” We Believe the Children” By Richard Beck : A Review by Carol Tavris
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-very-model-moral-panic-1438980250
A Very Model Moral Panic. Preposterous charges against an L.A. preschool set off a wave of copycat cases—with dire consequences.
In the mid-1980s, a friend of mine testified on behalf of an elementary-school teacher who had been accused of being a pedophile. A child had told his mother that the teacher had taught them about “boobies and dicks” and had drawn a picture on the blackboard that sounded suspiciously to the mother like an image of an ejaculating penis. The police had raced to the classroom and confiscated the damning evidence: several copies of “Moby-Dick.” What the teacher had drawn was a whale and its spout.
Looking back, we can see that the only boobies involved in this case were the adults. But whenever we are in the midst of a moral panic, as we were in the 1980s, we feel that our alarm is reasonable and that punitive solutions are appropriate. Dicks? That child knew the word “dicks”? Cancel sex ed! Run that teacher out of town!
Waves of sexual hysteria sweep across our nation with depressing regularity. Each one seems to come out of thin air, wreaks enormous havoc, subsides and is forgotten. Each is regarded as an anomaly. I have no doubt that 30 years after the Salem witch trials of 1692-93, parents tried to teach their children about the Un-Puritan Activities Committee’s interrogations that led to the executions of 20 people, the imprisonment of 150 others, and accusations against an additional 200. “George, sit down here so I can tell you how Giles Corey was pressed to death by these crazy people,” I can hear a parent say. “Aw, Ma,” young George probably replied, “that was so 17th century.”
We Believe the Children
By Richard Beck
PublicAffairs, 323 pages, $26.99
It is a sobering moment when you realize that a moral panic that you have lived through has become, to most young people, an obscure bit of history. How do you convey to the next generation the stupidity, the rush to judgment, the breathtaking cruelty, the self-righteousness, the ruined lives that every hysterical epidemic generates? On the other hand, understanding a moral panic requires perspective—distance from the emotional heat of anger and anxiety. Sometimes it is precisely those who didn’t live through it who are best suited to providing that perspective.
In “We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s,” Richard Beck accomplishes this difficult feat, and he does so calmly, detail by meticulous detail. He gives a thorough account of a panic that was ignited by the fear that the sexual abuse of children was widespread, a fear crystallized by the McMartin Preschool case in Manhattan Beach, Calif. Mr. Beck, a young editor at n+1 magazine, is neither a historian nor a social scientist, and apparently he knew little about the subject before digging into it. His important book gives readers who don’t know the story—or who think it is over, so 20th century—an understanding of its lingering, pernicious effects on our lives.
I was in Los Angeles in 1983 when the news exploded with allegations that Virginia McMartin, her daughter Peggy McMartin Buckey, and Peggy’s son Ray Buckey were molesting and torturing children at the beloved day-care center that Virginia had opened more than 20 years earlier. The McMartin case began when a disturbed woman alleged that her toddler son, who had become fascinated by “playing doctor”—not in the way you’re imagining but by pretending to give people shots and taking their temperatures—was being molested by Ray Buckey. Ray’s penis, she decided, was the “thermometer.” The police arrested Ray. And then they sent a letter to all the parents of children in the preschool. The letter, which Mr. Beck reprints in its entirety, included this:
Please question your child to see if he or she has been a witness to any crime or if he or she has been a victim. Our investigation indicates that possible criminal acts include: oral sex, fondling of genitals, buttock or chest area, and sodomy, possibly committed under the pretense of “taking the child’s temperature.” Also photos may have been taken of children without their clothing.
You’re one of the professionals who had recently been moving to the area. You fought to get your child a coveted place in the McMartin Preschool, and you get this letter. Do you say, “Don’t be absurd. More than 5,000 children have been in day care here, with nary a complaint. My child is happy and has no symptoms of distress”? Or do you panic, call fellow parents and join the posse, even at the risk of all hell breaking loose?
All hell broke loose.
The McMartin Preschool closed, and the two costly, yearslong trials ended with no convictions, but dozens of copycat accusations appeared from coast to coast, notably against Little Rascals Day Care in North Carolina, Kelly Michaels in New Jersey, and Violet Amirault and her adult children Cheryl Amirault LeFave and Gerald Amirault in Massachusetts. In each setting, under relentless, don’t-accept-no-for-an-answer questioning by social workers and therapists, children produced allegations that grew more and more preposterous. Some children said they had been attacked by a robot, forced to eat feces, or raped with forks and toys.
