Ross Cheit, a professor of political science at Brown University (and a friend of Apt. 11D), has a hot new book, The Witch-Hunt Narrative, that looks at an old case, The McMartin preschool abuse scandal in 1984. Emily Bazelton discusses the book and the history of the case in the New York Times today.
While this case is ancient history, the topic is very current. Just a few months ago, Dylan Farrow and Woody Allen fought over the same issue in the opinion pages of the New York Times. Can we believe a child?
Children have active imaginations. The lines between reality and imagination are fluid and changing and easily manipulated by adults. When the stakes are small, it’s probably best to believe a child. Child abuse, however, is a high stakes accusation. An adult who is accused of child abuse is utterly devastated. There’s jail time and a destroyed reputation. Can we believe a child, when the result means the total devastation of an adult’s life?
On the other hand, child abuse happens all the time. And the victims are also utterly destroyed. I’ve seen recovered memory happen in a friend. It’s a real thing. We cannot discount the child’s point of view entirely and allow horrible predators to continue their crimes.
Cheit believes that abuse did happen in McMartin childcare center. His book reviews the old material and makes a compelling case for the victims.
While the methods for investigating these cases have improved since the 1980s, the process of getting the truth from a child remains more of an art than a science. As a parent of a child with special needs who goes into men’s restrooms alone, this ambiguity makes me incredibly nervous. As someone who likes to think up solutions to problems, I suppose the best route is to try to establish rules that make abuse impossible (or at least extremely difficult), so we don’t have to rely upon a child’s testimony at all.
Apt. 11d 
I believe children. From my perspective, the risk of believing a child who isn’t telling the truth is far, far less than the risk of not believing a child who is telling the truth. Full stop. There is not a pandemic of false accusations of child abuse, be it physical or sexual. There is a pandemic of physical and sexual abuse of children. Seven percent of girls in grades 5-8 say they have been sexually assaulted. And most of them have never made a formal report because they didn’t think they’d be believed.
Rules…you mean like rules for kids? Gift of Fear style? Oh yeah. Hell yeah. I was pretty explicit about insuring my daughter grew up “streetwise” and untrusting of strangers, especially men. Paranoid? Nope. Working class. Predators troll neighborhoods like mine because they know our kids are considered throwaways by society at large. That’s why society is content to release serial predators from prison—certain neighborhoods and certain children are de-facto sacrifice zones. There’s a recognition that abuse can’t be eliminated, so it’s steered toward the “appropriate” targets. Targets like me. Targets like my daughter. And it’s left entirely up to us to make that not so, because no one else cares. We just aren’t that valued.
Yeah, I’m bitter.
Here’s the thing: that childlike imagination has disappeared in kids who know they can’t trust the adults in their lives to protect them. Who know that for some reason, abusers are considered more worthy of protection than the abused. They’re still in the process of figuring out the cold logic of power dynamics, and what it means to be on the losing end of that.
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“There is not a pandemic of false accusations of child abuse, be it physical or sexual. ”
In the 1980s, there was.
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Dr. Manhattan, how many people in your personal social circle were falsely accused of sexually abusing children? Either now or in the 80s? Of those, how many were actually arrested and charged?
I was born in 1967. I’m familiar with the 80s. I have not yet met a person falsely accused of sexual abuse of a child. But about a quarter of the women I know were sexually assaulted before the age of 18. And a few men. That’s higher than the general average, but I suspect that’s because socioeconomic status plays a role.
NO, there was not a “pandemic” of false accusations in the 80s.
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I have to say I know 2 people (one in my family) that were completely falsely accused. Both accusations were recanted. One of them went on for over 5 years. It was horrible and ripped our family a part.
When my daughter was 3, she lost her favorite blanket. I asked her numerous questions, trying to figure out where it was and she just kept responding “yes”. Finally I asked her if she threw the blanket in a volcano and she said “yes.” I told her to tell her dad she threw it in a volcano. She did. I think small children are highly susceptible to suggestion.
I think older children and adults can have their own reasons to manipulate accusations.
False accusations happen.
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Lisa V said:
“Finally I asked her if she threw the blanket in a volcano and she said “yes.” I told her to tell her dad she threw it in a volcano. She did. I think small children are highly susceptible to suggestion.”
When I was probably 3ish, my mom was questioning me about whether or not I’d done something (a puddle, I suspect) “on purpose.” I replied, yes, on purpose and my mom got flaming mad at me.
Of course, at the time, I had absolutely no idea what “on purpose” meant, so I hadn’t understood what she was asking.
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Everyone here is well aware of how I feel about Woody Allen. I can’t even look at Emma Stone any more.
