Sept. 21, 2012

“Los Angeles psychiatrist Roland Summit’s ‘child sexual abuse syndrome,’ a theory about incest… argues that if there is evidence of sex abuse and a child denies it, this is only further proof that it happened and a therapist should use any means necessary to help the child talk…. If they later recant, that means they are under family pressure to protect the father and their turnabout is further proof of the crime.

“So no matter how much coercion was used to get an accusation and no matter if a child later retracted it, once Summit’s incest theory was applied, a charge of abuse became irrefutable. Child protection workers ignored the fact that this logic had little to do with day care. After all, why would children staunchly defend abuse to protect an adult who wasn’t part of the family? And if they had been so brutally attacked at school, why wouldn’t they tell their parents?

“Therapists and investigators came up with all sorts of rationales. One was the teachers threatened them by slaughtering animals and warning that the same thing would happen to their parents if they told….”

– From “The Ritual Sex Abuse Hoax” by Debbie Nathan (Village Voice, January 12, 1990)

The “threatened parents” claim reared its head in this 1995 letter from Little Rascals parents:

“…Many (children are now) old enough to realize that Bob Kelly can’t work his threatened evil to kill their families.”

Oct. 9, 2016

Paul J. Stern, recently retired prosecutor in Snohomish County, Wash., has long served the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children as a board member and as an instructor on forensic interviewing.

At the least his June presentation to a large audience of APSAC conventioneers promised to be provocative: “What Practices Are We Engaging in Now That 15 Years From Now We’re Going to Look Back on and Think ‘What in the World Were We Thinking?’ ”

But the title paled in comparison with what Stern went on to say about the rap sheet of this ostensibly professional organization – its serial gullibility about “satanic ritual abuse,” “multiple personality disorder” and various other “misguided ideas.”

Click below to watch a video of Paul J. Stern’s entire talk.

He rambles, and the video suffers from not showing his accompanying PowerPoint. But the case he makes is powerful, unmistakable and surely discomfiting to audience members such as President Emeritus for Life Jon Conte and Board Member at Large Kathleen Coulborn Faller.

“I may irritate a few of you from time to time,” he noted as he began.

Some excerpts, edited for clarity:

• “I want to start by going back to the ’60s, the ’80s, the things we cared about then…. Some of the things we’ve grown up from in this field…. What were we thinking back then?… Oy! (clutches head, steps away from lectern)….What the hell were we thinking?….”
• “Let’s get the granddaddy of our ‘Oops!’ out of the way: ‘satanic ritual abuse.’ Individuals and agencies that weren’t skeptical failed to recognize that all of the iceberg that existed was the tip….And that melted pretty quickly…”
• “This matters [because] prosecutors sentenced people to prison based on good, scientific evidence that turned out not to be accurate.”
• “Why does all this happen? Child abuse is both an advocacy field and a political field. We’ve got to energize the base, energize the policymakers, get their attention…. Easy answers manage anxiety, and they get attention. ‘Kids never lie!’ ‘Believe the children!’ Great slogans, great bumper stickers,  but it’s a little more complicated than that….”

Prosecutor Stern continued with a call for APSAC to focus on “evidence-based decision-making,” but I remained stunned by his acknowledgement of decades of APSAC’s cocky, costly wrongheadedness. Yes, innocent defendants such as Bob Kelly did indeed go to prison based on unfounded theories and corrupt interview practices.

Thank you, Mr. Stern, for your candor. Will this moment turn out to be an aberration – or is APSAC finally ready to make amends to the real victims of its “satanic ritual abuse” mythology?

Dec. 17, 2015

“Three men convicted of murder by arson for a 1980 fire in Brooklyn (were) exonerated on Wednesday….

“What carried the three men into prison was not reliable evidence of an intentionally set blaze, but rather an arson investigation that was more like shamanism than science, rooted in hunches and folklore and disconnected from the dynamics of actual fires. Like the comparisons of bite marks, hair and handwriting, it was a forensic practice that had the authority of white-coat laboratory science but virtually none of its rigor….”

– From “Between Guilt and Innocence, an Evolution in Fire Science”
by Jim Dwyer in the New York Times (Dec. 16)

Hats off to District Attorney Ken Thompson, who moved to vacate the three convictions, citing “circumstantial evidence, outdated science and the testimony of a single, wholly unreliable witness….”

Columnist Dwyer is reminded of a statue at the University of Pennsylvania Law School depicting a mythological Chinese beast believed to have the ability to tell the guilty from the innocent by butting them. Inscribed on its base: “Slow and painful has been man’s progress from magic to law.”

“Slow and painful” indeed. Ask Junior Chandler, who has been imprisoned since April 17, 1987, for committing the magical crime of “satanic ritual abuse.”

April 25, 2012

“Many questions were repeated (by interviewers in the McMartin Preschool case) even when the children had previously given unambiguous answers.

“For example, after a child responded that he/she did not remember any pictures of naked bodies, the interviewer repeated the question saying, ‘Can’t remember that part?’

“Even after the child again responded ‘no,’ the interviewer persisted, saying ‘Why don’t you think about that for awhile…. Your memory might come back to you.’ ”

 – From “Tell Me What Happened: Structured Investigative Interviews
of Child Victims and Witnesses” by Michael E. Lamb, et al. (2008)

There is every reason to believe this approach typified interviews in the Little Rascals case, but of course prosecutors ensured almost no record of those interviews survived.