Sept. 16, 2013

“The prosecution-minded are careful to say that they do not believe everything a child says. For example, they do not believe 3-year-old Virginia’s statement that ‘Karen was cooked in a microwave.’

“But they do believe her when she says, ‘I helped my teacher put a playhandle in Karen’s heinie’ – even though one 3-year-old sodomizing another with a ‘playhandle’ an inch or 2 wide and not causing bleeding from a torn rectum is as unbelievable as cooking a child in a microwave.

“Accepting half a child’s statement and rejecting the other (death by microwave) is capricious: The truth is not a smorgasbord from which we can choose the facts we fancy and leave behind those we do not.”

– From “Magical Child Molestation Trials: Edenton’s Children Accuse” by Margaret Leong (1993)

March 9, 2019

Pete Manning, 89, died Feb. 21 at his home in Edenton. Before retiring, Manning worked more than 50 years at the Chowan Herald, most prominently as publisher.

As prosecution of Edenton Seven lurched forward, members of the local “Believe the Children” cohort grew wary of the news media. Early on, however – before seeing themselves on “Frontline” — they had actually sought the spotlight.

Jack D. Grove, managing editor of the Herald, recalled that short-lived era to journalist David Loomis:

“I was approached by several influential businessmen who clouded up and rained all over me for putting a [Little Rascals] story on the back page. I said, ‘Go tell Pete Manning, don’t tell me.’ These businessmen, almost all parents of Little Rascals children, went into a closed-door meeting with Pete. We never again had a story anywhere but on the front page after that.”

Unfortunately, the Herald’s front-page coverage was painfully passive at best.

March 1, 2013

“Now, you can ask yourself why did the jury believe these things? How could the jury believe that, as in the Amirault (day-care ritual-abuse) case, old Mrs. Amirault, one of the most upright of citizens, had suddenly turned at the age of 67 into a child molester who raped children?

“She was accused and convicted of inserting a stick into the body orifice of a little boy, tied him to a tree stark naked in front of everyone, in front of the house in Massachusetts, and the children all attested to this, the ones that were part of the case. Now, who would believe this?…

“But if you have a prosecutor who tells the jury, ‘Here are all of these brave children. These brave children have come forward to ask that you credit their story because they have endured so much suffering, and if you don’t do this, you’re betraying the children’ — it is not easy to find a jury that is stalwart enough to say, ‘Hey, you know, this really is a pile of nonsense.’”

– From a C-SPAN “Booknotes” interview with Dorothy Rabinowitz, author of “No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness and Other Terrors of Our Times” (May 4, 2003).

Jan. 9, 2013

“One question that arises from studies on children’s suggestibility is whether they document false memories or merely false reports. Do children really believe that the fictional events happened? Or do they merely say so to please the interviewers?

“Consistent with the false memory interpretation, approximately one-third of the children in these studies continued to insist that particular events had really happened to them even after they were told those events were not real….

“Lacking any obvious motivation to lie, these children appeared to have developed false memories, perhaps confusing the products of their repeated attempts to visualize the events with the products of direct experience….

“Professionals were no better than chance at discriminating false from true reports. The credibility of a child’s account was related to the amount of perceptual detail mentioned in the child’s narrative. The more details, the more professional tended to believe the narrative, regardless of whether it was true.”

– From “Remembering Trauma” by Richard J. McNally (2003)

To better understand how the Little Rascals therapists went so wildly astray, give that last paragraph a second reading. “Professionals were no better than chance at discriminating false from true reports” – and they were mesmerized by the “perceptual detail” in those tales of sharks and spaceships.