Nov. 2, 2011

Post on hidden mysteries.org (1995):

“Aside from the children and their parents, others are deeply disappointed by the N.C. Supreme Court’s decision not to (overturn) the reversals by the Court of Appeals.

“Superior Court Judge Marsh McLelland, who heard the Little Rascals case the first time, wrote in a letter to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court: ‘Your refusal to review the Kelly and Wilson reversals by the Court of Appeals is legally and morally reprehensible.’

“Once more, the Edenton children find themselves as much on trial as their alleged perpetrators, if not more so.”

ANN EARLE

Letter to the editor of the News & Observer of Raleigh (May 16, 1996):

“As a psychotherapist who treats many child victims and adult survivors of sexual and ritual abuse… I am incredulous that so many people support Robert F. Kelly….

“There is ample historical and anthropological evidence that ritual abuse has existed for centuries…. Unfortunately, day care centers are optimal settings for such perpetrators.

“If there is indeed a ‘witch hunt’ going on, it’s actually aimed at abused children and those who advocate for them.”

ANN EARLE, C.C.S.W., B.C.D.

Chapel Hill

Letter to the editor of the News & Observer of Raleigh (June 4, 1997):

“Investigators should not ask leading questions, of course, but even if they did it is difficult to imagine how a young child could come up with graphic details of sexual activity if nothing happened. Child sexual abusers and pornographers routinely incorporate fantasy to entice children to cooperate and render them less believable if the child ever tells.

“Why are journalists so quick to believe alleged abusers and discount sexual abuse allegations by children?”

ANN S. EARLE

Chapel Hill

Letter to the editor of the News & Observer of Raleigh (January 15, 1999):

“In reality, false allegations of sexual abuse by preschool children are rare.

“I have spent three years researching and editing a book on ritual abuse allegations. Ample evidence supports the existence of such abuse in day care centers, in spite of how bizarre it may sound.

“Robert Kelly was found guilty by a jury of his peers in a lengthy trial. This verdict was overturned only on a technicality.

“Finally, there is obviously significant evidence to charge Kelly in a case unrelated to Little Rascals (charges dropped eight months later). We should consider these facts before concluding that the alleged abuses at Little Rascals were due to a ‘hysteria’ fueled by a ‘rumor mill.’ ”

ANN EARLE, C.C.S.W., B.C.D.

Chapel Hill

As these comments suggest, certainty in the pervasiveness of ritual abuse extended well beyond those therapists directly involved in the Little Rascals case.

Did Ann Earle, a board member of the International Council on Cultism and Ritual Trauma, ever change her mind? If so, she seems not to have shared the news.

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.”

Nov. 28, 2011

“The Little Rascals case offers a trove of testimony illustrating how immersion into the popular psychology of sexual abuse gave parent-experts the terms and concepts to retrospectively interpret their children’s behaviors and emotions, and to do so with the ring of authority….

“One mother testified that once she had learned the psychology of sexual abuse, she realized her child’s denial that anything untoward had happened at the day care center actually was a sign that he had been sexually abused.”

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

May 14, 2012

Mary De Young’s engrossing bibliography “The Ritual Abuse Controversy” lists page after page of books and journal articles that accept wholeheartedly the existence of an epidemic of ritual abuse in day cares during the ’80s and early ’90s.

Roland Summit, Ann Burgess, Susan Kelley, David Finkelhor, etc., all used their professional credentials to support and spread the panic. But who among them has since acknowledged that it was all baloney? And that it left behind hundreds of profoundly damaged child-witnesses, families and defendants?

When I asked Dr. Finkelhor about the now-discredited foundation of “Nursery Crimes,” he replied that “This was a while ago, and I have not revisited the case. Our research did not conduct any independent review of the evidence, but simply coded the conclusion of the investigator we interviewed. I was neither an authority about the validity of claims at the time or at the present.”

Am I wrong to expect a higher level of professional accountability?

Mostly, by the turn of the latest century the alarmists had simply withdrawn from the arena. Like Dr. Finkelhor, they had moved on to other topics and “not revisited the case.”

One exception is Kathleen Coulborn Faller, professor of children and families in the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan.

In “Understanding and Assessing Child Sexual Maltreatment” (second edition, 2003), Dr. Faller writes, “Though others’ perceptions of the problems of sexual abuse in day care have changed, mine essentially have not.” Minimizing the work of next-generation researchers such as Ceci and Bruck, she cites approvingly such works as Kelley’s “Parental Stress Response to Sexual Abuse and Ritualistic Abuse in Day-Care Centers.”

Might Dr. Faller have changed her mind over the past decade?

Last week I asked her. So far she hasn’t replied.