We Believe the Children

by Richard Beck

  Despite the fact that the December interviewees said little that their November predecessors hadn’t already said, and despite the fact that so few of them became formally involved in the criminal complaint and trial, they were important to the development of the case as a whole. Criminal complaint or no, MacFarlane was absolutely convinced that nearly all of the children she saw over the first two months had been abused, that Ray’s “pee-pee” had “touched a lot of people.” But during December she also came to believe, as Judy Johnson believed, that teachers other than Ray were involved and that the crimes they had committed went well beyond what investigators normally saw in sex abuse cases. As MacFarlane sat on the floor in the middle of the room and interviewed each child, the person operating the video camera kept a written log of what was said. (These logs were made so that particular exchanges could be tracked down after the fact, without having to go through an entire transcript.) These logs document CII’s growing conviction that the teachers at McMartin had not only been abusive but, bizarrely, elaborately so: Peggy had watched Ray molest a student; Betty Raidor had taken photographs during the naked movie star game, removed her own clothes in class, and driven a tied-up child to an unidentified home in the area where she had taken more pictures; and Babette Spitler had not only organized but played the naked movie star game. In some instances CII therapists entered these claims in logs summarizing interviews in which children had not actually made those claims.45 With twelve months of additional interviews to come, CII made up its mind about what had happened at McMartin.

  In the thirty years since these interviews were conducted, a number of commentators have tried to excuse MacFarlane’s mistakes on the grounds that social workers and therapists working with suspected sex abuse victims in the 1980s simply could not have known any better. As a discipline, the forensic interview was in its infancy, and the body of psychiatric research on the dynamics of conducting forensic interviews with children was tiny. In his recent book The Witch-Hunt Narrative, Ross E. Cheit acknowledged that some of the techniques used at CII “are now recognized as inappropriate,” but the “now” in that phrase does more to exonerate MacFarlane than to criticize her, as though she were simply the unfortunate product of scientifically unenlightened times.46 Incomplete scientific knowledge, however, does not seem to account for MacFarlane’s approach to her interview subjects, nor does it account for the video operators’ mistaking the interviewer’s questions for the children’s answers in compiling the logs.

  When children said “no” in response to MacFarlane’s questions, she tended to believe that they would have said “yes” except for their teachers’ intimidation. She acquired this belief, at least in part, from a local psychiatrist named Roland Summit. Working out of the Harbor UCLA Medical Center in nearby Torrance, Summit was officially a “community psychiatrist.” In the 1970s he helped Jolly K organize Parents Anonymous’s first board of directors, and he encountered both victims and abusers in the course of advising police departments and other organizations. He wrote papers based on his clinical work in which he tried to taxonomize child sex abuse, describing incest as a kind of familial love run amok. “Snuggling with children under the covers on a cold Sunday morning,” he wrote in a 1978 paper, “can be one of the great joys of family living. A woman may remember fondly the warmth and strength of her father’s body against her.”47 Problems arose, he wrote, when this affection overstepped the bounds family roles assigned to it: “A child is regarded at times as something other than a child, or as a surrogate of someone else.”48 This “someone else” was almost always the mother, who was “no longer invested either in endorsing her husband’s ego needs or in trying to wring pleasure from a tired relationship.” Burying herself in “a job, church, or social commitments,” the mother can “count on her daughter to take her place.” The victim of incest, meanwhile, is almost always a girl on the cusp of adolescence, a developmental stage at which she is “learning to transmit the magical vibrations our society requires of the emergent woman.”49 (Summit’s words often took on this slightly honeyed quality, which, given the subject matter, was unfortunate. In one newspaper interview he ventriloquized the incestuous father’s point of view by describing children as “delicious little creatures.”)50

  Although Summit was an early adherent to the feminist idea that incest was a woefully underacknowledged social problem, his theories about incest’s causes were more deeply rooted in prefeminist, midcentury psychiatric doctrine, with its transference, its Oedipal fantasies, and its menagerie of unwittingly seductive children and frigid wives and mothers. He also shared with midcentury psychiatric orthodoxy the idea that family preservation took priority over most other considerations. Some of Summit’s work involved reintegrating incestuous fathers into the families that had been torn apart by their actions. He believed that healthy family life was organized around limits and that “incestuous activity begins when the father needs to bend those limits and the mother chooses to ignore them.”51 He began regularly working with Kee MacFarlane shortly after her move to Los Angeles.

  Summit saw no children as patients, nor had he conducted any peer-reviewed original research on child sex abuse, but by the late 1970s he was well established throughout Southern California as an expert on the subject. He made what is undoubtedly his most influential contribution to the field in 1979, when he began work on a paper that would eventually be published under the title “The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome” (CSAAS).52 “Since the events depicted by the child are so often perceived as incredible,” Summit wrote, “skeptical caretakers turn to experts for clarification. . . . Every clinician must be capable of understanding and articulating the position of the child in the prevailing adult imbalance of credibility.” To facilitate this understanding, Summit proposed the CSAAS, which was in essence a narrative describing the process by which children did or did not disclose the abuse they had suffered. For many therapists, investigators, and prosecutors who would become involved with massive child sex abuse cases during the 1980s, this narrative would become a sort of hymn. An oddly self-regarding tone prevails throughout the paper, which describes psychiatric professionals as leaders in society’s effort to bring the problem of child sex abuse out into the light.

