's what they're about. That's not what I want to do. What you got for him? What you got for an intervention for him that will help him change? I know him. I've lived with him for, you know, whatever, however many years we have kids together. I know him. He's capable of doing different. He

doesn't hit me all the time. What have he got for him? And she said, says he wants to change. Now, traditionally the domestic violence movement would say, oh, no, that's just another manipulation on his part. He doesn't really want to change. He's, you know, just trying to keep her. Well, human beings are complicated. There's a lot of stuff that goes into that. Yeah, he wants her to stay. Yeah. He promises to change when he doesn't know how to. You know, and that's where I say, we, as a country need to provide interventions that work for him. Yeah, and I really appreciate that perspective. So my kids are little. I have a seven-year-old and a three-and-a-half-year-old. And my older one is a girl, my younger one's a boy. So I think I'm maybe more attuned even than I used to be about sort of like

how we talk about men, how we look at men. There's all these conversations about sort of like men are lost, men are lonely, all this stuff, right? There's so much cultural conversation around it right now. And I think sometimes there is, I think, pretty understandable kind of like feminist pushback to like they need to solve their own problems. And I'm like, yeah, like they should take agency. And on the other hand, this is all of our problem. Yes, it's not, oh, all the women now need to like do fix all the men. But like, we're all on the same boat here. Like we're just on so many things. I'm just like, you guys, we all go down together if we go down. Right. Like it's not. We can't just be like, those guys over there. And so I really appreciate that and think about how masculinity is such a

prison, that that's something that deserves empathy more than we're giving it right now. Absolutely. And when men and women are suspicious of each other and each other's motives, if guys say, or the only reason, you know, she's just trying to get a meal ticket or, you know, That's the only reason that she's going to bed with me is she's just looking to trap me. You know, if there's that kind of suspicion, I think one of the things that we've lost is the kind of sex education in high school that was led by really skilled teachers who could help young men and young women together. You know, now if we do sex education, we put the girls over there and the boys over there,

They could learn so much from each other in terms of each other's viewpoints on these really difficult topics. And we could at least do that in college. There's a college course I know at Georgia State where the nickname for it is how to have great sex. And it's oversubscribed. Yeah, I bet. Yeah. You know. And they have very frank talks about both.

sex and also abusive sex, sexual assault, all of those kinds of things in a very, and it's young men and young women together. And how else are they going to learn what the opposite sex really thinks and hopes about this kind of thing? With a skilled instructor, I'm like, that's every university, every community college in the country should be offering that. as a basic course, just like we have English as a required course. But that's the kind of thing. As communities, we need to say, okay, maybe we're afraid to have it in high school. Stupid for us to be, but maybe we're afraid. But we could at least have it in college. We could at least have that kind of a course, life skills. I don't care what you call it,

but we'll get around if it actually helps kids with this. I think the whole masculinity is, I mean, there's some feminists, I'm a feminist, don't get me wrong. There's some feminists that say, oh, we need to change the masculine traditions and norms. We need to change them. And I'm like, uh-uh, let's build on what we've got. You know, one of the traditional masculinity's norms is that men should protect their families, right? That's a good one. We just need to include in protection, protecting their families from themselves, the worst of their angels, too.

Yeah, that's a beautiful reframe, yeah. And so I'm like, you know, girlfriends, like Jackson Cats work. I don't know if you heard of him. But he has a wonderful new book out that now I'm going to forget what the name of it is, but it's about getting men to address issues of violence against women. And it's got a better title. But he does a great job of saying, you know, come on, guys, let's get in this together with women. Let's work on this.