Adults who believed they should “believe the children” took these stories literally or as symbolic of the actual abuse the children had suffered. If there was no physical evidence, no matter; the lack of evidence was confirming evidence of the deviousness of pedophiles. Mr. Beck unearthed a typical comment from a dental assistant who taught hygiene at McMartin and never noticed anything suspicious. “How could we have been so blind?” she said.
The author builds his book around an in-depth narrative of the McMartin story, with separate chapters on the allegations and how they grew, the preliminary hearing, the trials and the verdicts, and other notorious cases that followed. But equally important are the chapters he intersperses on two other manifestations of the panic over the sex abuse of children.
One was recovered-memory therapy, in which grown adults went into psychotherapy for normal problems, such as depression or eating disorders, and came out believing they had been raped and tortured for years, often starting in infancy, their memories having been “repressed” until therapy got the truth out of them. The other was multiple personality disorder (MPD), in which people with everyday mental problems ended up producing dozens, even hundreds, of “alters.” MPD was said to occur because being sexually abused as a child caused the mind to “dissociate,” creating several different personalities. Two books that instigated the MPD craze—“Michelle Remembers” (1980) and “Sybil” (1973)—were sensational stories that set off thousands of me-too claims. Both were also completely untrue.
“We Believe the Children” reveals the various combinations of ignorance, venality, arrogance and zealotry that characterized the major players who fueled the moral panic.
Here are Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, authors of “The Courage to Heal” (1988), who admitted that they knew nothing about psychology but had no qualms making irresponsible assertions, most famously that “if you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were”—even if you can’t remember. The book was full of such noxious notions, including, as Mr. Beck summarizes, that “any kind or degree of abuse, from violent rape all the way down to being made to ‘listen to sexual talk,’ would inevitably have severe, long-term psychological effects.”
Here are the psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, such as Richard Kluft, Frank Putnam, Bennett Braun, Bessel van der Kolk and Colin Ross, who prospered by promoting recovered-memory therapy and multiple personality disorder. Mr. Beck tells how, with one patient, Mr. Ross “embarked on a course of treatment that uncovered some fifty alter personalities (many of them also children) as well as a buried history of abuse that involved ongoing paternal rape, live spiders, a ‘contract rape’ paid for by her father and carried out by a biker in a parking lot, and ritual abuse orchestrated by her mother.” People took this kind of thing seriously.
Here are the foot soldiers—the social workers, psychotherapists, child-protection employees—who were confident they knew how to determine, through interviews or nonverbal doll play, whether a child had been sexually abused. Kee MacFarlane, a social worker, testified that a toddler’s play with “anatomically correct” dolls could be used not just therapeutically but diagnostically. Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to her to ask: How do non-abused children play with these dolls? When psychological scientists eventually conducted experiments using control groups, they found no differences between abused and non-abused children. Non-abused children will poke at the dolls, grab them, pound sticks into a female doll’s vagina and do other things that alarm adults. Clearly you cannot reliably diagnose sexual abuse on the basis of children’s doll play.
Finally, here are the prosecutors who gained fame from railroading day-care workers and other targets into prison and keeping them there long after they were exonerated. One is Martha Coakley, the former attorney general of Massachusetts. In 2000, the governor’s parole board voted to commute the sentence of Gerald Amirault (his mother and sister had been released earlier), noting the lack of evidence against the family and the “extraordinary if not bizarre allegations” on which they had been convicted. Ms. Coakley, then the Middlesex County district attorney, nonetheless prevailed on Gov. Jane Swift to keep him in prison. He was finally released in 2004, but Ms. Coakley did her best to make sure that he lives as a registered sex offender. Given “the frequency with which judges and appeals courts attributed the wrongful convictions to clear instances of investigative and prosecutorial overreach,” writes Mr. Beck, “one might have expected more people to lose their jobs.” They didn’t. Most were rewarded with promotions, political office or judgeships.
