We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s (book)
We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s by Richard Beck describes the moral panic and hysteria surrounding "child sex panics" but misses the whole point--it was the radical feminists, using false and misleading propaganda, who set off the panic in the first place! And Richard Beck? He still believes the rest of the radical feminist propaganda about the evils of "the patriarchal nuclear family"! So, by supporting the radical feminist liturgy, he furthers the myths about "monster pedophiles". That shows just how effectively the radical feminists have seized control of the American mind.
Jason Willick, of the-american-interest.com, reviewing the book:
- But We Believe The Children is not only, or even primarily, a work of history. It is first and foremost a sophisticated culture war polemic. Woven throughout Beck’s measured, journalistic accounts of the investigations and prosecutions is a radical political argument—an all-out attack on “the patriarchal nuclear family,” an institution that he sees as having no function whatsoever except to suppress individual freedom. It is the “patriarchal nuclear family,” Beck insists, that is the real cause of child sexual abuse. The heroes in his narrative are the radical feminists who sought to dismantle the family in the 1960s and 1970s. And the villains are the Reagan-era social conservatives who sought to stem its decline. According to Beck, these reactionaries created the 1980s hysteria by terrifying parents into thinking that alternative social arrangements would put their children in peril.[1]
BoyLovers today are demonized largely on the basis of the panic and hysteria fostered by the media when reporting on false cases of so-called "child sexual abuse". This book is especially beneficial for those under the age of 40, who don't remember the cases unfolding (and then collapsing) in the press.
Product Details
BOOK COVER: https://anonfiles.com/file/87105e5a8ecf3ad24cd1af29ce10c212
- Hardcover: 352 pages
- Publisher: PublicAffairs (August 4, 2015)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1610392876
- ISBN-13: 978-1610392877
Awards
A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2015 A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015
Publisher's description from Amazon.com
"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."
Google books description of the book
"In the 1980s in California, New Jersey, and New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, and elsewhere, daycare workers were arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of committing horrible sexual crimes against the children they cared for. These crimes, prosecutors said, had gone undetected for years, and their brutality and sadism defied all imagining. What’s more, the abusers had photographed and videotaped their victims, distributing the images through a sophisticated international network of child pornographers. More often than not, violent satanic cult worship had also played a central role, with children made to watch forced abortions in cemeteries and then eat hacked-off bits of the little corpses. In just over a decade, thousands of people in every part of the country were investigated as child sex abusers, and some one-hundred and fifty of them were sent to prison.
But, none of it happened. It was an epic decade-long outbreak of collective hysteria – on a par with the Salem witch trials or the red scares of the 1950s.
Using extensive archival research conducted in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and elsewhere, and drawing on dozens of interviews conducted with the hysteria’s major figures, Richard Beck shows how a group of legislators, doctors, lawyers, and parents, all working with the best of intentions, set the stage for a judicial disaster. A number of opportunistic journalists helped to carry the story from state to state, and the silence of their colleagues, who should have known better, allowed it to keep spreading long after it became clear that the story was simply unsupported by evidence. Beck reveals how a small group of skeptics finally began working to slow the runaway train in the last half of the decade, and he explores the fates of those accused and convicted of these unbelievable crimes, the casualties of a culture war. It is this culture war that is the books pervasive subtext – the conditions that made possible the demented frenzy of accusations were very specific, and at the root of them were competing visions of society and the things that threatened it most."
Book reviews from Amazon.com
4.0 out of 5 stars
- Suspension of disbelief - nationwide
- By David Winebergon August 2, 2015
"Throughout the 80s and 90s I clipped articles on the various fantastic sex and satan arrests and trials that suddenly became the norm. It filled a folder to the point where I had to split it into cases. We Believe The Children is a summary of those cases, the background and tangents to them, and what happened to those accused. Not a single one of them should have been jailed.
