June 18, 2012<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, prosecutors blundered terribly by piling on charges and piling on defendants, just because they could.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, some of the parents became hysterical and acted out of guilt. That\u2019s the way people act when told their children have been sexually abused \u2013 by someone to whom they entrusted them, to whom they personally delivered them every day.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd here’s another thing the experts are right about. The children weren’t perfect witnesses. They got mixed up. They talked about spaceships and houses that walked.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut that’s what it means to be a child, and what makes children prey to pedophiles. Children don’t know how to defend themselves. They’re easy to scare and apt to do what adults tell them to do.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is plenty to learn from the tragic mistakes in the Little Rascals case. But the final tragedy would be to conclude that child sex abuse is some sort of figment of our social imagination, and not the very real predator it is.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2013 From a column by Lorraine Ahearn in the Greensboro News & Record (June 1, 1997)<\/em><\/p>\n As previously mentioned, journalists were among\u00a0those who just couldn\u2019t believe\u00a0nothing\u00a0<\/em>happened<\/a>\u00a0at Little Rascals.<\/p>\n Ms. Ahearn, who covered part of Bob Kelly\u2019s trial before becoming a columnist, has changed\u00a0her line of work<\/a>\u00a0since 1997 \u2013 has she also changed her mind about ritual sex abuse at day cares? Apparently not:<\/p>\n \u201cI am no longer a working journalist, and I am not interested in weighing in.<\/p>\n \u201cYou may glean whatever you wish from the (column). I did cover the trial as a reporter and that was what my column was based upon, not second-hand views about unrelated cases.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019d be the last to disparage shoe-leather reporting, but it\u2019s those \u201csecond-hand views about unrelated cases\u201d \u2013 from journalists such as Debbie Nathan and social scientists such as Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck \u2013 that enable us to comprehend the incomprehensible.<\/p>\n \u25cf\u00a0 \u25cf\u00a0 \u25cf<\/p>\n Do I ever tire of asking the Lorraine Ahearns, the\u00a0David Finkelhors<\/a>, the\u00a0Kathleen Coulborn Fallers<\/a>, the\u00a0H.W. Williamses<\/a>, the\u00a0Elisabeth Porter-Hurds<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Michele L. Zimmermans<\/a>, \u201cHave you changed your mind?\u201d<\/p>\n Well, yes, I do. But do they ever tire of insisting they haven\u2019t?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" June 18, 2012 \u201cYes, prosecutors blundered terribly by piling on charges and piling on defendants, just because they could. \u201cYes, some of the parents became hysterical and acted out of guilt. That\u2019s the way people act when told their children have been sexually abused \u2013 by someone to whom they entrusted them, to whom they […]<\/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-537","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\/537","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=537"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2516,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions\/2516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}