July 9, 2012

What happens to a social scientist who builds her career on exposing illusory “sex rings” and “ritual abuse” at day cares? And, more specifically, whose seminar at Kill Devil Hills apparently seeded the hysteria behind the prosecution of the Edenton Seven?

If you’re Ann Wolbert Burgess, it’s no problem. You just plunge ahead – and don’t look back.

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.”

For some people, that would be a career’s worth of wrongheaded ideas. But Burgess, now professor of psychiatric mental health nursing at Boston College, continues to accumulate merit badges on new topics such as heart attack victims, AIDS, infant kidnapping, online predators, nursing home abuse, women in prison, mass murder and elder abuse. Here she is in Raleigh on May 29 testifying as “an expert in crime scene classification and offender typology.”

Whew.

I’ve asked Dr. Burgess to reflect on Little Rascals and other examples of ritual abuse prosecutions. Too bad the subject didn’t come up when she was on the witness stand in Raleigh.

Sept. 12, 2014

Edenton has been the scene of many historic events – the Edenton Tea Party, the escape of Harriet Jacobs, etc. – but surely nothing happened there in the entire 20th Century more significant than the Little Rascals Day Care case.

So why is the case not even mentioned on Edenton’s Wikipedia page?

On Sept. 28, 2013, a rogue editor abruptly removed a passage similar to this one:

“Edenton achieved international notoriety for the Little Rascals Day Care sexual abuse trial, the subject of journalist Ofra Bikel’s award-winning trilogy of documentaries….”

Wikipedia entries are intentionally easy to edit, but the process leaves fingerprints.
The person whose name is attached to the Little Rascals deletion turns out to be an innkeeper in Edenton. He ended our exchange with “I did not remove anything or post anything on that site…. must have been my competitor from across the street.”

I have restored the deleted passage – let’s hope it proves innkeeper-proof.

March 18, 2013

“When I look back, I think my greatest mistake (was) my failure as editor of the News & Observer to make sure we had a top-notch investigative reporter on the Little Rascals case in Edenton.

“Our regional person was adequate as a regional correspondent, a full-time staffer, but he was not the person to see what was wrong with this case and to do the necessary digging to root it out.

“That prosecutor had gone wild, eaten up by ambition, I suppose, to hang these people, these people who operated the Little Rascals Day Care Center, no matter how.

“…All the kids talked about being borne through the air this way and that way and flying all over, and it was crazy stuff.

“As it turned out, (the Edenton Seven were eventually released), but it wrecked their lives forever. And I still feel sorry about that, still feel sorry about it.

“I think had we sent someone like Pat Stith down there, that would have been it.

“But see, at that time, Edenton already was a pretty far reach for the News & Observer…. (Our) pulling out of eastern North Carolina (to cut expenses) might have affected my thinking (about) whether we were really responsible for doing something about that miscarriage of justice.”

– From an interview with Claude Sitton, editor of the Raleigh News & Observer from 1968 to 1990 (Southern Oral History Program, Southern Historical Collection, UNC Chapel Hill, July 12, 2007)

March 13, 2015

“In this this arena of Recovered Memory Therapy and treatment of DID, therapists will simply imitate what sounds exciting or innovative without assessing the scientific value of the procedure. At times there appears to be little awareness of or concern with the professional literature.

“At a (1995) conference sponsored by a group dealing with ritual and cult abuse, there was an aversion to and a quick dismissal of major studies, including (those by David) Ceci….

“It is troubling that an entire panel had never heard of his well-known research.”

– From “The Death of Psychotherapy: From Freud to Alien Abductions” by Donald A. Eisner (2000)