The tide of witch hunts and therapeutic malpractice subsided at the end of the 1990s, thanks to the work of investigative journalists (such as Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal, Debbie Nathan, Lawrence Wright and Judith Levine) and psychological scientists (such as Elizabeth Loftus, Richard McNally, Maggie Bruck and Stephen Ceci). Mr. Beck describes their work accurately, though he doesn’t fully convey the vitriol they endured, along with organized attacks on their professionalism and ethics. The moral panic also abated thanks to the indefatigable efforts of attorneys, many working pro bono. Hundreds of malpractice suits, criminal prosecutions and revocations of licenses shut down the MPD clinics and the more egregious practitioners of recovered-memory therapy. And let’s not forget the attorneys who took on what seemed like hopeless cases—defending accused pedophiles—and then persisted in pursuit of justice despite appeals and setbacks and obstructionist district attorneys and judges.
“We Believe the Children” is not especially original; many others covered this territory in the mid-1990s, notably Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker in “Satan’s Silence” (1995) and Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham in “The Myth of Repressed Memory” (1995). But Mr. Beck’s book is valuable because it is timely and comprehensive. He not only tells the story of a moral panic with a fresh eye but provides context, identifying the forces that preceded it as well as those that fed it and have kept it going today. The author sets the stage with a chapter on the postwar “discovery of child abuse” and the ensuing laws that mandated that physicians and members of other professions disclose even their suspicions of abuse to the authorities. Reports skyrocketed: in Florida alone, from 16 cases of abuse in 1965 to more than 28,000 by 1974. Some were real. Most were not.
The 1960s and 1970s were decades of expanding opportunities for women, a breakdown of traditional gender roles, and sexual liberation. As women entered the workforce, they lobbied for the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which, Mr. Beck explains, would have provided “day care services to parents across the country, with a set of sliding fees in place to accommodate a range of incomes.” Social conservatives lobbied fiercely against this act, and Nixon vetoed it in 1971, citing its “family-weakening implications.”
Entering the 1980s, America had become a cauldron of fears about the changes sweeping the nation, particularly those involving women, children and sex. The moral panic that ensued focused those fears onto a specific enemy: day care. Mr. Beck draws a direct line between antifeminism and the sex-abuse hysteria: The day-care scandals validated every negative thing that social conservatives feared about feminism, the sexual revolution and working women. “The day care trials,” Mr. Beck argues, served “as a warning to mothers who thought they could keep their very young children safe while simultaneously pursuing a life outside the home.” But feminists contributed to the panic as well: For them, the day-care trials validated everything they feared about the mistreatment of children. This concern caused many to uncritically support the multiple-personality and recovered-memory epidemics and to “believe the children,” even when the children claimed they had been tortured in tunnels under the McMartin Preschool.
Where are we today? One legacy of the moral panic of the 1980s, writes Mr. Beck, is that it “drastically altered people’s views on the wisdom of ever allowing children to go unsupervised.” He reminds us that a child being abducted from a public place by a violent pedophile is “a vanishingly rare occurrence,” yet the fear of such crimes is still being used to justify the punishment of poor women who leave their child alone for a short while so they can go to a job interview and to harass more affluent women who simply think it’s fine for children to walk home from school alone. In short, Mr. Beck writes, women today who fail to devote every moment to their role as mothers are “viewed as literally criminal.” To this point I would add another legacy: a deep suspicion of men, who are now an endangered species as teachers of young children and who are virtually prohibited from touching or comforting a child in need.
Another gloomy legacy of those sorry times is the persistence of the pseudoscientific beliefs that gave surface legitimacy to the moral panic. A recent study found that many people (including many psychotherapists) now take for granted that traumatic experiences are typically repressed, though they do not know the relatively recent origin of this idea or that research has soundly discredited it. Multiple personality disorder has been rebranded as “dissociative identity disorder.” “Believe the children” has become “believe the survivors.” The comforting identity of sexual victim, articulated by “The Courage to Heal” decades ago, is now widespread on college campuses. That book’s claim that being forced to “listen to sexual talk” can be as traumatic as rape has been reincarnated in new definitions of sexual assault: being kissed without express verbal consent, or being touched over your clothes, is now said to be as traumatic as forced penetration.
Indeed, today’s alarms about the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses have all the hallmarks of a modern moral panic: anxiety and rage; reliance on inflated statistics; an impulse to shout down anyone with opposing views; and moral certainty and self-righteousness. Once again, accused perpetrators are being suspended from work or school without due process. Once again, we are told that if you worry about the falsely accused you are somehow exonerating the justly accused. Moral panics are shape-shifters, attaching to whatever we most fear now. The wicked witch of day care may be dead, but witch hunts are eternal.
—Ms. Tavris is the co-author (with Elliot Aronson) of “Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me).”
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