July 9, 2012

What happens to a social scientist who builds her career on exposing illusory “sex rings” and “ritual abuse” at day cares? And, more specifically, whose seminar at Kill Devil Hills apparently seeded the hysteria behind the prosecution of the Edenton Seven?

If you’re Ann Wolbert Burgess, it’s no problem. You just plunge ahead – and don’t look back.

Here’s how Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker described Burgess in 2001 in “Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a  Modern American Witch Hunt”:

“promoter of the use of children’s drawings to diagnose sexual abuse, developer of the idea of the sex ring, participant in developing the case that imprisoned the Amirault family and currently a researcher into the traumatic aftereffects of ritual abuse.”

For some people, that would be a career’s worth of wrongheaded ideas. But Burgess, now professor of psychiatric mental health nursing at Boston College, continues to accumulate merit badges on new topics such as heart attack victims, AIDS, infant kidnapping, online predators, nursing home abuse, women in prison, mass murder and elder abuse. Here she is in Raleigh on May 29 testifying as “an expert in crime scene classification and offender typology.”

Whew.

I’ve asked Dr. Burgess to reflect on Little Rascals and other examples of ritual abuse prosecutions. Too bad the subject didn’t come up when she was on the witness stand in Raleigh.

April 26, 2014

“Given the near certainty of Junior’s innocence (his first jury could not reach a verdict), given the fact that he has already served 26 years in prison with only a single infraction (committed in his third week in prison), given the fact that many others similarly situated have been freed by the courts, Junior is a worthy candidate for a commutation of sentence.”

– Letter from Mark Montgomery, Andrew Junior Chandler’s appellate attorney, to Gov. Bev Perdue (Dec. 7, 2012)

“This letter is to inform you that your request for a commutation of sentence on behalf of Mr. Chandler has been reviewed and denied.

“If he would like to reapply, he may do so three years from the date of this letter.”

– Letter to Montgomery from Pat Hansen, Governor’s Clemency Office (March 25, 2014

So ends the latest of Andrew Junior Chandler’s repeated attempts to find a path out of Avery-Mitchell Correctional Institution, where he has spent the past 27 years for a crime neither he nor anyone else committed. He may in fact be the last still-imprisoned victim of the “satanic ritual abuse” day care panic.

“I don’t know what they have against me,” Junior told me by phone this week.  I don’t know either – I don’t even know who “they” are. But I can’t imagine that those prosecutors who so persuasively argued that “Junior would drive off his route to a park by a river, strip the children of their clothes, troop them down to the river, put them in a rowboat, commit various sexual acts, put them back on the bus and take them home” are eager to see the case dusted off and reexamined.

April 24, 2013

“Ted Koppel said the idea for (a “Nightline” episode criticizing juries’ growing skepticism toward child-witnesses) had been brought to him by Civia Tamarkin, who although she ‘served on the advisory board of an organization called Believe the Children insists that she remains neutral on the subject…. We have found her to be a useful, objective and reliable source.’

“Tamarkin had indeed devoted a lot of attention to child sexual-abuse cases, along with an abiding conviction that most defendants are guilty…. She believes the McMartin prosecution should have resulted in convictions (and) has praised the prosecution in the Little Rascals case….

“I interviewed prosecutors and defense lawyers in Little Rascals and read trial transcripts. It was clear the child witnesses had been persistently manipulated….”

– From “Koppel lost his balance on child witnesses” by Washington Post columnist Nat Hentoff (Dec. 3, 1996)

Believe the Children, organized by McMartin parents, later expanded to become a clearinghouse for ritual abuse allegations. It apparently disbanded after holding a final conference in Arlington Heights, Illinois, in 1995.

May 3, 2014

 As I’ve noted before, the Google Ngram Viewer mines a database of more than 5 million books to track word and phrase frequencies over time.

Too bad it abruptly ends at 2008, but the graph above still plots clearly the rise and fall of not only “(satanic) ritual abuse” but also two other examples of the 20th century’s most misguided ideas.

Let’s hope their decline continues uninterrupted.