Sept. 11, 2013

“Why did the epidemic of day care hysteria happen just when and where it did? Why in 1982? Why in the United States?…. You can’t have a panic about day care centers unless you have day care centers. These had become a necessary fixture of American life as more mothers entered the work force, families traveled far distances to chase available jobs and there were fewer available grandmothers to help babysit. Undoubtedly parental guilt in turning over parental responsibility played a role.

“Among therapists, there was concern over previously not taking seriously enough the statements of kids who had actually experienced sexual abuse. There were also too many therapists with too little expertise who were able nonetheless to self-promote and gain authority as fake ‘experts.’ This sad episode is the clearest caution imaginable to any therapist feeling the impulse to jump onto a current or future fad bandwagon.”

– From “Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life” by Allen Frances (2013)

Despite Dr. Frances’s timidity in exposing the “complete bunk” of multiple personality disorder, his influence across psychiatry is undisputed. But will his words be sufficient to deter the next generation of overreaching therapists from jumping onto the “fad bandwagon”?

Dec. 4, 2015

“Hertford, N.C. – Three children who attended Little Rascals Day Care Center behaved strangely in kindergarten, a teacher testified Wednesday in the sex abuse trial of Dawn Wilson.

“Lisa Leary said one girl who attended the day care in Edenton refused to take a nap the year after Little Rascals closed. She also cried and wet her pants when she saw Elizabeth Kelly in a hall, she said.

“Another girl had to be separated from a boy after she mimicked a sex act with him during class, Leary said.
“A third child ‘did not want anyone to touch him’ and was concerned about fire, she said….”

– From “Kindergarten teacher testifies in Rascals trial” from the Associated Press (Dec. 3, 1992)

Although Dawn Wilson’s prosecutors never let up in their pursuit of the mythical “coherent package” of behaviors attributable to child sexual abuse, the questioning of this witness wandered even further into the weeds than usual. As the AP added dryly:

“On cross-examination by defense attorney Edward Simmons, the teacher said the children did not mention Wilson.”

May 4, 2018

“Only a pedophile would attempt to justify other pedophiles. If you didn’t follow the case in the news at the time or attend the trial,
how do you know they’re innocent? The fact is you don’t and are just saying they are to brush the incident under the rug.
“You should be investigated yourself.”

Levine

Jan. 8, 2018

“Because [this movement] was about sex and children, hysteria was not far behind. Before long, an industry of feminist and Christian therapists and self-help writers were claiming that virtually every behavioral quirk or emotional trouble could be traced to sexual abuse, even if – especially if – the alleged victim did not remember it. ‘If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were,’ wrote poet Ellen Bass and journalist Laura Davis in their massive bestseller The Courage to Heal  (1988). The symptom checklists in it and similar books include everything from arthritis to feeling ugly. Bass’s book launched a battery of unscientific ‘therapeutic’ and forensic interviewing techniques to extract false and ‘recovered’ memories of sexual depredation. …

“A new crusade marched under the banner ‘Believe the Children.’ With the sketchiest of evidence or none at all, child protective agencies removed kids from their parents. Credulous juries sent day-care workers to prison on charges of ‘satanic ritual abuse.’ Adults denounced their aging parents, guilty of nothing more than imperfect love, as sadistic rapists. It took only one accusation to ruin a person’s life. Bus drivers, babysitters, divorcing fathers, and boyfriends at the wrong end of a grudge lost jobs, families, and reputations with one accusation, one newspaper item. In its review of exonerations from 1989 to 2012, the National Registry of Exonerations reported that among convictions for crimes that never occurred, over half involved child sexual abuse: ‘Two-thirds of these cases were generated in a wave of child sexual abuse hysteria that swept the country three decades ago.”

– From “Will Feminism’s Past Mistakes Haunt #MeToo?” (Dec. 8) by Judith Levine in Boston Review