Feb. 9, 2015

The Little Rascals Day Care case has often been likened to the Salem Witch Trials, but this lengthy list from “Understanding The Crucible: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents” by Claudia Durst Johnson and Vernon Johnson (1998) drives home the point:

• Both involved children as accusers.
• Convictions were determined almost solely on the basis of the children’s testimony.
• Everything escalated rapidly – the number of children involved, the number of the accused, and the different kinds of charges.
• The minds of the children were in both cases manipulated by adults.
• Charges were instigated by adults who held grudges against the accused.
• There was an absence of corroborating evidence.
• “Fanciful” testimony was regarded seriously. In Salem, it was spectral evidence. In the twentieth-century cases, it included children’s stories of spaceships, sharks, and ritual murder.
• Community hysteria arose from the feeling that evil – witches and sex abusers – had access to their children.
• “Poppets” or dolls were involved. In the Salem trials, little dolls were immediately seized upon as poppets used by witches to pierce with pins with the object of inflicting torture. In sexual abuse cases, “anatomically correct” dolls were used by psychologists to coach details from the children.
• There were charges that satanic rituals were conducted.
• The prosecution showed a single-minded determination, by threat or bribe, to get the accused to confess.
• The prosecution showed a single-minded determination, by threat or bribe, to get children to disclose more and more details of misconduct without regard to truth.

startribune.com

Shirley Ardell Mason

“[Shirley Ardell] Mason was the real person behind the 1970s best seller ‘Sybil,’ which sold 6 million copies with its riveting account of an abused woman inhabited by 16 different personalities. Sally Field won an Emmy for her 1976 portrayal seen by 20 percent of the nation.

“In the process, Mason popularized the condition known as multiple personality disorder – a trendy 1970s diagnosis. The number of cases mushroomed from about 75 to 40,000 after ‘Sybil’ was published….

“In the trove of records kept on her case, Mason actually admitted making up the many personalities.

“ ‘I do not really have any multiple personalities,’ she wrote in a letter to her psychiatrist. ‘I do not even have a “double.” … I am all of them. I have been lying in my pretense of them.’

“Her doctor chalked it up to a defensive ploy to avoid deeper therapy….”

–  From “The Minnesotan behind Sybil, one of America’s most famous psychiatric patients”
by Curt Brown in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (Feb. 25)

Aug. 24, 2015

“(Richard) Beck is generally restrained in his narrative, letting the details pile up to a well-deserved indictment of the many players in the ‘moral panic.’ But in explaining how these fever dreams managed to seize the national imagination, he does a little witch-hunting of his own. The frenzy, he tells us, was a backlash by family-values conservatives to the social changes around them. It was a period of ‘an intense reactionary antifeminism.’

“This is an inexcusably partial interpretation. From Beck’s own evidence, feminists themselves were vital players in the hysteria. Gloria Steinem donated money to the McMartin investigation, and Ms. Magazine ran a 1993 cover article ‘BELIEVE IT! Cult Ritual Abuse Exists,’ even though, by that time, the general public had grown increasingly skeptical of the idea.

“In part because of her aggressive pursuit of child abusers – and conviction of a number of people later exonerated – a relatively unknown Dade County state attorney named Janet Reno was picked by President Clinton to become the nation’s first female attorney general. According to Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, the authors of ‘Satan’s Silence,’ (Kee) MacFarlane had been a lobbyist for NOW before she set about terrifying the children of Manhattan Beach.

“With his partisan recounting of the child abuse panic of the 1980s, Beck turns what could have been a careful history about one facet of the nation’s exhausting culture wars into one more illustration of them.”

– From “ ‘We Believe the Children,’ by Richard Beck” by Kay Hymowitz in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (Aug. 21, 2015)

I’m posting this criticism of Beck’s book – from an otherwise laudatory review – mostly for archival purposes. My own interest lies less in the tangled roots of the day-care panic than in its results: defendants wrongfully incarcerated, children profoundly misguided and therapists and prosecutors unjustly unscathed.

bc.edu

Ann Wolbert Burgess

Aug. 23, 2016

“Connell School of Nursing Professor Ann Wolbert Burgess, a pioneer in the field of forensic nursing and an internationally recognized leader in the treatment of victims of trauma and abuse, has been designated a ‘Living Legend’ by the American Academy of Nursing, the academy’s highest honor.

“Burgess is being recognized this year for multiple contributions to the nursing profession and society. [Her] research and books cover topics such as serial killers and rapists, kidnapping, sexual victimization and exploitation of children, cyber crimes, sexual abuse, and elder abuse….”

– From “A ‘Living Legend’ ” by Kathleeen Sullivan in the BC [Boston College] News (Aug. 23)

Yet again, a key fomenter of the “satanic ritual abuse” day care panic takes a career achievement bow, plowing unapologetically past the wrecked lives of the wrongfully prosecuted.

Here’s how Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker described Burgess in 2001 in “Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a  Modern American Witch Hunt”: “promoter of the use of children’s drawings to diagnose sexual abuse, developer of the idea of the sex ring, participant in developing the case that imprisoned the Amirault family and currently a researcher into the traumatic aftereffects of ritual abuse.”

Most grievous for the Little Rascals defendants, it was Ann Wolbert Burgess who led a three-day conference in Kill Devil Hills  just months before Bob Kelly’s arrest. The agenda: learning how to spot child molesters operating day-care facilities.

I’ve asked Professor Burgess to look back at her role in Little Rascals. No response – maybe she intends to bring it up in her acceptance speech.