Sept. 27, 2013

“The children are the big victims (in unfounded sex abuse cases) and are sacrificed….  Can you imagine being a child and being interrogated, being sent to the gynecologist, seeing your mother cry, seeing your father getting into fights, or a person you really like being sent to prison? You actually end up believing that this happened to you, that’s what we called ‘added memory.’

“Those children grow up with the same memories as those who actually experienced child abuse. I found it disturbing and I felt that it had to be told.”

– From an interview with Thomas Vinterberg, director of “The Hunt,” at filmophelia.com (July 11, 2013)

Vinterberg’s sympathy for the children in such cases is well placed – but do they in fact “grow up with the same memories as those who actually experienced child abuse”?

Although reliable follow-up is scarce,  Debra Poole, professor of psychology at Central Michigan University, had this to say about the unfounded claims of child witnesses in the Fells Acres (Amirault) case:

“It has nothing to do with lying and everything to do with the implanting of false memories…. Studies have shown that children will vehemently defend the veracity of implanted memories. They recall reporting them, and those reports produce mental images of the events that these individuals cannot distinguish from their real experiences. But the kids are not responsible for that. The interviews are.”

The Little Rascals child witness I talked with insists she continues to “remember vividly what happened.”

March 30, 2012

Kee MacFarlane is the notorious therapist who led the ritual abuse scare of the late 1980s (and pioneered the misuse of anatomically correct dolls in interviewing children). In just four months MacFarlane diagnosed more than 360 children at the McMartin Pre-School as abused.

In 2005 she declined to be interviewed by CNN but sent a statement:

“We’ve learned a lot in 20 years about how to interview children for forensic purposes and how to manage complex cases such as this one. It would be a sad commentary if we didn’t learn from such painful experience.”

Not much of a mea culpa – but still more than anyone connected with the Little Rascals prosecution has managed.

Nov. 18, 2011

“Gossip serves to fill up the vacuum of many people’s lives. It adds spice and excitement ….

“ ʻI would never have imagined it,ʼ say the neighborhood people. ʻIt looked like such a nice, friendly, reputable school, and all the while we didn’t know what terrible things were going on in there. They sure were clever. They really kept it quiet for a long time.

“ ʻWhen those kids came out, I never thought that they had just eaten feces, drunk urine and were beaten with whips.ʼ ”

– From “Sex Abuse Hysteria: Salem Witch Trials Revisited” by Richard A. Gardner (1991)

Nov. 4, 2015

“(Psychiatrist Roland) Summit praised the hysteria-induced news media hype and community gossip (about the McMartin Preschool case) as a public service: Without that type and extent of press coverage, the researchers and other professionals would not be able to gather this information and would be trapped by old myths about child sexual abuse.

“Summit complained that investigators were limiting the ability of parents to cope by discouraging them from meeting and discussing the case. The community’s priority, he explained, should be to support the children. Hundreds of children had escaped sexual assault, he claimed, because of the publicity about the McMartin case.”

– From “Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Reference Handbook” by Karen L. Kinnear (2007)

The “satanic ritual abuse” day-care myth had no more enthusiastic – and effective – pitchman than Roland Summit, who conjured up the Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome, who spread the gospel as far as New Zealand and who never ever gave up on the existence of the McMartin tunnels.

Although Summit himself never made it to Edenton, his ill-conceived cosmology arrived full-blown.