Nov. 11, 2011

“The first case to raise alarms about predators in nursery schools was that involving the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, California…. In 1983, a woman named Judy Jones charged that 25-year-old Ray Buckey, a teacher and grandson of the school’s founder, had sodomized her two-year-old son.

“(Jones) was an alcoholic and subsequently diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

“After her charge against Buckey (who was acquitted in 1990 along with his mother and school owner Peggy McMartin Buckey), she went on to make the same allegations against a member of the U.S. Marine Corps who had, she said, sexually assaulted her dog.”

– From “No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness and Other Terrors of Our Times” by Dorothy Rabinowitz (2003)

 When Rabinowitz, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, the judges cited her series on unjustified child-abuse prosecutions.

Jan. 23, 2012

Last week I visited Avery-Mitchell Correctional Institution in Spruce Pine to talk to Junior Chandler, who soon will have served 25 years on charges strikingly similar to those in the Little Rascals case.

Junior, now 54, may well be the last still-imprisoned victim of the ritual-abuse contagion that swept the nation’s day cares in the ’80s and early ’90s.

I’ll be updating his case soon.

In Junior’s former life in the mountain town of Revere, he told me, he was close to his parents, his wife and two boys, his two brothers.

Early on, he and his brothers helped their uncle grow tobacco and corn. Before driving a van for the Madison County Day Care Center, he had worked for the Forest Service, the Department of Transportation and Southern Railroad. At least one job he gave up because it interfered with his softball tournaments and night fishing.

In prison, visits from his family became less frequent, and eventually his wife filed for divorce. “Two life sentences,” Junior says. “She couldn’t wait, you know.” And his sons couldn’t keep watching him aging away in his prison grays.

When his father died in 1997, he attended the funeral in handcuffs. He worries about his mother, who recently suffered a stroke.

He sleeps in a bunk bed in a dorm with 33 other inmates. His assigned janitorial job is cleaning meal trays. For relaxation he plays volleyball and horseshoes, watches Westerns on TV, reads a little. His only write-up was a scuffle not long after he arrived. “It’s learning to walk away and how to carry yourself,” he says.

Of course I was touched by Junior’s deep sadness and resignation. Sometimes I find it too easy to minimize the emotional havoc wrought by incarceration of the guilty – just imagine what it must be like for the innocent.

March 7, 2014

Second of three posts

After our lengthy email exchange I took up editor Jon Conte on his offer to consider an expanded letter challenging the Journal of Interpersonal Violence’s past support of the “satanic ritual abuse” moral panic.

This is what I submitted on Oct. 25, 2013:

To the editor:

In December 1989 the Journal of Interpersonal Violence published “Stress Responses of Children to Sexual Abuse and Ritualistic Abuse in Day Care Centers” by Susan J. Kelley. In December 1990 it published “Ritualistic Child Abuse in a Neighborhood Setting” by Barbara Snow and Teena Sorensen. Both these articles endorsed, promoted and attempted to substantiate a concept that subsequent research has proven to be a quintessential moral panic. Today no respected social scientist will argue that satanic (or sadistic) ritual abuse ever existed in the nation’s day cares.

These articles in JIV, however, were unequivocally confident that it not only existed but also was widespread. From Kelley’s synopsis: “The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of sexual abuse and ritualistic abuse of children in day care settings. The sample was composed of 134 children; 67 children who were sexually abused and ritually abused in day care centers were compared on the Child Behavior Checklist with a carefully matched group of 67 nonabused children. Findings indicated that sexually abused children had significantly more behavior problems than did the nonabused children. Sexual abuse involving ritualistic abuse was associated with increased impact as well as increased severity in the extent of the sexual, physical, and psychological abuse the children experienced.”

Snow and Sorensen criticized “attempts to discredit victims and therapists” and seemed unaware that they were exposing the corruption of those therapists’ interviewing techniques when they wrote: “Disclosures were difficult and progressed slowly. The majority of children showed little symptomology at initial referral with significant increases during the disclosure process.”

