Three years ago a former Edenton resident told me: “The town leaders still have some things to answer for about Little Rascals, and I suspect that until there is a process of reconciliation, the town will remain a troubled place, though it does a good job putting on a facade.”

Edenton will elect its town officials Nov. 5. The predominant issues – population decline and the lack of a second supermarket – are clearly important, but I want to add another. This is from a query I sent all the candidates:

I don’t live in Edenton, but I’m reaching out to candidates for mayor and town council about a local issue of historic importance.

The Little Rascals Day Care case was Edenton’s most significant event of the 20th Century. The trial of Robert Kelly remains the longest and most expensive in North Carolina history. He served six years in prison before the North Carolina Court of Appeals overturned his conviction and that of Dawn Wilson. The lives of Kelly, Wilson and the five other defendants were profoundly harmed over allegations of “satanic ritual abuse” of children in their care.

The Little Rascals case, most prominently covered by eight hours of documentary coverage on PBS’s “Frontline,” also did nationwide damage to the town’s reputation. But Edenton has never reexamined, much less made amends for, the wrongful prosecution of the Edenton Seven. One way to move forward would be to create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Fact-finding, non-judicial truth commissions first appeared in the 1970s and have since been used to foster honest discussion and to encourage reconciliation in the aftermath of community conflict.

In North Carolina the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission was an independent, seven-member body that sought to heal a city left divided and weakened by the “Greensboro Massacre” of 1979. The parallel to Edenton is inexact but undeniable.

If elected, would you consider supporting a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address Edenton’s continuing divide over the Little Rascals Day Care case? Thank you for your time and attention. And good luck in your campaign.

The two candidates who have responded so far seem at least cautiously open to the idea. One day the Town of Edenton will surely find the courage to embark on its long-avoided “process of reconciliation” – let’s hope the Edenton Seven are around to see it.’

Oct. 19, 2011

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2003, social psychologist Carol Tavris noted that:

“One mother (in the Little Rascals case) told reporters that it took 10 months before her child was able to ‘reveal’ the molestation.

“No one at the time considered the idea that the child might have been remarkably courageous to persist in telling the truth for so long.”

March 30, 2012

Kee MacFarlane is the notorious therapist who led the ritual abuse scare of the late 1980s (and pioneered the misuse of anatomically correct dolls in interviewing children). In just four months MacFarlane diagnosed more than 360 children at the McMartin Pre-School as abused.

In 2005 she declined to be interviewed by CNN but sent a statement:

“We’ve learned a lot in 20 years about how to interview children for forensic purposes and how to manage complex cases such as this one. It would be a sad commentary if we didn’t learn from such painful experience.”

Not much of a mea culpa – but still more than anyone connected with the Little Rascals prosecution has managed.

May 31, 2013

“After the DSM-III, often called the ‘Bible’ of psychiatric diagnosis, included (Multiple Personality Disorder) in 1980, thousands of spurious cases emerged in the next two decades, and special psychiatric clinics arose to treat them. Yet faced with evidence of this disastrous epidemic, the DSM-IV did not delete the diagnosis. Instead, the manual renamed it Dissociative Identity Disorder.

“ ‘MPD presented a dilemma for me,’ says (psychiatrist Allen Frances, who oversaw DSM-IV). ‘We took scrupulous pains to present both sides of the controversy as fairly and effectively as possible – even though I believed one side was complete bunk.’ How do you ‘fairly’ argue for a diagnosis you think is complete bunk? Where’s the methodological rigor? Why did it take malpractice suits to close the psychiatric MPD clinics and not the presumed voice of scientific authority, the DSM? Dissociative Identity Disorder remains in the DSM-5.”

– From “How Psychiatry Went Crazy” by Carol Tavris in the Wall Street Journal (May 17, 2013)

“Another disturbing by-product of the MPD diagnosis is the prevalence of alleged repressed memories of satanic ritual abuse. The association of satanic ritual abuse in MPD diagnoses has been attributed to the belief by numerous MPD adherents in the existence of an intergenerational satanic cult conspiracy that has murdered thousands without leaving a trace of evidence.”

– From “Repressed Memory, Multiple Personality Disorder and Satanic Ritual Abuse,” an amicus brief filed in Supreme Court of Georgia, Kahout v. Charter Peachford Behavioral Health System (September 1998)