All posts by pakison

Additional Background

The False Memory Foundation Home Page: A treasure trove of information covering every aspect of these conditions. Case studies, FAQ, book reviews, monthly newsletter, hypnosis, multiple-personality disorder, and much more.


Elizabeth Loftus is a Professor or Law, Criminology , Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine, and University of Washington. Professor Loftus has published dozen’s of articles on this subject.


Professor Loftus’ book The Myth of Repressed Memory, has been described by the The Washington Post Book World as, “[A] thoughtful, scholarly book…concerned with exposing the damage caused by, and the falsity of, the practice of recovered-memory therapy.” The New York Times Book Review said, “The descriptions…of the ‘therapeutic’ practices by which memories are recovered are a frightening indictment of at least some members of the burgeoning therapy industry.”


Satan’s Silence, The Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker.

 

John Stoll

Bakersfield, Calif. (AP); By Gary Kazanjian, AP

Not even murderers and rapists can stand child molesters. Behind bars, they are the marked men, constantly living in fear.

Found guilty of child molestation, John Stoll knew he would never survive with that stigma. So he lied, posing as a drug runner for 20 long years, and managed to avoid attack until his conviction was overturned last week.

Read the article...

Gary Meyers Interviewed by Detective Hatch and Detective Jones

Gary Meyers Interviewed by Detective Hatch and Detective Jones 

Hatch: We’ve had kids who stated that they saw you and that you’re involved, OK?

Jones: We want to go through this with you. Don’t deny it yet.  If you question twelve kids, you’ll get 12 different answers.  Take Arnie Friedman’s own words.  But he admitted this.

Gary: I didn’t see it.  I didn’t hear it.

Jones: Arnold was under no obligation to admit, but he did.  Why would Arnold Friedman admit to something that wasn’t true.  The kids know that he did it.  Take Arnold’s own words… I know it’s impossible to speak to him now but he’s openly admitted to this in an open courtroom.  He said “I did it.”

                 [Ann Meyers enters room and she is asked to leave]

Hatch:J. B. and M. E. both say that they saw Gary engaged in it… Arnold Friedman did not have to admit this.  No one put him in a dark room.  He said it in open court with an attorney.  He sodomized them.  What I say to you as an intelligent human being is what did you say to that.  He admitted he sodomized a lot of children

Gary: inaudible

Hatch: Arnold Friedman says in a courtroom in front of a judge… I’m not going to tell you, you tell us.  What we’re trying to determine is… Arnold Friedman in court says that he sodomized children … The judge said that there are other children and exactly what he did.

                 [Inaudible discussion]

Hatch: We are trying to find out who the other victims are to help the parents and those children.  Arnold Friedman will not be charged with any other additional charges.  There’s no axe to grind here.  There’s no axe to grind here.  It was all stipulated in open court that there would be no further charges.  One judge and the DA says no further charges will be made.  Once the stipulation was made with the judge, no further charges will be made.  What we want to do is to let the parents know if there are other children that we aren’t aware of so that they can get psychological help for the children.  We also learn how to deal with pedophiles and how they operate, how they operate and their method of seduction… Not one child came forward.  Why?  They were blackmailed.  Sexual perversions if a person is sexually abused and wanted to keep your mouth shut and took photos and took notes and told you if you said anything to anyone you would be in worse trouble because they would show the picture -‑ what if the person was seven or eight years old… Could you imagine a copy to our mother, a copy to a smut magazine with the name and address to show that you were a pervert?

Gary: inaudible

Hatch: Did you know that much five years ago?  I’m 43 years old and when I was seven I didn’t know as much as I do now.

Gary: inaudible

Hatch: [angrily] I think you’re very funny… No evidence to speculate anything happened… You’re reasonably intelligent I wouldn’t say you’re a genius but you are reasonably intelligent.  Arnold Friedman stipulated in court that he sodomized a large number of children.

Gary: No he never touched me.

Hatch: Oh, it happened to everyone else but not to you.  How many sessions did you have at Friedman’s.

Gary: 8 to 12.

Hatch: Arnold Friedman had a certain age group.  Pre‑adolescent males.  He wouldn’t be interested in a guy like you?  You were nine years old and nothing happened?  An eight year old, you don’t know as much as you do at 13 years old.  I’m saying to you, you went through a physical change.  You look different at 13 than you did at 8.  Because of that difference, Arnold Friedman no longer wanted you. Pedophiles are very selective.  Like heterosexuals.  Some like blondes some like brunettes.  Arnold Friedman liked eight-year-olds.  You’ll find out as you get older that certain things are true, certain things are lies. You denying this doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.  Arnold Friedman admitted it and it’s true.  When young, impressionable children are running around….

Gary: inaudible question

Jones: Why don’t you ask your sister if something happened?  A lot of boys seem to have concerns about their own sexuality.

                             [Inaudible conversation between Meyers and Jones]

Hatch: What about a homosexual act over a period of years?  Formative years?  Would you consider that having an affect on a person’s sexuality?  Do you think that determines if you are a homosexual?  If a person was involved in a homosexual act during preadolescent years after they are forced out of it do you think they would like it?  What about a man who takes unfair advantage of children?  If you are going to be a homosexual, you’ll be a homosexual.

Gary: inaudible

Hatch: Well guess what?  You are absolutely wrong.  Most children who abuse children have been abused themselves.  It’s a monster created with in you. This little monster inside you.  This little voice and every now and then it rears its ugly head.  Unless the victim knows enough about the problem to get himself straightened out.  If suppressed, it’s a two‑fold problem.  One is anger and frustration.  And the other is acting itself out.  It’s a no‑win situation unless the person goes and gets help and admits that he was victimized. If something bad happens even though its not the kid’s fault the child blames himself and feels tremendous guilt.  We find, with help that they can see it’s not their fault.  And then the place the blame on the person who created the situation and then they are a lot better off.  Don’t over intimidate women.  Don’t over intimidate women.  You’re a super‑smart intelligent individual.  You’d have to be an idiot not to see this.  To a child, you don’t need a knife, guy or machete. The seduction in force can be very subtle.  If Arnold Friedman took a small boy and put a very big guy over him, what do you think the little guy will do?  There are children who would defy but a very small percentage.  90% would submit.  Most kids would be intimidated.  If a pedophile wants to get his goal accomplished, I’ll have 10 or 12 kids in my class.  I know the kids.  I know those who I can intimidate and those I cannot.  And I’ll cut out those that I can’t intimidate.  Then I go to the next stage in the process and I might cut out even a few more.  You might go so far, and then that’s that.  If you don’t want to do something you won’t.  That’s another stage.  It’s a process of elimination and psychology plays a big part. And then there are other methods other than intimidation.  There’s carrots and rewards.  You are having so much fun and you’re getting rewards.  If you do something right, you get a reward.  A candy bar, a pat on the back.

Do you remember games of a sexual nature? Stroker? Strip Poker? [checks notes] Exploding fists?

Gary: Exploding fists was a Karate Game.

Hatch: Did you ever see any porn magazines?

Gary: No

Hatch: Did you ever go to any other room in the house?

Gary: Yes. 

Hatch: What room?

Gary: Jesse’s bedroom to play with the Commodore computer and nothing happened.

Hatch: Did Jesse help with the classes?

Gary: no answer

Hatch: Did Gary Meyers ever take a special SAT class?  Who was in the class?  Gary, A. G., J. B., H. S., M. D.?

Hatch: Did you ever see a magazine called Gallery Magazine?

Gary: No

Hatch: [calls Ann Meyers back into the room] Gary was a wise guy and I didn’t like his answer.

End

Cognitive Tunnel Vision Biases and Their Detrimental Affect on Prosecutorial Evidentiary Evaluation

The purpose of this letter is to alert and educate law-enforcement, particularly those engaged with post-conviction “conviction integrity unit” panel evaluations, to the problems involving various kinds of psychological cognitive biases.

Psychological cognitive distortions such as “confirmation bias”, “hindsight bias”, “outcome bias”, and a host of other psychological phenomena result in a general “tunnel vision”. These are the product of multiple processes and pressures and make some degree of tunnel vision inevitable. Normative pressures on police, prosecutors, the courts, and even defense attorneys amplify those natural tendencies. Instead of countering those pressures and tendencies, institutional features of the criminal justice system inevitably institutionalize these biases.[1]

It is especially true that that these biases are magnified in cases of violence against children.  The sensitive nature of the charges; a natural desire to err on the side of protecting the children; the very heinous and emotionally charged nature of such crimes; all tend to distort otherwise ambiguous facts, and intensify these naturally developing prejudices.

Julius Caesar famously said, “Homines fere credunt libentur id quod volunt”, observing that “people easily believe that which they want to be true.” 

I.        Introduction: On Prevalence

The psychological biases to which we refer have been the subject of extensive study by experimental psychologists across a spectrum of professionals and many decades. Nonetheless the tendency of humans toward such biases has been obvious to those willing to objectively observer since time immemorial. What has not been necessarily obvious prior to the study by modern science is the extent to which these biases can operate outside the scope of conscious recognition, as well as the variety of circumstances which intensify the effects of these presumptive biases.[2]

Outlining the multifaceted ways in which psychological biases infects police investigations, district attorney’s offices, and judicial proceedings is not intended to make a value judgment about the nature or qualities of police and prosecutors. Instead we wish, to some degree at least, to merely acknowledge the natural tendencies that can—and do—influence anyone’saccess and interpretation of data. Police, prosecutors, and judges are not bad people because they are affected by tunnel vision; they are merely human.

The intrinsic state of these psychological biases and distortions does not absolve players in the criminal justice system from responsibility of an obligation to attempt overcoming them. Rather, to the contrary, it demands that we become aware of these cognitive processes and the tunnel vision they produce, so we may search for ways to neutralize them.[3]

It should be kept in mind that in the social sciences the term “bias” is value neutral. It merely describes a situation in which any errors that might be made are skewed in one direction or another, as opposed to a situation of random error, where errors have no directionality.[4]

An initial step towards addressing these problems is awareness of multiple causes and expressions. Serious efforts must be made to identify these biases, or the tendencies of the criminal justice system that contribute to their occurrences at every stage in the life of a criminal case, including, and especially, post-conviction integrity unit reinvestigation efforts.

