March 7, 2014

Second of three posts

After our lengthy email exchange I took up editor Jon Conte on his offer to consider an expanded letter challenging the Journal of Interpersonal Violence’s past support of the “satanic ritual abuse” moral panic.

This is what I submitted on Oct. 25, 2013:

To the editor:

In December 1989 the Journal of Interpersonal Violence published “Stress Responses of Children to Sexual Abuse and Ritualistic Abuse in Day Care Centers” by Susan J. Kelley. In December 1990 it published “Ritualistic Child Abuse in a Neighborhood Setting” by Barbara Snow and Teena Sorensen. Both these articles endorsed, promoted and attempted to substantiate a concept that subsequent research has proven to be a quintessential moral panic. Today no respected social scientist will argue that satanic (or sadistic) ritual abuse ever existed in the nation’s day cares.

These articles in JIV, however, were unequivocally confident that it not only existed but also was widespread. From Kelley’s synopsis: “The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of sexual abuse and ritualistic abuse of children in day care settings. The sample was composed of 134 children; 67 children who were sexually abused and ritually abused in day care centers were compared on the Child Behavior Checklist with a carefully matched group of 67 nonabused children. Findings indicated that sexually abused children had significantly more behavior problems than did the nonabused children. Sexual abuse involving ritualistic abuse was associated with increased impact as well as increased severity in the extent of the sexual, physical, and psychological abuse the children experienced.”

Snow and Sorensen criticized “attempts to discredit victims and therapists” and seemed unaware that they were exposing the corruption of those therapists’ interviewing techniques when they wrote: “Disclosures were difficult and progressed slowly. The majority of children showed little symptomology at initial referral with significant increases during the disclosure process.”

The Little Rascals and McMartin cases were but two manifestations of this moral panic of  the 1980s and early 1990s. Dozens of less publicized prosecutions occurred across North America and as far away as New Zealand and Germany. The extensive literature illuminating the day care moral panic includes “Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend” by Jeffrey S. Victor, “Sex Panic and the Punitive State” by Roger N. Lancaster, “Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America” by Philip Jenkins, “The Satanism Scare” by David G. Bromley, Joel Best and James T. Richardson, “Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance ” by Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, “The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic” by Mary De Young and the latest edition of “Folk Devils and Moral Panics”  by Stanley Cohen – who coined the term “moral panic” in 1972.

The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the Wee Care Day Nursery case in 1985. Among law enforcement reports debunking ritual abuse allegations the best known is “Investigator’s Guide to Allegations of ‘Ritual’ Child Abuse” by Kenneth Lanning, the FBI agent in the Behavioral Science Unit assigned to examine these cases. Similar reports have been issued in countries such as England (“Extent and Nature of Organised and Ritual Abuse” byJ. S. La Fontaine), the Netherlands (“Report of the Ritual Abuse Workgroup”) and Australia (“Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service”).

Eventually the convictions of most of the day care providers in the United States were overturned.  Playing a major part in alerting appellate courts to the suggestibility of child witnesses was an amicus brief filed in the Wee Care case by pioneer researchers Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck.

Before the fever broke, however, untold harm was done to defendants,  families and child-witnesses. In the words of sociologist Mary De Young:

“Innocent people have been accused and convicted; the autobiographies of children have been usurped (and some children, now adults, have completely retracted their allegations); professional reputations have been destroyed (and some of the loudest proponents of the idea of ritual abuse have since retracted their claims); tens of millions of dollars were wasted on investigations and trials; it distracted attention, time, money and energy from ‘real’ cases of sexual abuse and from the fathers, brothers and other family members who most likely were the perpetrators; it made quality day care harder to find and drove out male providers who could have been valuable role models to children, especially boys; it eroticized abuse by focusing on rituals and masked and hooded perpetrators; it added nothing – absolutely nothing – to a clinical or scientific understanding of the traumatic effects of abuse because the trauma children experienced in these cases was iatrogenic, i.e., caused by investigators, interviewers, prosecutors and hysterical parents; it broke up families; and even dropped property values and interfered with commerce; and it introduced distrust, cynicism and incivility into our lives and into legitimate work on helping abused kids.”

The Journal of Interpersonal Violence should not allow these misguided articles from 1989 and 1990 to stand as its last word on claims of day-care ritual abuse.

Lew Powell

Charlotte, North Carolina

Alas, publication in the JIV now seems unlikely. Dr. Conte has not responded to my follow-up emails and phone messages over the past four months.  Why might that be?

