We Believe the Children

by Richard Beck

  This book is primarily a work of history, not of investigative journalism. The panic received enormous amounts of coverage as it took place. Some of this coverage was fearless and intelligent, and some of it was clumsy and stupid. In any case, the events recounted here are not breaking news, and my work is not a substitute for these earlier journalistic efforts. My goal is to understand why, after this initial tide of media coverage receded, so many of these cases fell so quickly into almost total obscurity. McMartin retains some wider function as a metonym for the panic as a whole, but Country Walk, Kern County and Bakersfield, the Bronx Five, Little Rascals, and Scott County, Minnesota, (to offer only the beginning of a much longer list) are unlikely to signify anything at all to people other than those who were directly involved. This is a large gap in recent historical memory, and it is not incidental to the panic’s meaning; it is a central part of it. These cases were forgotten because the issues that brought them into being—especially conflicts surrounding the transformation of family life—remain very much unresolved. This book is an attempt to understand how hysteria both responded to and shaped these new social arrangements. It is also an attempt to make a lasting, stable place for these investigations and trials in the country’s cultural and social history.

  Chapter 1

  The Discovery of Child Abuse

  In the years following the end of World War II, American doctors, psychiatrists, and social workers discovered that young children were sometimes beaten by the people who cared for them. For decades the question of what to do about child abuse—or whether to do anything at all—had been answered almost exclusively in private homes, with each family addressing the issue on its own in the manner it thought best. Now abuse became a public concern, a social problem. People began to look for a solution. How could child abuse be stopped?

  The discovery that children were regularly subjected to acts that are now universally recognized as “abusive” might actually be called a rediscovery. The Victorian era had also been preoccupied with the things certain groups of parents did to their children at home. In 1874 concerned neighbors of an eight-year-old living on West 41st Street in New York City raised the alarm about the girl’s maltreatment at the hands of her foster parents. As the neighbors reported to local officials in an unsuccessful attempt to goad the police into action, Mary Ellen Wilson’s guardians starved the girl, beat her with leather straps, and sent her out into cold weather wearing little more than rags. It wasn’t until a Methodist missionary contacted Harry Bergh, the founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, that Mary Ellen was removed from the home. Bergh and the missionary, a woman named Etta Angell Wheeler, took the foster parents to court, and the sensational trial that followed was a staple of newspaper coverage for weeks. The trial ended with a one-year sentence for the foster mother, but more lasting was a decision made by Mary Ellen’s lawyer, Elbridge T. Gerry, to found the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Gerry’s idea caught on across the United States, and by the turn of the century poor neighborhoods in many cities were filled with “anti-cruelists,” crusading reformers who scoured immigrant communities for signs of abuse. By 1910 more than 250 separate organizations devoted to child protection, primarily comprising members of the philanthropic upper classes, operated in the country’s urban areas.1

  The anti-cruelists derived part of the moral impetus for their work from the Victorian elevation of childhood as a sacred and precious time of life, but as would also be the case in the 1980s, this earlier explosion of interest in combating child abuse provided cover for a completely different set of political concerns. American cities took in some 20 million immigrants during the second half of the nineteenth century, and many people regarded these immigrants with tremendous suspicion and resentment, with special attention paid to their lack of education and training. Viewed in light of the high birth rates that prevailed among the newly arrived immigrant populations, this lack of education potentially threatened social stability itself.2 The anti-cruelists accordingly paid more attention to immigrants, whom they referred to as “the brutal poor,” than to any other group of potential child abusers.3 In 1924, however, quotas imposed by the National Origins Act set off a rapid decline in immigration rates, and so public concern about the brutal poor and their child-rearing habits went into a decline as well.4 The first wave of enthusiasm for child protection remained a feature of American life for half a century and then disappeared just as quickly as it had emerged.