Normative tunnel vision does not end after the conclusion of a conviction.  The distortion intensifies as cases proceed through appellate and post-conviction stages.  That is not to say that procedural rules require situations of tunnel vision during post-conviction review, or to say that such rules are necessarily flawed; good reasons may justify the increasing hostility to claims of innocence as appeal review works its way through the system. However, the effect those rules have on reinforcing tunnel vision biases—and thus on sustaining the conviction of those innocent and wrongfully convicted—must be acknowledged and understood.[5]

II.        Why This Is Especially Important for Conviction Integrity Review Units to be Aware of While Conducting an Investigation

A prosecutors’ assessments of a case review placed before them can be flawed both by the information provided as well as the feedback they receive. Law enforcement prosecutors are particularly vulnerable to distortions based on the types of information their role in the process provides them access. There is a problem of hidden, or absent, data, which is often cited in studies of cognitive error, and can distract actors in the criminal justice system. Various psychological biases impede a person’s ability to rationally and accurately assess both the significance and reliability of information, or to use all information available to them before reaching generalized conclusions. This tendency is exacerbated when crucial information is unavailable.  The lack of complete investigation is a constant hurdle for all parties involved given lack of adequate resources, a dedication beyond that which the system can generally bear the burden, or where full information is simply hidden or absent for various situational reasons.[6]

Conviction integrity units are often confronted with complicated situations involving “reluctant witness” syndrome.  There is an assumed finality of a conviction from the viewpoint of witnesses involved in the criminal process. Post-conviction review boards are sometimes confronted with untangling decade’s old entrenched beliefs.  Examples have shown that it is very difficult to revisit eye witness testimony in a post-conviction setting.

Witness memories have a tendency to latch onto an often small, perhaps ancillary memory, which over time has grown in stature, often crushing any lingering doubt as to the validity of the conviction or guilt of the defendant.  These memories will often be factually insignificant in that they will not relate directly to any observation of the charged crimes to which there is grand jury testimony.  Witness memory works tirelessly to justify away any potential belief or support for the credibility of the wrongful conviction claim.

As much as all parties involved would like to believe otherwise, prosecutors receive only incomplete pictures of their cases. Tunnel vision consistently shapes the information upon which prosecutors base their judgments, or develop leads which focus police on a suspect, or a series of interconnected piece of evidence, and then develop further evidence supporting that suspect or theory, disregarding inconsistent or disconfirming evidence. 

Prosecutors enter the process via the evidence generated by the police investigation, and are rarely privy to any evidence relating to alternative suspects who were rejected too quickly; about eyewitnesses who failed to identify the defendant; or about other disconfirming evidence that police dismissed as insignificant.[7]

III.        Primary Categories of Biases

   A.        Tunnel Vision

Tunnel vision is the product of a variety of cognitive distortions that can impede accuracy in what we perceive and in how we interpret what we perceive. The tendency toward tunnel vision is partly innate; it is part of our psychological makeup. It can lead investigators, prosecutors, judges, and even defense councils to focus on a particular conclusion and then filter all evidence through a tinted lens provided by that assumption.[8]

Tunnel vision is a natural human tendency that has particularly pernicious effects in the criminal justice system. By tunnel vision, we mean that compendium of common heuristics and logical fallacies to which we are all susceptible, that lead actors in the criminal justice system to focus on a suspect, select and filter the evidence that will ‘build a case’ for conviction, while ignoring or suppressing evidence that points away from guilt.[9]

Once these filters are in place all information supporting such an adopted conclusion is elevated in significance, viewed as consistent with the other surrounding evidence, and deemed primarily relevant and probative. Any evidence inconsistent with the presumptive theory is often overlooked, dismissed, deemed irrelevant, incredible, or unreliable.[10]

Psychologists analyze tunnel vision as the product of various cognitive biases such as confirmation bias, hindsight bias, and outcome bias.

   B.        Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias, as the general term is used in psychological literature, typically connotes the tendency to seek or interpret evidence in ways that support existing beliefs, expectations, or hypotheses. The bias has several expressions. In part, the bias reflects that, when testing a hypothesis or conclusion, people tend to seekinformation that confirms their hypothesis and to avoid information that would disconfirm their hypothesis.[11]

Ongoing studies have repeatedly documented confirmation biases, having found that investigators often seek information in a manner which increase their confidence in a prior belief or hypotheses—even when they have no vested interest in those hypotheses.[12] 

Confirmation bias is especially worrisome and prevalent when it relates to interviewing witnesses.  It should be noted that when evaluating the reliability of witness testimony the post-conviction review process must sometimes consider a potential double-filtering which is occurring.  First through the memory imperfections of the witnesses themselves, and second through the potential tunnel vision judgment of the interviewer. 

The empirical research demonstrates that people not only seek confirming information, but they also tend to recall information in a biased manner. Memory recall when revisiting information previously obtained tends to function in biased ways, giving preference to information that tends to confirm presented hypothesis or belief. In addition to seeking and recalling confirming information, people also tend to give greater weight to information that supports existing beliefs than to information that runs counter to them. Put simply: people tend to interpret data in ways that support their prior beliefs. Contemporary research demonstrates that all people are to some degree always incapable of evaluating the strength of evidence independently of their prior beliefs.[13] 

While biases affect the acquisition and interpretation of information, and thereby cloud rational or logical evaluations of hypotheses or conclusions to reflect new information, there are natural tendencies which people resistant evidence that wholly undermines their initial hypotheses even in the face of new change. This phenomenon, known as “belief perseverance” or “belief persistence”, produces intractable beliefs and opinions. People are naturally disinclined to revisit or revise initial conclusions or beliefs, even in extreme circumstances of overwhelming contradictory revisionist evidence or information which undermines those earlier conclusions. Law enforcement are especially more likely to distrust information which conflicts with preexisting beliefs (or judicially established “fact”) and are personally and professionally inclined to interpret ambiguous information as supporting rather than disconfirming their original beliefs. People can be quite facile at explaining away events that are inconsistent with their established beliefs.[14]  

    C.        Hindsight Bias: “Where there is smoke there is fire,” or “Something must have happened.”

Hindsight bias results from the fact that memory is a fluid process of construction and reconstruction. Memories do not germinate from our brains fully formed. They are assembled piece by piece from information as we recall events. These pieces of information, regardless of the event or situation, are being constantly updated and replaced by our brains with new information.  This updated information is then relied upon each time we are called upon to reconstruct a relevant memory.  This process results in the appearance of the ultimate conclusion being a preordained conclusion.[15]  

During this process, evidence consistent with the reported outcome is elaborated, and evidence inconsistent with the outcome is minimized or discounted. The result of this rejudgment process is that the given outcome seems inevitable or, at least, more plausible than alternative outcomes. Understood another way, the process is one in which an individual reanalyzes an event so that the early stages of the process connect causally to the end.[16] 

Scholarly research has repeatedly shown that when viewed through the passage of time people tend to consider that an eventual outcome was inevitable, more than likely, or generally more predictable then when originally expected or presented. Hindsight bias essentially operates as a means through which people project new knowledge—outcomes—into the previous situation, without any awareness that the perception of the past has been tainted by revisionist information.[17]

Hindsight bias might reinforce premature or unwarranted focus on an innocent suspect in several ways. First, once a suspect becomes the focus of an investigation or prosecution—that is, once police or prosecutors arrive at an outcome in their own quest to determine who they believe is guilty—the hindsight bias would suggest that, upon reflection, the suspect would appear to have been the inevitable and likely suspect from the beginning. Moreover, events supporting a given outcome are typically better remembered than events that do not support that outcome. Hence, once police and prosecutors conclude that a particular person is guilty, not only might they overestimate the degree to which that suspect appeared guilty from the beginning, but they will likely best remember those facts that are incriminating (thereby reinforcing their commitment to focus on that person as the culprit).[18] 

A “reiteration effect” is also linked to hindsight bias. Studies have established that confidence in the truth of an assertion or testimony increases naturally as the assertion is repeated (and increases exponentially with increased reassertion). This increase in confidence from repetition is independent of the truth or falsity of the original statement. Accordingly, the longer that police and prosecutors (and witnesses) live with a conclusion of guilt, repeating the conclusion and bases for those conclusions, the conclusions becomes more entrenched.  Simultaneously, the more obvious it will appear that all evidence pointed towards that conclusion all along from the very beginning.  As a result, this reiteration effect makes it increasingly difficult for police and prosecutors to consider alternative perpetrators or theories of a crime, and the greater significance this consideration must hold for those involved with a post-conviction review process.[19]  

   D.        Outcome Bias and Expectancy Bias

Outcome bias describes the process whereby people interject new knowledge (or new plausible outcomes) into past conclusions when in fact the outcome information was influenced by their foregone perception of the past. 

Outcome bias differs slightly from hindsight bias in that outcome bias does not refer to the effect of outcome information on the judged probability of an outcome, but to its effect on the evaluations of decision quality.  In other words, outcome bias does not reflect a judgment as to how likely an event appears to have been, rather the hindsight reflect upon whether a decision was good or bad, correct or incorrect. When people are affected by this bias there rarely any notion or awareness of its occurrence.[20] 

Even when people understand that outcome bias is inappropriate, it is difficult to overcome; as with hindsight bias, people tend to show an outcome bias even when they think they should not, and . . . even though they think they do not.[21]

Hindsight bias and outcome bias, together, should be expected to have an affirmance-biasing effect in the post-conviction review process because the conviction conclusion will appear, always in hindsight, to have been both inevitable and correct in judgment.  The simple data to support that conclusion is how extremely rare are reversals in criminal cases.  Even when a court finds error, it is frequently forgiven under the “harmless error doctrine”.[22] These is virtually no data on the inverse review of court finality because criminal appellate law almost always focuses on challenges brought by the convicted defendant. The double jeopardy clause prohibits most prosecutorial appeals of acquittals.  

An expectancy bias is when people are being led by circumstances into a pre-expected fact or condition.  This is especially true when facts or conditions fall into informationally ambiguous situations.  This is a foundational tendency and lead to error biased in the direction of the expectation[23]

 IV.        A Call for Transparency

A call for transparency is an obvious important step towards sensitizing police, prosecutors, judges and even defense attorneys to these problems.  To help understand pitfalls inherent in the system’s process is a first step towards understanding the consequences, nature, and effects of these underlying biases and institutional pressures.[24] Unfortunately, research suggests that merely informing people about cognitive bias, tunnel vision and other hindsight biases, or even urging a person to overcome such biases, is somehow ineffective.[25]  

To the extent that training and new procedures are inadequate to overcome the powerful forces that produce tunnel vision, an additional reform is necessary. Given that police and prosecutors, because they are human, cannot be expected to recognize and correct for all of their natural biases, the system must find a way to give sufficient case information to those who have different incentives and different natural biases. In the end, greater transparency at all stages of the criminal process is the most powerful way to counter tunnel vision.[26]

Providing full investigative information to a defense team (or other interested parties to the litigation) improves the likelihood of the one party best situated for evaluating the evidence free from guilt-confirming biases to being presented with that role.  (Although, defense counsel are also subjected to condition to believe that the defendant clients are guilty, they at least are subject to considerable countervailing pressures, not to mention ethical obligations, which make them better situated than police or prosecutors to approach a case with an alternative perspective.[27]) Sharing all information with true transparency, with all actors who may have an incentive to look outside the tunnel, can only work towards bringing about greater faith in the finality of the conviction.[28]

Transparency helps to counter cognitive hindsight tunnel vision biases in another important way by helping to modify the effects of biases on sole decision-makers. Psychological research has shown that when people feel publicly accountable for decisions, they exhibit less bias in their hypothesis testing strategies.[29] 

With conviction integrity units the more that investigations are conducted in open and observable ways, the more likely police and prosecutors are to resist biasing pressures and tendencies. Understandably there is certainly room for secrecy or confidentiality in police work or prosecutions such as sensitive information that could jeopardize witness safety cannot be made public.  However, with post-conviction claims of actual innocence those shields of secrecy should be called upon for only the most extreme circumstances seeing as how parties involved are already privy to the witnesses and evidence being reviewed.

