Aug. 23, 2013

“Developing a mental tuning fork for the credibility of a claim, gaining an instinct for when to trust and when to doubt a source – these are two critical components of becoming a confident and effective researcher.”

– From “The Devil in the Details: Media Representation of ‘Ritual Abuse’ and Evaluation of Sources” by Barbara Fister in Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education (May 2003

Although Fister’s observation addresses the challenge of fact-finding on the Internet, it applies just as well to the interviewing of child witnesses. The poorly prepared Little Rascals prosecution therapists – and social services investigators – surely had an overabundance of confidence in their “mental tuning forks” and their “instinct for when to trust and when to doubt.” By contrast, social scientists such as Ceci and Bruck proceed with caution, not credulity.

Nov. 18, 2011

“Gossip serves to fill up the vacuum of many people’s lives. It adds spice and excitement ….

“ ʻI would never have imagined it,ʼ say the neighborhood people. ʻIt looked like such a nice, friendly, reputable school, and all the while we didn’t know what terrible things were going on in there. They sure were clever. They really kept it quiet for a long time.

“ ʻWhen those kids came out, I never thought that they had just eaten feces, drunk urine and were beaten with whips.ʼ ”

– From “Sex Abuse Hysteria: Salem Witch Trials Revisited” by Richard A. Gardner (1991)

July 18, 2012

“Law enforcement officials are teaming up with social services experts to investigate and more effectively prosecute child sexual abuse in North Carolina day-care facilities….

“State Bureau of Investigation Director Charles Dunn said… the goal is to train up to 300 individuals in the state’s largest cities.

“Under the protocol, agencies in counties would establish guidelines for interagency task forces. Each task force would include an investigative unit and a resource unit.

“The typical investigative unit would include a child protective services social worker, law enforcement officer, consultant from the state day-care licensing agency and an SBI agent.

“The resource unit might include medical personnel, SBI lab experts, mental health workers and representatives of the attorney general’s and local district attorney’s offices…

“The General Assembly (this year required) SBI notification within 24 hours of any report of sexual abuse in a day-care setting. ‘The Little Rascals case really just helped to focus the public’s and the legislature’s attention,’ ” Dunn said.

– From the Associated Press, July 21, 1992

I suppose this massive response by the state could be described as closing the barn door after the horse is out – except, of course, for the absence of a horse in the first place.

Two decades have passed since all that staff training, protocol drafting and attention focusing, but apparently the state’s interagency task forces are still waiting to be activated for the next day-care ritual abuse case.

Aug. 20, 2015

“In the mid-1980s, a friend of mine testified on behalf of an elementary-school teacher who had been accused of being a pedophile.

“A child had told his mother that the teacher had taught them about ‘boobies and dicks’ and had drawn a picture on the blackboard that sounded suspiciously to the mother like an image of an ejaculating penis.

“The police had raced to the classroom and confiscated the damning evidence: several copies of ‘Moby-Dick.’ What the teacher had drawn was a whale and its spout.

“Looking back, we can see that the only boobies involved in this case were the adults. But whenever we are in the midst of a moral panic, as we were in the 1980s, we feel that our alarm is reasonable and that punitive solutions are appropriate.

“Dicks? That child knew the word ‘dicks’? Cancel sex ed! Run that teacher out of town!…”

– From “A Very Model Moral Panic” by Carol Tavris in the Wall Street Journal (Aug. 7)