April 20, 2012

David Finkelhor’s “Nursery Crimes: Sexual Abuse in Day Care” (1988) helped lay the foundation for the moral panic that would soon engulf Edenton and so many other ill-starred towns.

Finkelhor, a respected and widely published sociologist at the University of New Hampshire, built a Potemkin village of statistical tables – “Victim Characteristics by Type of Perpetrator,” etc. – that concealed the utter worthlessness of his data. He was wrong from the first chapter, accepting unsubstantiated claims of ritual abuse as reality, to the last, recommending that “parents, licensing and law-enforcement officials be educated to view females as potential sex-abusers.”

This is from a recent exchange Finkelhor and I had via email:

Q: In “Nursery Crimes” you accept that ritual sexual abuse did in fact occur at Little Rascals, McMartin, Wee Care, etc., and give little credence to the “backlash” against such prosecutions. Has your position changed?

A: This was a while ago and I have not revisited the case. Our research did not conduct any independent review of the evidence, but simply coded the conclusion of the investigator we interviewed. So I was neither an authority about the validity of claims at the time or at the present.

Q: Yes, I understand that your research and analysis relied entirely on “local investigating agencies (that) had decided that abuse had occurred” (p. 13).

But I’m not finding in “Nursery Crimes” any skepticism about these prosecutorial allegations. In fact, the book seems only to reinforce the belief that satanic ritual abuse was a frequent occurrence in the nation’s day cares. Am I misjudging it?

Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck are but two of the researchers who have detailed the contaminated interview techniques that supported each of these cases. And of course almost all the defendants eventually went free, either when charges were dropped or their guilty verdicts overturned.

Would you consider returning to this subject and, if you so chose, changing your public position? I know the defendants – innocent citizens who saw their lives crushed by unfounded charges – would appreciate it.

—

No response yet to my second question. If I receive one, I’ll post it.

Dec. 28, 2015

“One problem with pardons is that Presidents have considered them in secret, springing the decisions on the public only after they have been made. In high-profile cases, like Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton’s pardon of the fugitive financier Marc Rich, the political repercussions have been disastrous.

“But Obama could avoid this problem with some innovation – and sunshine. Over the last year of his Presidency, his Administration should publish the names of people being considered for pardons. In this way, members of the public can make their views known about the wisdom (or lack thereof) of letting each individual out of prison.

“All Presidents and governors (who also have pardon power) are haunted by the possibility that they might release someone who goes on to commit horrible crimes. (Former Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas pardoned several people who did just that.)”

– From “It’s Time for Obama to Go Big on Pardons” by Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker (Dec. 22)

Yes, the risk attached to granting pardons is real. But is it even possible for someone convicted of an imaginary crime – such as the Edenton Seven and Junior Chandler – to be a recidivist?

July 22, 2013

“Precisely because of human fallibility, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Now, I know that (alien-abduction theorist) Budd Hopkins responds that extraordinary claims require extraordinary investigations. And I have two kinds of responses to that.

“There is a claim that a brontosaurus is tramping through the jungles today in the Republic of Congo. Should a massive expedition be mounted with government funds to find it, or it is so implausible as not to be worth serious sustained systematic attention?

“My second point is that to the extent that extraordinary claims require extraordinary investigations, those investigations must be true to the spirit of science. And that means highly skeptical, demanding, rigorous standards of evidence. There’s not a hint of that from alien abduction enthusiasts.”

– From “Carl Sagan on Alien Abduction” on NOVA (Feb. 27, 1996)

I’m just trying to imagine the Little Rascals prosecutors and therapists conferring after a long day of bullying 3-year-olds and asking themselves whether their investigations had been “true to the spirit of science.”

Feb. 13, 2012

“It is evident that, although mistakes were made in the handling of the (Little Rascals) case, these children definitely were sexually abused by one or more individuals at the day care center. To suggest otherwise is to revictimize these smallest victims.

“As a professor of social work at UNCG whose specialty is child abuse, I would like the public to be aware that research has shown that 97-99 out of 100 children who report that they have been sexually abused are telling the truth. When a child tells you that an unauthorized adult is ‘playing doctor’ with him/her, it is highly likely that he/she is describing some sort of abuse.

“If you do not believe the child, you become part of the victimization of that child. If you believe that detection and prosecution of child abuse cases are witch hunts, then you protect child molesters and allow them to continue to traumatize children. I cannot imagine that the responsible people of this state want to put themselves on the side of criminals who abuse children.”

Elisabeth Porter Hurd, Greensboro

– From a letter to the editor of the Greensboro News & Record, June 9, 1997

Does Dr. Hurd still believe that the Little Rascals children “definitely were sexually abused”? And that to doubt the prosecution’s case was to “protect child molesters and allow them to continue to traumatize children”?

Last week I asked Dr. Hurd whether she might have changed her mind – so far no response.