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A brilliant, disturbing portrait of the dawn of the culture wars, when America started to tear itself apart with doubts, wild allegations, and an unfounded fear for the safety of children. During the 1980s in California, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, and elsewhere, day care workers were arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of committing horrible sexual crimes against the children they cared for. These crimes, social workers and prosecutors said, had gone undetected for years, and they consisted of a brutality and sadism that defied all imagining. The dangers of babysitting services and day care centers became a national news media fixation. Of the many hundreds of people who were investigated in connection with day care and ritual abuse cases around the country, some 190 were formally charged with crimes, leading to more than 80 convictions. It would take years for people to realize what the defendants had said all along -- that these prosecutions were the product of a decade-long outbreak of collective hysteria on par with the Salem witch trials. Social workers and detectives employed coercive interviewing techniques that led children to tell them what they wanted to hear. Local and national journalists fanned the flames by promoting the stories' salacious aspects, while aggressive prosecutors sought to make their careers by unearthing an unspeakable evil where parents feared it most. Using extensive archival research and drawing on dozens of interviews conducted with the hysteria's major figures, n+1 editor Richard Beck shows how a group of legislators, doctors, lawyers, and parents -- most working with the best of intentions -- set the stage for a cultural disaster. The climate of fear that surrounded these cases influenced a whole series of arguments about women, children, and sex. It also drove a right-wing cultural resurgence that, in many respects, continues to this day.
In the 1980s, a series of child sex abuse cases rocked the United States. The most famous case was the 1984 McMartin preschool case, but there were a number of others as well. By the latter part of the decade, the assumption was widespread that child sex abuse had become a serious problem in America. Yet within a few years, the concern about it died down considerably. The failure to convict anyone in the McMartin case and a widely publicized appellate decision in New Jersey that freed an accused molester had turned the dominant narrative on its head. In the early 1990s, a new narrative with remarkable staying power emerged: the child sex abuse cases were symptomatic of a 'moral panic' that had produced a witch hunt. A central claim in this new witch hunt narrative was that the children who testified were not reliable and easily swayed by prosecutorial suggestion. In time, the notion that child sex abuse was a product of sensationalized over-reporting and far less endemic than originally thought became the new common sense. But did the new witch hunt narrative accurately represent reality? As Ross Cheit demonstrates in his exhaustive account of child sex abuse cases in the past two and a half decades, purveyors of the witch hunt narrative never did the hard work of examining court records in the many cases that reached the courts throughout the nation. Instead, they treated a couple of cases as representative and concluded that the issue was blown far out of proportion. Drawing on years of research into cases in a number of states, Cheit shows that the issue had not been blown out of proportion at all. In fact, child sex abuse convictions were regular occurrences, and the crime occurred far more frequently than conventional wisdom would have us believe. Cheit's aim is not to simply prove the narrative wrong, however. He also shows how a narrative based on empirically thin evidence became a theory with real social force, and how that theory stood at odds with a far more grim reality. The belief that the charge of child sex abuse was typically a hoax also left us unprepared to deal with the far greater scandal of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church, which, incidentally, has served to substantiate Cheit's thesis about the pervasiveness of the problem. In sum, The Witch-Hunt Narrative is a magisterial and empirically powerful account of the social dynamics that led to the denial of widespread human tragedy.
This book explores sexual violence and crime in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, a period of intense social and legal change. Driven by the sexual revolutions, second wave feminism, and ideas of the rights of the child, there was a new public interest in the sexual assault of women and children. Sexual abuse was studied, surveyed and discussed more than ever before in Australian society. Yet, despite this, there remained substantial inaction, by government, from community and on the part of individuals. This book examines several difficult questions of our recent history: why did Australia not act more firmly to eradicate rape and child sexual abuse? What prevented our culture from looking seriously at trauma? How did we fail to protect victim-survivors? Rich in social and legal history, this study takes readers into the world of victims of sexual crime, and into the wider community that had to deal with sexual violence. At the core of this book is the question that resonates deeply right now: why does sexual violence appear seemingly insurmountable, despite significant change?