The Little Rascals and McMartin cases were but two manifestations of this moral panic of  the 1980s and early 1990s. Dozens of less publicized prosecutions occurred across North America and as far away as New Zealand and Germany. The extensive literature illuminating the day care moral panic includes “Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend” by Jeffrey S. Victor, “Sex Panic and the Punitive State” by Roger N. Lancaster, “Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America” by Philip Jenkins, “The Satanism Scare” by David G. Bromley, Joel Best and James T. Richardson, “Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance ” by Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, “The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic” by Mary De Young and the latest edition of “Folk Devils and Moral Panics”  by Stanley Cohen – who coined the term “moral panic” in 1972.

The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the Wee Care Day Nursery case in 1985. Among law enforcement reports debunking ritual abuse allegations the best known is “Investigator’s Guide to Allegations of ‘Ritual’ Child Abuse” by Kenneth Lanning, the FBI agent in the Behavioral Science Unit assigned to examine these cases. Similar reports have been issued in countries such as England (“Extent and Nature of Organised and Ritual Abuse” byJ. S. La Fontaine), the Netherlands (“Report of the Ritual Abuse Workgroup”) and Australia (“Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service”).

Eventually the convictions of most of the day care providers in the United States were overturned.  Playing a major part in alerting appellate courts to the suggestibility of child witnesses was an amicus brief filed in the Wee Care case by pioneer researchers Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck.

Before the fever broke, however, untold harm was done to defendants,  families and child-witnesses. In the words of sociologist Mary De Young:

“Innocent people have been accused and convicted; the autobiographies of children have been usurped (and some children, now adults, have completely retracted their allegations); professional reputations have been destroyed (and some of the loudest proponents of the idea of ritual abuse have since retracted their claims); tens of millions of dollars were wasted on investigations and trials; it distracted attention, time, money and energy from ‘real’ cases of sexual abuse and from the fathers, brothers and other family members who most likely were the perpetrators; it made quality day care harder to find and drove out male providers who could have been valuable role models to children, especially boys; it eroticized abuse by focusing on rituals and masked and hooded perpetrators; it added nothing – absolutely nothing – to a clinical or scientific understanding of the traumatic effects of abuse because the trauma children experienced in these cases was iatrogenic, i.e., caused by investigators, interviewers, prosecutors and hysterical parents; it broke up families; and even dropped property values and interfered with commerce; and it introduced distrust, cynicism and incivility into our lives and into legitimate work on helping abused kids.”

The Journal of Interpersonal Violence should not allow these misguided articles from 1989 and 1990 to stand as its last word on claims of day-care ritual abuse.

Lew Powell

Charlotte, North Carolina

Alas, publication in the JIV now seems unlikely. Dr. Conte has not responded to my follow-up emails and phone messages over the past four months.  Why might that be?

Next: I’ll consider some possible answers.

Jan. 31, 2015

“ ‘You need to try to rectify whatever error you made,’ says Santa Clara County, California, Special Assistant District Attorney David Angel. ‘But it needs to really shift from this kind of highly moralistic, punitive view. Maybe it’s a cause for embarrassment, but it’s not a cause for shame.’

“He believes prosecutors have drawn the short straw in language, noting that defense attorneys who err are called ‘ineffective’ and judges are ‘reversed,’ while prosecutorial error alone is labeled ‘misconduct,’ with all the attendant negative connotations.

“Angel believes that most prosecutors are willing to admit to mistakes but that ‘people are very hesitant to admit to something that’s called “misconduct,” because it makes you feel like you did something morally wrong.’ ”

– From “Why can’t law enforcement admit their mistakes?” by Sue Russell at Pacific Standard (via Salon, Oct. 21, 2012)

The concept becomes trickier, however, the longer prosecutors cling to their fallacious and costly narratives. At some point – oh, let’s say 25 years later – might “mistakes” have toxified into “misconduct”?