Aug. 9, 2013

“(One) area of uncertainty is the extent to which sexual knowledge is learned by young children through exposure to either explicit or sexually suggestive materials on television, video and movies. Studies indicate that children watch from 14 to 23 hours of television a week with the highest level among preschoolers. About a third of them do so without parental involvement in what they watch.”

– From “Evidence Issues and ‘Lessons’ from State v. Kelly: Litigation of Allegations of Child Sexual Abuse” by Jeffrey L. Miller and W. Michael Spivey, presented at the 6th annual North Carolina Criminal Evidence Seminar, UNC School of Law (April 16, 1993)

Among the “suggestive materials” that aired during the early days of the Little Rascals allegations: “Do You Know the Muffin Man?”

Nov. 18, 2015

“Readers who want a deeper look at how young children’s accounts of CSA (child sexual abuse) were discredited in the same time frame of the (Roman Catholic) clergy CSA scandal should read Ross Cheit’s 2014 book ‘Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology and the Sexual Abuse of Children’….

– From “ ‘Spotlight’ Gets A Lot Right” by Colleen Friend in the Chronicle of Social Change (Nov. 15)

Whoa.

The clergy sex abuse scandal at the center of the just-released newsroom drama “Spotlight” had nothing to do with the “satanic ritual abuse” moral panic so earnestly if unpersuasively denied by Professor Cheit.

Clergy abuse was all too real, and the evidence proved undeniable; abuse in day cares was a fantasy produced by undertrained and overreaching therapists. Tragically, the children’s accounts that were “discredited” were their original denials that they had experienced abuse.

Worth noting: Dr. Friend is former director of Stuart House in Santa Monica, Calif., a child abuse treatment center opened to accommodate the tidal wave of (mostly imaginary) abuse cases spawned by McMartin.

April 18, 2015

“DNA testing has been used 329 times now to prove the innocence of people wrongly convicted of a crime. But what happens when there is no DNA evidence to prove someone’s innocence? What happens when there is only his word, and the mounded doubts of the team that prosecuted and convicted him? And what happens when – despite growing certainty that it has imprisoned the wrong man for more than 20 years – the Commonwealth of Virginia stands poised to keep him locked up, possibly forever?

“Of all the maddening stories of wrongful convictions, Michael McAlister’s may be one of the worst. For starters, he has been in prison for 29 years for an attempted rape he almost certainly did not commit….”

 – From “This Man Deserves a Pardon” by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate (April 13)

Michael McAlister’s story surely qualifies as “one of the worst,” but forgive me if I think Junior Chandler – coincidentally now serving his 29th year of imprisonment – has suffered every bit as much injustice.  And in McAlister’s case at least a crime was actually committed, just not by him.

March 26, 2012

How did the moral panic over day-care ritual abuse spread so widely? Did some undetected psychotropic waft from Manhattan Beach to Edenton to Christchurch, New Zealand?

I was reminded of that lingering question while reading the smart and lively “Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts” (2007).

Although Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson address the day-care panic only briefly, their reference to the McMartin case having produced “copycat accusations against day care teachers across the country” caught my attention. Yes, the timing, pattern and similarity of these cases suggest conscious imitation, but I haven’t seen the evidence.

“We didn’t mean ‘copycat’ literally,” Tavris explains in an e-mail. “It’s just that the McMartin hysteria scared people, and got them worried about their own local day care centers, and motivated DAs and cops to advance their careers by finding these villains… and thereby launched a thousand other efforts to find molesters under the bed and in the day care classrooms…. That’s what a hysterical epidemic means.”

Coincidentally, I’ve been corresponding with Michael Hill, professor of sociology at Victoria University of Wellington, who has traced outbreaks in New Zealand and Australia directly to visits from such American Appleseeds as Roland Summit and Kee MacFarlane.