And it's your issue as well as the, rapist issue when there's violence against women. There's such a productive conversation to be had here about prevention and intervention. And I think that the first step before any of those good things can happen, before you can have interventions of art and nature and mental health care and holistic, you know, healing of a family that has taken that first step down the road or that has those. risk factors. It's like you cannot do any of those things without looking at the problem. And why I'm so frustrated and angry about these projects like take care of Maya, like these big

fearmongering doctors are just abuse, you know, diagnosing abuse willy-nilly. No evidence that they're doing that, of course, but does not stop the media stories from rolling. Why I'm so frustrated about that is it's presenting itself as a conversation about helping families. And to me, it's the exact opposite. Because if we won't look at what is actually happening in families, then we can't do anything to prevent the harm. Right. I find it helpful to think about primary prevention as helping prevent these things from happening in the first place. So, trying to do everything we can to help families thrive and help families be healthy and providing decent housing and food and things like that.

It would do a lot to help families be healthy and provide healthy childhoods for kids. But then where I think we're the most lacking and is secondary prevention, that's recognizing problems when they first emerge, when they first little rearing ugly heads of issues, and helping people non-punitively, non, you know, get resources to, nip it in the butt, whatever we want to call it. But we first have to recognize a problem emerging.

when it's early and then providing strategic interventions to keep it from getting big. Because otherwise, we end up with having to do tertiary prevention, which is like, oh, my God, it's bad and we're just trying to prevent the ultimate harms. Yeah, which is where we're necessarily talking about, right? because I think that's like, if you're talking about a situation where there's already a CPS intervention that's happening, there's a police intervention, and even by the time someone is being diagnosed by a child abuse pediatrician, abuse has happened. That child is coming in with a brain injury or broken bone or their Munchausen by proxy case. And like we have gone past those first sort of posts. We're in now the tertiary situation. It would be very easy for someone like me. And I feel. this way sometimes, candidly, to look at, in particular the women in this situation. And I think so much about one of the sort of my overarching interest of this show is sort of like our wrong assumptions about motherhood and what motherhood is and the limitations of it and all of that.

And I think like part of the reason much has my proxy, because it's mostly female perpetrators by a wide margin, masquerades is all this cultural sort of stuff we have around motherhood. And I think it's happening in these cases too in kind of a different way. I've thought a lot about why we're not seeing the men in the media defending themselves. We're seeing the women. They're sending the women. Motherhood is, I think, our most potent cultural archetype, right? When we're seeing women who are defending their husbands, once we've gotten there, once the child has been harmed, and it's a serious enough injury to end up in one of these cases, the easy answer, especially on like a true crime podcast, would be like, send in the cavalry. They should call the police,

they should cooperate with CPS. They should do whatever they need to do to defend their husband or their children from their husband. It would be easy to see that as like, that's the right answer. That's what a good person would do. That's what a good mom would do.

And we all listening to it at home can say, that's what I would do. I would never let that happen in my house. I would never defend my husband if he were harming my children. And I think that that's too easy. I think that that's too black and white. And that's too much about the comfort of the listener.

So can you give us a better framework for the woman who ends up in the impossible situation of my husband has harmed my child? And now I have to decide, do I want that husband who I love, who is the father of my children, to go to jail? do I want to deal with the economic burden that will now be on me and the family? Do I want to deal with the public shame of all of that? It's like, can you give us a better sort of idea of what those women are sort of up against once it comes to that moment? Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about motherhood, that once we as women become mother, that all of a sudden we get a little bit more of a halo.

Yes, we ascend. Yeah. Right. Right. Even though it's really, really hard. And no one is ever doing it right. We're also, yeah, we're also like completely open for criticism on all fronts and we have now ascended to that. And we're sure we're not doing it right every day. You know, we make a hundred different decisions about our kids. And we're like probably 95 were you. And two were really good and three were really terrible. you have to make so many.

