June 29, 2012

“One month after drawing national attention when she dismissed final charges involving the children at the day-care center, (Nancy Lamb) clings to her belief that Robert Kelly is a child molester….

“Still, she admits it’s not easy to explain why none of the defendants have turned against each other, even though they were offered deals by her office.

“ ‘You did have kind of a group dynamic going on where they did hang around together and support each other and encourage each other to hang tough,’ Lamb said.”

– From the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, July 2, 1997

May 5, 2015

“Its members are, it’s claimed, drawn mainly from a school and church in Hampstead (a North London suburb). They are said to wear shoes made of baby skin, to dance with the skulls of dead babies and to sexually abuse young children. But the (satanic ritual) cult doesn’t exist. The claims are, according to a High Court Judge, ‘baseless’ and those who have sought to perpetrate them are ‘evil’….

“Why, after a police inquiry and a family court judgment which unequivocally rubbished the notion of satanic abuse in Hampstead, are the allegations still proliferating on the Internet and being spread all over the world? We hear from the supposed cult members who have had their personal details and photographs published online and received death threats. And we ask about the welfare of the two children at the centre of it all who were coerced into fabricating the fantastical story….”

– From “The Satanic Cult That Wasn’t” by Melanie Abbott on BBC Radio (April 23)

This half hour of BBC coverage skillfully demolishes every iota of the Hampstead claims, but of course facts aren’t what engage the eagerly gullible. Since video of the 8- and 9-year-old siblings telling their concocted horror stories was uploaded onto YouTube, it has been watched more than 4 million times.

Seck

Sept. 10, 2017

“With no conclusive DNA evidence, medical evidence of penetration or an eyewitness to the alleged assault, both prosecution and defense relied on expert witnesses to speak to the reliability of a young child’s testimony and whether it had been tainted by outside factors, such as how her mother had pressed her about whether she was touched… and how child advocacy center staff had interviewed her….

“ ‘Did [the 6-year-old girl] lie? I don’t know, and the problem is, neither does anyone else,’ [Marine Col. Daniel] Wilson’s civilian attorney Phil Stackhouse said in a closing argument…. Stackhouse pointed out that she had twice denied to her mother being touched by Wilson before she said he had.

“A government witness, Dr. Mark Everson, an expert on childhood trauma at the University of North Carolina, had testified that 6-year-olds are remarkably resilient to suggestion, or the planting of false memories….”

– From “Jury Deliberates Over Colonel Accused of Child Sex Assault” by Hope Hodge Seck at military.com (Sept. 9)

Yes, that’s the same Mark Everson who helped persuade a jury that Bob Kelly was guilty of 99 counts of child sexual abuse.

Everson, a UNC psychologist, disputed well-accepted research that children are suggestible and should not be repeatedly interrogated by therapists. Even 10 years later, he found it hard to believe that every Little Rascals child-witness had been badly interviewed and confused: “There’s so much smoke there, it’s hard to imagine there’s no fire.”

Update: A military court at Camp Lejeune found Col. Wilson guilty of child molestation.
 

April 3, 2013

In my fruitless attempt to extract a retraction from the journal Child Abuse & Neglect, I quoted only the abstract of “Sexual Abuse of Children in Day Care Centers” by Susan J. Kelley, Renee Brant and Jill Waterman.

But because the 1993 article continues to be cited in the literature – most recently in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry – it deserves a more detailed review.

Most offensive to me is the authors’ use of ostensibly sophisticated statistics. For example: “The mean number of different types of sexual acts per child ranged from 5.3 sexual acts per child in (Kathleen Coulborn) Faller’s (1988) sample to 6.6 different types of sexual abuse per child in Kelley’s (1989) study.”

Can’t you just picture the authors’ computers straining under the weight of all their meticulous research? In reality, of course, the “mean number of different types of sexual acts per child” was… zero.

And the anecdotes! What ever were Kelley, Brant and Waterman thinking as their fingers typed such unfounded claims as these:

• “Foreign objects used to penetrate children in day care center cases have included such items and pencils, needles, knives, scissors and crucifixes.”
• “Allegations of pornographic photographs and videos being taken of children in day care center cases sometimes surface…. Unfortunately, in very few cases have law enforcement officials been able to locate the pornography.”
• “Children who have been ritualistically abused describe participation in group ceremonies, use of chants and songs, adults dressed in costumes and masks, threats with supernatural powers….the sacrifice of animals, the ingestion of blood, feces and urine, and murders.”

Despite the authors’ unbridled certitude, they can’t help complaining that “One of the first complications in the evaluation of ritualistic abuse cases is the frequent disbelief and skepticism on the part of the professionals secondary to the bizarre and extreme nature of the allegations.”

“Complications,” indeed.