Aug. 10, 2012

Carol Tavris:

“After the McMartin trial in 1986, I wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times about research that had been done on how to interview children in sex abuse cases. Evidence at the time suggested that sometimes you have to ask children leading questions or they will not tell you they have been molested.

“For example, if you interviewed a child after a genital examination and you asked her just to tell what the doctor did, almost no child would volunteer that the doctor touched her genitals. But if you asked a leading question, such as, ‘The doctor touched your private parts, didn’t he?’ the children would say ‘yes.’ The L.A. Times headlined this article, ‘Do Children Lie? Not About This.’

“Of course that was preposterous. Of course children lie ‘about this’ and lots of other things. But my essay, although based on research at the time, helped support the child advocates who were on a rampage against child molesters, and who were running around saying ‘children never lie’ and selling bumper stickers that said ‘Believe the Children.’’ I didn’t foresee that prosecutors and therapists would use these same studies to coerce the hell out of kids.

“When I think of my own embarrassment about that little article, and how hard it was to say, ‘Boy, was I wrong about that research,’ I realize how difficult it must be for all those ‘believe the children’ people to acknowledge they were wrong, too. In fact, most of them haven’t. They are more entrenched than ever in their pernicious beliefs.”

– From “The Measure of a Woman: An Interview with Social Scientist Carol Tavris”
in Skeptic magazine (Feb. 9, 2011)

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.
 

Jan. 4, 2019

In January 1988 the Memphis Commercial Appeal published a 36-page special section recapping its recent series, “Justice Abused: A 1980s Witch Hunt” by Tom Charlier and Shirley Downing.

“Justice Abused” was the first major news coverage to link “satanic ritual abuse” cases across the country and to
characterize them as a witch hunt.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning criticism of how the news media so often mishandled cases such as McMartin Preschool, David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times credited Charlier and Downing with pointing out “among many other things, the large number of child molestation cases that had resulted in dismissals, acquittals and dropped charges and the startling number of similarities among many of the cases.

Children in both the Memphis and McMartin cases, for example, told of druggings, of animal mutilations, of trips in vans, of bloody rituals, of sacrifices of babies and of being taken on airplanes that resembled those of Federal Express.”

Until now this historically important series has not been available digitally. It is archived in two pieces here and here on our Bookshelf.

April 24, 2015

“As was made clear repeatedly upon testimony by experts, the very first reports of the children were the ones that would be most critical in determining whether sexual abuse had indeed occurred. Yet in the first interviews, the children said almost nothing of any interest with regard to sexual abuse, and the police officer who conducted these hearings destroyed all of her notes and all of her tapes of what happened before the case went to court. She was approached by several of the mothers initially because she had taken a short course in investigating cases of child abuse.

“Officer (Brenda) Toppin was crucial to the whole process because she was the one who escalated the case from a minor complaint by one parent into a case of massive sexual abuse of dozens of children by scores of day-care workers.”

– From “Understanding The Crucible: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents” by Claudia Durst Johnson and Vernon Johnson (1998)