And then you get in a situation worse, a really big decision. And you know it's a big decision. But you're no better equipped in that moment in time to make a really good decision than you are, you know, if your kid gets hit with a baseball bat at school and has his head bashed in. there's no manual that gives you all of the right decisions to make for all of the moments that you're going to have. And in our society, moms are with kids more than dad is. So most of these decisions are on us. So that motherhood thing is a big, it's both one of the biggest joys in the world,

but it's also a huge responsibility. And so I just think that we have to give each other and ourselves some grace. We're not going to be right all the time. And hopefully one of the things we can provide for each other when we're talking to each other in the park, in the grocery store, wherever, some grace, some listening to each other, listening to our daughters, who are mothers, listening to our mothers when we're grown or growing up. You know, I don't know any other way to say it besides give each other some grace,

give each other some forgiveness, be careful about being judgmental of ourselves or of other women for what they do. And helping our friends, our colleagues, people we run into not judge themselves and not interpret looks as being judgmental on somebody else's part. Yeah. And in terms of sort of like if you are a parent who's looking at that fork in the road or if we are a person looking at someone who has faced, that fork in the road. Like, there's so much of this media conversation right now, it's focused on

the narrative of the parents and their rights. And we were sort of talking about, like, how these conversations around patriarchy and sort of, and I think like this, this sort of very, again, just like a very culturally embedded notion of like a family and keeping a nuclear family together. And that's something that can really impede our conversations around dealing with some of these other issues, right? That sort of this ultimate thing is to have kids raised in a two-parent household and that's the best outcome always, right? And I think so much of the anxiety around that is sort of this idea of like, oh, family structures are changing and all, you know, all these things we've been going through in various waves throughout since the 70s in

particular. And like, and then that you sort of lived through. And I wonder, like, obviously, like, there is data to suggest that having a parent go to jail, having your parents' separate from each other, especially in like a contentious way, having to then live through a custody battle. Like, we know that those harms to children are real and the harms to not having any kind of interventions are real. So how can we evaluate those sort of two options, recognizing that we very sorely need a better third option? Talking about especially something as that as misunderstood as much as in my proxy, it's like, we always still tell people. people report and call the police. And like, we know those aren't great interventions, but they are

the only ones we have right now. And right now, if a child's ending up in the hospital with abusive head trauma or broken bones, or like, to me, sending that child back without any kind of intervention is not acceptable. And it's especially not acceptable to then somehow scapegoat the doctor who just made the diagnosis. I firmly believe. that there are lines that you can cross as a parent where you should no longer have rights to your children anymore. And one of them is causing them brain injuries, breaking their bones, sexually abusing them, starving them, poisoning them. Like, there are just some lines that we should just be like, no, that person, we don't even need to do that in a particularly judgmental way. We don't need to say that person's a monster.

We just need to say, you know what, that person is not a person that could provide a safe home for their child. And I happen to believe that children have an inalienable right to be safe with the adults who are, raising them and around them. Yeah, right. But I also want to, I want to maintain some empathy for the parents that are facing this choice that like both outcomes are bad. So like, I guess, yeah, how should we like look at that decision? First of all, you know, there are many different chapters in a person's life. And we talk about forks in the road, but sometimes there's, you can take one path and then still get back to, you know, do some redemptive things, et cetera, and so forth. So I believe that...

Ziggs and zags, yeah. Yeah. That has to be possible. But it may well be that while the child is a child, that there are certain parents that should not have any contact with them, but that doesn't mean when that child becomes an adult that they don't reach back out. They don't try and reestablish some sort of ties, try, and bless them. If they're able to do that, bless that offending parent, if they're able to get the kind of help they need to take a different path.

I'm basically an optimist. You know, I do believe human beings are capable of changing for the most part. There are some truly evils out there, but fortunately, most are not. as I said, if we can do that secondary prevention, if we can find signs of this person going down a dark path early, early, where there's a chance of early redemption. If it gets really bad, they may have to be separated from society, put in jail for time being, at least. with that we had better mental health services in our jails so that it wasn't just a more traumatizing, more evil-creating experience in our jails.

