May 8, 2013

“We just had all kinds of rumors. Everybody in town was involved in it, with this one pointing fingers, that one pointing fingers. My telephone was ringing right steady….

“We really didn’t know what we had. I had a police officer who works as a secretary (Brenda Toppin) who deals with this type case, and she had right much training but nothing like she needed. So we had problems right from the start.”

– Edenton Police Chief Charles Harvey Williams, recalling for a North Carolina House committee how his 15-person department struggled to sort out allegations about the Little Rascals Day Care center (April 23, 1991)

Toppin has been variously described as a secretary and a dispatcher in Edenton’s 15-person police department – she may well have been both. Regardless, she seemed utterly unaware how far in over her head she was interviewing children about supposed ritual sex abuse.

March 8, 2015

“As public debate rages about issues like immunization, Obamacare, and same-sex marriage, many people try to use science to bolster their arguments. And since it’s becoming easier to test and establish facts – whether in physics, psychology, or policy – many have wondered why bias and polarization have not been defeated. When people are confronted with facts, such as the well-established safety of immunization, why do these facts seem to have so little effect?

“Our new research, recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, examined a slippery way by which people get away from facts that contradict their beliefs…. (They) reframe an issue in untestable ways. This makes potential important facts and science ultimately irrelevant to the issue….

“These experiments show that when people’s beliefs are threatened, they often take flight to a land where facts do not matter. In scientific terms, their beliefs become less ‘falsifiable’ because they can no longer be tested scientifically for verification or refutation….”

– From “Why People ‘Fly from Facts’ ” by Troy Campbell and Justin Friesen in Scientific American (March 3)

 And what allegations could be more “untestable” than pure fantasy? As Junior Chandler knows too well, “….It’s extremely hard to get help to prove my innocence when there isn’t a crime committed to begin with.”

July 1, 2013

I noted last week the continuing unwillingness of law professor John E.B. Myers, widely published authority on child sex abuse, to express an opinion “regarding the guilt or innocence of any of the McMartin defendants.”

In this passage in “Child Protection in America” (2006), which Professor Myers graciously forwarded to me, he justifies his indecision on the case by pointing to claims of secret underground tunnels supposedly discovered (too late!) beneath the McMartin Preschool:

“Several McMartin parents, especially the indefatigable Jackie McGauley, hired an archeologist to excavate under the abandoned preschool. The archeologist conducted an excavation and issued an exhaustive report concluding there probably were tunnels. The tunnels had been backfilled with dirt, but McGauley pointed out that the Buckeys had months to fill in the tunnels after the preschool closed. I read the archeologist’s report and came away convinced. Yet, I shared the report with a colleague who was just as firmly convinced the report proves nothing.”

At the very least, this approach constitutes feckless “research.” To see the tunnel report thoroughly vaporized, Myers needed only to click on “The Dark Truth About the ‘Dark Tunnels of McMartin’ ” by John Earl (1995) or “What Was Under the McMartin Preschool?” by Joseph Wyatt (2002).

When the McMartin parents went digging for nonexistent tunnels, the term “truther” hadn’t yet entered the lexicon. Too bad.

Sept. 21, 2012

“Los Angeles psychiatrist Roland Summit’s ‘child sexual abuse syndrome,’ a theory about incest… argues that if there is evidence of sex abuse and a child denies it, this is only further proof that it happened and a therapist should use any means necessary to help the child talk…. If they later recant, that means they are under family pressure to protect the father and their turnabout is further proof of the crime.

“So no matter how much coercion was used to get an accusation and no matter if a child later retracted it, once Summit’s incest theory was applied, a charge of abuse became irrefutable. Child protection workers ignored the fact that this logic had little to do with day care. After all, why would children staunchly defend abuse to protect an adult who wasn’t part of the family? And if they had been so brutally attacked at school, why wouldn’t they tell their parents?

“Therapists and investigators came up with all sorts of rationales. One was the teachers threatened them by slaughtering animals and warning that the same thing would happen to their parents if they told….”

– From “The Ritual Sex Abuse Hoax” by Debbie Nathan (Village Voice, January 12, 1990)

The “threatened parents” claim reared its head in this 1995 letter from Little Rascals parents:

“…Many (children are now) old enough to realize that Bob Kelly can’t work his threatened evil to kill their families.”