Next: I’ll consider some possible answers.

Nov. 21, 2011

Raymond Lawrence, the New York City chaplain who founded the Committee for Support of the Edenton Seven, was an attentive and often appalled observer at Bob Kelly’s trial. This passage is excerpted from a memoir now posted in its entirety on the Bookshelf:

“Among the more obscene performances I witnessed by the prosecution was a long argument that Robert Kelly had had vaginal intercourse with a five-year-old girl.

“On a screen about four feet square the prosecutor displayed a color slide the girl’s genitalia, with two adult thumbs shown pulling back the labia to display the hymen and vaginal opening. The hymen appeared fully intact, covering most of the vaginal opening. The prosecutor thus spent what I recall as hours arguing that the stretch marks in the hymen were evidence of adult penile penetration.

“I wondered why the defense attorney did not rise up and ask if this were Alice in Wonderland…. It was as if I had entered an alternate universe.”

Nov. 8, 2014

“In the summer of 1989, I accepted my first job at a daily paper when The Daily Advance hired me to cover a two-county beat – Chowan and Perquimans. When I arrived, Bob Kelly had just been arrested and charged in about a dozen cases. My editor told me about it, almost in passing, and said, ‘You might want to keep an eye on it.’ I did, and for the next two years it consumed my life.

“I was 24 years old with a wife of two years and no children. I had no experience reporting on police and courts and was very naive as to how the system worked. As the case expanded I became convinced of the defendants’ guilt. Their lawyers wouldn’t let them talk and they were hard to reach in jail. Prosecutors were also tight-lipped, but some of the parents couldn’t stay that way.

“For two years all I had to go on were the stories of parents and what I believed to be a mountain of evidence in the hands of prosecutors. Shortly before Bob’s trial began, three important things happened. I finally got to interview two of the defendants (Robin Byrum and Scott Privott). Their stories were very convincing and I was no longer certain of their guilt. I was also promoted to an editing position and was no longer actively reporting on the case. I was in charge of the reporters who would. Also at this time the ‘Frontline’ show came out, pretty much blowing the lid off the prosecution’s case.

“As Bob Kelly’s trial unfolded, I found that the prosecution had little to no evidence. My faith in the case was weakened and I was surprised when Bob was convicted. Then another defendant (Dawn Wilson) fell and Bob’s wife Betsy Kelly pleaded no contest. That upset me because I was convinced she was innocent and I wanted her to fight and prove it.

“At this point in my life, I had become a parent and soon my first marriage would end. I returned home to Colorado but continued to follow the case from afar. I was happy when the convictions were overthrown and the other charges dropped. As a parent I could now see and understand that what was normal childhood behavior was being grossly misinterpreted as signs of child sex abuse.

“In hindsight, I feel bad for everyone involved in the case. Both sides went through hell. Most of all, though, I feel for the children. Their lives were altered and family and community dynamics changed by forces beyond their control and beyond reason.”

– Joe Southern, recalling his experience covering the Little Rascals case for the Elizabeth City Daily Advance

This 1991 piece, reprinted in a Del Rio, Texas, paper, seems to be reporter Southern’s lone Little Rascals story to survive online. He is now managing editor of The Sealy News in Sealy, Texas.

More recently, the Daily Advance has shown far less interest in the case – well, none, actually – or in Nancy Lamb’s responsibility for pursuing and prolonging it.

Feb. 10, 2012

“(The scene of children screaming invective at a prison-bound Bob Kelly) was… the graphic heart of the documentary….

“The car pulled away, and they began to giggle self-consciously. A second or two of awkward silence heightened the artificiality of the moment, the sense of a construct that the girls fully understood. Then an older woman (presumably a mother) moved into the silence, and began to clap and cheer. A few others joined in in desultory fashion. ‘Let’s go get something (to) eat,’ said the mom….

“By chance, I had just finished reading ‘The Professor,’ a minor novel of Charlotte Bronte’s. Like most Bronte novels it was laced with leisurely reflections, and this one struck me powerfully enough to note down: ‘Human beings – human children especially – seldom deny themselves the pleasure of exercising a power which they are conscious of possessing, even though that power consists only in a capacity to make others wretched.’

“As those children shrieked at Bob Kelly through the glass of the police car window, I wondered if there wasn’t more than a whiff of that pleasure in power in the air.

“And then I remembered this town is called Eden, and we’ve known for a long while that the darnedest things happened in Eden.”