Aug. 1, 2012

“Congress’s well-intentioned but misguided Mondale Act (the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, CAPTA), signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1974, provided impetus to prosecute alleged crimes against children.

“First, it provided immunity to reporters of abuse, thereby unleashing an unlimited supply of unsubstantiated charges.

“Second, it provided funds to permit so-called victims to receive state-financed therapy immediately, even prior to any adjudication.

“Thus, the victims in Edenton received extensive counseling, at government expense, for ‘abuse’ that never occurred. Four ‘sex therapists’ got all that business and received many thousands of dollars in reimbursement. They had no motivation to suppose those charges might be bogus.”

– From “Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom” by Raymond J. Lawrence (2007)

Jan. 4, 2018

“Sexual harassment or assault, by contrast [with the Communism scare in Hollywood], obviously warrants discipline at the very least and criminal prosecution wherever appropriate. But then and now, what’s lacking is any shared obligation to respect constitutional rights, ensure due process or maintain a sense of proportion…. And that’s the thing about moral panics: they may begin with a legitimate societal concern – drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, child abuse, human trafficking – but they can devolve into Prohibition, movie and broadcast censorship, banning comic books and rock ‘n’ roll, and general crusades against anything in popular culture challenging the official conformist line. And if you’re not careful, you’ll soon find yourself succumbing to irrational fears of ‘satanic ritual abuse,’ ‘backward masking’ in rock lyrics and secret pedophilia rings run out of suburban pizzerias….

“It’s not witches, but the witch-hunters, that we should really fear, for they lead us to abdicate our responsibilities to be fair, thoughtful, measured, and rational….”

– From “Season of the witch” by Joel Bellman at LA Observed (Dec. 10)

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?

Feb. 13, 2013

“Can we say beyond a shadow of a doubt that any day-care operators in the country are innocent? No. Can we say that those who claim they were abducted by UFOs were not? No.

“(That) is not a frivolous comparison. The methodology used by therapists on the children is the same methodology used by UFO debriefers. The debriefers ask, Did you see a light? The therapists ask, Did you get taken to a secret tunnel? The debriefers ask, Did you feel a probe by the aliens? The therapists ask, Did Mr. Bob stick a knife in your vagina?

“When people, even fully functional members of their communities, regurgitate what they have been told about space probes, we call them lunatics. When children, after constant prodding, regurgitate what they have been told about intimate probes, we put people in prison.”

– From “Abusing Justice, in the Name of Children” by Ed Siegel in the Boston Globe (Sept. 8, 1995)