Dec. 14, 2011

Among the leaders of the Committee for Support of the Edenton Seven was Doug Wiik, whose own Breezy Point Day School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, had just been cleared of similar abuse accusations. I asked him to compare the two cases.

“I remember that Barbara Fleischman, a dear friend who had moved to North Carolina from Bucks County, called to let me know that the child abuse contagion had reared its head in Edenton.

“Having been deeply affected by my personal experience, I felt the need to reach out. I read about Raymond Lawrence’s formation of the Edenton Seven committee, and after several discussions with him and Dee Swain (a fuel dealer in Washington, N.C.) I was truly inspired to do what I could. I was gratified to find individuals who would fight the injustice being perpetrated upon the Kellys.

“The eventual outcome in Little Rascals was the correct one, but the damage done to many individuals was enormous. We all have a list of heroes in our lives, and Bob Kelly and Dawn Wilson certainly were added to mine. Both stood firm in speaking truth to a community that lacked leadership in politics and law enforcement….

“The Edenton case and my own were just two of many produced by the 1980s culture. It happened in Salem 300 years ago, and it will happen again some day.

“So why did my child care business survive, when so many others didn’t?

“We had the exact same claims of horrors perpetrated against children. We had the same media coverage that initially proclaimed ʻChildren don’t lie.ʼ We had the same overzealous child abuse investigators from the county Department of Children and Youth Services. We had the identical mass hysteria.

“But we also had leadership! District Attorney Alan Rubenstein was a seeker of justice, not political gain. He conducted a long, expensive criminal investigation, one that branded the parents’ and children’s claims as false and reckless.

“I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention my employees and our parent community, who all knew nothing had happened at Breezy Point. They went on camera, wrote letters to editors and participated in several large meetings answering all questions about our school.

“My experience lasted five or six years, caused lots of heartache and did much financial damage. However, Breezy Point Day School still opens at 7 a.m. and closes at 6 p.m. every day and is still filled with several hundred happy children, parents and staff.

“It’s a shame Bob and Betsy Kelly chose Edenton, North Carolina, to open a child care business and not Bucks County, Pennsylvania.”

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Later this week I’ll post excerpts from the DA’s 1990 investigative report, along with a few of his recollections (he’s now a judge).

Dec. 21, 2013

As noted here and here, News & Observer columnist Dennis Rogers was among the too-few voices of skepticism about the Little Rascals case. Today Rogers is mostly retired, but he continues to lament the state’s failure to take responsibility for its willful prosecution of seven innocent defendants:

“North Carolina has a sad reputation for misguided justice. There is no better example than the plight of the Edenton Seven. The government destroyed lives and families in its fevered rush to find wrong where there was none.

“It takes political courage to right painful and embarrassing wrongs from 25 years ago. The case of the Edenton Seven offers those who would claim the mantle of leadership in our state an opportunity to demonstrate that they are the kind of people we need in Raleigh.

“Silence in the face of such obvious injustice is cowardice.”

May 14, 2012

Mary De Young’s engrossing bibliography “The Ritual Abuse Controversy” lists page after page of books and journal articles that accept wholeheartedly the existence of an epidemic of ritual abuse in day cares during the ’80s and early ’90s.

Roland Summit, Ann Burgess, Susan Kelley, David Finkelhor, etc., all used their professional credentials to support and spread the panic. But who among them has since acknowledged that it was all baloney? And that it left behind hundreds of profoundly damaged child-witnesses, families and defendants?

When I asked Dr. Finkelhor about the now-discredited foundation of “Nursery Crimes,” he replied that “This was a while ago, and I have not revisited the case. Our research did not conduct any independent review of the evidence, but simply coded the conclusion of the investigator we interviewed. I was neither an authority about the validity of claims at the time or at the present.”

Am I wrong to expect a higher level of professional accountability?

Mostly, by the turn of the latest century the alarmists had simply withdrawn from the arena. Like Dr. Finkelhor, they had moved on to other topics and “not revisited the case.”

One exception is Kathleen Coulborn Faller, professor of children and families in the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan.

In “Understanding and Assessing Child Sexual Maltreatment” (second edition, 2003), Dr. Faller writes, “Though others’ perceptions of the problems of sexual abuse in day care have changed, mine essentially have not.” Minimizing the work of next-generation researchers such as Ceci and Bruck, she cites approvingly such works as Kelley’s “Parental Stress Response to Sexual Abuse and Ritualistic Abuse in Day-Care Centers.”

Might Dr. Faller have changed her mind over the past decade?

Last week I asked her. So far she hasn’t replied.

April 19, 2014

“Is it possible to so modify child forensic interviewing that the sorts of errors described by Ceci and Bruck are minimized?…

“The primary problem is that most prosecutors and most so-called mental health professionals do not stay current….

“How likely, for instance, is it that a copy of ‘Jeopardy in the Courtroom’ will be found on your favorite prosecutor’s desk?”

– From “A Review of a Review of ‘Jeopardy in the Courtroom’ by Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck” at falseallegations.com