Overwhelming research suggests that, whenever, wherever, and however possible, transparency in the criminal justice system should be an objective.  Such actions serve to enhances reliability as well as public trust and confidence in the system to which we are all, directly or indirectly, connected.[30]     

   V.        Conclusion

Eliminating the psychological bias of tunnel vision in all these various manifestations is a most intractable problems underlying wrongful convictions, especially wrongful convictions of the innocent. With so many causes deeply rooted in our psyches, our culture, and our institutions, and because it has such multivariate expressions, a simple solution eludes us all.  

Reforms can begin along several fronts. First, to the extent that existing legal rules enforce tunnel vision, doctrinal reform is an obvious place to begin. Second, education and training must be an important part of the solution to help system actors understand the nature of the problem and attempt to overcome the cognitive biases and institutional pressures that produce tunnel vision. Third, to the extent that tunnel vision is produced by flawed evidence collection and investigation techniques and procedures, those techniques and procedures should be reexamined. Fourth, police and prosecutors can adopt a variety of management and supervision practices to reduce the risk that tunnel vision will lead to wrongful arrest, prosecution, and conviction. Fifth, to the extent that the cognitive biases and institutional pressures are simply too powerful to overcome from within, greater transparency throughout the criminal justice system offers a way to provide both incentives for police and prosecutors to overcome tunnel vision, and, more importantly, the necessary information to those who already have an incentive to see outside the tunnel so that they can pursue alternative theories about a case. Finally, we propose a few major reforms to the police and prosecution institutions to minimize the effects of tunnel vision.[31]

This is something which no one person, or even one group of people can solve, and instead requires diligence, commitment, often attempts which lead to failures, false starts, and continual efforts.  Even when the possibly of hope for a solution recedes from us, hope should not fail.  Instead, the efforts and attempts are perhaps the best solution we can put forth collectively, defying simple solutions.

[additional summations and conclusions]



[1] Keith A. Findley & Michael S. Scott The Multiple Dimensions of tunnel vision in criminal cases, WISCONSIN LAW REVIEW VOLUME TWO, (2006) 396.

[2] See e.g. Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life 33 (1991); Richard Nisbett & Lee Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (James J. Jenkins et al. eds., 1980); Alafair S. Burke, Improving Prosecutorial Decision Making: Some Lessons of Cognitive Science, 47 WM. & MARY L. REV. 8 (2006; Charles G. Lord et al., Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence, 37 J. PERSONALITY & SOC. PSYCHOL. 2098 (1979; Raymond S. Nickerson, Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises, 2 REV. GEN. PSYCHOL. 175, 175 (1998); Yaacov Trope & Akiva Liberman, Social Hypothesis Testing: Cognitive and Motivational Mechanisms, in SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: HANDBOOK OF BASIC PRINCIPLES 239, 239-70 (E. Tory Higgins & Arie W. Kruglanski eds., 1996).

[3] Findley & Scott, supra at 322.

[4] Findley & Scott, supra note 126 at 307.    

[5] Findley & Scott, supra at 348.

[6] Findley & Scott, supra at 329; See Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life 33 (1991) note 127, at 37-44. 

[7]Findley & Scott, supra at 329

[8] Myrna Raeder, What Does Innocence Have to Do With It?: A Commentary on Wrongful Convictions and Rationality, 2003 MICH. ST. L. REV. 1315, 1327-28; Findley & Scott, supra at 292.

[9] Dianne L. Martin, Lessons About Justice from the “Laboratory” of Wrongful Convictions: Tunnel Vision, the Construction of Guilt and Informer Evidence, 70 UMKC L. Rev. 847, 848 (2002) 

[10] Martin, supra note 6, at 848.

[11]See e.g. Nisbett & Ross, supra note 127, at 169-71; Nickerson, supra note 127, at 175; Trope & Liberman, supra note 127, at 239-70;  Gilovich, supra note 127, at 33; Burke, supra note 127, at 8; Lord et al., supra note 127, at 2098; Nickerson, supra note 127, at 177; Findley & Scott , supra at 309.

[12] Findley & Scott, supra at 311; Nickerson, supra note 127, at 178; Gilovich, supra note 127, at 33. 

[13] Findley & Scott, supra at 312-313; Burke, supra note 127, at 9-10; Nickerson, supra note 127, at 178.

[14] Findley & Scott, supra at 314; Burke, supra note 127, at 13; Joel D. Lieberman & Jamie Arndt, Understanding the Limits of Limiting Instructions: Social Psychological Explanations for the Failures of Instructions to Disregard Pretrial Publicity and Other Inadmissible Evidence, 6 PSYCHOL. PUB. POL’Y & L. 677, 691 (2000); Nickerson, supra note 127, at 187.

[15] See e.g. Ian Weinstein, Don’t Believe Everything You Think: Cognitive Bias in Legal Decision Making, 9 CLINICAL L. REV. 783, 800-801 (2003); Erin M. Harley, Keri A. Carlsen & Geoffrey R. Loftus, The “Saw-It-All-Along” Effect: Demonstrations of Visual Hindsight Bias, 30 J. EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOL.: Learning, Memory & Cognition note 220, at 960 (2004).

[16] Findley & Scott, supra at 317.

[17] Harley, Carlsen & Loftus, supra note 200, at 960; Scott A. Hawkins & Reid Hastie, Hindsight: Biased Judgments of Past Events After the Outcomes Are Known, 107 PSYCHOL. BULL. (1990) note 200, at 311; Findley & Scott, supra at 317.

[18] Findley & Scott, supra at 318; Lieberman & Arndt, supra note 184, at 692;Harley, Carlsen & Loftus, supra note 200, at 960; see e.g. Gary L. Wells & Amy L. Bradfield, Good, You Identified the Suspect: Feedback to Eyewitnesses Distorts Their Reports of the Witnessing Experience, 83 J. APPLIED PSYCHOL. 360-62 (1998).

[19] Findley & Scott, supra at 319; Ralph Hertwig, Gerd Gigerenzer & Ulrich Hoffrage, The Reiteration Effect in Hindsight Bias, 104 PSYCHOL REV. 194, 222-225 (1997).

[20] Findley & Scott, supra at 319; Jonathan Baron & John C. Hershey, Outcome Bias in Decision Evaluation, 54 J. PERSONALITY & SOC. PSYCHOL. 569, 570 (1988).  

[21] Findley & Scott, supra at 319; Baron & Hershey, supra at 570, 572; (1988). 

[22] Findley & Scott, supra at 319

[23] see generally D. Michael Risinger et al., The Daubert/Kumho Implications of Observer Effects in Forensic Science: Hidden Problems of Expectation and Suggestion, 90 CAL. L. REV. 1 (2002); Findley & Scott, supra at 307.

[24] Findley & Scott, supra at 370-371.

[25] See e.g. Stephanos Bibas, Transparency and Participation in Criminal Procedure. New York University Law Review, Vol. 86, p. 911, 2006, U of Penn Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 06-28, U Iowa Legal Studies Research Paper No. 05-30, U of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 117,note 363, at 5; Richard M. Kurtz & Sol L. Garfield, Illusory Correlation: A Further Exploration of Chapman’s Paradigm, 46 J. CONSULTING & CLINICAL PSYCHOL. 1009 (1978); Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, Subjective Probability: A Judgment of Representativeness, in Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases 32 (Daniel Kahneman et al. eds., 1982). 

[26] Findley & Scott, supra at 390; See, e.g., Innocence Common for VA., supra note 20, at 68.

[27] Findley & Scott, supra see note 505, 390.

[28] Stephanos Bibas has argued that greater transparency is needed throughout the criminal justice system, particularly to make the system more understandable and accessible to victims and the public, and to make insiders like police, prosecutors, and judges more accountable. See Bibas supra.

[29]Richard A. Leo, The Third Degree and the Origins of Psychological Interrogation in the United States, in Interrogations, Confessions, and Entrapment 37, note 258, 99 (G. Daniel Lassiter ed., 2004). 

[30]Findley & Scott, supra 391.

[31]Findley & Scott, supra 354.

San Diego Presentation 1990

Child Pornography and Extrafamilial Child Sex Abuse

Sandra Kaplan, M.D., David Pelcovitz, Ph.D., Carol Samit, C.S.W.
Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, North Shore University Hospital, Cornell University Medical College

Detective Sergeant Frances M. Galasso, Nassau County New York Police Department

CHILD PORNOGRAPHY AND EXTRAFAMILIAL CHILD SEX ABUSE

S. Kaplan, M.D., D. Pelcovitz, Ph.D., C. Samit, C.S.W., F. Galasso, Det. Sgt.

Although extrafamilial sexual abuse of children is widely recognized as a major problem there is a paucity of mental health literature in this area. This symposium will provide a review of the existing literature on child pornography and extrafamilial sex abuse with a specific focus on clinical treatment of child victims and their parents as well as legal aspects relevant to child victim and their parents. The presenters have collaborated in the individual and group treatment of victims of one of the largest child pornography and sex abuse cases in the United States. This case which has been recently successfully prosecuted involved hundreds of children in an upper socioeconomic suburban area. The presentations will address the individual treatment of these children, group therapy of the children and their parents and use of hypnosis in the treatment of dissociation in victim. Relevant legal issues including reliability of children as witnesses and the role of clinicians in preparing children for testimony will also be presented. All presentations will address both general clinical and research issues regarding child pornography and extrafamilial sex abuse using specific illustrations from the case described above.

The presentations of this symposium will include: Overview of Child Pornography and Child Sexual Abuse; Group Therapy for Victims of Child Pornography and Extrafamilial Sexual Abuse; Group Treatment of Parents of Child Pornography and Extrafamilial Sexual Abuse Victims; Dissociation and Sexual Abuse in Children and Adolescents; Legal Proceedings of Child Pornography and Extrafamilial Child Sexual Abuse.

OVERVIEW OF CHILD PORNOGRAPHY AND CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE

PRESENTATION I

SANDRA KAPLAN, M.D.

Although extrafamilial sexual abuse of children is widely recognized as a major problem there is a paucity of mental health literature in this area. This symposium will provide a review of the existing literature on child pornography and extrafamilial sex abuse with a specific focus on clinical treatment of child victims and their parents as well as legal aspects relevant to child psychiatrists. The presenters have collaborated in the individual and group treatment of victims of one of the largest child pornography and sex abuse cases in the United States. This case which has been recently successfully prosecuted involved hundreds of children in an upper socioeconomic suburban area. The presentations will address the individual treatment of these children, group therapy of the children and their parents and use of hypnosis in the treatment of dissociation in victims. Relevant legal issues including reliability of children as witnesses and the role of psychiatrists in preparing children for testimony will also be presented. All presentations will address both general clinical and research issues regarding child pornography and extrafamilial sex abuse using specific illustrations from the case described above.