I look at other societies like Norway, for instance, which in the Maine has very low levels of violent behavior across the board. If you get put in jail, it's like 10 hours. a day therapy, practically. That's the correction institutions are their job is to correct this person's behavior. Seriously, I mean, it's almost inconceivable, right, with the system that we have, right? But they have the very best therapists working with incarcerated individuals because it's a big challenge. How did this person get so far down the wrong path? What did we do wrong? So I don't know that that's going to happen here. But let's think about the possibility of at least more of that

as part of incarceration. Let's recognize that what we're doing now, I ain't working, but that's the kind of thing that it takes a lot of people saying. And I'm like, you know, some of the low tax rates we give billionaires, we could. You're speaking my language, Jackie. we just like to pretend that everything's impossible because there just isn't enough money and I'm like there's enough money there really is they're just so is yeah but that's another conversation probably not for this podcast but it's okay we like to hit that note every once a while just remind people remind people that actually these are not impossible conversations and we could have them if we all decided to yeah you know musk is getting three billion dollars a year

Yeah, no, subsidize their stupid projects. Yes, no, I know. Right. But anyway, I do think, I mean, that's my bottom line on this. And when it gets to tertiary, when we get these people that do horrible harms, yes, we have to totally take away any of their parental rights. We have to incarcerate if necessary. We just can't tolerate that behavior if it gets that bad. And like you say, and let's not blame it on the doctor who didn't recognize evil when they see it because that's not what they usually see nor what they're supposed to see. But at the same time, let's get, we can do a better job of educating physicians and nurses. A lot of people forget that it's nurses that are with that child in the hospital and observing those parents. let's get better child abuse teams in hospitals and that also are available to outpatient settings where there's nothing like a pediatrician or a pediatric nurse practitioner observing a parent with their kid to say, oh, not good here.

Yeah. And how do we deal with it before it gets bad? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's really, I think particularly for Munchausen by proxy cases. Yeah. But I think probably also in these cases too. And I think like I'm interested in your viewpoint as someone who has been, again, lived through the satanic panic.

And sort of all of these like very maybe good intention, but very wrongheaded directions that we've gone in our sort of societal, which I'd say obviously we have made a lot of progress, you know, accepting that domestic violence, child abuse. child sex abuse, like that these things are real, accepting that they happen from family members, from trusted people. Like, obviously, we have come so far on so many of those things. And right now, we are in a strange backside. And, like, the people who are adopting this, parents are being falsely accused of child abuse narrative, are not idiots. And they're not conspiracy theorist. And they're not, I mean, there are some of those, too. But, like, they're not all these, like, Q&on whack job, way down the rabbit hole, that person's obviously like, they're like otherwise respectable journalists. Do you have any thoughts on why, why are we backsliding on this right now, do you

think? Well, I think it's our inability to say sometimes. Sometimes there are parents that, you know, sometimes there are physicians that fail to recognize. And this is, has always been the media, the public's wish, want for a story that has always, that does away with complexities, that gives us easy answers. So if we just did this, that problem would go away. And me as a consumer, I want some problems to be easy, thank you. What I do professionally, is too hard anyway. And so if you could just tell me the exact answer to the hormone replacement, whatever, I want the answer. Never mind all this. Yeah, but sometimes, and you should also think about this. So you think part of this is sort of, what can we call it, nuance fatigue? Right, right.

Yeah, because I think a lot about why doctors make such good scapegoats. in particular. And I think in these cases, right, for one thing, there's HIPAA, there's everything that happens in family court is sealed, right? So it's like, which I wish my colleagues in the media would do a better job of just at least acknowledging if they're going to talk about these stories. So you have this like very asymmetrical thing. But then even then, right, like I spend a lot of time talking to doctors and other medical professionals. Y'all don't talk in black and white ways, right? I mean, I talk to detectives as well. They are very black and white, right? Like they're like, or just, just in general.

Generalities, obviously, many of my, you know, I've talked to many people in law enforcement that appreciate nuance and are very thoughtful. But, like, their job is, they're looking for evidence. They're looking for a yes or no. Did the person do it? Guilty not guilty. Totally different framework, right? Prosecutors, detectives, like that's, and that they shouldn't, like, that is their job, right?