  The syndrome included five “categories”:

  1. Secrecy

  2. Helplessness

  3. Entrapment and accommodation

  4. Delayed, conflicted, and unconvincing disclosure

  5. Retraction

  The first three concerned the child’s experience of abuse as it happens. Of the first, Summit wrote that child abuse “happens only when the child is alone with the offending adult, and it must never be shared with anyone else.” He provided a long list of examples, things a molesting adult might say to a child to underline the importance of keeping the secret: “Nobody will believe you”; “If you tell anyone (a) I won’t love you anymore, (b) I’ll spank you, (c) I’ll kill your dog, or (d) I’ll kill you.” Basing his argument in large part on reports and anecdotes he received from other clinicians at professional conferences and symposia, Summit argued that “any attempts by the child to illuminate the secret will be countered by an adult conspiracy of silence.” In the face of such a dynamic, a child victim might naturally move into the second stage of the CSAAS: helplessness. Summit discussed the power imbalance that characterizes all adult-child sexual encounters, an imbalance produced not only by the disparity in size and strength but also by the caretaking or authoritarian role played by the adult. “Small creatures simply do not call on force to deal with overwhelming threat,” Summit wrote. “Children generally learn to cope silently with terrors in the night. Bed covers take on magical powers against monsters, but they are no match for human intruders.”

  Trapped in an abusive relationship with someone who wields such enormous power and authority, the child progresses into the third stage of Summit’s syndrome, “entrapment and accommodatio
n.” Summit describes how the abused girl eventually learns to accept her situation—the paper only discusses girls as victims, citing the difficulty of obtaining reliable clinical data on the abuse of boys—not because she enjoys the abuse but because she must find a way to survive. This involves accommodating not only the abuse itself, which Summit says tends to escalate in severity as time passes, but also the child’s growing awareness that what is happening is wrong, that it is a betrayal, and that her father has abandoned his proper role in pursuit of his own desires. This abandonment, Summit writes, is an extremely violent and disfiguring psychological experience for the child, one that resonates throughout the rest of a person’s life. Summit writes that entrapment and accommodation lie at the root of “much of what is eventually labeled as adolescent or adult psychopathology.”

  To this point in the paper, the psychological dynamics Summit describes, although outlined in a melodramatic way, are more or less in line with clinical observations subsequently made by thousands of counselors, therapists, and social workers. Toward the end of the third section, however, Summit introduces a more radical idea. Describing the effects of accommodation, Summit says on multiple occasions that the process breaks the child’s psyche apart. He approvingly cites another researcher who wrote, “This is a mind splitting or a mind fragmenting operation,” Self-hate produces “a vertical split” in the child’s sense of reality, and a few paragraphs on, Summit describes the “inevitable splitting” of moral values that attends the experience of abuse. Writing in the wake of Sybil but before the publication of Michelle Remembers, Summit became one of the first physicians to write that victims of child sexual abuse “may develop multiple personalities”—one to handle the feelings of rage, another to suffer in silence, and so on—or that victims frequently “dissociate” from their own bodies during abuse so as to avoid experiencing its full horror.

  The fourth aspect of the CSAAS is “delayed, conflicted, and unconvincing disclosure.” It refers to victims’ common reluctance to tell others about the abuse, adult family members’ desire to seek other explanations for what is going on, and a wider social failure to credit those rare allegations that actually do make it into the criminal justice system. (Then, as now, child abuse remains an underreported crime.) This, again, outlines a psychological dynamic that is widely recognized among child protection and mental health professionals. Summit went a step further, however, in describing what he saw as the therapist’s appropriate role in the drama of disclosure. “The psychiatrist or other counseling specialist has a crucial role in early detection, treatment intervention, and expert courtroom advocacy,” he wrote. Faced, first, with children reluctant to disclose, and second, with parents and judges who hesitated to believe those disclosures that did manage to come out, the task of exposing and insisting on the truth fell squarely on the psychiatrist’s shoulders. Summit had essentially asked a group of healers to start working as investigators and prosecutors as well. Like much of Summit’s writing from this period, “The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome” has a bit of a messianic gleam in its eye.

