Videotapes aid prosecution of child abuse

Few issues that government must confront are more troublesome or involve more of a tangle of emotional charge and countercharge than the issue of child abuse.

Child abuse is a horrible reality, one that reveals the dark side of human nature. Efforts to eradicate it are among the most important business of the day.

Precisely because such efforts are so important and because they are so emotionally charged, however, the allegation of child abuse can itself be badly misused.

Such allegations can and frequently are used as weapons, especially in divorce and other domestic-relations cases.

Into this volatile mix now comes the increasing likelihood that child abuse will be caught on videotape and preserved as the evidence that such tapes represent.

The celebrated videotape of what appeared to be thoroughly contemptible actions by a woman named Madelyn Toogood is the most vivid recent example. It is a good thing that her brutal, fists-flying attack on her own 4-year-old daughter was caught on videotape.

Nor should issues of privacy trump this concern. Privacy issues are implicated in many instances involving videotape, but not this one.

The law of privacy centers on whether a person has a "reasonable expectation of privacy." There can be no such reasonable expectation in the public arena of a shopping-mall parking lot -- any more than there would be for a person in a packed stadium at a football game.

So the Toogood-style wrongdoers are on notice as they go about their brutal business. They bear the burden of an increasing likelihood that their misdeeds will be caught on videotape, which usually provides solid evidence for the necessary prosecution to come.

Meanwhile, the difficulty authorities face in sifting truth from fiction in such allegations will continue, even though the process will be helped, at the margin, by the visual evidence that is now available.