Aug. 24, 2015

“(Richard) Beck is generally restrained in his narrative, letting the details pile up to a well-deserved indictment of the many players in the ‘moral panic.’ But in explaining how these fever dreams managed to seize the national imagination, he does a little witch-hunting of his own. The frenzy, he tells us, was a backlash by family-values conservatives to the social changes around them. It was a period of ‘an intense reactionary antifeminism.’

“This is an inexcusably partial interpretation. From Beck’s own evidence, feminists themselves were vital players in the hysteria. Gloria Steinem donated money to the McMartin investigation, and Ms. Magazine ran a 1993 cover article ‘BELIEVE IT! Cult Ritual Abuse Exists,’ even though, by that time, the general public had grown increasingly skeptical of the idea.

“In part because of her aggressive pursuit of child abusers – and conviction of a number of people later exonerated – a relatively unknown Dade County state attorney named Janet Reno was picked by President Clinton to become the nation’s first female attorney general. According to Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, the authors of ‘Satan’s Silence,’ (Kee) MacFarlane had been a lobbyist for NOW before she set about terrifying the children of Manhattan Beach.

“With his partisan recounting of the child abuse panic of the 1980s, Beck turns what could have been a careful history about one facet of the nation’s exhausting culture wars into one more illustration of them.”

– From “ ‘We Believe the Children,’ by Richard Beck” by Kay Hymowitz in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (Aug. 21, 2015)

I’m posting this criticism of Beck’s book – from an otherwise laudatory review – mostly for archival purposes. My own interest lies less in the tangled roots of the day-care panic than in its results: defendants wrongfully incarcerated, children profoundly misguided and therapists and prosecutors unjustly unscathed.

June 28, 2013

“Children can lie, but research shows that they do not fabricate detailed descriptions of adult sexual acts unless they have experienced or witnessed them. Studies also show that children have good memories and that even preschoolers can remember key events like sexual abuse. One problem is that repeatedly molested children have great difficulty distinguishing one act of abuse from another and linking abuse to specific dates….

“In the McMartin case, we learned… to minimize the use of leading questions during interviews…. While the verdict comes as a disappointment to the children in the case, their courage and willingness to testify for weeks on end has been a catalyst for change that will protect countless other children.”

– From Believe the Children adviser Civia Tamarkin’s interview with John E. B. Myers, professor at McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific, in “The McMartin Nightmare” (People magazine, Feb. 5, 1990)

As his faculty bio notes, Professor Myers has long been “one of the country’s foremost authorities on child abuse,” especially in tracing its historical context, but he seems to have been excruciatingly slow to recognize the fraudulence of  “satanic ritual abuse” claims. Although he stopped short of declaring the McMartins guilty, Myers clearly stationed himself in the “child saver” camp, more sympathetic toward serial interviewer Kee MacFarlane than toward the defendants whose lives she devastated.

In a journal article five years later, Myers would acknowledge “growing skepticism regarding children’s credibility,” at the same time warning of a “real danger that the pendulum will swing too far in the direction of disbelief.”

More recently, Myers addressed McMartin in “Child Protection in America: Past, Present, and Future” (2006), crediting it with raising the standard for interviewing, but concluding that “In the final analysis, we will never know what happened at the McMartin Preschool. From the outset, the case divided people into ‘true believers’ and skeptics….”

In “The Backlash: Child Protection Under Fire” (1994) Myers had added a most curious footnote: “I have no opinion regarding the guilt or innocence of any of the McMartin defendants.” How could he – a law professor! – acknowledge the corruption of the child-witnesses’ testimony, yet doubt the defendants deserved a “not guilty” verdict?

Almost 20 years later, I wondered whether Myers might have formed an opinion.

His emailed response: “No idea about guilt or innocence.”

Feb. 11, 2013

“After reading a number of these interviews (of children) in the Wee Care (Kelly Michaels) case, it is difficult to believe that adults charged with the care and protection of young children would be allowed to use the vocabulary that they used in these interviews, that they would be allowed to interact with the children in such sexually explicit ways, or that they would be allowed to bully and frighten their child witnesses in such a shocking manner. No amount of evidence that sexual abuse had actually occurred could ever justify the use of these techniques especially with three- and four-year-old children.

“Above and beyond the great stress, intimidation, and embarrassment that many of the children so obviously suffered during the interviews, we are deeply concerned about the long-lasting harmful effects of persuading children that they have been horribly sexually and physically abused, when in fact there may have been no abuse until the interviews began….”

– From an amicus curiae brief to the Appellate Court of New Jersey from Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck on behalf of the 46-member Committee of Concerned Social Scientists (1994)

Aug. 26, 2013

“Attorney General Roy Cooper stopped far short of apologizing to (Greg Taylor and Floyd Brown). He said that the SBI had better investigative practices now and that ‘It was in the best interest of the state to settle these cases.’

“And maybe in the best interest of justice, too?

“These two men lost their youths thanks to agents of the SBI. That is an outrage for which they can never be adequately compensated. State officials have been encouraged to offer profuse apologies, and that is not unreasonable, though it’s a little late for it now….

“But let no one involved in prosecuting these two men believe that the debt for their ‘mistakes’ is paid in full.”

– From “Two former prisoners’ lives, valued,” editorial in the News & Observer (Aug. 15, 2013)

As compensation for their flagrantly corrupted prosecution, Taylor received about $4.5 million from the state, Brown about $8 million. Attorney General Cooper seems to find such an outlay easier to swallow than offering an apology – providing yet another example of the “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)” approach to accountability.

By contrast, in 2007 the Duke lacrosse case moved Cooper to give the defendants a “statement of innocence” and to at least brush up against remorse:

“In the rush to condemn, a community and a state lost the ability to see clearly…. I think a lot of people owe a lot of apologies to a lot of people.”

But in 2009, after yet another wrongful conviction settlement – this one for $3.9 million – Cooper declined to give murder defendant Alan Gell a statement of innocence. ”The Duke case was a clear case, very unusual,” he explained. “There was no crime committed….”

“No crime committed”? Why, I know another “clear case, very unusual” that precisely meets that standard!