June 18, 2018

“Ted Cross, a senior research specialist at the University of Illinois School of Social Work, [said] separation of the two interventions – forensic and therapeutic – is critical for the child, but is also important for practical reasons: ‘You don’t want the therapeutic work to taint a criminal investigation. If a child is in therapy at the same time that the forensic interview takes place, the attorney representing the offender can say the therapist planted the idea of abuse in the child’s head.’.

“This point is of particular importance in the wake of high-profile cases such as the McMartin Preschool trial during the 1980s, in which therapists’ interviewing techniques were so suggestive that the children falsely accused their teachers of abuse….”

– From “How to Build a Space to Support Abused Children” by Mimi Kirk at Atlantic Cities (March 29)

Did the Little Rascals therapists offer children any therapy at all? What do you think?

Feb. 1, 2013

“The Little Rascals case serves as a good reminder that parents also are part of the child-savers interest group and have as much, in fact probably more, of a vested interest in ‘getting to the truth’ than any of their professional associates….

“From the witness stand, one mother describes how her repeated questioning of her three-year-old son finally confirmed that he, too, had been abused by Bob Kelly…

Mother: First time I questioned him, we were laying on my bed and I was just, you know, ‘Do you like Mr. Bob?’ ‘Has Mr. Bob ever done anything bad to you?’ And as we were talking I got more specific…. ‘Has Mr. Bob ever touched your hiney? ‘Has he ever put his finger in your hiney?’

Attorney: Was that the only time you questioned him?

Mother: No, it went on….

Attorney: Now tell me how it developed that you began to get statements from him that raised a question in your mind about sexual abuse.

Mother: (My son) was being questioned a lot from that first time on, quite often. And then that last week it was probably a few hours every day thing…. I got a response from him. Um, he told me that Mr. Bob had put his penis in his mouth and peed on him….

Attorney: How did he come up with those kinds of statements?

Mother: Because I asked him…. He had been hearing it at least once a week since I first started questioning him and then that last week he was hearing it every day.

“In their empirical research on repeated interviewing, Ceci and Bruck (1995) find that while children do remember more with each additional interview, their reports also become more inaccurate over time.

“Simply put, they recall both more accurate and inaccurate details with each successive interview. Further, repeated interviews signal the interviewers’ bias to the children, cueing them on how to answer in a way that pleases their interrogators.”

– From “The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic” by Mary De Young (2004)

Nov. 4, 2013

“It’s not a great time for psychology. Diederik A. Stapel, a Dutch social psychologist, has recently confessed to serial fraud. That he gamed the peer review process of his field’s best journals so often and for so long calls into question the quality-control mechanisms of academic psychology. If garbage can pass peer review, as long as it is well-written and well-formatted garbage, then the authority conferred by appearing in peer-reviewed publications would seem to be slight….

“Most work in the psychological and social sciences suffers from a lack of conceptual rigor. It’s a bit sloppy around the edges, and in the middle, too…. It’s as if the precision of the statistical analysis is supposed somehow to compensate for, or help us forget, the imprecision of thought at the foundation of the enterprise.”

– From “Barbara Fredrickson’s Bestselling ‘Positivity’ Is Trashed by a New Study” by Will Wilkinson at the Daily Beast (Aug. 16, 2013)

The contemporary cases Wilkinson cites and the episodes of the day-care ritual-abuse era bear many dissimilarities. But they share all too closely the practitioners’ use of “the precision of the statistical analysis… to compensate for, or help us forget, the imprecision of thought at the foundation of the enterprise.”

March 9, 2019

Pete Manning, 89, died Feb. 21 at his home in Edenton. Before retiring, Manning worked more than 50 years at the Chowan Herald, most prominently as publisher.

As prosecution of Edenton Seven lurched forward, members of the local “Believe the Children” cohort grew wary of the news media. Early on, however – before seeing themselves on “Frontline” — they had actually sought the spotlight.

Jack D. Grove, managing editor of the Herald, recalled that short-lived era to journalist David Loomis:

“I was approached by several influential businessmen who clouded up and rained all over me for putting a [Little Rascals] story on the back page. I said, ‘Go tell Pete Manning, don’t tell me.’ These businessmen, almost all parents of Little Rascals children, went into a closed-door meeting with Pete. We never again had a story anywhere but on the front page after that.”

Unfortunately, the Herald’s front-page coverage was painfully passive at best.