Feb. 9, 2018

“Both prosecution and defense [in a trial in Palo Alto, Calif.] called expert witnesses to testify to ‘child sexual-abuse accommodation syndrome’….

“Roland Summit, a southern California psychiatrist, coined the term in 1983. He defined the syndrome through five categories: secrecy, helplessness; entrapment and accommodation; delayed, unconvincing disclosure; and retraction. The categories describe how victims often do not resist the abuse because of power dynamics in the relationship with an adult, often delay disclosing the abuse and may change their stories due to pressure or guilt….

“Blake Carmichael, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, Davis, testified for the prosecution that child sexual-abuse accommodation syndrome is not a diagnosis but rather a set of concepts that provide context for a child’s experience of sexual abuse. He testified that research supports Summit’s original claims.

“By contrast, William O’Donohue, a clinical psychologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, testified for the defense that Summit’s paper is ‘junk science’.

“O’Donohue co-authored a literature review of Summit’s work that determined the syndrome is not a scientific theory grounded in research. O’Donohue noted that a second article Summit published in the 1990s described child sexual-abuse accommodation syndrome as his ‘clinical opinion’ and a ‘pattern’ rather than a diagnosable condition.”

– From “Former teacher denies sex-abuse allegations” by Elena Kadvany in Palo Alto Weekly (Feb. 7)

So here we are, 35 years after Roland Summit fanned the flames in the McMartin Preschool case, and prosecutors are still using his cockamamie conceit to win over jurors. It’s not just on the internet that no bad idea ever dies….

March 12, 2012

After reading thousands of pages of Little Rascals coverage, shouldn’t I have become inured to the prosecution’s gratuitous brutality?

Not yet.

On August 11, 1993, Dawn Wilson, serving a life sentence for child sexual abuse, went back to court to seek release under house arrest. In six days she would give birth to her second child.

Nancy Lamb and Bill Hart could’ve responded with any number of temperate legal arguments against her release. Instead….

“She made a quite irresponsible decision in 1992 to become pregnant early in her trial,” Lamb said. “She was thinking only of herself….”

“Dawn Wilson… simply has no character…,” added Hart. “Is she the kind of mother figure who ought to be bonding with a second out-of-wedlock child?”

Judge Marsh McLelland granted Wilson’s request, but delays in paperwork and payment of a $250,000 bond kept mother and son in women’s prison another month.

In 1995 the N.C. Court of Appeals overturned her conviction. And then of course the prosecutors rushed to apologize to Dawn Wilson for their disgraceful vilification.

July 2, 2015

“The notion of satanic ritual abuse was dismissed as ‘utter nonsense’ by Mrs. Justice Pauffley in care proceedings in the family court at (London’s) Royal Courts of Justice in March. Two children were coerced by their mother and her boyfriend into alleging horrendous sexual abuse and murder of babies by their father and others in a secret satanic cult…. ‘There was no satanic or other cult at which babies were murdered and children sexually abused,’ the judge said. The claims were ‘fabricated’ and ‘baseless.’

“But the total lack of physical evidence does not deter the compensation chasers. At a child abuse training day in London last week run by the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, delegates were told that satanic abuse was a reality. Barrister Lee Moore – a self-proclaimed satanic abuse survivor – and solicitor Peter Garsden, who are respectively the past and current president of the Association of Child Abuse Lawyers, ‘kept going on about satanic ritual abuse,’ according to a barrister who was present.

“She went on: ‘Peter Garsden told the assembled band of lawyers that SRA was prevalent and would be accepted as such, “given time.” The point is that at a conference of ‘cutting-edge’ personal injury lawyers specialising in child abuse, only one delegate was prepared to challenge these SRA proponents.’ ”

– From “Satanic Panic Ritual Defence” by Rosie Waterhouse in Private Eye (June 26) – hat tip, British False Memory Society

One difference on our side of the pond: The “compensation chasers” in American ritual abuse cases were much less likely to be lawyers than therapists.

Dec. 22, 2014

““We evangelical Christians by definition live by our own narrative of creation, fall, and redemption. We believe in good and evil. That is why, as a group, we might be vulnerable to other meta-narratives – after all, if you believe in one, it’s easier to accept a second and a third.

“One example: in the 1980s and 1990s too many of us accepted the story of widespread Satanic Ritual Abuse, despite the fact that the evidence could not be found, nor could anyone name the thousands of missing children who supposedly had been sacrificed to the devil.”

– From “ ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ has its 50th Anniversary” by Gary Shogren at Open Our Eyes, Lord!

Although “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” by Richard Hofstadter was first published in response to Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, it continues to offer insights into the attraction of a wide range of conspiracy theories.