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.

Sept. 9, 2016

“Strange what we worry about when it comes to our children. A great deal of the culture-war politics of the 1980s consisted of theatrical wailing about threats to our children that were either entirely made up or wildly exaggerated: The boys in ‘Stranger Things’ love to play Dungeons & Dragons, and, in a rare oversight, the series does not even touch on the minor cultural panic surrounding that game in places such as small-town Indiana, where D&D’s supernatural elements sparked terrified tales of occult experimentation.

“It’s not for nothing that this came around the same time as the Salem-style mass hysteria over ‘Satanic ritual abuse’ at the nation’s child-care centers, with fanciful worries about Luciferian cults obscuring the more straightforward anxiety associated with abandoning one’s children to child-care facilities. Yesterday’s Satanic cultists and Alar [a controversial apple growth inhibitor] are today’s online predators and brain-scrambling vaccinations….”

– From “Familiar Things: The TV series ‘Stranger Things’ portrays family breakdown yesterday and today” by Kevin D. Williamson in National Review (Aug. 29)

…and clowns?

Oct. 19, 2011

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2003, social psychologist Carol Tavris noted that:

“One mother (in the Little Rascals case) told reporters that it took 10 months before her child was able to ‘reveal’ the molestation.

“No one at the time considered the idea that the child might have been remarkably courageous to persist in telling the truth for so long.”

April 23, 2012

In 2007, W. Joseph Wyatt, writing in the professional journal The Behavior Analyst Today, looked back at the Little Rascals case:

“Prosecutors appeared to have little appreciation for the possibility, or likelihood, that they were pursuing innocent people. Prosecutorial fervor for the case evidently persisted long after it had become clear that the case had taken a series of wrong turns.

“Despite the disastrous results, one of the prosecutors continues to hold herself out as an expert. As recently as November, 2006, Nancy Lamb, still working as an assistant district attorney, was co-presenter of a training program for professionals titled ‘The Necessary Components of a Legally Defensible Child Sex Abuse Investigation.’ ”

If for no other reason, the Little Rascals case demands continued public attention as long as Nancy Lamb remains at large, presenting her cruelty and deviousness as a model for future prosecutions.

Update: At a 2010 workshop for the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys, “Nancy Lamb… presented on how to defend the forensic interview in the courtroom.”