{"id":3032,"date":"2018-01-08T07:36:13","date_gmt":"2018-01-08T07:36:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/?p=3032"},"modified":"2018-01-12T18:27:34","modified_gmt":"2018-01-12T18:27:34","slug":"remembering-when-sketchiest-of-evidence-or-none-at-all-was-plenty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/?p=3032","title":{"rendered":"Remembering when \u2018sketchiest of evidence or none at all\u2019 was plenty"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_3033\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3033\" style=\"width: 80px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-3033\" src=\"http:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/180108Levine80.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"80\" height=\"120\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-3033\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Levine<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\">Jan. 8, 2018<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBecause [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 \u2013 especially if \u2013 the alleged victim did not remember it. \u2018If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were,\u2019 wrote poet Ellen Bass and journalist Laura Davis in their massive bestseller <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/1995\/02\/16\/thanks-for-the-memories\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Courage to Heal<\/a>\u00a0 (1988). The symptom checklists in it and similar books include everything from arthritis to feeling ugly. Bass\u2019s book launched a battery of unscientific \u2018therapeutic\u2019 and forensic interviewing techniques to extract false and \u2018recovered\u2019 memories of sexual depredation. &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA new crusade marched under the banner \u2018Believe the Children.\u2019 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 \u2018satanic ritual abuse.\u2019 Adults denounced their aging parents, guilty of nothing more than imperfect love, as sadistic rapists. It took only one accusation to ruin a person\u2019s 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/?p=530\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">National Registry of Exonerations<\/a> reported that among convictions for crimes that never occurred, over half involved child sexual abuse: \u2018Two-thirds of these cases were generated in a wave of child sexual abuse hysteria that swept the country three decades ago.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><em>\u2013 From \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/bostonreview.net\/gender-sexuality\/judith-levine-will-feminisms-past-mistakes-haunt-metoo\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Will Feminism\u2019s Past Mistakes Haunt #MeToo?<\/a>\u201d (Dec. 8) by Judith Levine in Boston Review<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-1707\" src=\"http:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/LRDCC20.jpg\" alt=\"LRDCC20\" width=\"132\" height=\"20\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jan. 8, 2018 \u201cBecause [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 \u2013 especially if \u2013 the alleged victim did not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3032"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3041,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3032\/revisions\/3041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}