Will try to get a copy of Cheit’s book and/or see him speak about it locally. Will ID myself as “Friend of 11D” if I get to meet him. 🙂
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I draw two conclusions from the Bazelon review, which (to be honest) are mostly consistent with what I believed before. (Wherever you go, there you are.)
There was definitely a pandemic of incompetent police and prosecutorial work involving child sexual abuse accusations in the 1980s. Cheit himself concedes that numerous innocent people were falsely accused. That’s a failure of the criminal justice system. Furthermore, it’s clear enough, from various reports over the years, that at least some innocent people were wrongly convicted, which is an even worse failure.
What psychologists seem to have concluded is that children who spontaneously produce accusations of sexual abuse should be believed, but that children can also be “tainted” and led to produce stories that are wholly false. Obviously, this divergence makes it hard to evaluate credibility in any particular case. My own view is that other evidence indicates that Mia Farrow is an amoral, narcissistic woman, from which I conclude that is very possible that she might coach one of her children to make up baseless accusations. Hence I am inclined to believe that Woody Allen has been falsely accused. But the psychologists in Bazelon’s article seem to indicate that these questions are simply unanswerable once the child has been incompetently interrogated.
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I suppose the best route is to try to establish rules that make abuse impossible (or at least extremely difficult)
The problem is that most abuse is perpetrated by family members and trusted friends and authority figures, usually male. Unless you want to preemptively criminalize all men (which kind of happens already, in certain circumstances), it’s going to be hard to structurally prevent most abuse from occurring. On top of this, doing so is antithetical to goals of feminism which say that men can and should also be caretakers of children.
I agree that it’s wise to teach your kids to be streetwise to prevent the statistically unlikely but horrific scenario of stranger abuse or worse, just like it’s wise to teach kids not to stand in an open field or swim to prevent the statistically unlikely chance of being struck by lightening. I *don’t* think it’s wise or ok to teach kids to fear all men. Once you start teaching kids about certain behaviors being ok vs. not ok, then you’re back in the territory of having to trust children.
Or maybe what you mean is to try to eliminate the hierarchies which allow people in power to feel like they can get away with abuse of subordinates? Because it seems like family abuse frequently relies on patriarchal structures where Father Knows Best–I’m thinking of cases like Fritzl as an extreme example which lays bare how patriarchy allows for horrific abuse to go unquestioned.
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*I mean, stand in a field or swim during a thunder storm.
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We had a family friend who was locked in a horrific custody battle with his Evangelical Christian ex-wife. She accused him, among other things, of child abuse, because he used to take baths with their toddler-age son. My guess is that there are cultures in the US where nudity, esp male nudity, is inherently sexually threatening and intimate male parenting so unusual that a man doing routine early childcare stuff really is seen as child abuse.
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I don’t believe anyone without proof. Period.
I had a relative who was a serial fantabulist. He could be very convincing. He never alleged any abuse of any kind, but someone like him could be very convincing, especially today when so much information is available on the internet.
A friend’s brother helped exonerate a teacher who had been falsely convicted. The students in that case colluded. We still have a printout of a facebook page in which one middle schooler proposed to others they should accuse an unpopular teacher of abuse, purely as a tactic to get rid of her.
And the news this week of the Slenderman stabbings by two 12 year olds should give anyone pause.
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What are the rules? Oh, there’s plenty of them these days. For the clergy, for schools, daycares, camps, music schools. Priests go through extensive training on “how not to be unjustly accused of child abuse.” They can’t pat a kid on the back or on the head, if the kid does a good job with something. Absolutely no physical contact whatsoever. Church administrators have all sorts of new rules about how to screen for pedophilia and how to deal with situations. Jonah had to take a two hour online class and pass a test on child abuse in order to volunteer at the YMCA.
Parents install nannycams on their nannies. Even more send their kids to daycare centers, which have extensive rules. Some daycare centers have internet cameras in the rooms, so you can check on your kid, while you’re at work.
If a kid in our town is approached by a weird guy in a car, the entire town gets a robocall from the superintendent tellling us to be careful within minutes of the incident.
Has all this taken the spontaneity out of interactions with others? Has it made every guy a pedophile-suspect? Has it limited the freedom of kids? Yes. Is the increased safety of my kids worth the trade-off? Not sure.
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Thanks, Laura. The book begins with McMartin, as it must, but it also covers lots of other cases. What should concern those who are alert to the false accusation problem is the extent to which credible claims in these cases were dismissed with the word “witchhunt.” There is little or no skepticism of the “witchhunt” argument, and this argument has been advanced on behalf of some very guilty people, like Frank Fuster in Florida. See chapter 6. But absolutely, this is complicated territory. Beware of simplistic answers.
