April 11, 2012

“Almost always you find the kids are three or four years old.

“The two-year-olds are no good because they can’t speak well enough and are totally unreliable in what they do say. The five- and six-year-olds are already old enough to say, ‘He didn’t do that, lady, and nothing you say is going to convince me of it.’

“But threes and fours are perfect. After they’ve been worked over by a parent or zealous validator, they can be counted on because they believe it and will testify accordingly.”

– Dr. Richard A. Gardner, clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia
University, quoted in Playboy magazine (June 1992)

July 19, 2013

“…There should be lessons here, lessons about the risks in cases so emotional that they take on a life of their own; lessons for prosecutors who need to use their considerable investigative resources to learn, and not to crusade; lessons about the price in credibility paid by a judicial system in which defendants who are not rich are up against tremendous odds….

“The Little Rascals case…. has wasted many years of many lives. The greater waste will be if nothing is learned from it.”

– From “Case dismissed” (News & Observer editorial, May 28, 1997)

Dec. 28, 2012

Let’s not leave behind “Ritual Abuse: What It Is, Why It Happens, and How to Help” without considering Appendix B, “Similarities in the Lives of Ritual Abuse Survivors.”

Author Margaret Smith “asked survivors to note any clues or indicators in their lives that may have suggested they were ritually abused as a child.” She then “organize(d) these responses into meaningful categories.”

Like the symptom charts of psychologist Catherine Gould, these “meaningful categories” strain to make the wildly anecdotal seem scientific.

“Reactions to Objects That Trigger Memories,” for instance, includes not only “Preference for red meat,” but also “Hated read meat. I have been a vegetarians since I was a child.”

“Indicators from Childhood or Adult Behavior” covers both “Threw up a lot” and “Would never allow myself to vomit.”

And just what manner of abuse might be revealed by “clues” such as – I wish I were kidding – “Addicted to book reading”?

May 17, 2013

From Betsy Kelly’s comments at the ceremony awarding Ofra Bikel the 2007 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism:

“I stand before you tonight because of Ofra Bikel. She spent many hours with my family and with some of the most hurtful and hateful people. She turned many (viewers) around to believe in the truth. The day she walked into my life I had somebody to hold onto… and she opened the door and she led me out…..”

From Nancy Smith Barrow’s comments:

“I thought: She comes from another planet, she doesn’t speak Southern, what can she do?

“I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to climb into that hole we were in…

“Ofra took us where we were, where hell was raining down, where people who have known us since we were born would cross the street not to meet us….

“Ofra, I owe you for the most precious thing in my life (my sister), you brought her back…..”

From Ofra Bikel’s comments:

“I was this close to not doing (‘Innocence Lost’). I said (to assistant Rachel Dretzin), ‘Are you crazy? What are we going to do in a little town with a little hotel that doesn’t take American Express?’…. Anyway, we went, and the first day I realized we were staying….

“The whole country was awash in sexual abuse stories, but there was nothing less likely than for Edenton, North Carolina, to be involved in this satanic conspiracy… The town was calm on outside but seething on the inside with these rumors of terrible sexual abuse, started by one kid, then three kids, then 10 kids, then 80 and then close to a hundred… until they decided to close the list….

“(After the last Little Rascals charges were dropped) I was left with two very strong feelings: how many things can go wrong in the justice system…. and what a powerful tool we had in our hands with the television documentary….”