Aug. 17, 2012<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve wondered how the prosecutors (in ritual-abuse day-care cases) could live with themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cSays Debbie Nathan (coauthor of \u201cSatan\u2019s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt\u201d): \u2018There was a time \u2013 and it lasted eight or nine years \u2013 when there was an entire body of expert opinion that these things could happen.\u2019 It was a time, she says, when pseudoscience had raced ahead of science, when best-selling books that had yet to be contradicted asserted that the inability to remember a trauma was the strongest proof of it, when doctors trying to be helpful established as a baseline a model virginal hymen so perfectly smooth and shaped that it allowed any actual hymen to be construed as traumatized.<\/p>\n
\u201c \u2018Our culture is still really atavistic,\u2019 says Nathan, \u2018but there\u2019s an overlay of science on it. Mix the totally primeval stuff with science and you\u2019ve got this mix that can\u2019t be beat.\u2019 Prosecutors, she says, \u2018are just as naive as anyone else, but they also know how to sway people. They have all the techniques down pat. \u201cSuffer the little children.\u201d \u201cInnocence defiled.\u201d \u201cWorse than murder.\u201d \u2018<\/p>\n
\u201cBut why, as science and truth become clearer, is it so hard for so many prosecutors to recant?\u2026\u00a0 \u2018Maybe it\u2019s because the whole process of constructing one of these innocent people as a really demonically evil sexual pervert who sadistically violates lots of kids \u2013 the whole process of constructing this character on a real person is torture. You have to be very invasive. It\u2019s a very sadistic enterprise. You become like a torturer.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
\u2013 From \u201cWhy Can’t They Admit They Were Wrong?\u201d by John Conroy Aug. 17, 2012 \u201cI\u2019ve wondered how the prosecutors (in ritual-abuse day-care cases) could live with themselves. \u201cSays Debbie Nathan (coauthor of \u201cSatan\u2019s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt\u201d): \u2018There was a time \u2013 and it lasted eight or nine years \u2013 when there was an entire body of expert […]<\/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-605","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\/605","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=605"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2508,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605\/revisions\/2508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nin the Chicago Reader (Aug. 1, 2003)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"