June 25, 2012

“I saw this woman in her 20s … accused of something like 2,800 charges of child sex abuse. Oh, I thought, well, that’s very odd….

“I thought, How can (Kelly Michaels) one woman, one young, lone woman in an absolutely open place like the child care center of the church in New Jersey that she worked for – how could she have committed these enormous crimes against 20 children, dressed and undressed them and sent – you know what it is to dress and undress even one child every day without getting their socks lost? – 20 children in a perfectly public place, torture them for two years, frighten and terrorize them, and they never went home and told their parents anything?… This did seem strange.”

– Dorothy Rabinowitz, recalling on C-SPAN the 1985 case that led to her Pulitzer-winning coverage of the ritual-abuse day-care mania

“This did seem strange.”

From the vantage of 2012, of course, such allegations seem not only “strange” but also patently incredible.

So why didn’t everybody – therapists, journalists, prosecutors, jurors – share Rabinowitz’s reasonable doubt?

How did such a grotesque misconception flourish?

Had skepticism really fallen that far out of fashion during the “Believe the Children” zeitgeist?

April 13, 2012

“A decade-long investigation by the FBI has found no evidence linking child abuse with organized satanic cults.

“In a recent report by the agency, Special Agent Kenneth Lanning warns about the influence of ‘overzealous intervenors,’ such as therapists and parents, ‘who may be affected by their zeal to uncover child sexual abuse, satanic activity, conspiracies.’ Their influence can contaminate a case so much that no one will ever determine what, if anything, really happened….”

– From the San Diego Union-Tribune (December 27, 1992)

Dec. 23, 2011

“Many appalling results of the recovered-memory movement of the 1970s and ’80s arose from … unexamined views of memory – occurrences like the false accusations of employees of children’s care centers… Such fantasies have often been encouraged as reliable memories by doctrinaire therapists and have sometimes resulted in prison sentences and ruined lives for innocent fathers, mothers, kin, teachers and devoted caretakers.

“The documentary films made by Ofra Bikel … are meticulous and frightening accounts of such fantasies and their overwhelming power in the hands of the cruelest, most self-deluded and most easily panicked among us.”

– From “Ardent Spirits” by the late Reynolds Price (2009)

Oct. 9, 2013

“We are a society that, every 50 years or so, is afflicted by some paroxysm of virtue – an orgy of self-cleansing through which evil of one kind or another is cast out.   From the witch-hunts of  Salem to the communist hunts of the McCarthy era to the current shrill fixation on child abuse, there runs a common thread of moral hysteria.

“After the McCarthy era, people would ask: But how could it have happened?  How could the presumption of innocence have been abandoned wholesale? How did large and powerful institutions acquiesce as congressional investigators ran roughshod over civil liberties – all in the name of a war on communists?  How was it possible to believe that subversives lurked behind every library door, in every radio station, that every two-bit actor who had belonged to the wrong political organization posed a threat to the nation’s security?

“Years from now people doubtless will ask the same questions about our present era – a time when the most improbable charges of abuse find believers; when it is enough only to be accused by anonymous sources to be hauled off by investigators; a time when the hunt for child abusers has become a national pathology.”

– From “From the Mouths of Babes to a Jail Cell” by Dorothy Rabinowitz (Harper’s Magazine, May 1990)