Feb. 1, 2014

“As our medical schools and graduate programs fill with students who were born after 1989, we meet young mental health professionals-in-training who have no knowledge or
living memory of the Satanic ritual abuse (SRA) moral panic of the 1980s and early 1990s. To those of us old enough to have been there, that era already seems like a curious relic of the past, bracketed in our memory palaces behind a door we are loathe to open again.

“Some mass cultural phenomena are so emotionally-charged, so febrile, and in retrospect so causally incomprehensible, that we feel compelled to move on silently and feign forgetfulness…

“Despite the discomfort it brings, we owe it to the current generation of clinicians to remember that an elite minority within the American psychiatric profession played a small
but ultimately decisive role in the cultural validation, and then reduction, of the Satanism moral panic between 1988 and 1994….

“Are we ready now to reopen a discussion on this moral panic? Will both clinicians and historians of psychiatry be willing to be on record?”

– From “When Psychiatry Battled the Devil” by Richard Noll in Psychiatric Times (Dec. 6, 2013)

Wow! After more than two years of seeing mental health professionals shrug off responsibility for the moral panic they promoted, I can hardly believe what I’m reading. Noll, an accomplished author and professor, traces how it all happened – and asks, “Shall we continue to silence memory, or allow it to speak?”

An early vote to silence memory came from an unexpected source: Psychiatric Times itself, which clumsily pulled Noll’s piece from its website.

By contrast, Allen Frances, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke, offered a powerful – and I hope influential – personal mea culpa.

July 5, 2013

“RALEIGH – During a hearing at the state Court of Appeals, Chief Judge Gerald Arnold repeatedly asked a state prosecutor about the fairness of testimony by (Bob) Kelly’s former attorney in Edenton. Arnold said the attorney had, in effect, testified that he believed in Kelly’s innocence until he learned his child had been abused.

“ ‘How can you argue that it was not extremely prejudicial?’ the judge asked.

“Associate Attorney General Ellen Scouten argued that Chris Bean did not divulge confidential information and did not violate an attorney-client relationship with Kelly. She said Bean testified as a parent and a crime victim.

“Arnold said Bean, now a district court judge, had gone beyond describing what he had seen and witnessed as a parent.

“ ‘This boils down to the most fundamental questions of fairness,’ Arnold said. ‘When you have an attorney testifying that “I was Mr. Kelly’s attorney and I believed in him very strongly until I learned the truth, that is to say that he’s guilty, and then I was shattered.” How can there be more prejudicial, stronger evidence put before a jury than to have a former attorney, the defendant’s attorney say that?’

“Scouten said that because the defense had contended that accusers in Edenton were hysterical people on a witch hunt it was fair to allow the state to show the type of people involved.

“ ‘Mr. Bean and his wife were reputable, respected thoughtful, educated people – not the type of people that would be swept up by community hysteria,’ she said.”

– From “Appeal of 2 defendants in Little Rascals case draws a crowd” in the News & Observer (Jan. 10, 1995)

Given this line of questioning, it came as no great surprise when four months later the Court of Appeals overturned the convictions of both Kelly and Dawn Wilson.

Bean’s unfettered opinionating was only one of three major defects cited by the court, the others being the withholding of exculpatory evidence by prosecutors and the testimony of parents as expert witnesses.

The prosecution got off light – the brief filed by appellate defender Mark Montgomery claimed no fewer than 222 potentially reversible errors.

July 22, 2013

“Precisely because of human fallibility, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Now, I know that (alien-abduction theorist) Budd Hopkins responds that extraordinary claims require extraordinary investigations. And I have two kinds of responses to that.

“There is a claim that a brontosaurus is tramping through the jungles today in the Republic of Congo. Should a massive expedition be mounted with government funds to find it, or it is so implausible as not to be worth serious sustained systematic attention?

“My second point is that to the extent that extraordinary claims require extraordinary investigations, those investigations must be true to the spirit of science. And that means highly skeptical, demanding, rigorous standards of evidence. There’s not a hint of that from alien abduction enthusiasts.”

– From “Carl Sagan on Alien Abduction” on NOVA (Feb. 27, 1996)

I’m just trying to imagine the Little Rascals prosecutors and therapists conferring after a long day of bullying 3-year-olds and asking themselves whether their investigations had been “true to the spirit of science.”

May 16, 2016

The aftereffects of Little Rascals on Edenton have long interested me. With few exceptions the town’s residents, now fewer than 5,000 for the first time since 1970,  seem dedicated to forgetting their prominent role in the “satanic ritual abuse” day-care panic. When the chief prosecutor ran for district attorney, the local paper published 17 stories and an endorsement editorial without mentioning Little Rascals.

One Edenton innkeeper even deleted mention of the case from the town’s Wikipedia page.

So I’m always glad to see another perspective. This is from a note sent by a former resident:

“I was excited to see your Facebook page on Little Rascals. I had been looking for copies of the PBS programs for years and had only uncovered some poor quality copies.

“I have many friends in Edenton, which made viewing ‘Innocence Lost’ all the more interesting. I began to know Edenton right at the tail end of the saga. For me its attractiveness was the sense that I was in a very different place, a different culture from home. Quiet, peaceful, slow-paced. But we concluded this was no place to live. Yes, some nice people to be found, but overall, pretty stifling.

“The town leaders still have some things to answer for about Little Rascals, and I suspect that until there is a process of reconciliation, the town will remain a troubled place, though it does a good job putting on a facade.

“Little Rascals is unfinished business. The problem is that the power structure sees no reason for change. There is such a direct link to the plantation mentality here in eastern North Carolina (which also saw no reason to change), it’s not even funny.”