  Child abuse completely disappeared from the public agenda for nearly forty years, but in 1946 a pediatric radiologist named John Caffey encountered something unexpected in the course of his work. On six separate occasions, Caffey made X-rays of infants admitted to the hospital for treatment of chronic subdural hematomas (swelling or bleeding immediately underneath the skull) and found recent fractures of the long bones in the children’s arms and legs.5 Caffey also observed scattered thickenings in children’s bones, evidence of past healing from previous traumas. Caffey was a radiologist, so he didn’t have contact with the children whose X-rays he examined, nor did he speak to the children’s parents; he was left more or less to his own devices in trying to understand the cause of their injuries. “In not a single case was there a history of injury to which the skeletal lesions could reasonably be attributed,” he wrote. In a different article published that same year, Caffey discounted scurvy, rickets, syphilis, and “neoplastic disease” as plausible causes. He also considered but then discounted violence inflicted on the children by someone else.6 Caffey wondered whether the fractures and hematomas might be associated symptoms of some new children’s disease.7 Whatever their cause, Caffey wrote, the injuries clearly deserved further attention and study.

  Evidence continued to accumulate in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as other radiologists began to report similar infant injuries. In 1953 a physician named F. N. Silverman rather tactfully identified parental carelessness as a potential source of injury. He suggested that physicians obtain detailed patient histories for injured infants, but he also wrote that doctors should not ask too many questions or seem overly suspicious.8 It was hoped that these patient histories could be obtained without alarming (or angering) the parents. In 1955, however, two other American physicians observed that many infants admitted to medical facilities with very serious injuries were “unaccompanied by readily volunteered and adequate account of injury,” and after looking into the infants’ family backgrounds, the doctors determined that they “came invariably from unstable households with a high incidence of neurotic or frankly psychotic behavior on the part of at least one adult.”9 Finally, in 1957, more than ten years after his initial discovery, John Caffey reevaluated his original data set and concluded the children had probably been injured by their parents, not by some new disease.10 One might wonder at the medical profession’s decade-long reluctance to question or challenge any aspect of parents’ conduct toward their children. How powerful the sense of embarrassment must have been in order for these doctors to avoid the most obvious conclusion for so long. It speaks volumes about the nuclear family’s status in postwar society: the prestige, the respect, and especially the extraordinary degree of privacy that families regarded as their natural right.

  The turning point came in 1962, when a Denver physician named C. Henry Kempe published “The Battered-Child Syndrome” in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Kempe had reviewed injury reports from seventy-one hospitals around the United States and identified 302 cases in which injuries appeared to have been intentionally inflicted by the child’s parents. He argued that although the condition “may occur at any age,” affected children are generally “younger than 3 years,” and he further noted that one hospital in Colorado had provided treatment to four children “suffering from the parent-inflicted battered-child syndrome” in just a single day. He wrote that symptoms varied widely, manifesting as everything from “very minor skin
changes” to “life-threatening damage to vital organs,” and that although child-beaters could often be diagnosed as “psychopathic or sociopathic characters,” it was often the case that “the guilty parent is the one who gives the impression of being the more normal.”11

  “The Battered-Child Syndrome” was the most direct acknowledgment to date that physical violence against children was a common practice of American family life, and yet it is easy to see that the authors were uncomfortable with their findings. They arrive at their conclusions slowly, even reluctantly, and they also acknowledge, in an editorial that accompanied the article, that many physicians would have difficulty following the clear trail of medical evidence to its logical conclusion. “The implication that parents were instrumental in causing injury to their child is often difficult for the physician to accept,” they wrote. “But, regardless of how distasteful it may be, the history should be reviewed for possible assault and the necessary laboratory studies performed in order to confirm or reject the suspicion.”12 Once the diagnosis of parental assault had been made, they went on to write, physicians had a moral obligation to act on that diagnosis: “The consequences of improper disposition are often so tragic that the physician must, in good conscience, call on social agencies and legal authorities to make certain that proper protection is given the child.”

