Aug. 30, 2013

“The Edenton case is not just a horrifying aberration. Adults across the country are suddenly ‘remembering’ that they were abused as children, and filing civil lawsuits and criminal charges against aged parents…

“Claims of long-ago child abuse, ‘blocked out’ from memory until now, have become a common defense tactic. Unscrupulous ‘therapists’ and sensationalist writers feed the frenzy.

“Anything goes against accused abusers, especially the right to a fair trial.”

– From an editorial in the Arkansas Times (Aug. 5, 1993)

April 28, 2017

“There is this idea that people of the 1980s were just not very bright or really superstitious or something like that. Back then, the people who questioned it were treated with suspicion. People would say, ‘Of course this is happening, what’s wrong with you?’ And it’s not like this is an anomaly in American history. In the ’50s, Commies were crawling out of the basement. This stuff goes back to Salem witch trials…

“The ritual abuse thing also became part of psychological culture. This idea that children don’t lie about these things became really entrenched for a while….

“It was a way to talk about actual abuse, I think. At the time, the idea that childhood abuse was mostly perpetrated by family members was too outrageous, too awful. People would rather believe that it was evil, Satan-worshipping strangers.”

– Dan Chaon, author of “Ill Will,” quoted by Joe Gross in the Austin American-Statesman

Early on, Chaon’s interest in writing a novel centered on “satanic ritual abuse” was piqued by the West Memphis Three.

March 8, 2013

“Over 15 years ago, a number of children were sexually abused while attending three different day care centers sponsored by military services…

“This is the fourth follow-up interview with parents of 42 (of those) children….

“(In 1984 children at West Point day care) reported that the perpetrators wore masks and black robes. Pencils and fingers penetrated vaginas and rectums. Children were threatened with harm to themselves and their parents if they told that they witnessed the abuse of other children….

“After extensive investigation, the federal prosecutor declined to bring the case to trial due to the young ages of the children and the fragility of their memories….

“One lingering source of distress for the parents was that two of the criminal cases (Presidio and West Point) fell apart. It seemed to them as if reporting the abuse did not matter. This also added to the mystery of conspiracy that surrounded these two cases….”

– From “Children’s Adjustment 15 Years After Daycare Abuse” by Ann Wolbert Burgess and Carol R. Hartman (Journal of Forensic Nursing, Summer 2005)

Although Burgess’s career-making wrongheadedness isn’t news, I was still surprised to find her clinging to the ritual abuse hoax as recently as 2005. Prosecutors’ cases “fell apart”? – must be a “conspiracy”!

But it was Burgess, after all, whose conclusion that children in the West Point case had been ritually abused (with the obligatory “masks and black robes”) compelled the government to settle a civil suit by parents for $2.7 million. To acknowledge her error would require quite an “Oops!” wouldn’t it?

Footnote: I’ve got a previous commitment, but if you’re in Nashua, N.H., today, you can see Burgess honored by the American Psychiatric Nurses Association.

June 26, 2013

The suburban New York child sex abuse case documented in the Oscar-nominated “Capturing the Friedmans” (2003) returned to the spotlight Monday, this time because of a review panel’s finding that Jesse Friedman had in fact been rightfully convicted.

Although the New York Times describes the Friedman case as having come “to symbolize an era of sensational, often-suspect accusations of child molestation,” many aspects – including the 1988 confessions of both the defendant and his father – make it an outlier to the epidemic of day-care cases of that era.

The review panel itself emphasized this distinction, the Associated Press points out:

“The Friedman case has drawn comparisons to the 1980s McMartin Preschool scandal, but the investigators said they ‘were in no way similar.’ In the McMartin case, the report noted, more than 200 preschool children described being sexually abused by teachers, but only after months of highly suggestive questioning by social workers working with prosecutors. The report noted in the Friedman case, the victims were more than twice as old as the McMartin preschoolers and many in the Friedman case disclosed abuse quickly.”

Regardless, there are similarities, too. In an interview with the Village Voice interview last month, Jesse Friedman had this to say about the young computer students who testified against him:

“When I was in prison, my hope always hung on the idea that, give it five or 10 years; once they get to college, once they’re actual adults, once they’re old enough to no longer be living at home with their parents in Great Neck, they will come forward and admit that they lied.

“When (journalist( Debbie Nathan came to visit me, she told me that most of the complainants in the McMartin case publicly affirm that they were raped and abused in the McMartin Preschool. Whereas that case has been thoroughly, completely vetted beyond all doubt that nothing happened. And yet the kids involved believe that they were abused. She said, ‘You really can’t hang your hopes on the idea that the kids know that they lied and that nothing happened. Because they might very well think that something happened.’ “

Do the now-grown child-witnesses in the Little Rascals case “know that they lied and that nothing happened”? Or does the shapeless memory of their supposed abuse remain forever sealed from self-examination?