Child pornography is a multi‑faceted, international, multimillion dollar business. More than 260 different varieties of pornographic publications have been produced. (Pierce, 1984). It is estimated that between 300,000 to 600,000 children below the age of sixteen are involved nationwide in child pornography activities, (Pierce, 1984). Depiction of sexual activity between adults and children is thought to account for approximately 7% of the total pornographic industry in the United States (House of Representative Hearing, 1977, cited in Pierce).

The United States is the world’s leading consumer of child pornography materials. Customs officials have evidence that approximately 20,000 known Americans (97% of whom are male) are buying child pornography material, either from domestic or foreign (Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark) distributors (Thorton, Washington Post, 1986). Domestic materials are typically produced by amateurs, foreign production is commercially produced in a more sophisticated way. (American Medical Association, 1987).

The typology of child pornography will be presented and the mental health literature will be reviewed. The psychological consequences have been reported by Burgess (1984) in her study of sixty‑two children involved in sex rings, that those involved in child pornography as part of the abuse had more negative symptoms than those who were abused but not subject to child pornography.

CHILD PORNOGRAPHY AND EXTRAFAMILIAL SEX ABUSE
Group Therapy and Hypnosis for Victim of Child Pornography and Extrafamilial Sexual Abuse

PRESENTATION II

David Pelcovitz, Ph.D.

Group treatment for victims of sex abuse is widely thought to be the treatment of choice for this population. Forseth and Brown (1981) report that in their survey of 36 incest‑treatment programs, group therapy was most often cited as the preferred treatment modality. The advantages of group treatment include a lessening of the feeling of stigmatization and difference which is one of the most damaging sequence of sexual abuse, a decrease in feelings of social isolation which is also reported by many victim and the beneficial effects of learning that their experiences were no so “horrible” that they permanently have to be kept secret. In light of the above, it is surprising that the literature on group treatment of victims of sex abuse there is no reference to the unique treatment needs of boys abused by perpetrators outside of their family.

In light of the paucity of data on group therapy for this population, we attempted to empirically measure the effectiveness of groups we offered to these victims.

Fifteen victim of a child pornography and sex abuse ring which victimized children attending an after‑school program were seen in once weekly focused group therapy sessions for six months. The victimization of the children included repeated sodomy, oral sex and numerous sexual games. The abuse was recorded by the perpetrators on videotape, and numerous photographs. All members of the group were administered the Child Behavior Checklist, Youth Self‑Report, Area of Change Questionnaire, and a structured interview designed by Pynoos and Eth to assess changes in children’s behavior as a result of the trauma. The results of these questionnaires pre and post group interviews are not yet analyzed but will be reported at the time of the symposium.

Short‑term focused group therapy sessions were offered on a once a week basis for ten sessions. The focus of the sessions was similar to what is described in the group therapy literature on incest victims but a number of themes emerged which were unique to this type of abuse. Themes consistent with what is reported in the group treatment of incest included:

(1) Stigmatization: The children reported feeling permanently damaged and different from their peers as a result of the abuse. Some of the children reported being teased and called“gay” by peers who discovered they were abused. A number of the children expressed a hope that their future wives and children never find out about their victimization;

(2) Guilt: A number of the children were embarrassed to discuss their feelings about being abused because of fear that the abuse would be viewed as their fault. In spite of repeated assurance by family members and therapists that they were not to blame, these feelings persisted. A major source of guilt was not having told their parents about the abuse because of their believing the perpetrators’ threats.

(3) Trust: Many of the children expressed continuing difficulty trusting adults outside of their family-‑particularly teachers. Unlike children in incest families, there was no evidence that this lack of trust was also directed towards parents. However, several children expressed concern regarding their parents [sic] failure to protect them from the abuse;

(4) Anger: As is the case with groups of incest victim, perhaps the most frequently expressed feeling in our groups was that of anger at the perpetrator. On the evening following the conviction of the man they felt was the most sadistic perpetrator of abuse, the boys had a party to celebrate the event. Vivid fantasies of torturing the perpetrators were often expressed.

(5) Powerlessness: This theme emerged repeatedly particularly in the dreams reported by these youngsters: One child reported dreaming repeatedly of being trapped and unable to get help, “I tried to scream for help but nothing came out”;

(6) Sexuality: The children had considerable difficulty discussing the effects the abuse had on their sexual functioning. The consensus of most of the children was that since the abuse was done by men and not women, it was not really sex, and they were, therefore, still virgins. A group which discussed the children’s knowledge of sexual matters, revealed many misconceptions about sex, as well as a high level of anxiety about discussing the impact which their abuse might have on future sexual functioning.

Several issues which emerged in the group were unique to this type of victimization. Pornography: The children almost universally denied being upset by the idea that pictures of their victimization are being circulated. An interesting adaptation to the permanent record of their abuse was a belief that since several years have elapsed since the photographs and videotapes were made, they now look so different that they have a new appearance and identity from that seen on the pornographic material.

Dissociation: Of the 15 children seen in the two groups, six children had no memories of being victimized even though members witnessed their abuse. A technique that was useful in helping these children remembering was having all group members draw pictures of the room where they were victimized and speak about their memories of the classes using the pictures as visual aid. With the help of this technique, two group members who had amnesia for the abuse, remembered most of the detail of their victimization. Two of the remaining four have had vague but not detailed memories and the remaining two continue to not remember their abuse. The group was also helpful in that those children who remembered, who initially had dissociated, were able to reassure those with amnesia that the process of remembering would not be painful (the children had been told by detectives who questioned them that when they remembered it would be traumatic). Family Issues: Many of the victims harbored anger at their parents for urging them to continue attending classes. Although it was apparent that most parents encouraged their children to discuss the abuse, almost all of the group members reported that they were only comfortable discussing their topic in the safety of the group and not with their parents.

In summary, group treatment for male victims of child pornography and extrafamilial sex abuse appears to be very helpful in providing a forum for discussion of memories and feelings related to the victimization, lessening feelings of stigmatizationand damage,, and lessening feelings of isolation and powerlessness. The group also proved to be a helpful modality for helping those children who repressed their memories of the abuse to remember what had happened to them

A number of workers in recent years have pointed to a link between physical and sexual abuse in early life and the subsequent development of dissociative disorders, particularly multiple personality disorder (Putnam, 1985; Braum & Sachs, 1985). Most of the existing studies on this issue have been based on retrospective studies of adult patients with multiple personality disorder, although the findings of a correlation have been quite consistent and etiologically suggestive. A critical review of this literature will evaluate the empirical evidence and theoretical formulations for the emergence of dissociation as a psychopathologically over-determined response to physical and sexual abuse during childhood and adolescence.

Supportive evidence for the above includes a recent study by Finer (Ph.D. dissertation), which compared the dissociative propensity of abused children with that of a control group. Finer found higher dissociation scores in the abused group on two independent measures, one of which was a standard measure of hypnotizabilty. The findings and implications of this study will be discussed.

Finally, treatment implications of the above findings will be addressed. This will include a review of the literature on the use of hypnosis with physically and sexually abused children as well as those with dissociative disorders. Our own clinical experience in this area will be reviewed, together with suggested guidelines for further study. 

CHILD PORNOGRAPHY AND EXTRAFAMILIAL SEX ABUSE
(Group treatment of parents of child pornography and of extrafamilial sexual abuse victims.)

PRESENTATION III

Carol Samit, C.S.W.

The majority of the literature on the treatment of child sexual abuse focuses on the treatment of incest. Few articles describe the group treatment of extrafamilial sexual abuse and those are limited to the treatment of child victim. Reference has been made to the need to help parents cope with extrafamilial molestation, but there is nothing written about group treatment for parents whose children are these victims.

In a clinical presentation, we will describe the process and the themes in the group treatment of parents whose latency age children were molested while attending an after‑school program.

Like their children, these parents feel victimized, stigmatized and betrayed. The symptomology of the parents often paralleled their children. Among their symptom were feelings of sadness, feelings of failure (as a parent), fear that something bad will happen to them in the future and general feelings of depression and anxiety. In addition, feelings of self‑blame and guilt and a wish for retribution and need to be validated were expressed. Individual and couple issues emerged as therapy progressed. The boys’ own ongoing group process as well as for group sessions, were strongly influenced by community response to the sexual abuse, media coverage and the impacting legal systems.

Counter-transferential issues of working with a non‑pathological parent group, therapists living in the same community, sharing a similar SES background and common value base will be discussed. The stages of group process will be examined as they apply to other groups of this type. 

LEGAL PROCEEDINGS OF CHILD PORNOGRAPHY AND EXTRAFAMILIAL CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE

PRESENTATION IV

Detective Sergeant Frances M. Galasso, Nassau County, New York Police Department

Federal and State laws regarding child pornography and extrafamilial child sexual abuse and investigation and prosecution procedures will be presented. Legal obligations of child and adolescent psychiatrists will be discussed.

Court proceedings and child victims as witnesses will also be reviewed. The law enforcement and judicial proceedings of the case involving all of the presenters will be utilized to illustrate this presentation. Child and adolescent psychiatric collaboration with law enforcement in these cases will be emphasized.

The Ritual Sex Abuse Hoax

By Debbie Nathan

[From The Village Voice, January 12, 1990. Reprinted in Women and Other Aliens: Essays from the U.S.-Mexico Border, El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 1991. Copyright 1990 by Debbie Nathan. Reposted here with explicit permission of Debbie Nathan.]

After the First McMartin Trial

The eight kids sitting in Geraldo Rivera’s New York studio after the first McMartin trial ended could have stepped out of a candy bar commercial on Saturday morning TV. They gleamed with the healthy tans, shopping-mall clothes, and moussed sun-bleached hair of the southern California suburbs; their parents looked equally affluent. But these families were far from cheerful. “We were molested,” a strapping blond teenager told the audience solemnly, “and that’s an honest-to-God fact.” When some of the children – most of them by now adolescents – described suffering flashbacks and night terrors, their mothers quietly dabbed at tears. Other parents seemed angry and driven. “The parents and children standing up here will not stop,” said Marymae Cioffi, who since the beginning of the case had been organizing to convince the public and the courts that bizarre sex abuse claims at places like the McMartin preschool should be believed.

As Cioffi spoke, her lips twitched in spasms of anger. The children sat politely. But when a relative of the defendants noted that the investigation had never produced any evidence against them, the eyes of a small, until then subdued 14-year-old boy suddenly turned to slits; his teeth bared and his lips trembled, just like Cioffi’s. For even though the jury had completely exonerated Peggy McMartin Buckey while acquitting her son Ray on most counts and deadlocking on the rest, Geraldo’s guests insisted their former teachers really were sadistic sex criminals.

