Nov. 9, 2011

“Fear recaptured the 9-year-old, much as it had six years ago when last he left Bob Kelly’s day care. Lingering fears gripped many of Kelly’s victims when the appellate court overturned his 99 guilty verdicts…. A week later, the little boy is still too frightened to ride his bike around the block….

“We forget the victims – unless we live with them. Our wounds from media distortions heal. Our memories of Kelly’s manipulation of ‘the system’ fade. But the genuine fears of our sons and daughters persist.

“What would you do if you knew your little ones had been sexually abused? Would you seek justice? Would… you be able to endure the years of trauma and persecution? We implore our fellow North Carolinians to ponder those questions…. Join us in requesting that the North Carolina Supreme Court uphold these verdicts.

“If the court denies the opinions of two separate juries that found both (Kelly and Dawn Wilson) guilty, the innocent victims will be under attack again. Do helpless child victims forget the brutality of rape, sodomy and crimes against nature? A more significant question is: Do we in North Carolina want to pry those agonizing details from them once more?

“True, many are old enough to realize that Bob Kelly can’t work his threatened evil to kill their families. But others still draw pictures of their visions of safety: pictures of heaven and guardian angels because they say, ‘I know Mr. Bob won’t be in Heaven.’

“We must take a stand against re-victimization of the innocent. Don’t interrupt the healing that is emerging in these courageous young ones. Refuse to allow the media to create a ‘circus’ in our noble state. Child sexual abuse can no longer be allowed or excused in North Carolina.”

– From a letter to the editor of the (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot, signed by 17 parents of children involved in the Little Rascals case (May 14, 1995)

Buried in the Edenton parents’ heartfelt plea to the N.C. Supreme Court (which would soon agree with the Court of Appeals’ overturning the convictions of Kelly and Wilson) is this profoundly revealing question: “Do we in North Carolina want to pry those agonizing details from them once more?”

If only those details had not been pried from the children in the first place….

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.

Oct. 12, 2011

In the digital age more than ever before, no bad idea ever dies. Consider (neo)Nazism, creationism and vaccine-caused autism.

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, ritual sex abuse is still being promoted as a significant national peril.

The possibility of another episode of day-care hysteria – e.g., Little Rascals, McMartin, Fells Acres, Wee Care – has lessened but certainly not vanished. A repeat of history requires only an angry parent or two, an agenda-guided therapist and a fervid prosecutor.

Aug. 15, 2012

The North Carolina Supreme Court won’t release its next batch of opinions until August 24, but its recent decision on a 2009 child sex abuse case could augur well for Junior Chandler.

On June 14 the court upheld the North Carolina Court of Appeals’ overturning of Patrick Loren Towe’s conviction in Surry County. Here’s the crucial part of the opinion:

“Under the North Carolina Rules of Evidence, a qualified expert may testify as to her opinion in her field of expertise if the testimony will assist the jury in understanding the evidence. An expert may not, however, testify as to the witness’s credibility or state that she believes the defendant is guilty.

“In sexual abuse cases involving child victims, an expert may not testify that sexual abuse has occurred without physical evidence supporting her opinion. An expert may not testify that the child has been ‘sexually abused’ if the testimony is based solely on the interview with the child-victim.”

In Patrick Towe’s case, only one expert witness so testified – in Junior Chandler’s it was six.

Without such a parade of “expert vouching,” Junior surely would have spent the past 25 years back home in Madison County instead of behind bars. How can the North Carolina Supreme Court now fail to acknowledge this?