A plague of madness passed over the country, in which adults came to believe vast numbers of children were being sexually abused in their daycare centers. No amount of testimony, no lack of any evidence whatsoever, could dissuade them. Daycare workers were international pornographers, perverts and Satanists. Period. Parents pestered their children until they parroted back what the adults wanted to hear and the adults turned them over to police and therapists who pestered them harder and further in order to bring charges. The children learned the only way to make this annoyance stop was to tell them what they wanted to hear. Often they made up totally unbelievable stories the authorities took at face value. Animal sacrifices, secret rooms under concrete slabs, wild costumes, sexual games, airline flights to other cities, deaths - nothing was too crazy in support of these cases.
The other driver was prosecutors in search of fame and fortune. Their personal agendas kept the cases alive long after it was clear they were not just unwinnable but farcical.
Beck tries to make the case that change in society was at the bottom of it all. The breakdown of the 1950s family, the rise of preschools and programmed activities, both parents working – all meant that adults felt guilt and fear over children’s upbringing. That may be, but the terror the whole country went through, ruining numerous lives, putting many children in damaging therapy, and diverting the justice system to absolve adults of these nightmares is both fascinating and horrifying. Statistically, most sexual abuse occurs at home. Another third of it occurs between children themselves. Daycare accounts for next to none of it.
Beck does an excellent job recreating the scenes, the trials and the mental abuse of the children, whose only experience with sexual abuse was at the hands of the police and therapists who forced them to create new memories of things that never happened. It has made messes of their lives as much as it has for all those jailed for years, having to sell their homes and businesses to pay their defense bills, and their ostracism in society. Their own children were immediately removed from them, and getting them back was another nightmare.
I was most displeased with Beck’s abandoning the comprehensiveness of his book by all but ignoring two of the biggest cases. In Wenatchee, Washington, 43 adults were charged with 29,000 crimes of sex abuse on 60 children. Just to accomplish this is obviously not possible. These preschoolers would have had to be there over a decade. The fantasies expressed in the charges are laughable, the horror of destroying the lives of childcare workers is shocking, and the seeming untouchability of the officer in charge is revolting. Similarly, the Amirault case in Malden, Massachusetts dragged on for a decade at the behest of an aggressive attorney general who wanted to be governor. Nothing could keep him from his appointment with destiny: certainly not backing down on sex abuse charges. Yet Beck devotes just two pages to these cases as he winds up the history of the madness. It’s as if he had had enough too.
There are cases where impossible, imagined diseases spread through whole towns, and cases where whole populations believed they were infested with witches and worse. This case fits those models, and this book is a clear warning that common sense can easily be suspended sine die."
5.0 out of 5 stars
- Kindergarten Horrors
- By Rob Hardy HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWE Ron October 30, 2015
"Richard Beck is 28 years old, and as a writer for the journal _n + 1_, was involved in a research group that looked into the history of radical feminism. Thus he was introduced into something he had never heard of before, the child abuse panics of the 1980s. Those of us who are older remember the sensational stories that children at kindergartens had been sexually and satanically abused, and everyone began wondering how safe it was to entrust your child to others for pay. Beck realized that he wasn’t the only one who didn’t know about the panics; he could hardly find anyone under thirty who knew about the events, and when he told people he was writing a book about the subject, they thought he must be working on a novel. _We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s_ (PublicAffairs) is no novel, but it is a serious account of horrifying incidents when reason went to sleep and monsters were produced. Beck is good at recounting the episodes, concentrating on the McMartin Preschool case in Manhattan Beach, California, but he is far from the first at telling it. His book is especially good for those who did not live at the time of the case as it is comprehensive and puts the events into the sociological and psychological context of the time. It also shows that we are still dealing with the aftereffects of the panic.