  A certain queasiness surrounding the issue is further suggested by the fact that child abuse was first identified as a medical problem rather than a social one. Murder, robbery, assault—these are crimes, problems society usually asks cops, lawyers, and juries, rather than doctors, to solve. When the medical profession does get involved, as in the case of an insanity plea, the purpose is to remove some degree of moral or personal responsibility from the defendant. Kempe’s decision to describe child abuse as a “syndrome” served the same purpose. The year before his article was published in JAMA, Kempe organized a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Pediatric Association. Although Kempe had originally planned to choose a title for the panel that accurately reflected the subject of his research—that is, the physical abuse of children—colleagues warned him that such a title might scare people off. They suggested that Kempe choose a less threatening title, and after a bit of trial and error, the Battered-Child Syndrome was born.13 By medicalizing and psychologizing the issue, Kempe successfully fended off a different interpretation of child abuse, one that, in identifying abuse as a social and criminal problem, could have more forcefully assigned moral and social responsibility. But this other interpretation would not make its way into the public discourse for almost another decade.

  With its careful documentation and obvious concern for the special intricacies and difficulties of pediatrics, Kempe’s article is a model of professionalism. But it was a press release that made Kempe’s work a sensation. In the wake of his paper’s publication, Kempe convinced the American Medical Association to send a release out over the Associated Press wire, and within weeks dozens of articles had picked up the news reported in “Parental Abuse Looms in Childhood Deaths.”14 In her study of the emergence of child abuse as a political issue, Barbara J. Nelson writes that professional research journals published just 9 articles on child abuse in the decade preceding the publication of “The Battered-Child Syndrome.” In the decade following Kempe’s article that number rose to 260, and that number, in turn, was dwarfed by the number of news­paper and general interest magazine pieces that repeated and amplified the contents of the AMA’s press release.15 In the New York Times a report on Kempe and his work didn’t actually discuss any of that work until after the author had run through a disturbing list of sensational child abuse cases from around the country: in Cincinnati doctors had treated a “baby girl suffering from 20 cigarette burns”; in Boston a mother had beaten two teenage girls with a frying pan; a woman in Washington, DC, had taken out “her anger on her six-week-old baby by throwing him across the room.”16

  The Saturday Evening Post, with its readership of millions, took a similarly lurid approach:

  [Children] are strangled, thrown, dropped, shot, stabbed, shaken, drowned, suffocated, sexually violated, held under running water, tied upright for long periods of time, stepped on, bitten, given electric shocks, forced to swallow pepper or buried alive. The reports of the injuries read like a case book of a concentration-camp doctor: bruises, contusions, welts, skull fractures, broken bones, brain injuries, burns, concussions, cuts, gashes, gunshot and knife wounds, ruptured vital organs, bites, dislocated necks, asphyxiations, eyes gouged out.17

  In Time, Life, Newsweek, and elsewhere journalists focused at length and in detail on the variety and brutality of abuse, but they consistently did so within the medical framework set out by Kempe and his colleagues. The Saturday Evening Post headline said it best: “A Tragic Increase in Cases of Child Abuse Is Prompting a Hunt for Ways to Select Sick Adults Who Commit Such Crimes.”

  Medical professionals and state legislatures began to feel that some kind of a response was needed, and they tailored that response to fit the spirit of the times. By the middle of the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs were well under way. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 established an office aimed at addressing the roots of poverty as well as a Job Corps designed to provide vocational training. The federal government also established programs and passed legislation to fund public schools, protect large tracts of wilderness from industrial development, build low-income housing, establish suffrage for nonwhites, provide basic health care to the poor, and raise safety standards for consumer products. The country was experiencing a surge of optimism about the federal government’s ability to solve social problems with legislation, and the doctors who rediscovered child abuse at the beginning of the decade felt that they should not be left behind. In 1963, California became the first state to pass a law mandating that physicians report any suspected instances of child abuse to the authorities. Just four years later, Hawaii became the fiftieth state, along with the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands, to pass such a law.18 Even in the midst of the period’s intoxicating political optimism, the reporting laws were adopted with astonishing speed. In most cases those who reported their suspicions received immunity from civil or criminal lawsuits, and although the specific list of responsible professionals varied from state to state—some also included dentists, social workers, or pharmacists—the laws all agreed on a basic principle: for the first time, some people had a professional obligation to look for and speak up about child abuse.

