Perry's Rejoinder to Chancellor's Response

I just finished reading Chancellor's response to Perry's "attack" of his work. I'm writing to encourage folks to get a login account and read the series of articles, because they are great!

I was amazed by Chancellor's responses to Perry. It was as if he's never had to defend his scholarship against the critical analysis of a peer. It's interesting how quickly Chancellor took things to a personal level. Crimeny, how did he ever manage to get a PhD? Obviously, he's used to playing in the minor leagues of scholarly inquiry.

A couple of things in Chancellor's response to Perry's critique really irked me, and I thought Perry did a good job of responding to them.

First, there was Chancellor's lament about the personal attacks he's had to endure about his work. So he lists the false accusations--that he was FF'd, that his wife is a former member, that he took money from TF, etc. RED HERRING!

Funny thing is, he completely forgot to talk about my personal letter to him and various website posts where I've pointed out he was stepping way beyond the boundaries of his professional expertise when making public pronouncements on the risk of abuse and neglect risk faced by children currently being raised in the Family. Thankfully, Perry zeroed right in on that VERY pertinent issue:

"Dr. Chancellor states that the major issue here is sexual abuse, that according to his understanding there is “no evidence of current sexual abuse,” and wonders if I have such evidence. I do not claim in my article that systemic sexual abuse is occurring now or that I have evidence for it. What I do is document Family publications, Family doctrines and beliefs, and leadership attitudes that continue to put children in harms way or deny them basic human rights."

Once again, Chancellor completely refuses to address the issue of the risk factors that put Family children "in harms way or deny them basic human rights." He also had nothing to say about Family doctrine and policies on rape. He may feel that acknowledging these things would negate his great contribution to scholarship on TF, namely, that systematic, institutionalized sexual abuse of minors is no longer an overtly practiced Family norm.

Something else I found interesting is how Chancellor mishandled the issue of "deceivers but true." Apparently, he doesn't understand what it means to practice the "deceivers but true" doctrine, because he seemed to think it's simply about lying. He says he was trained as an FBI investigator in a previous career, and he knows the basics of interrogation. Therefore, he could cut through the outright lies of his interviewees and get to the truth. But he doesn't say a word about how his methodology accounts for the omissions and half-truths of the people he interrogated. Which was exactly the point of Perry's article--a researcher checks for omissions and half-truths in an oral account by interviewing a wide group of people that includes former members.

One last thing--I got a kick out of Chancellor making a point to say Perry can write well, as though it gave Perry an unfair advantage. Good writing is about clear thinking, pure and simple. Great job, Perry!