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Weren’t there actual accusations of witchcraft in the McMartin case?
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Stupid form memory.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mcmartin_preschool
From the accusations:
“In addition, Johnson [the first suspected abuse victim] also made several more accusations, including that people at the daycare had sexual encounters with animals, that “Peggy drilled a child under the arms” and “Ray flew in the air.””
“Some of the accusations were described as “bizarre”,[5] overlapping with accusations that mirrored the just-starting satanic ritual abuse panic.[4] It was alleged that, in addition to having been sexually abused, they saw witches fly, traveled in a hot-air balloon, and were taken through underground tunnels.[4] When shown a series of photographs by Danny Davis (the McMartins’ lawyer), one child identified actor Chuck Norris as one of the abusers.[20]”
“There were claims of orgies at car washes and airports, and of children being flushed down toilets to secret rooms where they would be abused, then cleaned up and presented back to their unsuspecting parents.”
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“Furthermore, it’s clear enough, from various reports over the years, that at least some innocent people were wrongly convicted, which is an even worse failure.”
That’s my issue with false equivalence. There are bad people in this world, and they abuse children, sometimes. Those abusers are usually close to the children they abuse, so rules about strangers are only going to have minor impact on incidents of abuse.
But, when we convict an innocent individual and destroy their life (the NY times just ran a story, of someone who was convicted and then released and won compensation from the state, because they ignored part of the evidence), we, as elements of the state, are committing the offense, we are complicit in the wrong that’s being done. I am firmly committed to the principal of innocent until proven guilty as a standard of law, and yes, I understand that this standard means that some abusers will go free.
What to do then? Well, I would believe any child I knew and immediately separate them from the individual. I would treat them as though the story was true and support them in any way they needed. The next step would be to let them tell their story to others, so that everyone could have the information. For this next step, I would have a higher standard of belief, though not the one that would be necessary to convict someone in court.
I am unconvinced that many of the measures (robocop calls, rules that forbid men touching children at all) make children safer. I think abuse occurs because trust is perverted into opportunity, and that the measures we take publicly can have little impact on that kind of abuse. I do think listening and removing shame from telling will go a ways towards helping children avoid abuse, because it lets them put their trust into those who don’t abuse them.
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From what I recall of my oldest when she was 4, it was like pulling teeth to get any account from her of what her day at school at been like. I suspect that the testimony of 3 and 4-year-olds is very liable to be contaminated by adult prompts, because they often just aren’t very forthcoming. That seems to have been the case in the McMartin case, but I’m hoping that evidence-gathering methods have improved.
For that age child, I would not put really any evidentiary weight on the children’s testimony. Physical evidence or the presence of illegal pornography in the possession of the accused would be far more important. Although probably only a fraction of possessors of illegal pornography actually directly abuse children, I suspect that close to 100% of child molesters have a substantial stash of illegal photographs and videos. If an accused person has a clean computer, clean phone, and no iffy photographs or video in his possession, I think that’s excellent evidence of innocence.
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Hobo came by a farm and wanted a handout. Farmer was skeptical, hobo said he could talk with animals. Farmer skeptical, hobo asked the cows about what was going on, cows gave a story about pasture all day and getting milked. Farmer remains skeptical, that is what all cows do. Hobo talked to the cat, and reported a detailed story of the day: when the farmer had been working on the tractor, the hired man went off the farm for lunch, fence repair. Farmer is impressed. Hobo offers to talk with the sheep. Farmer says, ‘no no that’s okay, sheep lie’
I’m inclined to think that kids say whatever they think will benefit them, often. And then if they have said it, they fear consequences of retracting. And then when they have said it enough times, they believe it. Sometimes it’s originally true, sometimes it never actually happened. Believing as I do about kids, I am inclined to give Woody Allen the benefit of the doubt, given the authorities’ behavior at the time.
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I don’t know much about this book or the so-called pandemic of accusations it is referring to but I think the general premise is a sound one. There likely could have been some sexual abuse going on in these cases but it was the run-of-the-mill, typical sexual abuse (still completely horrifying) and not the drinking blood/satanic ritual abuse that was claimed. There is no way to ever know though since it methods used to gather information were so messed up. It does sound like those approaches have improved over the years even though it’s still a huge struggle to know.
There is rarely much proof of sexual abuse of young children. In my brief stint working for child protective services I can’t remember a case that involved physical evidence. That’s why most of the sexual abuse cases never go to court and are “handled” by child protection because they can use a more expansive definition of evidence than the one used in court. Of course, the only punishment that can come from relying heavily on child protection to handle sexual abuse cases is termination of parental rights, which leave the abuser free to abuse again.
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