I want to recognize that is their job. It's not a feeling of theirs. But doctors, you're looking at probabilities and data and differential diagnosis and, like, all these other things that are just not black and white. And I think we're so uncomfortable with that. Something I think about with child abuse pediatricians, it's like, here is what we do know about child abuse pediatricians. They are the most skillful. They are the most knowledgeable because that's the job.

That is literally the job is to be the most knowledgeable doctor about child abuse in a medical setting. And they're still humans. And they're going to make human errors. and I think we're so uncomfortable with that because of the stakes. Because that's like one of the most high-stake jobs I can imagine. You make an error to one side and then, you know, the family has to suffer these consequences of prison and separation of these. You make an error to the other side. You could end up with a dead child on your hands.

That is such high-stakes work. And we just don't want them to make any errors. And to be clear, a lot of the media that's presented, their errors, I don't think are errors. I think there are just a lot of cases that are like just being painted as errors. I think the question that like no one kind of wants to grapple with, what is the acceptable rate of error in that job? It can't be zero. It cannot be zero because they're human beings. We cannot say that because they made an error once or twice that that's over a 30 year career. We want it to be zero, right? We want it to be zero. And just like we want the guilty or innocent verdict,

We want zero mistakes there. But that's never going to be possible. And part of it is you hope that those doctors have figured out ways to sleep at night and not second guess themselves. Probably isn't helping that they're being painted as villains in the media right now. I would imagine. No, it doesn't. It doesn't help to have people calling their offices and telling them their evil baby snatchers.

I would imagine this is not helping. I get some of those emails myself, so I, you know, whatever, I just don't read them. But it's such a challenge because I think, yeah, you're right. We want black and white solutions. We want these perfect solutions. I think, again, we need to sort of revisit what we have agreed upon as a society because in the criminal justice system, we've agreed upon this framework that will let 10 guilty people go free rather than in prison one innocent person, right?

Not every society has that framework. We've decided. So, right, and that's an uncomfortable thing. We don't like the idea of someone getting away with a heinous crime, but we've decided that that's better, right? If we want to re-decide that, if we want to relitigate that, we can, but that's the system that we have. We all recognize that that system's feeling.

So I think you have to, like, when you're looking at like, oh, well, these people weren't charged, that must mean they didn't do it. No, our system is specifically set up to let more innocent people go free than falsely in prison guilty people. So it's like, if we're not operating in that framework. You know, we always have to accept, like, that is the framework we have. That just is. That's an absolute. And then on the other hand, from CAPTA forward, we have decided that the framework we want for protecting children is that we err on the side of caution because the outcome of a dead child is the worst possible outcome out of any outcomes. Right. So I've seen people sort of criticizing over vigilance or safe but sorry, but I'm like, but that's the laws that we have. And we have those for a reason, right? Because we've decided that children who are.

are precious and vulnerable and innocent should be protected from the adults in their life if those adults are going to subject them to harm. And like, we've decided that it's better to err on protecting those children than it is to like sort of put a family through a separation and a child that they wouldn't have other heights. So it's like, I feel like any conversation that doesn't start with like, this is the framework we're operating in, is just a bad faith conversation. Yeah. Obviously, hopefully, since you began this work, you have seen meaningful progress. Maybe like what are one or two of those things that you think could be sort of built upon to make further progress in things like

domestic violence and child abuse in terms of those primary and secondary preventative intervention. Yeah. Well, it's a big puzzle. Lots of different pieces need to be in play. But I think we need to do a better job of engaging early childhood educators, our head start teachers, for instance, to be attuned to when things are off in a family and just, you know, observing moms or dads, pick up kids after school. What's the dynamic? And does this dynamic keep happening that makes you, And we need to therefore get more of this in their educational programs, what they have to do to get certified as a preschool educator. The same thing for nurses and for physicians in their medical education or nursing education. We need to bring things up like

the Munchausen's syndrome and what it might look like early. It's one thing to recognize when it's really bad and know there's such thing, but what about in, again, early signs in when a mom brings a child to the doctor for their regular checkups? What are the kinds of things? and we need to do some more research to figure out what are those red flags, what are those things that make us think, okay, this interaction is starting to look like a problem to me.