Gerald reminded the audience that defendants are innocent until proven guilty. But he also asked whether the acquittals spelled doom for child abuse prosecutions, and titled the program “The McMartin Outrage: What Went Wrong?” Finally, when he patted the children’s shoulders and remarked on their “sincere pain,” it was clear this show was adding to the pressures that would lead to the current retrial of Ray Buckey on eight counts involving three girls.

What Geraldo neglected to mention was that none of these children had ever taken the stand: since McMartin first hit the media in 1984, his guests’ accusations had been so consistently bizarre and illogical that their testimony would only have damaged the case. There was 18-year-old Chris Collins, whose father belongs to a McMartin parents’ group that believes the teachers are part of an intergenerational Satanic conspiracy. Collins, who insists that he was molested attending McMartin in the mid-‘70s, remembers a room below the school office and “major, major sacrifices” connected with the “Satanic Church.” The problem with his claim is that when Collins was at McMartin, Ray Buckey was in high school and, according to his mother, maintained a perfect attendance record – meaning he was never at the preschool when Collins was. Then there was round-faced, 10-year-old Elizabeth Cioffi. According to her father, she has talked about being molested under the school in tunnels lined with flashing lights and pictures of the devil.

Irrationality pervaded the McMartin case from the beginning. The first allegation came from a woman later diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. After Judy Johnson noticed one day in 1983 that her two-year-old son’s bottom was red, she told police he said something about a man named Ray at his nursery school. In the next few weeks, Johnson accused 25-year-old Buckey of donning a mask and sodomizing her child while sticking his head in a toilet; of wearing a cape while taping the boy’s mouth, hands, and eyes; and of sticking an air tube in his rectum. She also said Ray made the child ride naked on a horse and molested him while dressed as a cop, fireman, clown, and Santa Claus. Later, she claimed that the McMartin teachers, including Ray’s 57-year-old mother, Peggy, jabbed a scissors into the boy’s eyes and staples in his ears, nipples, and tongue; that Ray put her son’s finger into a goat’s anus; and that Peggy killed a baby and made the boy drink the blood. She also told the D.A.’s office than an AWOL marine and three models in a health club had raped her son, and that the family dog was sodomized as well.

Within a few months, Peggy, Ray, his 28-year-old sister, his 77-year-old wheelchair bound grandmother, and three other women teachers would be jailed and charged with hundreds of counts of sex abuse. During the investigation, some parents would claim that hundreds of Los Angeles-area children were brutally molested in several day-care centers, over a 20-year period, by a conspiracy of Satanic child pornographers. Children would talk about playing the “Naked Movie Star” game, about being photographed nude, about sexual assault in hot-air balloons, on faraway farms, on the shoulders of busy highways, in cemeteries, in tunnels under the school yard.

The McMartin School was painstakingly probed for tunnels. None were found. Neither was child pornography, nor witnesses from the traffic-filled freeways, nor any other evidence. Doctors’ findings of physical abuse were later debunked by medical researchers. Child protection experts have since criticized the prosecution’s social workers for using leading, suggestive interviewing methods that resembled brainwashing. Judy Johnson was hospitalized for psychosis in early 1985 (she later died of an alcoholism-related liver disease.) An assistant D.A., who quit the case and then helped the defense told the press over three years ago that the woman had been mentally ill when she made her first charges – information the McMartin jurors were never allowed to hear.

But none of these revelations seemed to dampen the prosecutors’, the media’s, or the public’s need to believe horrible things had happened at McMartin. For the first two years, the press slavishly trumpeted every illogical accusation, so that when charges against five women defendants were dropped in 1986 – after the Los Angeles D.A. called the evidence “incredibly weak” – polls showed that most people still thought that abuse had occurred at the pre-school. During the subsequent, almost three-year trial, neither the Los Angeles Times nor the rest of the metropolitan media bothered to critically dissect the case.

Finally the verdicts were announced, but the fact that they were overwhelmingly not guilty didn’t seem to matter much either. In each of the 13 hung decisions, from 7 to 11 jurors decided in Buckey’s favor, but this was glossed over by the press. So were the comments of jurors like Darryl Hutchins: he said that during deliberations he decided that Ray Buckey had molested the first child, but that he would have voted differently had the judge allowed testimony about the mother’s mental illness – or the defense’s contention that while the McMartin defendants were in jail, the little boy was molested by his father.

Refiling counts that most of the jury has rejected is almost unheard of. Immediately after the verdicts, however, McMartin parents began a media campaign to push the D.A. to prosecute Ray Buckey a second time. Again, the press dealt uncritically with the pressure. On tabloids like Geraldo and Oprah, support for a retrial was overt; “responsible” media like The New York Times were more subtle, suggesting, for example, that the jurors in the first trial were “stymied” by “the malleable memories of children and the distorting effects of questioning, particularly when a child has been traumatized.” Hardly anyone acknowledged that most of the jurors had concluded the children had likely not been abused, except possibly by their own relatives and certainly by the investigation itself.

A National and International Panic

Clearly, the public had come to believe that something as monstrous–sounding, yet as patently absurd, as McMartin was eminently imaginable. So imaginable in fact that a rash of similar cases surfaced across the country. A month after the McMartin investigation started, a Jordan, Minnesota, garbage collector accused of molesting three girls told authorities several local families were in a child sex ring. The charges against the middle-aged couples met widespread disbelief. But as neighbors stepped forward to support the accused, they, too, were arrested – the children had named them as perpetrators. Stories of ritual and slaughter emerged after the children were removed to foster care and many were interviewed more than 30 times apiece. The murder tales were later deemed fabrications, and some children admitted they lied to get relentless interviewers to leave them in peace. A husband and wife were acquitted, charges against 21 others were dropped, and the garbage collector confessed to inventing the charges in hopes of getting a lighter sentence.

In Chicago, a child told her mother that a day-care janitor had tickled her vagina. During repeated interviews, some 300 other children accused 40 teachers of abusing them during Satanic rituals, complete with baby killing. No physical evidence was produced; the janitor was tried anyway and acquitted. Several other cases surfaced, and by 1985, McMartin parents with media connections were collaborating with ABC’s “20/20” on shows claiming that “Satanic” crime and day-care abuse were epidemic. Other journalists ran with the story, disregarding the lack of evidence. Meanwhile, prosecutors, police, and social workers were attending nationwide conferences to “network” with “experts” on Satanic kiddie-porn conspiracies and learn how to root them out of nursery schools. There was a wave of cases that year, among them one in El Paso, Texas, where two women teachers were accused. Investigators were in touch with McMartin child interviewers and with Satanic Conspiracy theorist Ken Wooden, who helped produce the “20/20” series. The preschoolers never testified; instead, parents described their children’s “outcries” since the investigation had started, and behavioral changes like masturbating, urinating on walls, and assuming “sexual” postures. The teachers were convicted.

In these and some thirty others covered by the Memphis Tennessee Commercial Appeal in a 1988 series, journalists noted striking similarities in what child protection officials dubbed “ritual abuse” cases. Investigations usually began because of vague medical symptoms or after an upper-middle-class child did something that adults thought inappropriately sexual. Then, even though most sexual abuse occurs within the family, investigators immediately directed their inquiries outside the home. Sometimes they even suspected community sex rings, but most often they focused on elite childcare centers. The first allegation sometimes seemed plausible. But in remarkable departures from forensics, police, social workers, doctors, and therapists badgered children to name more victims and perpetrators, ignoring answers that contradicted a ritual abuse scenario. As a result, many men were charged; but women were too, and this was especially shocking, since females have not been thought of as child molesters, much less sex torturers.

From 1984 to 1989, some 100 people nationwide were charged with ritual sex abuse; of those, 50 or so were tried and about half convicted, with no evidence except testimony from children, parents, “experts” expounding on how the children acted traumatized, and doctors talking about tiny white lines on anuses or bumps on hymens – “signs of abuse” that later research would show on nonabused children. By 1986, in many states, hastily reformed criminal statutes made it unnecessary for children to come into court; parents could act as hearsay witnesses, or kids could testify on closed-circuit TV, giving juries the automatic impression that defendants had done something to frighten the child. And once a person stood accused, the community often decided that something must have happened. Any remaining skeptics were blasted for “condoning child abuse” and some were accused themselves.

As the cases snowballed, many parents were skeptical, but therapists told doubters that unless they believed the allegations, their children would be further traumatized. Anxious, guilt-ridden parents formed organizations with names like Believe the Children, the group begun by the McMartin parents. Besides offering psychological support, these groups helped prosecutors put together cases, did media promotion, and lobbied for laws allowing children to testify outside the courtroom.

Despite the support they received from adults, instead of getting calmer as time passed, many of the children showed increasingly traumatized behavior, such as flashbacks. Their tales of abuse followed a pattern; at first they said they were merely fondled; later in the investigation, they mentioned rape, sodomy, and pornography; then they progressed to increasingly bizarre scenarios. Across the country, the molesters were described as black men, mulattos, deformed people, or clowns; the abuse took place in churches; adults wore masks and costumes; they urinated and defecated on children; they burned, stabbed, cooked, or drowned babies; they sacrificed animals; they molested children in funeral homes and buried Barbie dolls. Extensive investigations have failed to turn up material evidence to support any of those claims.

In a 1987 case in Holland, the authorities decided there were no culprits at all. A four-year-old boy in the town of Oude Pekkela returned home from a play area with a bloody anus. In the next few months, some 100 children told authorities that German pornographers dressed as clowns had kidnapped, molested, and tortured them in Satanic rituals, and as time passed they acted more and more traumatized. But after a massive investigation, officials concluded that the four-year-old had poked himself with twigs while playing with another preschooler; that no German pornographers – or any other molesters – had ever existed. And in suburban Philadelphia, where an investigation began last year into claims that a teacher and her 68-year old aide ritually assaulted three girls with excrement, the Bucks County D.A. dismissed the allegations as hysteria. Still, an unquestioning belief in ritual sex abuse in the U.S., Canada, and other post-industrial countries remains the rule. Here, not only religious fundamentalists and the unschooled, but large numbers of literate, secular people seem ready to accept the idea that scores of people in crowded daycare centers could engage hundreds of children in vicious – not to say extremely messy – assaults, and yet leave neither a scintilla of physical evidence nor an adult material witness. What’s going on?

In a sense, nothing new. Moral panics – the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism, for example – have often run rampant through cultures in flux, and “ritual abuse” is today’s mythic expression of deep-seated worries over sweeping changes in the family. Since the 1970s, the number of working women have risen, and so have the divorce rates and female-headed households. Children are being socialized less by family authority and more by the media and its consumerist focus on the erotic, yet AIDS has imbued eros with a new danger. All these changes spell anxiety. For conservatives, they are literally sinful, and since moral traditionalists hate public day-care, a right-wing impulse to demonize childcare workers is not surprising. But many feminists and progressives have bought into the hysteria, too: ritual abuse panic has become an outlet for women’s rage at sexual violence and harassment. While this anger could hardly be more justified, it has increasingly been articulated through an anti-sexual current in the feminist movement, a current that jibes with the views of conservatives who loathe pornography – and who also fear women, their need for day-care, their independence, and their sexuality.