  The historian Judith Sealander has described Florida’s initial experience with reporting laws as typical. The state’s department of protective services only reported 16 cases of abuse across the state in 1965. Over the next eight years, however, Florida publicized a toll-free hotline number that citizens could call to report abuse and also ran television and radio ads describing the provisions of the reporting law. By 1971 protective services had recorded 250 cases of child abuse, and by 1974 the number would explode to more than 28,000.19 It was at this point, as states scrambled to adequately staff their new reporting agencies, that the rhetoric surrounding child abuse began to change. Child abuse had initially been publicized as a syndrome, a collection of associated symptoms inflicted on children by adults who often displayed symptoms of mental illness as well. In the early 1970s, however, a different medical term began to appear in newspaper headlines and at professional conferences. Now the country was facing an “epidemic.”

  The first people to attempt a political analysis of child abuse—what caused it, what its consequences were, and what it said about the country’s social arrangements—were members of the women’s liberation movement. On April 17, 1971, a psychiatric social worker named Florence Rush made a presentation at Washington Irving High School in New York City. She was delivering her talk at a conference and speak-out on rape that had been organized by a group called New York Radical Feminists. At fifty-three, Rush was a few decades older
than most of the young activists and thinkers who provided radical feminism with its initial surge of energy, and despite her years of organizing experience, she was more or less unknown to the younger feminist generation.

  Her presentation, “The Sexual Abuse of Children: A Feminist Point of View,” stunned the audience.20 Rush historicized child sex abuse, explaining that the sexual culture of the Victorian era had given rise to both the idea of the innocent child as well as that innocent child’s illicit erotic appeal. Departing from the popular view of child sex abuse as the product of psychological deviance—this remains the popular view of child sex abuse today—Rush analyzed abuse in terms of the power structures that made it possible, writing that psychiatrists had ignored “a social milieu where male sexual power over women and children is institutionally integrated.”21 Her talk attacked conservatives who believed the family was a benign institution based on love and affection, but she also criticized leftists who argued that the sexual revolution would eventually cause the taboo of pedophilia to fall harmlessly away. Both of her critiques were founded on the argument that the causes and the consequences of child abuse stemmed from inequalities that were built into the basic structure of the nuclear family. Rush’s insistence on thinking through a problem that was often described as “unthinkable” made her talk a sensation, and she received the conference’s lone standing ovation. Following Rush’s lead, many radical feminists would come to believe that in order to eradicate child abuse, the family itself would have to change.

  Although more moderate progressive groups were not interested in mounting such a direct attack on the country’s most sacred institution, they did try to link violent child abuse to other aspects of child welfare, including poverty, education, and the problems working women faced in trying to keep jobs while caring for children. They believed it would be impossible to understand or prevent abuse unless the problem could be situated within a more general picture of children’s lives. In 1971 the National Organization for Women (NOW), which was then the largest and most powerful feminist group in the country, spent enormous amounts of energy and money supporting a bill called the Comprehensive Child Development Act. A textbook example of Great Society optimism and ambition, the bill would have funded the single-greatest expansion of federal children’s services in the country’s history. Conservatives wanted nothing to do with it. A particular flashpoint was a set of provisions that would have provided federal day care services to parents across the country, with a set of sliding fees in place to accommodate a range of incomes. NOW and other feminist organizations had fought hard to encourage women to leave the domestic sphere and enter the workforce, and now that women actually were beginning to make their way into white-collar workplaces, feminists hoped that the federal government would provide them with much-needed support.