May 8, 2013

“We just had all kinds of rumors. Everybody in town was involved in it, with this one pointing fingers, that one pointing fingers. My telephone was ringing right steady….

“We really didn’t know what we had. I had a police officer who works as a secretary (Brenda Toppin) who deals with this type case, and she had right much training but nothing like she needed. So we had problems right from the start.”

– Edenton Police Chief Charles Harvey Williams, recalling for a North Carolina House committee how his 15-person department struggled to sort out allegations about the Little Rascals Day Care center (April 23, 1991)

Toppin has been variously described as a secretary and a dispatcher in Edenton’s 15-person police department – she may well have been both. Regardless, she seemed utterly unaware how far in over her head she was interviewing children about supposed ritual sex abuse.

April 24, 2015

“As was made clear repeatedly upon testimony by experts, the very first reports of the children were the ones that would be most critical in determining whether sexual abuse had indeed occurred. Yet in the first interviews, the children said almost nothing of any interest with regard to sexual abuse, and the police officer who conducted these hearings destroyed all of her notes and all of her tapes of what happened before the case went to court. She was approached by several of the mothers initially because she had taken a short course in investigating cases of child abuse.

“Officer (Brenda) Toppin was crucial to the whole process because she was the one who escalated the case from a minor complaint by one parent into a case of massive sexual abuse of dozens of children by scores of day-care workers.”

– From “Understanding The Crucible: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents” by Claudia Durst Johnson and Vernon Johnson (1998)

Feb. 11, 2013

“After reading a number of these interviews (of children) in the Wee Care (Kelly Michaels) case, it is difficult to believe that adults charged with the care and protection of young children would be allowed to use the vocabulary that they used in these interviews, that they would be allowed to interact with the children in such sexually explicit ways, or that they would be allowed to bully and frighten their child witnesses in such a shocking manner. No amount of evidence that sexual abuse had actually occurred could ever justify the use of these techniques especially with three- and four-year-old children.

“Above and beyond the great stress, intimidation, and embarrassment that many of the children so obviously suffered during the interviews, we are deeply concerned about the long-lasting harmful effects of persuading children that they have been horribly sexually and physically abused, when in fact there may have been no abuse until the interviews began….”

– From an amicus curiae brief to the Appellate Court of New Jersey from Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck on behalf of the 46-member Committee of Concerned Social Scientists (1994)

June 11, 2015

“In (the upcoming movie) Regression, Ethan Hawke plays a detective investigating accusations by a woman against her father. There’s a twist: The father has admitted wrongdoing, though he has no recollection of what happened – and a psychologist is summoned to help him recover his memories….

“The trailer is opaque in its rendering of what crime the father may have committed, but it’s probably meant to echo the Satanic witch hunts that gripped parts of America in the 1980s and early ’90s….  The daughter’s haunting memories include ‘chanting,’ ‘robes’ and a ‘black mask’….

“So it’ll be interesting to see (director Alejandro) Amenábar’s take in Regression: Does he present the case as a real, Satanic experience that actually occurs within the world of the story, or will the film be a larger commentary on the horrific fallout of unfounded hysteria?

“Here’s hoping it’s the latter…. We’ll find out when Regression opens in August.”

– From “Ethan Hawke and Emma Watson Battle Satan (Maybe) in the Trailer for Regression”
by Aisha Harris at Slate (June 10)

Also arriving in August – but much less ambiguously: “We Believe The Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s” by Richard Beck. According to a starred review in Publishers Weekly, “Beck marshals extensive research into an absorbing dissection of a panic whose tremors still affect us today.”