The Denial — and Redefinition — of Incest

Until recently, generations of silence and denial shrouded the problem of child sexual abuse, especially incest. Academic literature had long described it as a one-in-a-million event, and when women and girls told therapists and child protection authorities they had been molested, their stories were usually dismissed as nasty figments of the female psyche. But by the mid-70s, as feminists were fighting this society’s tendency to belittle and disbelieve women’s rape reports, theoreticians like Florence Rush began eloquently arguing that children – especially girls – had the same problem when they tried to talk about being sexually abused. Meanwhile, several studies reported that one out of every hundred women remembered having sex with fathers and stepfathers – and that did not even include experiences with other family members like uncles. By 1980, thanks largely to feminist efforts to create and publicize reporting systems, the government tallied almost 43,000 cases of sex abuse annually, up from a few thousand only a few years earlier. Most perpetrators were fathers and other male relatives and most of the victims were girls.

Feminists who analyzed incest defined it as inherently victimizing the daughter; they said her extreme dependence on her family and the men in it meant she could not give meaningful consent to sex. But then they made a dubious leap: they began applying their perspective on incest to non-relatives. Judith Herman, in her 1982 book, Father-Daughter Incest, wrote that any sexual relationship between an adult and a child, even if the child is a teenager, “must necessarily take on some of the coercive characteristics of rape.” Florence Rush compared children choosing adult sex partners to chickens meeting up with hungry foxes.

Actually, studies show that the realities of transgenerational sex outside the family, where individual adults wield a good deal less power over children, are more ambiguous. Most male pedophilia consists of caressing and fondling. For most children, these experiences appear to be at best confusing, at worst traumatic. But others seem to willingly participate, and some adults recall that while still legally minors they accepted, even welcomed sex with grownups. (Many gay men, for example, say they instigated these encounters, and some suggest that such relationships offer the boys the only real possibility for healthy acculturation into homosexuality.) Nonetheless, the prevailing feminist view of child sexual abuse broadened its meaning to include, without distinctions, any contact between someone below the age of consent with someone older – even if that meant ignoring how the younger partner remembered the incident.

In the early 1980w, feminist sociologist Diana Russell asked women to remember any unwanted sexual contact before age 18, including with boyfriends of the same age – “sexual contact meaning anything from anal intercourse to glimpsing a flasher to an unwelcome hug.” She also asked women to recall “incest,” defined as sexual contact between relatives (even distant ones) more than five years apart in age. By Russell’s standards, tongue kissing between a 13-year-old and her cousin’s 19-year-old husband would be considered incestuous and therefore exploitative, even if the woman remembered enjoying it. Using her extravagantly broad definitions, she found that one in five women were “incest victims” and more than half suffered child sexual abuse. Because the media quoted this and similar studies without explaining how diverse the reported experiences were, it suddenly seemed to the public that little kids were in imminent danger of being raped.

Cultural Anxiety About Child Safety

But even before feminist anti-sex abuse efforts had begun, a national fear was growing that terrible, previously unheard of perversities were endangering children. It began with rumors of Halloween sadists. In 1970, The New York Times reported that the “plump red apple that Junior gets from a kindly old woman down the block … may have a razor blade hidden inside.” By 1972, many kids were not allowed to trick-or-treat; three years later Newsweek warned that several children were dead and hundreds more injured by viciously doctored Halloween candy. A few years later, kiddie porn was the new threat. In 1977, NBC reported that “as many as two million American youngsters are involved in the fast-growing, multi-million dollar child pornography business…” and “police say the number of boy prostitutes may be as high as half a million” (some 10 percent of all male adolescents in the entire country).

Then, in the early 1980s, following the New York City disappearance of Etan Patz, the kidnapping and slaying of Adam Walsh, and the murders of 28 Atlanta schoolchildren, the missing children’s movement emerged. Crusaders began describing a stranger abduction problem of astonishing proportion: U.S. Representative Paul Simon offered House members a “conservative estimate … 50,000 children abducted by strangers annually,” and a leading child-search organization said 5000 of these children were murdered each year.

Research by journalists and sociologists has debunked all these claims. In the entire U.S., only one child has ever been killed by Halloween candy – and the poison was put there by his own father. Only 18 injuries were reported nationwide during the 25 years before 1984, the most serious one a wound requiring some stitches. Some of these were hoaxes or fabrications by attention-seeking kids. As for kiddie-porn, it’s estimated that even before 1978, when all production and commercial distribution of such material was banned under federal law, only about 5000 and 7000 children were involved worldwide. Since then the commercial market in America, miniscule to begin with, has been virtually wiped out.

Research into claims about mass kidnappings likewise deflates the hype: a recently released Justice Department study finds that almost all missing children are teenage runaways and throwaways. The typical kidnapping is committed by a divorced parent who has lost custody. As for stranger-abductions, the Washington D.C.-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children currently lists about 240 children missing in the entire country. Still, much of the American public is convinced that molesters, sadists, kidnappers, and pornographers are major threats to our kids.

Paranoia about Satanism

This fear has been reinforced by yet another strand of irrationality – the rise of paranoia about Satanism. Religious belief in child-torturing conspiracies of devil worshippers – whether Christian, Jewish, or Satanist – has flowered and withered since the early days of the Church. Lately, the belief has resurged in the U.S. and gained widespread acceptance via tabloid media like Geraldo. Things have gotten so far out of hand that last year a Texas school district told students they could no longer wear T-shirts with peace symbols, since self-styled experts on Satanism say the design represents the devil. Another popular belief, that Satanists kidnap blonde virgins for sacrifice, cropped up nationwide in 1987 and 1988, and spawned a wave of what sociologist Jeffrey Victor calls “rumor panics”: townspeople from Montana to Maine banned library books, armed themselves into vigilante squads, and raided purported “covens” that often turned out to be nothing more than teen punk-rocker hangouts.

The latest Satan scare has its roots in 1970s fundamentalism. In The Late Great Planet Earth and Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth, both of which sold millions of copies, Christian TV celebrity Hal Lindsey decries the corrupting influence of the “New Age” ‘60s, yearningly prophesies the end of the world and Armageddon, and warns of the sinister power of rock music, witches and devil worshippers. Meanwhile, many white teenagers shocked their elders by reading popular works about Satanism, scrawling “666”-style graffiti, and listening to the music Cardinal O’Connor, in his recent “exorcism” sermon, called pornography in sound.

During the late ‘70s, “urban legends,” or modern folk rumors, about devil worshippers spread across the U.S. One tale had it that Ray Kroc, former owner of McDonald’s, had tithed his hamburger profits to the church of Satan in exchange for prosperous Big Mac sales. Another was that Procter & Gamble’s century-old moon-and-stars logo was a secret Satanic symbol. (The rumor got so out-of-control that the company had to change the logo in 1985.)

“Recovered” Memories and MPD

Another evolution in the popular zeitgeist was signaled by the 1980 release of Michelle Remembers, coauthored by Lawrence Pazder, a Catholic psychiatrist from Vancouver, and his wife and former patient, Michelle Smith. The book recounts how Smith, in treatment for depression, underwent months of hypnosis and “remembered” being imprisoned at age five by her mother and a group of Satanists. She said she was locked up, buried with snakes, smeared with human waste, raped with candles and crucifixes, and finally forced to destroy an infant. Smith’s therapy consisted of more hypnosis, prayers to the Virgin Mary, and exorcism.

There is no confirmation that anything Smith “remembers” occurred. Psychiatric anthropologist Sherrill Mulhern, who has reviewed tapes of sessions similar to Pazder’s and Smith’s, says patients retain an unshakable belief in whatever a therapist suggests under hypnosis. Smith’s “memories,” Mulhern says, were probably constructed piecemeal, with Pazder introducing the Satanic motifs. Still, Michelle Remembers became a “non-fiction” bestseller, and the authors appeared on national Christian talk shows. Another self-styled cult survivor had her story published in a tabloid, and by 1983 the FBI was getting calls from women around the country, claiming they too had escaped devil-worshipping cults. Their stories hardly varied: the cults were part of a generations-old, international conspiracy including prominent people, and practiced rites like the ones in Michelle Remembers; they also kidnapped and sacrificed children, which explained the country’s thousands of missing kids.

According to Kenneth Lanning of the FBI, at first the agency took the stories seriously. Perhaps there were a few isolated cults, maybe they could have killed some children. Authorities nationwide began digging up reported burial sites, but found nothing, and Lanning’s doubts increased as “survivor” reports mushroomed (the FBI now gets a call a day). “If the cults were real,” he says, “they would constitute the greatest conspiracy in history.”

Who, then are these “survivors” and what’s their connection to ritual abuse accusations? Sherrill Mulhern, who has spent years studying traditional cults and modern groups like Jonestown, began researching the “survivors” and their therapists about five years ago. She soon realized that she was looking not at a real cult, but at people linked by a delusionary belief in one.

Many “survivors,” Mulhern says, are former teen runaways who lived on the streets and took up prostitution – behavior typical of incest victims. Many have abused drugs that produce paranoid delusions; many have been treated for schizophrenia and for borderline personality, which is characterized by compulsive lying. More recently, many have been diagnosed by therapists as suffering from multiple personality disorder. And virtually all had fundamentalist Christian parents or later converted. While being “born again,” they were often hypnotized by fellow “survivors” of by self-styled Christian spiritual therapists.

The public knows about multiple personality from The Three Faces of Eve and Sybil. This diagnosis – which was called double consciousness in the 19th century and later fell out of favor – has been officially resurrected during the past 15 years by the American psychiatric profession. A century ago, Freud’s term for multiple personality was hysteria, and he first treated hysterical women during the 1880s. When hypnotizing deeply religious Catholic patients, Freud was struck by how many told trance tales of being raped by black-robed Satan worshippers, stories identical to those told by women during earlier witch trials. He speculated that these stories were actually sadomasochistic fantasies overlying memories of real childhood incest but articulated in the language of religion.

A century later, therapists started hearing the same tales again. This time around, they weren’t so willing to call them fictions. The new, unqualified belief that all womens’ and girls’ rape and incest stories were true reflected the reemergence of that strain in feminist thinking that condemned all sexual impulses as merely forms of male domination. In this view, men were inherently predatory, obsessed with penetration and violence – or, as Andrea Dworkin put it, “the stuff of murder, not love.” Women, on the other hand, wanted gentle, not-necessarily-even-genital-sex. By analogy, children were just as pure.