Not a full-blown problem. There's no signs that she's poisoning the kid. But what early on makes you think, you know, I just don't, this interaction, I don't like it. Let's get somebody more qualified than me in here. right now to do an observation to videotape the interaction with this parent. And yes, we're going to have to do HIPAA stuff. But we can say things like we're doing a study and we're, you know, taping 50% of our interactions. And just so we can learn what are those early signs that something is

off and get that family interventions early. Yeah, and is that something that you've seen as awareness of domestic violence and intimate partner violence? And like, as those, as awareness of those things has grown in your field, you know, have you seen those things be effective or we have a long way to go still? We have a long way to go. We're trying to get nurses and physicians able to ask about domestic violence in a way that somebody feels like they can disclose. And we've been a little bit successful, not entirely. We're still trying to work on it. We still have this thing that, you know, if a doctor sees or a nurse sees domestic violence gets somebody to disclose that we're like, oh, well, then you need to go to the shelter. Yeah. You need to leave. So anyway, I think as we work on it,

at least we've increased awareness about domestic violence. So we've increased the health care system is increasingly aware, and they are accepting of asking. So it takes time, and it takes nurses and physicians becoming comfortable with these issues. So, yeah, I think that can happen, but that's the secondary prevention is where I think we need to just do a whole lot more work. Yeah. Secondary prevention or early intervention. Yeah. I'm always wanting to have these conversations side by side because, yes, I am on a true crime podcast by the time I am talking about it,

it is too late for those things to have happened. And I think like, what could have been done? What could have been done? I think it's valuable to talk about what lessons, can we learn from this situation that did go too far about how it might not have gone so far. Because I think, too, like, I appreciate what you said about sort of like men and not seeing them as irredeemable and even violent men because I mostly talked about female perpetrators. And I mostly am talking about people that end up on my show that I end up covering on my show are people who do not have a capacity, I don't think, to feel remorse. They've really crossed this sort of series of lines that they are in this very specific. And then a lot of the people in these sort of the physical abuse

cases are just completely different, right? They're not the remorseless lack of complete utter inability to feel empathy. I mean, I do think they are living with the weight. Yeah. Right. And how do we as a society figure out psychopaths when they're young? Because there are truly evil people. So, what do we do to figure them out early? Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. And we do need to learn from the horrific learn as a society. I mean, I think we collectively need to take a little bit, more responsibility for both protecting children, seeing problems early, all the children we see in our neighborhood, we need to start thinking they all belong to us and all the moms that we interact with to help them be good moms and make some of those complex decisions and not feel

like they're alone. Yeah, I really agree with that. And I so appreciate this. conversation because I struggle in this job sometimes to maintain the level of empathy that I would like to maintain, or I feel too much of it. It's sort of a tublish sort of. But that really, I think it's always good to sort of ground this in the humanity of all the people that we're talking about, while also saying that some things are just not acceptable and we should not hide them, excuse them, or keep them away from view. I do think these narratives about false accusation when there has not been a false accusation are one of the worst things we could do actually for all the people involved in the situation because I don't think it makes life better for the person who got away

with it. I don't think it makes life better for the partner who's defending them. And it certainly doesn't make life better for the kids. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, Jackie, thank you so much for your work. It's really incredible. I'm just a I'm a great admirer. So thank you so much for being here with us. Thanks, Andrea. Nobody should believe Meek is produced and hosted by me, Andrea Dunlop. Our editor is Greta Stromquist and our senior producer is Mariah Gossett. Administrative support from Nola Karmouche.