June 15, 2012

“How did such a large group of child molesters assemble? This is not New York, this is Edenton, North Carolina.”

– Edward B. Simmons, making his closing argument on behalf of Dawn Wilson (Jan. 14, 1993)

April 26, 2013

By 1997, when the college textbook “Family Violence Across the Lifespan” was first published, the most grievous excesses of the day-care ritual-abuse panic had passed (although it would be two more years before Little Rascals prosecutors dropped a final, unrelated charge against Bob Kelly).

The authors, social scientists at Pepperdine University, devoted entire sections to “Do Children Fabricate Reports of Child Sexual Abuse?” and “The Satanic Ritual Abuse Controversy.” More on those issues here.

Their approach is thoughtfully skeptical, but they can’t quite bring themselves to call baloney on those peers whose ill-conceived claims ginned up the “controversy” or whose gullibility prolonged it. For example:

“If there is so little evidence confirming the existence of SRA, why do so many perceive the SRA threat to be real? One reason is that… therapists, police officers and child protection authorities, who are often required to attend seminars on current developments in their field, are exposed to SRA ‘experts’…. These seminars tend to employ proselytizing techniques characteristic of organizations seeking recruits. Many well-meaning helping professionals, who are generally motivated by the desire to help abused clients, become convinced of the existence of SRA through these seminars (such as the one at Kill Devil Hills)….”

“Family Violence…” has proved popular enough to justify a third edition (2011), in which all mention of ritual abuse has been removed.

I asked sociologist Robin D. Perrin, one of the authors, to trace his thinking on the subject between editions.

“I suppose one could argue that the ‘Satanic Ritual Abuse’ issue is a bit dated at this point,” he replied, “as the Satanism scare has mostly faded into the sunset. But it is still a fascinating page in history, if nothing else….

“As for our approach on these issues, I think ‘thoughtfully skeptical’ is probably fair. You are correct that we fall far short of an outright denial of the validity of all ritual abuse claims. I am quite certain we are not in position to do that. In fact, given the history of mistreatment of children (both ‘then’ and ‘now’) I have no doubt that ‘ritual’ abuse has occurred (depending on how it is defined, of course).”

Oct. 17, 2011

The two largest ritual-abuse day-care cases – Little Rascals in Edenton and McMartin in California – bore many similarities but McMartin resulted in not a single conviction.

I asked Mark Montgomery, who in 1995 successfully argued Bob Kelly’s case before the North Carolina Court of Appeals, why that might have been:

“Each state has its own criminal laws, rules of procedure and evidence, etc. … Several features of the law in North Carolina gave prosecutors an advantage.

“First, the prosecution interviewed all the children attending Little Rascals Day Care. Most said they had seen no abuse. The law allowed the prosecution to withhold those interviews from the defense. And the defense was not allowed to interview the children. So all the jury heard were the stories of the 12 children who were the subject of indictments.

“Second, the law allowed the state’s expert witnesses to testify that they believed the children’s claims.

“Third, the defense was not allowed to conduct its own physical or psychological examinations of the children.

“Fourth, North Carolina had (and has) very liberal rules for the admission of hearsay by children in these cases. Almost anything a child says out of court can be used by the jury as substantive evidence of guilt. An effective prosecution strategy was to enlist the parents to elicit allegations of abuse. For months, parents, who were told their children had been abused, pleaded with their children to ‘disclose.’ Some eventually did. The prosecution then called the parents as witnesses to testify to what their children said, even if the children themselves did not testify.”

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.