June 5, 2016

“One in five of all children born in a single year in England was referred to social services before they reached age 5…. Up to 150,000 pre-school children were reported over fears of abuse or neglect, most unnecessarily….

“Researchers (at the University of Central Lancashire) said while public and professional vigilance was welcome, the number of alerts received by social services meant staff were wasting their time on innocent families, and making it harder to find the children who are at risk.

“After a series of high profile cases where serious abuse was missed, social workers are under intense pressure… and end up checking up more of the warnings they receive than is necessary, the research suggests.

Lead researcher Professor Andy Bilson said, ‘We have this mantra that says it’s everybody’s job to safeguard children, but what we are doing doesn’t actually safeguard children.”

–  From  “One in five children referred over suspected abuse” at BBC News (May 25)

Not mentioned in the Central Lancashire report is the subcategory of “satanic ritual abuse” – about which the British are similarly prone to false alarm.

March 25, 2013

“I really see us as sharing the goal of making sure this conviction rests on credible and substantial evidence. I’m going to go where the truth leads in this matter.”

– Jon David, district attorney in Brunswick, Columbus and Bladen counties,
responding to a request from the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence
to review DNA evidence in the case of Joseph Sledge

Mandy Locke’s account in the News & Observer will inspire confidence in neither the competence nor the good faith of North Carolina justice. Sledge, imprisoned 34 years for a double murder, has encountered unspeakable frustrations in his pursuit of exoneration.

Like Willie Grimes, however, Sledge is at last benefiting from a district attorney unimpaired with willful blindness toward his office’s past failures.

If the Edenton Seven are ever able to achieve true exoneration from the state, it likely won’t be with the acquiescence of the prosecutors, much less their assistance.

Oct. 4, 2014

Among those journalists who fell for the “satanic ritual abuse” storyline, none fell harder than Civia Tamarkin.

She not only stage-managed an embarrassingly credulous episode of “Nightline,” but also testified earnestly at a Believe the Children convention alongside Little Rascals prosecutor H. P. Williams Jr. and supposed ritual-abuse survivor Laura Buchanan (““ was told that a surveillance device would be inserted into my brain….”).

In 1993 Tamarkin delivered a lengthy address on “Investigative Issues in Ritual Abuse Cases” to the Fifth Eastern Regional Conference on Abuse and Multiple Personality in Alexandria, Va.

Like Ross Cheit two decades later, she had no trouble detailing numerous flaws in the prosecution of McMartin and other ritual abuse cases but inevitably came up frustrated in her search for a smoking gun or two.  Most striking, after recounting all her journalistic fault-finding, was her unquestioning gratitude to SRA snake-oil theoreticians Roland Summit and Bennett Braun for “(taking) the time to teach me what they could.”

Prior to her affiliation with Believe the Children, Tamarkin had reported commendably for Time, People and the Chicago Sun-Times and had coauthored a book with Chicago educator Marva Collins.

More recently, she has directed a documentary on the aftermath of a soldier’s death in Iraq….

So what happened in the 1990s? How did an experienced reporter lose her skepticism in the face of “ritual abuse” claims?

I’ve asked Tamarkin what she was thinking then – and what she believes today – but haven’t received a response.

June 24, 2013

“(I) followed the Little Rascals case closely in the Norfolk and other papers…. Moved by (its) strangeness and patent senselessness, as well as by reports nationwide at the time of what came to be tagged ‘false memory syndrome,’ I wrote and later published a short story inspired by the spectacular miscarriage of justice…. The thrust of my story was popular hysteria and jaundiced, ambitious therapists together with a grievous breakdown of the judicial system….

“I believe that behind the recovered memory and child abuse therapeutic notions of that time, so destructive of the lives of the Edenton Seven and many others, lies Freud’s almost immeasurable popular impact on our now so heavily sexualized culture – though the easy lure of the witch hunt seems to have been all too contagious in Edenton’s fearful, credulous and manipulable parents as well.”

– Historian and writer John L. Romjue of Yorktown, Va., responding to “Remembering the shame of the Little Rascals Day Care case” at North Carolina Miscellany (Oct. 24, 2011)

Although “Witches of Devon,” the title story in Mr. Romjue’s 2002 collection, veers dramatically from the course of the Little Rascals case, it does indeed capture the essence: “It had started as a rumor – and not about molestation, not at first. There had been an ‘assault’ incident at Happy Children (day care). Joanne Jamison had spanked a little girl’s bottom and not suitably apologized to the mother….”