Feminists like Diana Russell, Florence Rush, and Dworkin denied that sadomasochistic acts or thoughts could be erotic for women. Russell viewed them as inventions of the patriarch and reflections of women’s powerlessness; Rush, in her groundbreaking work on sex abuse, The Best Kept Secret, disapprovingly connected the “uncensored erotic imagination” with “the total freedom of the sadist.” Besides being theoreticians, these women were also activists in Women Against Pornography, which was lending the right’s anti-porn crusade a modern “progressive” aura by arguing, despite the lack of evidence, that representations of women being wounded or sexually dominated by men cause sexual violence. At the same time, many therapists who considered themselves feminists adopted the belief that when patients bring up fantasies, dreams, or memories of coerced or brutal sex, they can never be products of the erotic imagination; they must really have happened – and anyone who says otherwise is an apologist for patriarchal violence.

This was the complaint lodged against Freud. During his early career, when female hysterics told him they had been seduced during childhood by their fathers and other adults, Freud believed them; he concluded that such violations were common and led to neurosis. Later, he decided many of the stories were untrue. Freud undoubtedly ended up underestimating the prevalence of abuse, though he never dismissed all his patients’ seduction stories. To explain the others as fantasies, he developed the theory of the Oedipus complex.

In recognizing children as intensely sexual beings, the theory was revolutionary. But its assumption that all women envy men their penises helped reinforce sexual stereotypes and encouraged therapists to mindlessly dismiss women’s memories of childhood molestation. Not surprisingly, then, Freud’s theories of sexuality were later just as simplistically attacked by feminists eager to conflate sexuality with male violence. Their criticisms were most forcefully articulated in 1984, with the publication of Jeffrey Masson’s The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory.

And even as Masson institutionalized Freud-bashing, women and children were telling therapists and police rococo tales about sadomasochistic, diabolical assaults. How could these bizarre stories be true? But then, hadn’t we learned that sex abuse was much more common than previously thought?  The stage was set for McMartin hysteria.

The McMartin “Investigation” and “the child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome”

In 1983, as part of his upcoming, hotly contested reelection campaign, the Los Angeles district attorney commissioned a survey asking voters to name their biggest crime concerns. He was surprised to learn that their main worry wasn’t drugs or drunken driving – it was child abuse. At about the same time the pollsters were at work, a mentally ill mother was telling Los Angeles County authorities Story-of-O tales about the McMartin preschool. Following her first accusations, police sent 200 letters to parents, listing specific questions to ask their children about whether and how Ray Buckey molested them. Virtually all the children denied being abused. Nevertheless, at the suggestion of the prosecution, panicked families made appointments at the Children’s Institute International (CII), a Los Angeles abuse therapy clinic.

There, social workers plied the children with puppets, suggested ritual abuse scenarios, coaxed recalcitrant kids to “pretend,” and said that if they didn’t tell the “yucky secret” it meant they were stupid. This interviewing method followed from Los Angeles psychiatrist Roland Summit’s “child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome,” a theory about incest. Summit argues that if there is evidence of sex abuse and a child denies it, this is only further proof that it happened and a therapist should use any means necessary to help the child talk. When this technique was applied to criminal investigation, there wasn’t supposed to be any problem with false allegations. Research has since suggested that as many as one in twelve sex abuse reports are fabricated, that in divorce custody disputes, the rate may be as high as one in two, and that a disturbingly common source of false allegations is mentally ill mothers who injure their children, even genitally, to get attention. But in 1984, few were thinking about such issues – conventional wisdom was that since children are innocent beings, they never lie about sexual abuse. If they later recant, that means they are under family pressure to protect the father – and their turnabout is further proof of the crime.

So no matter how much coercion was used to get an accusation and no matter if a child later retracted it, once Summit’s incest theory was applied, a charge of abuse became irrefutable. Child protection workers ignored the fact that this logic had little to do with day-care. After all, why would children staunchly deny abuse to protect an adult who wasn’t part of the family? And if they’d been so brutally attacked at school, why wouldn’t they tell their parents?

Therapists and investigators came up with all sorts of rationales. One was that the teachers threatened them by slaughtering animals and warning that the same thing would happen to their parents if they told. Kids who revealed nothing were said to have split off unbearable memories and developed amnesia. Following this line of thinking, it’s not surprising that some investigators and psychologists used hypnotic suggestion to get children to “remember” abuse; more typical was endless interrogation, much of it done by parents.

In imposing such techniques, adults no doubt injected their own motifs into allegations. Indeed, there is evidence that the details in ritual abuse charges come more from grown-ups than children. Lawrence Pazder, coauthor of Michelle Remembers, told the San Francisco Examiner he acted as a consultant to Los Angeles police investigating McMartin and to parents nationwide; McMartin parent Jackie McGaulley has confided she met with him during the early days of the investigation. Around the same time, Ken Wooden, the Satanic conspiracy theorist, mailed information to 3,500 prosecutors describing what to look for in ritual abuse cases. Women claiming to be survivors contacted McMartin investigators and parents; some even joined parents at nationwide child protection conferences to speak about ritual abuse. Meanwhile, prominent psychiatrists like Bennett Braun began appearing at symposia on multiple personality, telling colleagues that a fourth of the women with this diagnosis are escapees from cults organized like the “Communist cell structure.” Soon, other therapists would be carrying guns for protection against devil worshippers. And soon, more and more prosecutors would make front-page news by leveling charges of unspeakably sadistic rape, sodomy and terrorism against people whose only previous experience with the law was in traffic court.

Yet Satanism as a motive in ritual abuse cases didn’t always wash: Though prosecutors tried to keep it quiet, if the public or jury found out that the accusations included the belief that the defendants danced around in covens, cases tended to become laughingstocks and collapse. (Indeed, the phrase ritual abuse was coined by child-protection people worried that Satanic abuse would evoke public disbelief.) So prosecution-minded child-protection activists tried to develop sensible-sounding explanations for why ordinary people would suddenly get the urge to stick swords up toddlers.

The New Psychology of Ritual Abuse

To do this, common sense had to be reformed. Nobody, not even the most jaded of cops, had ever heard of people with no relationship to enragé politics or cults and with no mental health problems practicing intricate sexual tortures against little children in nursery schools. The situation was akin to the dilemma faced by inquisitors during the witch trials, when one of the biggest issues was how to physically identify a consort of Satan. The accused would be stripped and a search would ensue for “devil’s privy marks”: warts, scars, and skin tags, especially on the genitals. Such blemishes were said to prove the bearer had a compact with the devil. Three hundred years later, bodily flaws wouldn’t do. Now what was needed was a new psychology.

Serious research was no help. Most male molesters and pedophiles who commit non-violent offenses score normally on psychological tests, but one would expect a Rorschach to ferret out something remarkable about a person who rubs feces on toddlers and barbecues babies. Nevertheless, batteries of exams given to ritual abuse defendants turned up virtually nothing unusual. This was especially remarkable when it came to women, since the few female child molesters mentioned in earlier medical literature had invariably been diagnosed as mentally retarded or psychotic.

But in the 1980s, rapidly increasing reports of incest included several cases with female perpetrators. Recent studies suggest that these women are unusually emotionally disturbed, abuse drugs, and were themselves incest victims. When molesting their children, they do it nonviolently, by fondling them during diaper changes, for example; and they often feel ashamed and turn themselves in. Others report helping their husbands molest their daughters. These women seem to share many traits with battered wives, and after escaping abusive marriages, some have willingly confessed their former complicity.

As soon as female incest offender studies were published in the mid-1980s, prosecutors of ritual cases rushed to pound the accused into the profiles. In most cases, it takes a huge stretch of the imagination to link ritual abuse defendants with incest offenders. Accused groups have usually contained more women than men, and that doesn’t fit the battered or dominated wife profiles. And virtually all the defendants have insisted they are innocent even after generous plea bargaining.

Nevertheless, zealous child protection authorities keep trying to suggest “profiles,” even if it means fictionalizing defendants’ lives. In several cases, with no supporting evidence, officials have told journalists that the accused were “abused as children.” In others, prosecutors have intimated that benign activities, often having something to do with sex, reflect psychopathology. In one case, a middle-aged married woman had an affair (with a man) while she was working at a preschool; one week, when she was considering leaving her husband, she signed the daily attendance sheet with her maiden name. At trial, the prosecutor displayed the signatures and implied the woman was mentally ill.

Another profile gained popularity after the 1985 Meese Commission hearing where critics of adult pornography were joined by spokespeople for the kiddie porn, missing children, and ritual abuse panics. Appearing with a chart supposedly describing confessed and convicted male sex abusers, the FBI’s Lanning advised cops to check whether a suspect seemed Regressed (“low self-esteem”); Inadequate (“social misfit”); Morally Indiscriminate (“a user and abuser of people”); Sexually Indiscriminate (“try sexual – willing to try anything”). Though this typology is about as scientific as a horoscope, Lanning, a vocal Satanic-conspiracy-theory skeptic, has cautioned his chart wasn’t developed for women or ritual abuse defendants – which hasn’t kept prosecutors from using it.

Even so, the search for a more convincing profile goes on. In response to true believers’ urgings, the federal government followed Meese Commission recommendations and funded studies that accept, a priori, the validity of ritual abuse charges. In 1985, the University of California at Los Angeles got $405,000 to monitor into adulthood the “coping” skills of children allegedly molested in local preschools, though authorities later dismissed virtually all their stories as unbelievable.

One researcher for this study is sociologist David Finkelhor, a self-styled sexual progressive and longtime colleague of feminist Diana Russell. Finklehor got a grant to profile day-care sex crimes. Again, most of the cases he researched had so many investigative and evidentiary flaws that they never made it to trial. Except for idle speculations, Finklehor found nothing remarkable in ritual defendants’ histories or personalities. But instead of asking if this meant the charges were false, he implied that since the accused are normal, being normal is part of the typology of the ritual offender. With this sleight of hand, the study, titled Nursery Crimes, immediately became a bible for child protection fanatics eager to supply incredulous communities and journalists with a “scientific” rationale for their paranoia.

The Margaret Kelly Michaels Case

The updating of ritual abuse hysteria with pop psychology is vividly illustrated in New Jersey’s Margaret Kelly Michaels case – the northeast’s version of McMartin. Michaels, a teacher at a suburban Newark day-care center, was accused in 1985 of assaulting preschoolers sexually with peanut butter, swords, bloodied tampons, urine, feces, and terroristic threats. She was said to have committed these crimes against dozens of children daily, for seven months, in a crowded facility, without any adults seeing her and without leaving any physical evidence.

