June 18, 2018

“Ted Cross, a senior research specialist at the University of Illinois School of Social Work, [said] separation of the two interventions – forensic and therapeutic – is critical for the child, but is also important for practical reasons: ‘You don’t want the therapeutic work to taint a criminal investigation. If a child is in therapy at the same time that the forensic interview takes place, the attorney representing the offender can say the therapist planted the idea of abuse in the child’s head.’.

“This point is of particular importance in the wake of high-profile cases such as the McMartin Preschool trial during the 1980s, in which therapists’ interviewing techniques were so suggestive that the children falsely accused their teachers of abuse….”

– From “How to Build a Space to Support Abused Children” by Mimi Kirk at Atlantic Cities (March 29)

Did the Little Rascals therapists offer children any therapy at all? What do you think?

Dec. 19, 2011

“In the Little Rascals case, a handful of therapists were compensated by the state for evaluating and ‘treating’ the child witnesses. But there seemed to be other motivations for these therapists to become ‘investigators’ for the district attorney’s office. According to one mother’s testimony, one therapist seemed to have a vested forensic role.

“ ‘(The therapist) evidently had been involved in this for a long time, and she was planning on flying in experts and FBI people from everywhere, because she thought this was going to be bigger than the McMartin Preschool case in California…. And she wanted to get on this one right away, wanted to get all of these expert people in here because she knew there was a lot more to to it.’ ”

– From “Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children’s Testimony”
by Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck (1995)

Jan. 8, 2018

“Because [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 – especially if – the alleged victim did not remember it. ‘If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were,’ wrote poet Ellen Bass and journalist Laura Davis in their massive bestseller The Courage to Heal  (1988). The symptom checklists in it and similar books include everything from arthritis to feeling ugly. Bass’s book launched a battery of unscientific ‘therapeutic’ and forensic interviewing techniques to extract false and ‘recovered’ memories of sexual depredation. …

“A new crusade marched under the banner ‘Believe the Children.’ 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 ‘satanic ritual abuse.’ Adults denounced their aging parents, guilty of nothing more than imperfect love, as sadistic rapists. It took only one accusation to ruin a person’s 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 National Registry of Exonerations reported that among convictions for crimes that never occurred, over half involved child sexual abuse: ‘Two-thirds of these cases were generated in a wave of child sexual abuse hysteria that swept the country three decades ago.”

– From “Will Feminism’s Past Mistakes Haunt #MeToo?” (Dec. 8) by Judith Levine in Boston Review

June 14, 2015

Long after Bob Kelly reclaimed his freedom, he continued to fear that prosecutor Nancy Lamb was searching for yet another excuse to send him back to prison.

His apprehension was entirely reasonable.

In 1996, less than a year after the North Carolina Court of Appeals overturned Kelly’s conviction in the Little Rascals case, Lamb had had him indicted on a new round of sex charges, supposedly unrelated and transparently dubious.

According to correspondence I recently happened onto, a lawyer who attended a scheduling conference for Kelly’s upcoming trial was startled by Lamb’s unprofessional demeanor:

 “It was very obvious… that Nancy is on a personal mission to have Bob put behind bars for something. Her voice and her hands were noticeably shaking throughout the meeting and at times she wiped moisture from her eyes.

“I just don’t see how she can go through an entire trial without exposing to the jury this ‘witch hunt’ mentality that has consumed her….”

For whatever reason – she claimed, as usual, to be looking out for the ‘victim’ – Lamb’s decade-long pursuit of Bob Kelly ended anticlimactically. She dropped the last charges in 1999.