Aug. 21, 2013

“Some advocates have suggested secure facilities for America’s child sex trafficking victims…. Such facilities force troubled children into a system of care that may be just as exploitive as with a pimp/trafficker.

“Countless women continue to seek restitution for the sexual abuse by employees assigned to supervise them while in detention in the ’60s and ’70s – some of these women have children fathered by detention employees….

“So then why do we talk about secure facilities for child victims of sex trafficking? Because ‘sex is at issue’ in their victimization….

“Child sex trafficking is not the first social issue to create moral panic around physical and sexual abuse. In the ’80s, Satanic Ritual Abuse garnered self-proclaimed experts, national media attention, law enforcement mobilizations, federal funding, excitement and hysteria. By the ’90s official investigations produced no evidence of widespread conspiracies and only a small number of crimes were verified….”

– From “Residential Programs for America’s Child Sex Trafficking Victims: Secure or Non-Secure Facilities?” by Dr. Lois Lee, founder and president, Children of the Night, at Huffington Post (July 9, 2013)

Nov. 9, 2011

“Fear recaptured the 9-year-old, much as it had six years ago when last he left Bob Kelly’s day care. Lingering fears gripped many of Kelly’s victims when the appellate court overturned his 99 guilty verdicts…. A week later, the little boy is still too frightened to ride his bike around the block….

“We forget the victims – unless we live with them. Our wounds from media distortions heal. Our memories of Kelly’s manipulation of ‘the system’ fade. But the genuine fears of our sons and daughters persist.

“What would you do if you knew your little ones had been sexually abused? Would you seek justice? Would… you be able to endure the years of trauma and persecution? We implore our fellow North Carolinians to ponder those questions…. Join us in requesting that the North Carolina Supreme Court uphold these verdicts.

“If the court denies the opinions of two separate juries that found both (Kelly and Dawn Wilson) guilty, the innocent victims will be under attack again. Do helpless child victims forget the brutality of rape, sodomy and crimes against nature? A more significant question is: Do we in North Carolina want to pry those agonizing details from them once more?

“True, many are old enough to realize that Bob Kelly can’t work his threatened evil to kill their families. But others still draw pictures of their visions of safety: pictures of heaven and guardian angels because they say, ‘I know Mr. Bob won’t be in Heaven.’

“We must take a stand against re-victimization of the innocent. Don’t interrupt the healing that is emerging in these courageous young ones. Refuse to allow the media to create a ‘circus’ in our noble state. Child sexual abuse can no longer be allowed or excused in North Carolina.”

– From a letter to the editor of the (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot, signed by 17 parents of children involved in the Little Rascals case (May 14, 1995)

Buried in the Edenton parents’ heartfelt plea to the N.C. Supreme Court (which would soon agree with the Court of Appeals’ overturning the convictions of Kelly and Wilson) is this profoundly revealing question: “Do we in North Carolina want to pry those agonizing details from them once more?”

If only those details had not been pried from the children in the first place….

Jan. 25, 2017

“Why is there such a cultural bias toward stories of abuse – and especially toward grotesque and absurd tales, even when there is no reliable evidence that any crime occurred in the first place?

“The very people we count on to protect our society – prosecutors, police, social workers, jurors, even parents – are eliciting fantasies from children that express our worst collective fears. ….

“The libel that our society has imposed on child-care workers is a kind of projection of guilt for the damage that we ourselves have done, as parents and as a society. We have given our children to strangers to rear, and it makes us uneasy and fearful. Is it any wonder we have a bad conscience?…. ”

– From “Child-care Demons” by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker (Oct. 3, 1994)

March 7, 2013

Anthony Oberschall’s “Why False Beliefs Prevail: the Little Rascals Child Sex Abuse Prosecutions” appeared in “Essays in Honor of Raymond Boudon” (2000).

Most saliently, the UNC sociologist argues that “hysteria” and “moral panic” are inadequate to describe what happened in Edenton. Rather, he sees the town – and the Little Rascals defendants – as victims of the purveyors of “pseudoscience”:

“When child sexual abuse became a national issue, the medical profession, academic psychology and social science were just starting to study it scientifically…. The legal profession lacked experience with trial testimony of pre-schoolers and admission of hearsay testimony by parents and therapists….Meanwhile thousands of child sex abuse allegations had to be dealt with.

“In the absence of proven knowledge, a child sex abuse industry of self-appointed ‘experts’ based on pseudo-science filled the demand for training and informing child protection service workers, social workers, police investigators, prosecutors, therapists and others…. They were convinced they were saving America’s children, even though their methods and knowledge were contrary to science and to common sense. In Edenton, the prosecution and the investigators relentlessly labored to supplant common sense with false beliefs based on pseudo-science, (and) they succeeded….”

Working with UNC journalism student David Loomis on his master’s thesis detailing news coverage of the case, Oberschall “tried to survey Edenton households by mail (picked names at random from a phone book), but got less than a 10 percent return rate. It was obvious people there didn’t want anything to do with an outsider, a scholar.”

Rebuffed, Oberschall drove to Edenton himself and conducted perhaps a dozen interviews, which he made use of both in “Why False Beliefs Prevail” and in this more detailed draft working paper from 2010.