Sept. 23, 2016

“We Believe the Children” offers a clear explanation of how a then-novel crusade for child welfare and a murk of neo-Freudian psychological theory together drove officials to find suppressed trauma where none existed, and [Richard] Beck also cites the popular nonfiction books Sybil (1973) and Michelle Remembers (1980) for their role in spreading acceptance of Multiple Personality Disorder and Satanic Ritual Abuse as authentic phenomena.

“He further argues that the day care scandals represented a conservative backlash on behalf of traditional family structures, in which fathers worked while mothers stayed at home to raise children, over the newer model of two busy parents dropping their kids off with professionals.  In this reading, the contemporaneous wave of incest survivor memoirs and self-publicizing MPD victims likewise reinforced the traditionalist ideal of helpless females unable to cope in a modern society that gave women too much sexual and career freedom.

“Maybe.  Yet Beck only devotes a paragraph or two to the burgeoning pop-culture fascination with the occult which preceded the Satanic panic, and it’s worth pointing out that, despite hit films like The Godfather and Scarface, no one in the 1980s was accused of recruiting children into a mobster underworld, and despite turmoil in the Middle East, day cares were not suspected of being fronts for Islamic terrorists.

“Rather, the emphasis on perversion, ritual killing, and cultism which characterized the scare drew on obvious sources in the mass entertainment of the mid-1960s onward.  As I’ve written in my book Here’s To My Sweet Satan:  How the Occult Haunted Music, Movies, and Pop Culture, 1966-1980,

For a culture accustomed to the bloody rampages of Charles Manson, the shameless perversities of Anton LaVey, and the no-holds-barred gross-outs of The Exorcist, such combinations of cruelty, vulgarity, and the occult [in the McMartin charges] were no longer surprising.…For a long time the public had been bombarded with messages of what Satan and Satanists were like, of the words, images, and symbols associated with devil worship, and especially of how children were Satan’s favorite victims.  It had all finally proved too much for some people.

“I believe it’s this influence that fostered the climate for McMartin and other travesties, at least as much as any right-wing fantasies about dutiful moms and dangerous outsiders….”

– From “Children of the Grave” by Canaadian author and blogger George Case (Sept. 23)

An earlier challenge to Beck’s emphasis on conservative backlash points a finger at feminism.

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”?

April 18, 2012

“One of the more surprising aspects of this (Little Rascals) case…. was that none of the parents… had observed anything that caused them to suspect their children were being abused or tortured during the period of the alleged abuses; there were no reports of unusual incidents from their children.

“Nor did the parents detect anything unusual when, without notice, they dropped in early to pick up their children from the day care (e.g., to take them to a doctor’s appointment).

“It was only after allegations began to grow that parents also began to remember events or behaviors consistent with their child being abused.”

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

Prosecutor Nancy Lamb gave the Charlotte Observer her response to “Jeopardy in the Courtroom”: “It’s unfortunate that these two people who have a good reputation – or at least Ceci did – have written this. It’s garbage.”

March 26, 2012

How did the moral panic over day-care ritual abuse spread so widely? Did some undetected psychotropic waft from Manhattan Beach to Edenton to Christchurch, New Zealand?

I was reminded of that lingering question while reading the smart and lively “Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts” (2007).

Although Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson address the day-care panic only briefly, their reference to the McMartin case having produced “copycat accusations against day care teachers across the country” caught my attention. Yes, the timing, pattern and similarity of these cases suggest conscious imitation, but I haven’t seen the evidence.

“We didn’t mean ‘copycat’ literally,” Tavris explains in an e-mail. “It’s just that the McMartin hysteria scared people, and got them worried about their own local day care centers, and motivated DAs and cops to advance their careers by finding these villains… and thereby launched a thousand other efforts to find molesters under the bed and in the day care classrooms…. That’s what a hysterical epidemic means.”

Coincidentally, I’ve been corresponding with Michael Hill, professor of sociology at Victoria University of Wellington, who has traced outbreaks in New Zealand and Australia directly to visits from such American Appleseeds as Roland Summit and Kee MacFarlane.