July 11, 2012

“And what did Doctor (Mark) Everson say what to look for? A coherent package that’s consistent. You look at the behavior and what the child says…. He talked about sexual acting out, coaxing sexual behavior, masturbation, fears, and anxieties. New fears that come up that aren’t developmentally appropriate for a child that age, such as a fear of men or a particular man, changes in their personality caused by stress like regressive behavior, bed wetting, clinginess, thumb sucking.

“And as I name these, I hope that you are sitting there remembering how many of these children so far have had these kinds of behaviors.”

– From prosecutor Nancy Lamb’s closing argument in the trial of Bob Kelly

“… What could be expected for ritually abused children? That vexing question prompted everyone involved in the McMartin Preschool case to look for symptoms, and in their urgency, to mistake normal developmentally-based behaviors, quirky idiosyncrasies and even the iatrogenic effects of intimidating interviews for sequelae of ritual abuse. In this nascent moral panic, the widely circulated ‘symptom lists‘ transformed messy subjectivity into embodied and interpretable texts….”

– From “The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic” by Mary DeYoung (2004)

To day-care ritual-abuse prosecutors, what Nancy Lamb called “these kinds of behaviors” embraced everything from bed-wetting to hyperactivity to eating disorders. No dot went unconnected.

Contrary to such handy lists, however, numerous studies have found no “coherent package” of symptoms of child sexual abuse.

May 22, 2012

Fifteen years ago today: Claiming they want to spare their child-witnesses from another round of testimony, prosecutors drop the last Little Rascals charges against remaining defendants Bob Kelly and Dawn Wilson.

Nancy Lamb is referring to the children when she says, “They know who I am and why I walked into their lives and stayed awhile. They remember.” Of course she also “stayed awhile,” as an uninvited guest from hell, in the lives of the Edenton Seven.

Kelly remains on the hook for an unrelated sexual abuse charge filed more than a year earlier.
Finally, on Sept. 23, 1999, that charge too will be dropped, and for the first time in a decade he isn’t living under the thumb of prosecutors.

March 14, 2012

“Prosecutor Nancy Lamb practiced a little ‘voodoo’ psychology by telling the jury that when Dawn Wilson held and played with her child during breaks in the trial, it wasn’t because she loved the child – it was all a show for the benefit of the jury.

“No psychologist could have accurately reported on the state of mind or the motives of Wilson when she played with her child. However, had a psychologist known that Wilson had been offered a plea bargain which included no jail time if she pointed the finger at the others, and had told prosecutors to ‘Find yourselves another patsy,’ that psychologist might have known something about Nancy Lamb’s state of mind when she made those statements.”

– From “Due Process Is Good Psychology,” article in
Michigan Lawyer Weekly by Michael G. Brock

Defending this smear, one of many, Lamb said Wilson was presenting herself as a good mother, and “We had to remove that mask.”

In 1995 the N.C. Court of Appeals overturned her conviction. And then of course the prosecutors rushed to apologize to Dawn Wilson for their disgraceful vilification.

firstthings.com

Feb. 3, 2017

“Recall that after the 1970s there ensued a decade of moral panic over child sex abuse – including so-called satanic ritual abuse. Off-camera in The Exorcist [1973], the possessed Regan performed a Black Mass. In a film shot in the 1980s, her role in such satanic proceedings would have been quite opposite. In the mythology of that decade, the child is never a demon; the child is a victim of demons (i.e., pedophiles, satan-worshiping or not).

“Importantly, the tales of satanic ritual abuse that roiled the 1980s were nonsense, since discredited – as fantastical as any account of demonic possession. Yet they were believed, often beyond a reasonable doubt….”

– From “Fear of Children: What ‘The Exorcist’ Makes Us Confront” by Julia Yost at First Matters (Oct. 31, 2014)