Ten essays and an annotated bibliography.
These guidelines cover a number of areas considered to be of key importance in conducting an investigative interview, including: the feelings of the child and the interviewer; checklist; preparing for the interview; seating arrangements; establishing trust; a neutral location; background information; getting started; children's sense of time; children's language; use of aids such as drawings and dolls; validating the child's credibility; and concluding the interview.
In the early 1970s, a new wave of public service announcements urged parents to "help end an American tradition" of child abuse. The message, relayed repeatedly over television and radio, urged abusive parents to seek help. Support groups for parents, including Parents Anonymous, proliferated across the country to deal with the seemingly burgeoning crisis. At the same time, an ever-increasing number of abused children were reported to child welfare agencies, due in part to an expansion of mandatory reporting laws and the creation of reporting hotlines across the nation. Here, Mical Raz examines this history of child abuse policy and charts how it changed since the late 1960s, specifically taking into account the frequency with which agencies removed African American children from their homes and placed them in foster care. Highlighting the rise of Parents Anonymous and connecting their activism to the sexual abuse moral panic that swept the country in the 1980s, Raz argues that these panics and policies—as well as biased viewpoints regarding race, class, and gender—played a powerful role shaping perceptions of child abuse. These perceptions were often directly at odds with the available data and disproportionately targeted poor African American families above others.
People who have survived ritual abuse or mind control experiments have often been silenced, accused of lying, mocked and disbelieved. Clinicians working with survivors often find themselves isolated, facing the same levels of disbelief and denial from other professionals within the mental health field. This report - based on proceedings from a conference on the subject - presents knowledge and experience from both clinicians and survivors to promote understanding and recovery from organized and ritual abuse, mind control and programming. The book combines clinical presentations, survivors' voices, and research material to help address the ways in which we can work clinically with mind control and cult programming from the perspective of relational psychotherapy.
The child sexual abuse scandal in the English county of Cleveland in the 1980s was a defining moment but not the scandal we were led to believe it was. Acclaimed journalist Beatrix Campbell has uncovered government documents that show how medical evidence of childhood rape identified by pioneering paediatricians was deemed credible but ‘dangerous’ – it was more important to save money than save children. This book reveals how this secret has framed policy making and public opinion and the consequences it has had for children, professionals, justice and the state. The deaths of ‘national treasures’ Sir Jimmy Savile and Sir Cyril Smith led to a torrent of evidence of childhood suffering, the discovery of widespread sexual exploitation and institutional abuse across the world – all in plain sight. The Cleveland children have remained in the shadows. Now, for the first time, a Cleveland child delves into her records and shares her story.
"Haven in a heartless world or site of oppression and inequality? Such claims answer each other endlessly as the state and prospects of the family are debated. The end of the family is in sight, it is often said, and from the European Parliament to the heartlands of the Moral Majority the guardians of 'traditional values' prepare their last stand. On the left too, it is frequently argued--sometimes with regret more often with easy confidence--that the family is in decline. Yet the family continues to thrive, both as an institution and as an ideology. Our society is saturated with familialism. Welfare services take it as a natural point of reference. Trade unions still bargain on the basis of the 'family wage'. The return to 'family values' is offered as a cure for everything from unemployment to street crime. In this compact book, Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh dissect the network of household, kinship and sexual relations that is the dominant family form in advanced capitalist societies. They explore the personal and social needs that it ideally meets but more often denies. They consider the role of the nuclear family form in capitalism and its functions in the formation of gendered subjectivity, taking issue with theses of such writers as Jacques Donzelot and Christopher Lasch. A final chapter proposes some elements of a moral and political practice directed beyond the family towards more egalitarian and caring alternatives. Barrett and McIntosh have written a sensitive but uncompromising socialist-feminist critique of 'the anti-social family.'"--Publisher's description.
A study which shows that sexual abuse of children has an extensive history and has been - and still is - condoned by society. The author is on the board of New York Women Against Rape and works with Women Against Pornography. Her commentary is coupled with the testimonies of victims.