May 7, 2012

From an exchange with Stephen Ceci, author (with Maggie Bruck) of the landmark “Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children’s Testimony” (1995):

Q: What may have happened to the child-witnesses as a result of being so profoundly misdiagnosed? One Little Rascals child-witness who responded anonymously to an advertisement I placed in the Edenton paper continues to say she was abused by Bob Kelly, although she admits to doubts about the female defendants.

A: We lack good scientific data on the long-term beliefs of individuals who as children were suggestively interviewed. A handful of studies, none of which resemble allegations of sexual abuse, seem to indicate that they grow up with the belief that they were abused, replete with the same psychological sequelae of true abuse survivors.

But you’ll note I use phrases such as “seem to indicate,” because the data are not uniform or consistent and the scenarios are not sex abuse ones. I think many, perhaps most, memory researchers would expect someone who was convinced as a child that he or she was victimized to grow into an adult with the same problems seen in actual victims, e.g., distrust of authority figures, insecurity, etc..

–

What extreme caution Dr. Ceci, an unsurpassed authority on child abuse, uses not to present theory and speculation as fact…. If only the therapists and theoreticians behind the day-care-abuse mania had shown half the professional uncertainty….

June 26, 2013

The suburban New York child sex abuse case documented in the Oscar-nominated “Capturing the Friedmans” (2003) returned to the spotlight Monday, this time because of a review panel’s finding that Jesse Friedman had in fact been rightfully convicted.

Although the New York Times describes the Friedman case as having come “to symbolize an era of sensational, often-suspect accusations of child molestation,” many aspects – including the 1988 confessions of both the defendant and his father – make it an outlier to the epidemic of day-care cases of that era.

The review panel itself emphasized this distinction, the Associated Press points out:

“The Friedman case has drawn comparisons to the 1980s McMartin Preschool scandal, but the investigators said they ‘were in no way similar.’ In the McMartin case, the report noted, more than 200 preschool children described being sexually abused by teachers, but only after months of highly suggestive questioning by social workers working with prosecutors. The report noted in the Friedman case, the victims were more than twice as old as the McMartin preschoolers and many in the Friedman case disclosed abuse quickly.”

Regardless, there are similarities, too. In an interview with the Village Voice interview last month, Jesse Friedman had this to say about the young computer students who testified against him:

“When I was in prison, my hope always hung on the idea that, give it five or 10 years; once they get to college, once they’re actual adults, once they’re old enough to no longer be living at home with their parents in Great Neck, they will come forward and admit that they lied.

“When (journalist( Debbie Nathan came to visit me, she told me that most of the complainants in the McMartin case publicly affirm that they were raped and abused in the McMartin Preschool. Whereas that case has been thoroughly, completely vetted beyond all doubt that nothing happened. And yet the kids involved believe that they were abused. She said, ‘You really can’t hang your hopes on the idea that the kids know that they lied and that nothing happened. Because they might very well think that something happened.’ “

Do the now-grown child-witnesses in the Little Rascals case “know that they lied and that nothing happened”? Or does the shapeless memory of their supposed abuse remain forever sealed from self-examination?

Dec. 26, 2012

By 1993 the moral panic was at last retreating from therapists’ offices, courtrooms and the media. That timing gives “Ritual Abuse: What It Is, Why It Happens, and How to Help” a peculiar place in its genre.

Although the pseudonymous “Margaret Smith” is a supposed “survivor and researcher of ritual abuse,” her advocacy lacks the blind certitude of a “Nursery Crimes: Sexual Abuse in Day Care” (1988) or a “Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book about Satanic Ritual Abuse” (1990).

“If there is even a small chance that one ritual abuse claim is true,” Smith begins, “we owe it to all potential victims to explore the problem of ritual abuse in greater depth.” Such unexpected tentativeness!  Is she doubting even her own claim of victimhood? Or did an editor at HarperSanFrancisco awaken just in time to insist on at least a façade of rationality?

Unfortunately, the rest of the book alternates Smith’s first-person accounts of her ritual-abuse-caused “multiple personality disorder” with a predictable rollout of junk statistics. Could anyone be surprised, for instance, that among “adult survivors of ritual abuse,” fully 84 percent reported having witnessed “mutilation or killing of animals/humans”?

June 2, 2015

“Psychologist Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia says that the most common and problematic bias in science is ‘motivated reasoning’: We interpret observations to fit a particular idea.

“Psychologists have shown that ‘most of our reasoning is in fact rationalization,’ he says. In other words, we have already made the decision about what to do or to think, and our ‘explanation’ of our reasoning is really a justification for doing what we wanted to do – or to believe – anyway.”

– From “The Trouble With Scientists: How one psychologist is tackling human biases in science” by Philip Ball at Nautilus (May 14)

“Motivated reasoning” ran amok during the “satanic ritual abuse” day-care panic, resulting in journal articles such as “Stress Responses of Children to Sexual Abuse and Ritualistic Abuse in Day Care Centers” and “Satanic Ritual Abuse: A Cause of Multiple Personality Disorder” – and legitimizing testimony by the prosecution’s expert witnesses.

Not surprisingly, Dr. Nosek has found examples of “motivated reasoning” in claims of recovered memory.

“In my intro psych course,” he told me, “I have one lecture that is centered around Lawrence Wright’s fascinating ‘Remembering Satan’….” (about a 1988 case in Olympia, Wash., involving not only SRA allegations but also false confession).