We Believe the Children

by Richard Beck

  Jennifer’s mother was often physically abusive—“she would hit me all the time, would smack me on the face”—so as she entered adolescence, her therapy’s focus began to shift. But day care was never far from the discussion, and her therapists’ insistence that she really had been abused at day care complicated Jennifer’s relationship to her own thoughts and memories:

  I felt like I had secret rooms in my brain. Like, I had rooms in my brain where I needed to think very clearly, and be honest with myself, and try really hard to remember if anything happened. And at the same time, I had to keep it completely hidden and protected from my mom and the therapists. . . . They would tell me, ‘We have ways of finding out what you remember.’ So my brain just didn’t feel safe. I had to judge: If I thought really hard and remembered, could I also keep it hidden away from them? And they’re also saying, in kid language, ‘This could really backfire on you. You could end up an emotional wreck.’ I had this fear that one day I would decompose or explode.

  Civil suits meant that Jennifer and other children who attended the day care received money. This money went to the parents at first, but Jennifer gained control of it in her early twenties, and she will continue to receive payments at regular intervals, eventually totaling several hundred thousand dollars, until about the time she becomes eligible for social security. Like almost everything else about the case and its effects, the money was not openly discussed among Jennifer and her peers. She remembers a boy named Jake with whom she was close in high school. One day when they were seniors, Jake picked up Jennifer in a new red convertible he had recently bought. Then the pair drove to a nearby city, and Jake bought an expensive watch. A year later Jake came to visit Jennifer at college, and again he was talking about his money, and Jennifer asked him, “Where are you getting this money?” He said his parents told him they had invested in the stock market when he was young. Jennifer asked how much money he received and how often, and when he told her, Jennifer asked whether he had also attended the day care. He had. “I said, ‘Your parents sued the day care, and that’s where that money is from.’ He had no idea what I was talking about.”

  Going to college was important, because Jennifer knew she would not be returning to her hometown. She came out as a lesbian, and she had a long, difficult relationship with a girlfriend. Sometimes she told people about the day care. “I would tell people, ‘Nothing happened to me. I had all this crazy therapy that happened to me.’ I would also say, ‘It’s fucked up that I’m getting all this money. I should not be getting this money. Nothing should happen to me.’” She started seeing a therapist during her junior year, after an older relative died, but things didn’t get very far. “I was reticent to lay it all out there,” Jennifer says. She graduated, moved, saw a new therapist, moved again, saw another therapist, stopped seeing that therapist. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that Jennifer met a psychologist around whom she felt really comfortable. “From the very beginning,” Jennifer says, “I had to say, ‘You cannot get between me and the door, because if I feel in any way unsafe I am going to plow you over.’ So there were real baseline kinds of things.” Jennifer’s therapist respected these needs, and the two saw each other almost every week for five years. Jennifer told her all about the day care case and the therapy to which she had been subjected throughout her childhood. “We’ve learned a lot since then,” Jennifer says her therapist told her, “and you should not have been dealt with the way you were dealt with.”

  This therapy gave Jennifer a sufficiently secure grip on her childhood experiences for her to begin looking into them more deeply. Although her former lawyer had destroyed all of the files that pertained to her case, Jennifer was eventually able to track down a few dozen pages of documents. She was particularly interested to see the specific charges on which Chuck had been tried, in part because she wanted to know whether they matched two vivid memories she had of being abused at the day care. Although Jennifer knows the trauma she experienced took place in the therapy she was made to undergo, she cannot find a way to qualitatively distinguish her two day care abuse memories from memories of events she knows happened for sure, and she says they have not faded with the passage of time. In one memory, she is in the main room of the day care’s big Victorian house, and she is facing Chuck, who sits in a chair. She is in a line with the other kids, waiting for her turn. When she gets to the front, Chuck lays her facedown across his lap and then pushes a thumbtack through the seat of her jeans, into her buttocks. He does this to each child. “I don’t remember it being a problem when it was happening,” Jennifer says. “I was just like, ‘Okay, there are three kids in front of me.’ And then I remember anticipating the thumbtack going through the denim.” In the other memory, Jennifer is taken from the day care to a gravel pit. She doesn’t recall anything that happened there—just the gravel pit itself. She told her father about this once, and he drove her around outside of town looking for the gravel pit. “And as an adult, I’ve driven around trying to find it,” she says. She never found it.

