Oct. 31, 2012

“Mass movements can rise and spread without a belief in God, but never without belief in a devil.”

– Eric Hoffer in his landmark analysis of fanaticism, “The True Believer” (1951)

Hoffer’s point was impressively made in the day-care mania. In no case I’ve found – in this country at least – did religion play a significant factor. To the contrary, several ministers and churches were on the receiving end of wrongful prosecution.

Jan. 23, 2012

Last week I visited Avery-Mitchell Correctional Institution in Spruce Pine to talk to Junior Chandler, who soon will have served 25 years on charges strikingly similar to those in the Little Rascals case.

Junior, now 54, may well be the last still-imprisoned victim of the ritual-abuse contagion that swept the nation’s day cares in the ’80s and early ’90s.

I’ll be updating his case soon.

In Junior’s former life in the mountain town of Revere, he told me, he was close to his parents, his wife and two boys, his two brothers.

Early on, he and his brothers helped their uncle grow tobacco and corn. Before driving a van for the Madison County Day Care Center, he had worked for the Forest Service, the Department of Transportation and Southern Railroad. At least one job he gave up because it interfered with his softball tournaments and night fishing.

In prison, visits from his family became less frequent, and eventually his wife filed for divorce. “Two life sentences,” Junior says. “She couldn’t wait, you know.” And his sons couldn’t keep watching him aging away in his prison grays.

When his father died in 1997, he attended the funeral in handcuffs. He worries about his mother, who recently suffered a stroke.

He sleeps in a bunk bed in a dorm with 33 other inmates. His assigned janitorial job is cleaning meal trays. For relaxation he plays volleyball and horseshoes, watches Westerns on TV, reads a little. His only write-up was a scuffle not long after he arrived. “It’s learning to walk away and how to carry yourself,” he says.

Of course I was touched by Junior’s deep sadness and resignation. Sometimes I find it too easy to minimize the emotional havoc wrought by incarceration of the guilty – just imagine what it must be like for the innocent.

Feb. 3, 2016

“A new survey finds that adults at school, day care and organizations such as churches and scouting groups are less likely than relatives to abuse or mistreat children.

“In general, organizations that serve young people ‘do not look like particularly risky environments,’ said study co-author David Finkelhor, director of the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center. This contradicts perceptions by some people who ‘think these are magnets for molesters,’ he said.”

– From “Child Abuse at Daycare, Youth Groups Rarer Than Thought: Survey” by Randy Dotinga in the Northwest Indiana Times (Feb. 2)

Surprising to see Dr. Finkelhor dismiss the notion of day cares as “magnets for molesters,” given that his own overwrought “Nursery Crimes: Sexual Abuse in Day Care” (1988) was an influential text in spreading the moral panic.

How did he determine back then whether sexual abuse had actually occurred? “If at least one of the local investigating agencies had decided that abuse had occurred and that it had happened while the child was at a day-care facility….then we considered the case substantiated.” In other words, one supposed “red flag” sighting from Brenda Toppin was certification enough.

As recently as 2012, when I queried Dr. Finkelhor about his beliefs past and present,  he denied being “an authority on the validity of claims” that he had laid out with such credulity in “Nursery Crimes.”

April 16, 2012

“At the beginning of each ritual-abuse case, the children had been eminently reliable, but what they communicated was that they had not been molested by satanists. Indeed, it was only after an investigation started, after intense and relentless insistence by adults, that youngsters produced criminal charges.

“By then, their utterances had nothing to do with their own feelings or experiences. Rather, what came from the mouths of babes were juvenile renderings of grownups’ anxieties.”

– From “Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a  Modern American
Witch Hunt” by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker (1995)