We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s

Abstract

We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s Richard Beck. New York: PublicAffairs, 2015. 323 pp. $26.99Mention the term "witch-hunt" in American history and the replies would probably be mixed. Some might name the eponymous witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts in 1693, while others might think first of Joseph McCarthy's increasingly desperate - and increasingly embarrassing - search for phantom Communists in the federal government. Yet others might remember the short but violent pursuit of everyone purportedly connected with John Wilkes Booth or any of numerous other possibilities.These are decent examples, but in fact the worst witch-hunt in American history actually occurred barely thirty years ago, although it seems already to have been lost in the mists of time, and while no deaths directly ensued, scores of lives were scarred in various ruinous ways on the basis of woefully deficient evidence and argument. This was the "recovered memory therapy" or "false memory syndrome" craze which effloresced in the mid-1980s, did its dirty work, and largely, but only largely, faded away just a few years later. But in this brief period it managed to do untold damage to lives of scores of innocent parties that continues to this day. A few professions did suffer some temporary damage to their reputations, but quickly regained their credibility, neither wiser nor weaker for their experience. Richard Beck's We Believe the Children treats this sad episode and its continuing repercussions.It all began in the summer of 1983, when the mother of a child in a day care center in Manhattan Beach, California, thought she saw evidence of physical abuse and reported it to the authorities.1 Immediately after this incident became public, operators of day care centers and other custodial arrangements such as foster homes around the country fairly quickly came under mindless and evidence-free bombardment from all sides. All sides, that is, except the children themselves, of which more later. All this means that the wisdom of hindsight is hardly necessary to recognize the willful malice with which the accusers operated. It could not have been unnoticed at the time.Law enforcement officials and social-worker types quickly became involved, and various parents' groups formed to root out what they often referred to, collectively and incendiarily as "satanic practices," and which, they asserted, were rampant, virtually ubiquitous, despite the almost complete absence of physical evidence or precedent cases. It truly became a virulent epidemic. Day-care providers were arrested without any regard for due process, habeas corpus, or probable cause. Most were ultimately- usually rather quickly in fact - prosecuted and in most cases convicted. The conditions under which authorities operated were recognizably Guantanamo-esque.And the evidence? Well, that turned out to be the "testimony" of children aged as young as two. Almost without exception this testimony was neither freely spontaneously offered nor unproblematic in content, Rather it was prised out by incessant questioning, threats, and other forms of coercion by parents, various sub-genres of "therapists," and law enforcement. The questions were outrageously leading and violated every protocol of sound interrogation. If a child denied taking part in or observing the alleged activities, he or she was questioned over and over until finally saying "yes." And every yes-answer was held to outweigh any number of no-answers. Beck (174-75) describes one case in which, arriving for the fifteenth interrogation of a young child, the police reassured the mother that they would be stopping by for "as long it takes," but fails to tell readers whether this fifteenth visit elicited the desired results. Such instances recur again and again - and again - in We Believe the Children.The putative activities in question often included animal or even child sacrifice, role-playing, sexual acts, bizarre costuming, and the like, yet, as noted above, evidence of none of these was ever found either onsite or at any of the accuseds' homes. …