Aug. 1, 2012

“Congress’s well-intentioned but misguided Mondale Act (the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, CAPTA), signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1974, provided impetus to prosecute alleged crimes against children.

“First, it provided immunity to reporters of abuse, thereby unleashing an unlimited supply of unsubstantiated charges.

“Second, it provided funds to permit so-called victims to receive state-financed therapy immediately, even prior to any adjudication.

“Thus, the victims in Edenton received extensive counseling, at government expense, for ‘abuse’ that never occurred. Four ‘sex therapists’ got all that business and received many thousands of dollars in reimbursement. They had no motivation to suppose those charges might be bogus.”

– From “Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom” by Raymond J. Lawrence (2007)

Feb. 25, 2013

“The 99 guilty verdicts against (Bob) Kelly appear to have set a benchmark for such cases: that youthful witnesses can have enough credibility to win convictions on their word alone.

“‘This validated child witness testimony,’ said Carolyn McAllaster, who teaches a child advocacy clinic at Duke University’s law school and trial practice at the University of North Carolina School of Law.

“‘I think the reason a lot of prosecutors hesitate to take these cases is they fear these children won’t be believed by juries,’ she said. ‘They should give a child’s testimony the same weight they would give an adult’s testimony. I think that children are very believable and that their testimony can be judged on its own merits.’ ”

– From “Rascals verdict affirms children’s credibility” in the Raleigh News & Observer (April 26, 1992)

McAllaster has gone on to become director of the AIDS Legal Project and a clinical professor of law at Duke.

Has she changed her mind about the credibility of child witnesses?

I asked her.

She hasn’t responded.

April 3, 2013

In my fruitless attempt to extract a retraction from the journal Child Abuse & Neglect, I quoted only the abstract of “Sexual Abuse of Children in Day Care Centers” by Susan J. Kelley, Renee Brant and Jill Waterman.

But because the 1993 article continues to be cited in the literature – most recently in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry – it deserves a more detailed review.

Most offensive to me is the authors’ use of ostensibly sophisticated statistics. For example: “The mean number of different types of sexual acts per child ranged from 5.3 sexual acts per child in (Kathleen Coulborn) Faller’s (1988) sample to 6.6 different types of sexual abuse per child in Kelley’s (1989) study.”

Can’t you just picture the authors’ computers straining under the weight of all their meticulous research? In reality, of course, the “mean number of different types of sexual acts per child” was… zero.

And the anecdotes! What ever were Kelley, Brant and Waterman thinking as their fingers typed such unfounded claims as these:

• “Foreign objects used to penetrate children in day care center cases have included such items and pencils, needles, knives, scissors and crucifixes.”
• “Allegations of pornographic photographs and videos being taken of children in day care center cases sometimes surface…. Unfortunately, in very few cases have law enforcement officials been able to locate the pornography.”
• “Children who have been ritualistically abused describe participation in group ceremonies, use of chants and songs, adults dressed in costumes and masks, threats with supernatural powers….the sacrifice of animals, the ingestion of blood, feces and urine, and murders.”

Despite the authors’ unbridled certitude, they can’t help complaining that “One of the first complications in the evaluation of ritualistic abuse cases is the frequent disbelief and skepticism on the part of the professionals secondary to the bizarre and extreme nature of the allegations.”

“Complications,” indeed.

Sept. 14, 2015

“Rising retraction rates reflect (in part) the fact that scientists, journalists and amateur watchdogs have begun scrutinizing research more closely….

“This heightened scrutiny – the very scrutiny that likely contributed to the retractions surge in the first place – could help reverse the tide, by providing a powerful disincentive to bad behavior. As more scientific misconduct is exposed and shamed, researchers who were previously tempted to play fast and loose with their data may now think twice.”

– From “A Scientific Look at Bad Science” by Bourree Lam in The Atlantic (September 2015)

“The increase in overall retractions is mostly because a higher percentage of journals have begun issuing retractions…. One reason it’s taken a while… could be that they had to develop the necessary guidelines for defining, detecting and dealing with ‘misconduct’….

“(One) study found that editors are retracting articles significantly faster now than in the past. We might be working our way towards a future in which fraudsters like (Diederik) Stapel won’t build up such massive bodies of literature before being unmasked. Their first or second will be caught, before they’ve done too much damage.”

 – From “Scientific Retractions are on the Rise, and That May Be a Good Thing” by Rosie Cima at Priceonomics (June 24)

“Before they’ve done too much damage” – ah, if only that applied to the errant (and still unrepentant) authors and journal editors whose efforts lent credence to the prosecution during the “satanic ritual abuse” moral panic.