It all began in the summer of 1983 with one dubious report of a child with a medical problem; because it might have been a result of abuse, the police sent out a letter to parents requesting them to ask the kids about specific sexual acts at the kindergarten.. The setup was in place; the panic took over and reigned for years. The children were coaxed into telling stories that were horrific and at times made no sense; they told of tunnels beneath the school where they had been tortured and abused (there were no such tunnels), or being raped by a robot, or seeing animals ritually killed and worse. One little girl told an investigator, “It’s all a story,” and she thereupon wasn’t included as a complainant in the case. Physical evidence, like the photographs that were supposed to have been taken or the cat bodies that were supposed to have been mutilated, were never found. This was, however, not a demonstration that such evidence did not exist; it showed to the contrary that the devious abusers were experts at making sure the evidence was never going to be found. Something like $15 million was spent on getting the case to trial and on the trial itself, which lasted for six years. There were copycat cases all over the country. Almost all, just like the McMartin case, resulted in eventual court decisions of not guilty. The judicial system was able to go back and reflect that there had been clear instances of overreach on the part of investigators and prosecutors, but few such overreachers lost their jobs, and many went on to higher office.
Beck writes about how the panic was a reflection of its times. In the eighties, social conservatives were worried about feminism and changes in the family. No one planned the day-care panic to be a social lesson, but it was taken up as a warning to women who thought they could manage a life outside the home while turning over care of their children to others. We still have a legacy of the panic, in that some people are horrified that children are allowed ever to go unsupervised. Child abuse is horrible, and is not imaginary, but the pattern is that it happens at home; the horrible image of a child abducted from a public place by a violent pedophile is a horror only, and vanishingly rare. We are also faced with the pop psychology that if a person has a horrible experience, the person is likely to repress it. This simply is not the way humans operate; we do learn lessons from bad experiences, and it would be to our detriment to make them inaccessible to memory. There was a dental assistant who used to visit the McMartin school to teach hygiene, and reflected to her sorrow that she had never seen anything suspicious. She said at the time, “How could we have been so blind?” It’s a great question, but blindness comes in many forms, and one of the most troubling is seeing what is not there."
5.0 out of 5 stars
- 'Compelling, Interesting & Important
- ByAlex Wilsonon October 30, 2015
“We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s,” by Richard Beck, is a compelling book about the satanic ritual abuse, childcare sexual abuse, and repressed memory scandals that rocked the U.S. in the 1980s and early ‘90s. The autobiography “Michelle Remembers” and the McMartin preschool trial are thoroughly covered to highlight the hysteria and “witch hunt” against “epidemic” sexual abuse. Beck analyzes the legal, psychological, and sociological events that led to these scandals, and the backlash afterwards.
A cautionary tale for prosecutors, therapists, and media outlets, “We Believe the Children” documents the devolution of good intentions. As Beck points out, “prosecutors asked their child witnesses to do nearly all the heavy lifting in court,” forgoing hard evidence and incontrovertible proof with the manipulated stories of children “as young as three and almost never older than nine or ten.”
As Beck rightly highlights: “Resources that might have been directed towards addressing the real causes of child abuse—simply put, these are poverty, the relative powerlessness of women and children within the nuclear family, and the patriarchal organizations of many workplaces, schools and other social institutions—were instead used to fend off bogeymen. This misrecognition of the problem of child abuse and the misallocation of money and energy that resulted were, in a sense, part of the point. As disruptive and painful as the day care sex abuse cases were to those involved, addressing the real causes of child abuse would have been a much more difficult and disruptive task.”
Beck is highly critical of conservatives and liberals, noting that homosexuals’ “supposed predisposition to pedophilia,” the power structures of the nuclear family, pornography, chauvinism, and Satanism were blamed for the “epidemic” of child sexual abuse. This is perhaps best highlighted in Beck’s investigation of the 1980s “nonfiction” “Michelle Remembers”—“a tour-de-force of un-self-awareness”—and his inquiry in the Kee MacFarlane’s inquisition of the children involved in the McMartin case, where therapists were detectives, soothsayers and prosecutors.