  In the paper’s final pages Summit wrote, “It has become a maxim among child sexual abuse intervention counselors and investigators that children never fabricate the kinds of explicit sexual manipulations they divulge in complaints or interrogations.” Though presented as therapeutic common sense, this was actually Summit’s most radical claim. He wrote that no more than two or three children per thousand invented or exaggerated abuse claims and that among those children who misrepresented reality at all, the prevailing tendency was to minimize what had taken place. Summit’s argument was essentially that if children say they are abused, then they are always telling the truth. No less radical was Summit’s description of the final stage of the CSAAS, “retraction.” “Whatever a child says about sexual abuse,” Summit wrote, adding the italics himself, “she is likely to reverse it.” Summit argued that in the wake of disclosing abuse, the child is likely to face intense emotional pressure from those around her. Her father will accuse her of tearing the family apart. Her mother will ask how she could say such things about the man who has provided and cared for her. As a result, Summit wrote, a child following “the ‘normal’ course” of things will eventually admit that her story was made up. The quotation marks that Summit put around the word “admits” suggest that only in this one instance, in the case of retraction, is suspicion of the child’s truth-telling capabilities appropriate.

  In later years Roland Summit would write articles and give presentations bemoaning the unscientific way in which some therapists, prosecutors, and police detectives had used his CSAAS, but here he has only himself to blame. CSAAS was easy to use in an irresponsible way because it is an irresponsible paper. Summit made the therapist out as a kind of hero detective, someone uniquely well suited to persuade children to reveal their darkest secrets. Once those secrets did come out into the open, the paper implied, the investigator’s work was essentially done—if children were psychologically incapable of lying about sexual abuse, then corroborating evidence was just a superfluous adjunct to a truth the therapist already knew. And if a child should eventually retract her allegations for any reason—including accusations of overzealous or coercive interviewing—the therapist should not trouble himself too much. Given that Summit described it as a completely normal part of the disclosure process, a therapist might even be justified in seeing retraction as supporting the veracity of the child’s initial claims.

  MacFarlane and her colleagues at CII put Roland Summit’s theories into practice. In the interviews conducted during the first month of 1984, MacFarlane’s suspicion that the children’s denials were masking secret pain hardened into a conviction. A January 24 interview with a boy named Keith Doherty is very easy to interpret: the child repeatedly said that nothing bad happened at McMartin and that he did not play naked games or go into a bathroom with Ray. Again and again, MacFarlane encouraged him to come up with different answers. MacFarlane conducted much of the interview via puppets used by her and by Keith, a tactic thought to help children maintain some measure of psychological distance from the events they were about to recount. Early in the interview, as MacFarlane introduced these puppets, she explained their purpose to Keith:

  We and the puppets are trying to figure out secrets. That’s what we do in here. And this microphone is called our secret machine. And the way it works is that we tell it secrets, and they go down in that wire, and they go into the box, and they go into the TV, and then they’re gone. And that’s how it works. . . . We found out that there’s some secrets going around from your old school. And the puppets have been trying their best to figure it out. And all the kids from your old school have come to tell—help the puppets tell.53

  The first puppet Keith picked to use was a Looney Tunes rooster named Foghorn Leghorn, and as he tried it on, MacFarlane introduced a distinction that would become one of the interview’s themes. “Do you know anything?” she asked Foghorn. “Are you smart, or are you dumb?”54 Keith assured MacFarlane that he was smart. Keith was somewhat older than many of the other children interviewed at CII, and MacFarlane told him that these younger children were “too little to tell us, because they’re babies.” “What we’re trying to do is talk to the older kids,” she said, mentioning his name along with the names of a few peers, “because they’re the smartest kids in the whole school and they can help the little kids.” MacFarlane said, “We can figure out the games. That would be simple if you’re smart.”

  “Yeah, I’m smart,” Keith said.55 MacFarlane also told the child that she had talked to his parents and that while they hoped he would be able to tell some secrets, they didn’t know if their son had “a good enough memory.”

  Keith replied, “Well, I have a good enough memory.”56

  But when MacFarlane started to ask Keith about specific games and abuses, he refused to play along. He said Ray did not ride children around like a horsey, and he sai
d the horsey game was not played naked. At this point MacFarlane asked Keith to use a new puppet, an alligator, who maybe could be more helpful. “All right Mr. Alligator,” she said through her own bird puppet, “are you going to be stupid, or are you going to be smart and help us here?”

  “Well, I’ll be smart,” Keith said.

  Now MacFarlane asked the Alligator to talk about the naked movie star game. “Do you remember that game, Mr. Alligator,” she said, “or is your memory too bad?”57 Keith said he did not remember a naked movie star game. All he remembered was “a little song,” someone in his class singing, “naked movie star, naked movie star” as a joke. MacFarlane told the alligator puppet that he “better not play dumb.” When Keith again denied that he had ever seen anyone playing a game called “naked movie star,” MacFarlane said, “Well, what good are you? You must be dumb.”58

  At the end of the interview, after he had given in and agreed with MacFarlane that Ray had touched kids, he even tried to clarify that the allegations weren’t being made because of anything he had experienced. Speaking to each other through puppets, MacFarlane thanked Keith for being such a help. “Well, Keith told me,” said Keith, through the puppet, and then he added, “Well, his mommy and daddy told him, then he told me.” Finally, as the interview was winding down, Keith appeared to become anxious about what he had just said. “Some of the stuff I sort of forget,” he told MacFarlane, “and like then I remember, and I’m not really sure.”59 MacFarlane cut him off, but he tried to bring it up one more time: