Evidence on child sexual abuse and false reports

Overview

The bill rests on an empirical premise: that false reports of sexual abuse against children and adolescents are frequent, especially in custody (cuidado personal) disputes. This review brings together the evidence published in the last five years to test that premise, and supplements it with earlier studies where there are no new data.

The evidence points in another direction. According to the largest meta-analysis published, one in five women and one in six men worldwide suffered sexual violence before the age of 18, and most victims do not report it or do so years later. The most recent review of sexual abuse allegations in family proceedings, published in 2026 and covering 47 studies, concludes that deliberately false reports are infrequent and that most reports that are not confirmed arise from genuine concern. Nor did it find that reports of sexual abuse are especially frequent in custody disputes, although the proportion of fabricated reports is higher in them. The same review warns that failing to confirm a report is not the same as proving that it was invented, which is the distinction the bill erases.

The evidence has limits that these pages state in each section: a large share of the studies on false reports predate 2010 and come from North America and Australia, and there is no measurement of false reporting of child sexual abuse in Chile or in Latin America.

False reports and unsubstantiated reports

The most complete and recent synthesis is the scoping review by Schemmel, Zell, Senberg, Sahlfeld, Otzipka, Volbert and Zumbach-Basu (2026), published open access in Trauma, Violence, & Abuse. It analysed 47 empirical studies published between 1983 and 2024, with more than 80,000 cases, on sexual abuse allegations in custody, visitation and child protection proceedings (Schemmel et al., 2026).

Source: Schemmel et al. (2026), results and table 2. The averages treat each study as one data point, without weighting by sample size.

The authors conclude that deliberately false reporting is rare, that most unsubstantiated reports arise from a genuine concern, and that the low confirmation rate may reflect the limits of the means of proof, because sexual abuse rarely leaves physical evidence. They recommend that public policy not equate lack of confirmation with fabrication.

There are also data that the opposing position invokes, and this page includes them. In the Canadian study by Trocmé and Bala (2005), covering 7,672 child protection investigations of all forms of child maltreatment in 1998, knowingly fabricated reports were 4% of the total and 12% where there was a custody dispute; in that same group, reports that were not substantiated but were made in good faith were 34%, almost three times as many. Only 14% of the fabricated reports concerned sexual abuse. Two small studies measured the proportion of fabricated sexual abuse reports in custody disputes: one from 1992, with 18 cases, put it at 16.5%, and another from 1991 at 2.2% (McGraw and Smith, 1992, and Faller, 1991, cited by Schemmel et al., 2026). These data show that false reporting exists and is more frequent in some contexts, but that, in those contexts too, good-faith reports that are not proven outnumber it. The bill allows both to be declared false through the same procedure and the same standard of presumptions.

The review also found that, among false reports, those originating with the children themselves are the least frequent: in a study of 551 cases in Denver, 2.5% were erroneous accounts originating with children, and of these only 8 cases, 1.5% of the total, were false reports (Oates et al., 2000, cited by Schemmel et al., 2026).

Custody disputes

Schemmel et al. (2026) found no evidence that sexual abuse allegations are especially frequent in custody proceedings: the Canadian studies that directly compared cases with and without a dispute found minimal differences, 5% versus 6% and 5.3% versus 4.1% (Black et al., 2016). In both groups, other forms of maltreatment were reported far more often than sexual abuse.

The review by Milchman (2024) tests three beliefs that often accompany the so-called “parental alienation” defence against an abuse allegation: that these allegations are common in custody cases, that they are usually false and that they are malicious. To do so it reviews the frequency of allegations, the substantiation rates of child protection services, court decisions and children’s disclosure patterns, including delayed disclosure and recantation (Milchman, 2024).

The data on the consequences of these defences come from the United States. In 4,338 family court rulings between 2005 and 2014, when the court accepted the so-called “parental alienation” argument against a sexual abuse allegation made by the mother, she lost custody of her children in 76% of cases, 19 of 25 (Meier, 2020, cited in Schemmel et al., 2026). In 2023 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls recommended prohibiting the use of that concept in custody litigation (A/HRC/53/36, para. 74).

Measuring false reporting

Chile has no official measurement of false reports, and the Public Prosecutor’s Office does not publish how many cases under article 211 of the Criminal Code end in a conviction. The Chilean figures available show that most cases of sexual offences against children and adolescents are closed for lack of evidence and that, when they reach judgment, more than eight in ten end in a conviction (policy brief; Fundación Amparo y Justicia, 2025).

Spain offers an example of how to measure, albeit for a different offence. The Office of the State Attorney General (Fiscalía General del Estado) reported that, between 2009 and 2021, convictions for false reporting represented on average 0.0084% of reports of gender-based violence; in 2021, 41 false reporting cases were opened out of 162,848 reports (Chequeado, 2022). The figure does not refer to child sexual abuse and counts convictions, so it does not measure all invented reports; it serves as a model of the kind of record that Chile does not have.

In the English-speaking world, the review of all cases of alleged false allegations of rape and domestic violence carried out by the Crown Prosecution Service of England and Wales between January 2011 and May 2012 found 35 prosecutions for false allegations of rape compared with 5,651 prosecutions for rape (Crown Prosecution Service, 2013).

Comparative law

In the United States, where the duty to report covers many professionals, the states that penalise false reports of child maltreatment or abuse require that the reporter knew the report was false (Child Welfare Information Gateway), and all of them grant immunity to anyone who reports in good faith, even if the facts cannot be proven (Child Welfare Information Gateway, immunity). Connecticut, for example, punishes anyone who knowingly makes a false report with a fine of up to 2,000 dollars, up to one year in prison or both, and refers those cases to the prosecutor for a criminal investigation (Child Welfare Information Gateway, Connecticut). In that model the penalty falls on the lie, is determined in criminal proceedings and is not inferred from the outcome of the original case.

Limits of the evidence

• Almost half of the 47 studies reviewed by Schemmel et al. (2026) were published in 2000 or earlier, and seven in ten in 2010 or earlier. The authors warn that forensic and judicial practice has changed since then.
• These studies come almost entirely from the United States, Canada and Australia, countries with a broad duty to report. There are no Latin American studies.
• There is no measurement of false reporting of child sexual abuse in Chile. The bill does not present one either.
• Prevalence surveys and court records measure different universes. Subtracting one from the other to estimate the current dark figure is not rigorous, as Fundación Amparo y Justicia warns.
• The search on which these pages are based is not a systematic review: it gave priority to reviews and meta-analyses in Spanish and English relevant to the bill.

Fundación para la Confianza asks the Senate to reject the bill and, instead, to legislate on how the justice system receives, investigates and resolves reports of violence against children and adolescents. Read the FPLC proposal, read the full policy brief or sign the statement.