If these stories were fiction, they would be over the top. “Satanic Abuse Task Forces” searched for hidden dungeons and Satanic sex chambers, while children were coaxed into telling elaborate stories of being bitten by sharks at the behest of their abusers, undergoing ritual abortions, and forced enemas. Unfortunately, the telling of these stories is true, and had devastating consequences. For example, Bernard Baran, an openly gay man whose sexuality was used against him in court, was convicted of sexually abusing five children. Regarding one of Baran’s supposed victims, Beck notes, “when social services interviewed the boy, however, he unambiguously claimed to have been abused by his mother’s boyfriend, who was never charged with a crime.”
Perhaps Rosanne Barr best exemplifies the mentality that led to the hysteria of “epidemic” sexual abuse. Regarding the question, “‘Were you sexually abused as a child?’” Rosanne states: “there are only two answers, one of them is ‘Yes,’ and one of them is, ‘I don’t know.’ You can’t say, ‘No.’” This mentality fit perfectly with Multiple Personality Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder, which were created to explain the elaborate ways adults who were abused as children were able to forget their abuse for years, only to have it resurface in a therapists office.
Looking ahead, Beck rightly highlights today’s moral panic: children as sex offenders. He notes, “the specter of predators lurking even among the elementary school population eventually caused some states to begin including children on public sex offender registries.” [Full disclosure, I’ve worked for state governments regarding child sex offender laws] Federal acts like the Adam Walsh Act (AKA, Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act), compel States that adopt the Act to place some juvenile “offenders” on sex offender registries. This includes children and teens who take naked selfies and send it to friends, and teens who have sex with teens. Beck highlights, “Today juveniles constitute more than a third of all people thought by police to have committed a sexual offense against a minor, with some 4 percent of the total offending population under the age of twelve.”
In my own research, one government report found that individuals under the age of 18 account for 23% of reported cases of child sexual abuse. (Snyder, H.N. (2000). Sexual assault of young children as reported to law enforcement: Victim, incident, and offender characteristics. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics.) Rightly, however, Beck pokes holes in these studies. For example, when discussing retrospective studies conducted on college campuses, Beck asks: “If preschoolers and sixteen-year-olds alike were classified as children, and if “abuse” referred to everything from repeated violent assault to incest to fondling to isolated incidents of exhibitionism, how could one reasonably expect to find uniformity in people’s responses to child abuse?”
Perhaps most unsettling about the ritual abuse and day care abuse scandals of the 80s, and today’s juvenile sex offender hysteria, is that it quashes honest inquires in real problems. Two-thirds of sexual abuse happens at home or by individuals who in the victims’ “circle of trust.” (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Administration on Children, Youth and Families. (2007) Child Maltreatment 2005. Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.) Though it’s true that some children and teens do abuse other children, many of these cases are only considered “abuse” because of overzealous laws, overprotective parents, or ambiguities around what constitutes abuse. Further, children who actually are abusers are overwhelmingly repeating learned bad behavior, are themselves victims of sexual abuse, and should be treated as victims and not as offenders.
Do I believe everything Richard Beck wrote? Not quite. Also, his delivery—while entertaining (I laughed out loud at some of his sly remarks)—can come across as condescending, but how can it not when you’re discussing a book like “Michelle Remembers?” That said, “We Believe the Children” is a worthy read because it is compellingly written (quite a feat given the topic), an appropriate length, and applicable to law enforcers, policy makers, lawyers/prosecutors, psychologists/therapists, parents, and everyone in between.
My genuine hope for this “We Believe the Children,” based on my experience working as an advocate for people who have been sexually abused and my policy work in three states, is that this book leads to honest discussions about the true nature of childhood sexual abuse. In a society were “yes means yes” receives lauded front page headlines; a book like "Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men (Sexual Cultures)" (published by NYU Press) dismisses “do-or die” frat and military sexual hazing as “cultural” and “hyper-heterosexual;” and two fifteen-year-olds who engage in consensual sexual activities gets them both listed as sex offenders for 25 years; society is a long way from addressing the causes and resolutions to child (and adult) sexual abuse. “We Believe the Children” is a great place to begin the conversation.
Thank you NetGalley and Perseus Books Group for providing me with an ARC."
References
See also
- (more to be added)
- Moral panic