After investigators made all the mistakes that characterized McMartin, they still had no evidence that Michaels was in a cult. So they searched for psychopathology. Again, nothing strange in Michaels’ background. They pressed on anyway. To fit her into the incest offender profile, prosecutors played up unfounded rumors that her father fondled her during jailhouse visits. At a preliminary hearing, they brought in the FBI’s Lanning to “instruct” the judge that women don’t have to be psychotic to molest children. Both in court and off the record, the prosecutors plugged Michaels into anything that passed for a profile, even those developed for men. They suggested she was “dissociated” – i.e., a multiple personality – because she did dance exercises at the day-care center while looking “spacey.” They implied she was a pedophile – a term never before applied to women – because she took photographs at the playground. And the fact that Michaels adamantly insisted she was innocent was supposed to mean she was “morally indiscriminate.” As proof of her cunning, prosecutors told the jury that during one psychological evaluation, Michaels drew a person with one foot turned inward; but another time she drew it pointed out!

With such nonsense offered – and largely accepted – as “motive,” it was unavoidable that Michaels would be demonized for any sexual behavior not conforming to the strictest traditional standards. At her women’s college, for example, she had experimented with lesbianism. The prosecution insinuated that Michaels’ homosexual experiences and the fact that she had not slept with a man until age 25, were proof of “confusion” that would cause her to torture children. Michaels was ultimately convicted on 115 counts of abuse. The case against her, permeated as it was by the testimony of social workers and psychologists, exchanged open talk of Satanic conspiracies for a secular, feminist-sounding idiom that nevertheless couches a profound hostility towards women and a loathing for any erotic impulse.

Even children’s play with each other is becoming suspect. Abuse-finders now worry that preschoolers who play sexually with their peers may be “perpetrators” or pedophiles-in-the-making. CII, the Los Angeles clinic known for its abominable McMartin interviews, is now treating “offenders” as young as four years old if they have so much as “verbally cajoled” a younger child into sex play that CII deems not “normal.” While researchers say most of the “offenders” were themselves sexually abused, the clinic’s history of eliciting false allegations makes any such claims suspect. More telling is the CII therapists’ disapproval that some of their little girl patients said they acted sexually not out of “love and caring,” but simply “to feel good.”

While such rhetoric may still be patently laughable, repressing older kids is another story. Teenagers are increasingly victimized by laws denying them access to birth control, confidential abortions, or a sense that sex is anything more than a deadly disease. The trend is now justified via the rhetoric of “child protection”; in Arizona, after a law passed mandating teachers and counselors to report sex abuse victims, officials in the state’s largest school district gathered the names of sexually active students and handed them over to the cops.

Edenton, North Carolina

Meanwhile, in divorce disputes and especially on the day-care front, hysteria continues unabated. Across the country, more and more losers in custody battles are accusing spouses of being Satanic cult sex abusers. And since 1989, the town of Edenton, North Carolina, has been disrupted by charges that five women and two men associated with an elite preschool molested, raped, and filmed sex acts with 70 young children and infants. Earlier in the investigation, officials said they had photographic evidence of the crimes, and the D.A. claims the children have made most of their allegations to therapists. But the only “evidence” to emerge is one Polaroid photo, found in a woman defendant’s home, of her having sex with her fiancé (an adult); at least one therapist is giving Satanism and ritual abuse seminars around the state, and some parents of the alleged victims are active in Believe the Children.

The North Carolina kids’ stories have unerringly followed the ritual abuse plot, progressing lately to tales of witnessing babies slaughtered. Perhaps not coincidentally, their most bizarre allegations began surfacing this past fall, around the time that 27 million viewers watched Do You Know the Muffin Man?, a CBS move that rehashed details from several ritual abuse cases, but included the wholly fictional climax of parents discovering day-care teachers worshipping the devil amidst piles of kiddie porn. Or maybe the North Carolina children saw an earlier Oprah Winfrey show in which a Jewish woman, accompanied by her Jewish therapist, claimed to be a survivor of childhood cult ritual abuse and added that Jewish families had been sacrificing babies since the 1700s.

The Lasting Damage Done by McMartin

A few months later, during the taping of the Geraldo post-trial show, the McMartin children and their parents sat under bright lights and gave their names. Back at a Los Angeles studio hookup, a girl sat in a darkened area, anonymous. She told how when she was five she used to spend after-school hours with Ray Buckey helping him clean up classrooms, yet he never molested her. She recalled going to CII during the investigation, and how the therapists kept suggesting the details of ritual sex games before they even started up the tape recorder. Then they turned it on, all the while telling her things she’d never heard of, and insisting she repeat them.

She wouldn’t, and now six years later, a boy sitting in the bright lights – one whose parents parade him on national TV and make speeches about Satanist sex abuse networks in Episcopal churches – glared at her silhouette and insisted she was really molested. The girl sat in the shadows, afraid to show her face or give her name. She and her family fear harassment – not for proclaiming she was raped, but for insisting she wasn’t.

As for the children who sat in the light, their parents have invested years believing in demonic conspiracies and underground nursery tunnels. (Until recently, the parents were still digging. They came up with Indian artifacts.) They have spoken unremittingly of such things, to the world and to their sons and daughters. They have told their children, over and over again, that they were abused, then rewarded them for acting traumatized. They have put them in therapy with adult fanatics who have done the same, and enrolled them as guinea pigs in the “research” projects of zealots.

The McMartin kids, and hundreds of others in ritual abuse spin-offs across the country, have spent years trapped in clans now extended to include psychologists, social workers and prosecutors –– clans whose identity derives from a tent-revival belief in their children’s imagined victimization. Right wing devil-mongers may find the subculture to their liking, but the rest of us ought to recognize the harm it is wreaking, not only on civil liberties and the falsely accused, but also on day-care, on women’s rights, and especially on children. Because the kids involved in this hysteria have indeed suffered, but not at the hands of their teachers. And the abuse perpetrated against them by the child-protection movement gone mad are every bit as awful as the tyranny of incest.

Discredited Psychology

By Lona Manning

“False Memory Syndrome”, “Repressed Memory Syndrome” and “Recovered Memory” are highly controversial and now widely researched fields. I do not try to speak as an expert. I do not intend to imply that any one psychological evaluation can be used as a uniform explanation of every situation. However, I know one thing that the experts can’t know for certain. I know that no children were being sodomized playing some bizarre “naked leap-frog” game or being raped during those computer classes. Therefore anyone who now, as an adult, remembers being molested is suffering from the implanted memories of therapist. That, to me, is a horrific fact. How horrible it must be to live with the scars of such a traumatic experience when it never even happened!

Here are some links to information:

The False Memory Foundation Home Page: A treasure trove of information covering every aspect of these conditions. Case studies, FAQ, book reviews, monthly newsletter, hypnosis, multiple-personality disorder, and much more.

Elizabeth Loftus is a Professor or Law, Criminology , Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine, and University of Washington. Professor Loftus has published dozen’s of articles on this subject.

Professor Loftus’ book The Myth of Repressed Memory, has been described by the The Washington Post Book World as, “[A] thoughtful, scholarly book . . . concerned with exposing the damage caused by, and the falsity of, the practice of recovered-memory therapy.” The New York Times Book Review said, “The descriptions . . . of the ‘therapeutic’ practices by which memories are recovered are a frightening indictment of at least some members of the burgeoning therapy industry.”

Satan’s Silence, The Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker.

Lona Manning‘s Web site, Real Life Cases of People Sent to Prison for Crimes That Never Happened.

Additional items

It was important to me that Capturing the Friedmans would raise awareness about the issue of imaginary crimes. I have been working with the National Center for Reason and Justice to help those much less fortunate than I — namely those still in prison unjustly due to mass-hysteria sex-abuse scandals.

I want to thank all the thousands of well-wishers who contacted me with support and compassion over the years. That outpouring of support has given me strength to carry on the good fight and work towards building a new life for myself.

Please feel free to write to me at Jesse@freejesse.net. I love hearing from people who have seen the film and feel moved to write. I do my best to reply personally to everyone, and I am keeping an e-mail mailing list to update people about my appeal as events warrant.

Amirault released from prison after 18 years

Associated Press/April 30, 2004, By Shannon Boklaschuk

Norfolk, Mass. — Gerald “Tooky” Amirault waved and smiled nervously as he was released from prison Friday, 18 years after his controversial conviction in one of the country’s most bizarre and bitterly disputed child-molestation cases.

More than a dozen family members and friends were on hand as Amirault left Bay State Correctional Center in Norfolk with his wife, Patti, and his attorney, James Sultan. His three adult children followed in another car.

Amirault was convicted in 1986 of molesting and raping eight 3- and 4-year-old children at his family’s Fells Acres day care center in Malden. But he insisted he was innocent throughout his imprisonment, refusing to undergo counseling for sex abuse because he viewed it as an admission of guilt.

“It’s a bit overwhelming,” Amirault said. “I’m grateful to my wife and my children and the family and friends I have that are surrounding me. This is what’s representative of Gerald Amirault and his family, not this case, this Fells Acres fraud.”

His sister, Cheryl Amirault LeFave, who was also convicted in the case, smiled broadly and gave the thumbs-up sign as her brother’s long ordeal came to an end.

“We won’t ever forget what happened to our family,” LeFave said.

But Amirault’s joyous release from prison did not end the controversy that has swirled around the case for two decades.

In a case that came to symbolize changing attitudes toward the mass prosecution of child sex abuse cases, the Amiraults insisted they were victims of the day care sex abuse hysteria that swept the country in the 1980s.

They claimed they were railroaded by questionable testimony from child witnesses who they said were badgered by well-meaning therapists until they concocted their tales of abuse.

“We invite scrutiny,” Amirault said “We’re not afraid of the truth.”

But their accusers – now young adults – insist that Amirault is the monster they said he was during his trial. Their testimony, which included stories of Amirault dressing up as a clown and raping children with knives, and the ritualistic slayings of animals, made up the bulk of the state’s case.

His sister and mother, Violet Amirault, were convicted during a separate trial and were released from prison in 1995. Violet Amirault died in 1997.

Amirault victim Jennifer Bennett, now married with two children of her own, said earlier this week that her stomach was in knots just thinking about his release. She said she still has flashbacks, wakes up in a cold sweat and is terrified by clowns.

Larry Hardoon, the chief prosecutor in the case, said he continues to believe Amirault committed the crimes. He defended the interviewing techniques used by investigators, which were later criticized as leading and suggestive to the children.

“Anybody that takes the time to understand and pay attention to what the actual facts were – not the mischaracterization of facts that gets spread by the defense – the convictions have always been upheld as sound and fully supportable,” he said.

“I believe he had a fair trial and that the system worked the way it’s supposed to work. I’ve never seen or heard anything from the beginning of this case to today – that makes me think otherwise,” he said.

The state Board of Pardons recommended in July 2001 that his sentence be commuted, but then-acting Gov. Jane Swift rejected the recommendation in February 2002.

He was granted parole last October and Middlesex District Attorney Martha Coakley announced earlier this month that there was not enough evidence to have Amirault committed indefinitely as a sexually dangerous person.

Amirault will return to Malden, the city of 56,000 north of Boston where the Fells Acres saga unfolded two decades ago. He said he will continue trying to prove his innocence.

“I’m going to fight this case until the day I die,” he said. “I’m going to get my name back.”