Dec. 10, 2017

“Controversy over the credibility of children’s testimony has congealed into a debate between those who demand that we ‘believe the children’ no matter how outlandish their allegations and those who maintain that children are inherently so suggestible that their testimony can never be relied on upon. An interesting question that remains is why children are not believed when, as often happens, they specifically deny charges at the time they first arise….

“Why isn’t the child allowed to say no? A widening body of research shows that repeated questioning of children, especially by authoritative adults with a specific bias, will often lead to answers that conform to the interviewers’ expectations….

“Divorce, neglect, unsafe neighborhoods, bad schools – these primary social problems are not the fault of the people to whom we have entrusted our children. Forcing children to invent stories of abuse is abuse….”

– From “Child-care Demons” by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker (Oct. 3, 1994)

Jan. 16, 2012

Darkness to Light is a Charleston-based nonprofit with the goal “End Child Abuse.” Since its founding in 2000, D2L claims to have trained adults in 48 states and 10 foreign countries in how to prevent, recognize and react to child sexual abuse. Among its allies: YMCAs.

Unfortunately, D2L is less than meticulous in associating itself with other organizations. This is a letter I sent D2L officials on Dec. 5:

Darkness to Light does a disservice to the public and to your cause when you include on your list of resources the Survivorship website.

Survivorship’s board president is Neil Brick, who identifies himself as “the founder of S.M.A.R.T. (Stop Mind Control and Ritual Abuse Today) at http://ritualabuse.us. He is a survivor of ritual abuse and a survivor advocate. He works on developing supports for survivors and getting information out to the general public about ritual abuse. He runs yearly ritual abuse conferences on the east coast of the United States every year at http://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference. Links to his presentation transcripts and research papers are http://ritualabuse.us/smart/neil-brick.”

S.M.A.R.T. is perhaps the most prominent organization still insisting that numerous day-care providers in the 1980s and early 1990s subjected children to “satanic ritual abuse.” Although the day-care panic eventually waned and courts freed nearly all the unfortunate defendants, S.M.A.R.T. continues to see abuse in every one of these cases – from McMartin to Little Rascals to Fells Acres, etc.

Like Scientologists and Holocaust deniers, S.M.A.R.T. has been banned from editing Wikipedia entries. Neither should its disinformation campaign be given a platform by Darkness to Light.

Darkness to Light has yet to respond to that letter or to a Dec. 30 follow-up soliciting “a statement explaining why you continue to support this organization.”  I’d be happy to publish such an explanation, but even happier to learn that D2L has cut its ties to the ritual abuse movement.

Jan. 20, 2016

“The Jan. 15 editorial ‘The limits of zeal’ contrasted the penalty given Christine Mumma with the absence of rebuke to prosecutors for the ‘massive failure’ that kept her client wrongfully imprisoned for more than 36 years.

“It is not enough simply to point out this shameful disparity. The public embarrassment resulting from the hearing should move the North Carolina State Bar to empower a separate disciplinary panel to deal only with prosecutorial excesses. Such a panel would not lack for business.”

– From “A Panel for Prosecutors,” my letter to the editor of the News & Observer  (Jan. 19) (text cache)

April 8, 2013

“The panic over satanic ritual abuse in the United States… subsided rather abruptly, as panics usually do, whether they are individual or social. They are like an acute anxiety attack – absolutely absorbing while in course and then suddenly gone, leaving in their wake bewilderment, fear of confronting the causes of the panic, and bafflement about what just happened….

“But traces of its presence can be found without much difficulty in the child abuse and neglect (CAN) literature. The panic, and the way CAN personnel had contributed to it, made the field more self-reflective and self-questioning. CAN practitioners had been shocked by the spectacle of their colleagues battling one another in courtrooms… unable to distinguish between real events of abuse and mass hysteria over alleged satanic abuse.”

– From “Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children” by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (2012)

“More self-reflecting and self-questioning” may describe the current generation of child abuse professionals, but those who did such unspeakable damage in the 1980s and ’90s remain wedded to their junk science.