Jan. 23, 2013

“Ritual sex abuse is back. Recently (in 2003) I heard that a conference on the topic was being held for psychotherapists.

“It was planned not to critique a nasty period in the annals of American hysteria but rather so that attendees could learn to ask patients if they’ve ever been raped in day care by secret devil worshipers.

“This stuff was debunked in the 1990s as a type of urban myth. Yet it keeps cropping up, complete with pseudo-scientific theories about the psychology of so-called victims – theories that likewise refuse to die.

“One such theory is that children who are molested often grow up to deny that the crime ever happened. Many do so, the theory holds, because people commonly repress or dissociate from memories of horrific trauma – particularly sex abuse.

“This idea has been repeatedly discredited by research psychologists. But… in pop culture and among many child-protection workers, it’s still de rigueur to think that a child who was fondled or raped is at risk of burying the memory.”

– From “The Exorcists” by Debbie Nathan in the Washington Post (May 4, 2003)

April 29, 2013

If you watched “The Plea,” the concluding 1997 installment of “Innocence Lost,” you might not expect that Nancy Smith Barrow, Betsy’s sister, would choose to remain in the midst of those townspeople who caused her family such brutal and unjustified pain.

But stay she has, raising a family and participating in community affairs. I talked to her recently about her life then and now.

Why she has continued to live in Edenton:

“I never considered leaving. My parents were here. This is my home. For a long time, I imagined my dad, mom, sister and I would be back here together, after it all unraveled, after people looked behind the curtain and saw the Wizard….”

What Edenton was like for her during the Little Rascals panic:

“I’d walk into a public place and scan the room to see if I would be comfortable there. I never felt any physical threat – that’s not the kind of people they are here…. But I didn’t want my children exposed to such obvious and outward hatred….”

What Edenton is like for her today:

“Once Bob’s verdict was overturned, that was the end of it. Now I go where I want and do what I want….

“Things went very badly for the indicting parents. But they still believe – because they have to believe….

“Some of them I will talk to in the grocery store or at school, but we are not welcome in each others’ homes….

“Our children went to school together, and they finished growing up together (without conflict). It was like when the adults went away, when the adults got tired of playing, the children were left to clean up the game….”

How she looks back at the case:

“My sister (who now lives in Raleigh) has a life we could never have imagined, a wonderfully normal life. Everyone I loved at Little Rascals is free. My children (now 32 and 28) are fine and healthy…. The Little Rascals case was a phenomenon of epic proportions, and we weathered it….”

April 2, 2012

Among the contaminants reported in the deliberations of the first Little Rascals jury was a Redbook article used to profile Bob Kelly as a child molester. Its content never was detailed, so I looked it up (thanks yet again, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library).

Beneath the panic-inducing headline – “Why I’m Every Mother’s Worst Fear” – I was surprised to find virtually nothing relevant to day cares. Instead, the author offered insights such as:

“There are far more child molesters who operate like me than there are those who forcibly kidnap children. What the abductors do makes the headlines. What I do is more common and less noticeable. Most child molesters are established in our communities, known to others as just another good neighbor. We may even be married with kids of our own.”

An editor’s note drove home the point: “Finally, believe a child who reports a sexual overture or encounter, no matter how respectable or unlikely the accused person might seem.”

These descriptions, of course, fit the crazy-making template for ritual-abuse prosecutions:

If he seems like a child abuser, then he is.

If he doesn’t seem like a child abuser, then he is – “no matter how unlikely.”

Nov. 21, 2011

Raymond Lawrence, the New York City chaplain who founded the Committee for Support of the Edenton Seven, was an attentive and often appalled observer at Bob Kelly’s trial. This passage is excerpted from a memoir now posted in its entirety on the Bookshelf:

“Among the more obscene performances I witnessed by the prosecution was a long argument that Robert Kelly had had vaginal intercourse with a five-year-old girl.

“On a screen about four feet square the prosecutor displayed a color slide the girl’s genitalia, with two adult thumbs shown pulling back the labia to display the hymen and vaginal opening. The hymen appeared fully intact, covering most of the vaginal opening. The prosecutor thus spent what I recall as hours arguing that the stretch marks in the hymen were evidence of adult penile penetration.

“I wondered why the defense attorney did not rise up and ask if this were Alice in Wonderland…. It was as if I had entered an alternate universe.”