Feb. 10, 2012

“(The scene of children screaming invective at a prison-bound Bob Kelly) was… the graphic heart of the documentary….

“The car pulled away, and they began to giggle self-consciously. A second or two of awkward silence heightened the artificiality of the moment, the sense of a construct that the girls fully understood. Then an older woman (presumably a mother) moved into the silence, and began to clap and cheer. A few others joined in in desultory fashion. ‘Let’s go get something (to) eat,’ said the mom….

“By chance, I had just finished reading ‘The Professor,’ a minor novel of Charlotte Bronte’s. Like most Bronte novels it was laced with leisurely reflections, and this one struck me powerfully enough to note down: ‘Human beings – human children especially – seldom deny themselves the pleasure of exercising a power which they are conscious of possessing, even though that power consists only in a capacity to make others wretched.’

“As those children shrieked at Bob Kelly through the glass of the police car window, I wondered if there wasn’t more than a whiff of that pleasure in power in the air.

“And then I remembered this town is called Eden, and we’ve known for a long while that the darnedest things happened in Eden.”

Aug. 26, 2015

In November 2012 the journal Nursing Research declined my request to retract Susan J. Kelley’s 1990 article based on the existence of “satanic ritual abuse” in day cares. The editor contended that “Conditions that would lead to a retraction are not present.”

Nursing Research having since installed a new editor, I recently tried again. This time I was able to include two important academic developments: Richard Noll’s expose of the “satanic ritual abuse” movement in Psychiatric Times and Dr. Allen Frances’ personal apology for failing to do more to challenge that movement.

This is an excerpt from the response I received from editor Susan J. Henly, professor emerita, University of Minnesota School of Nursing:

“As I understood it, your argument for retraction (of ‘Parental Stress Response to Sexual Abuse and Ritualistic Abuse of Children in Day-care Centers’) was based on the rationale that: the title embraced and promoted the existence of ritual sexual abuse in day cares that did not exist, and that not a single respected academic or professional would be willing to give credence to claims about ritualistic sexual abuse from the times during which the research was conducted.

“In response, I re-read Kelley et al. (1990) many times, reviewed background information, contacted the author, and communicated with the editor of another journal that has published papers on child sexual abuse by Dr. Kelley. Documents related to the original peer review of the Nursing Research paper are not available, and the Editor (Dr. Florence Downs) who accepted the paper is deceased.

“I searched for other papers on this topic from the 1980s to the present and did not locate any, including other original research by Dr. Kelley, that had been retracted. I discussed the methods of the research with Dr. Kelley; she verified what was stated in the paper, which I found to be in accord with expectations for scientific standards and ethical conduct of research. The editor I contacted about a related paper said the journal stood by the integrity of their review process and quality of the scholarship that had been published.

“With regards to issues related to credence of claims about ritualistic sexual abuse, Finkelhor, Williams, Burns, & Kalinowski (1988) included this sort of abuse in their national study of sexual abuse in day care. More recently, Salter (2013) provided a critical overview of debates arising from allegations of organized sexual abuse and addressed issues related to terminology. (Dr. Michael Salter is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Western Sydney). Also, a book by (Ross) Cheit (2014) summarized scholarly work that uses empirical data to challenge the view that cases from the 1980s were based on moral panic of the type described in your message. (Dr. Cheit is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Brown University.)

“Findings from the many papers (thousands) in the peer-reviewed literature focused on the forensic, sociological, political, family and health aspects of child sexual abuse will no doubt, with time, contribute to better understanding that can be used to keep children from harm as well as protect the rights of those wrongly accused – both issues that are of critical importance to all citizens.

“Retraction is a mechanism for correcting the literature and alerting readers to publications that contain such seriously flawed or erroneous data that their findings and conclusions cannot be relied upon (Committee on Publication Ethics, n.d.). Criteria for retraction of a paper include: clear evidence that findings were unreliable, the paper was redundant or plagiarized, or the research was conducted unethically.

“Using the process described above, I did not find evidence of any of these concerns in Kelley (1990). For this reason, the paper will not be retracted.”

Dr. Henly’s rejection letter is thoughtful and earnest, and I appreciate the time and effort it required. Some editors would’ve simply ignored me. But it is far too narrow, blindered to the big picture. This is from my response to her:

“The ‘satanic ritual abuse’ day-care moral panic is prominently in the news media these days with publication of ‘We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s” by Richard Beck. Unlike Ross Cheit’s revisionist “The Witch-Hunt Narrative,’ Beck’s book already has been positively reviewed in such periodicals as the New York Times (twice), the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. It is the long-awaited standard history of this era, and it establishes clearly that “satanic ritual abuse” was no more than a toxic myth.

“Your citations in defense of Dr. Susan J. Kelley’s article do nothing to disqualify your first criterion for retraction: ‘clear evidence that findings were unreliable.’

“The ‘ritualistic abuse of children in day-care centers’ motivating the article simply never happened – what evidence of unreliability could be clearer?

“Would Dr. Kelley today argue otherwise?”

May 25, 2015

“Investigative journalist Susan Goldsmith has spent years examining the medical and legal industry that has arisen to promote its belief that vicious baby-shaking by enraged adults has killed thousands of infants, the subject of the new documentary The Syndrome….

“We’ve been here before. The Syndrome rewinds to the 1980s when the panic on behalf of children was Satanic Ritual Abuse, a national frenzy in which prosecutors and juries sent daycare employees to jail for years for crimes as implausible as cutting off a gorilla’s finger while at the zoo, then flying the children over Mexico to molest them.

“The media leapt on these accusations. So, too, did the doctors. ‘They medicalized Satan,’ says Goldsmith. ‘(Doctors would) go into court and say, “Yeah, she’s got a Satanic Ritual Abuse notch in her hymen” ’….

“Satanic Ritual Abuse and Shaken Baby Syndrome are more similar than they sound. In both cases, the expert speaks for the victim. The discredited Satanic Ritual Abuse cases proved that adults were able to pressure children to swear to all sorts of falsehoods…. The alleged victims of Shaken Baby Syndrome are either dead or too young to explain what happened. Thus a doctor’s educated opinion becomes crucial – even if that doctor is adhering to incorrect ‘proof’ of abuse.”

– From “Is Shaken Baby Syndrome the New Satanic Panic?” by Amy Nicholson in LA Weekly (April 9, 2015)

March 12, 2012

After reading thousands of pages of Little Rascals coverage, shouldn’t I have become inured to the prosecution’s gratuitous brutality?

Not yet.

On August 11, 1993, Dawn Wilson, serving a life sentence for child sexual abuse, went back to court to seek release under house arrest. In six days she would give birth to her second child.

Nancy Lamb and Bill Hart could’ve responded with any number of temperate legal arguments against her release. Instead….

“She made a quite irresponsible decision in 1992 to become pregnant early in her trial,” Lamb said. “She was thinking only of herself….”

“Dawn Wilson… simply has no character…,” added Hart. “Is she the kind of mother figure who ought to be bonding with a second out-of-wedlock child?”

Judge Marsh McLelland granted Wilson’s request, but delays in paperwork and payment of a $250,000 bond kept mother and son in women’s prison another month.

In 1995 the N.C. Court of Appeals overturned her conviction. And then of course the prosecutors rushed to apologize to Dawn Wilson for their disgraceful vilification.