  Jennifer eventually made a home for herself, her partner, and her child in a state hundreds of miles from her hometown. Her day care teacher’s conviction was eventually overturned. Around the country people associated with the ritual abuse panic moved on and moderated—or even repudiated—their old beliefs, many of them in ways that made prosecutors look like defiant and unapologetic intransigents by comparison. In 1998 John Briere, one of the leading advocates of recovered memory therapy in the 1980s, told an audience at the 12th International Congress on Child Abuse and Neglect that efforts to “liposuction people’s memories out of their brains” had been damaging. “It’s not the therapist’s job to help patients remember anything,” he said.39

  Some feminists in the incest survivors movement also expressed regrets and misgivings about their involvement with recovered memory. Diana Russell, the activist author of The Secret Trauma, wrote that although she had initially seen members of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation as “a bunch of perpetrators who were part of the backlash,” reading personal accounts by women who retracted their ritual abuse memories changed her thinking. She came to see that it was the therapists who “pathologized and depoliticized incest” who did the greatest damage to incest survivors.40 And, of course, there are the forensic interviewers who work to help child victims of abuse clearly and accurately describe their experiences in courtrooms. Professor Cheit’s concerns about a new climate of skepticism notwithstanding, most professionals believe the field is much stronger today than it was thirty years ago.41

  In other ways, however, the day care panic continued to paralyze scientific and intellectual debates on child abuse. In 1993, as satanic abusers were finally beginning to disappear from the front pages, psychology discovered yet another class of sexual predators: children themselves. The publication of Sexualized Children: Assessment and Treatment of Sexualized Children and Children Who Molest crystallized work that had initially been undertaken in the late 1980s. One of the book’s authors, Toni Cav­anagh Johnson, worked for a time at Children’s Institute International, and although her tenure there postdated Kee MacFarlane’s McMartin interviews, her writing on child sexual predators is imbued with the CII spirit. Although the preface to Sexualized Children states that it is just as important to avoid overreacting to normal sex play among children as to avoid underreacting to serious abusive behavior, the vast majority of the book’s pages are devoted to addressing the latter concern.42 With its treatment plans and multipage lists of “risk factors,” Sexualized Children and similar books opened the door to the development of therapies that pathologized many normal kinds of childhood behavior, including masturbation and bodily exploration among peers. Within the judiciary, the specter of predators lurking even among the elementary school population eventually caused some states to begin including children on public sex offender registries. Today juveniles constitute more than a third of all people thought by police to have committed a sexual off
ense against a minor, with some 4 percent of the total offending population under the age of twelve.43 In some states no law sets a minimum age for who can be placed on a public offender registry, and registration often lasts for life. By 2013 one such state, Texas, included nearly five thousand registered sexual offenders who were under the age of sixteen when they committed their crimes.44

  As the residual effects of the day care and ritual abuse panic allowed these new fears to flourish in the 1990s, they also stymied attempts to roll back the old fears. In 1998 the prestigious journal Psychological Bulletin published a detailed meta-analysis of other scientific articles on the psychological consequences of abuse.45 The paper’s lead author was the Temple University psychologist Bruce Rind. In light of the prevailing beliefs about the irreparable long-term trauma caused by abuse, many of his findings should have been received as very good news. After reviewing fifty-nine studies in which adults who were sexually abused as children were asked to describe the effects the abuse had on their lives, the authors found that abuse victims were, on average, “slightly less well adjusted” than people who had not been abused. Looking more closely, they found that the probability of future psychological maladjustment was not meaningfully influenced by the victim’s age or by the type of sex act that occurred but rather by the presence of some degree of coercion or force in the encounter. Even this insight, however, was complicated by the fact that many of the fifty-nine studies failed to distinguish the effects of abuse from the effects of a negative family environment in general. Once Rind and his colleagues controlled for family environment, the effects of abuse often became insignificant. “Basic beliefs about child sexual abuse in the general population were not supported,” the authors wrote.

  In many of the studies Rind and his team analyzed, people had been asked to reflect on their experiences of abuse and describe their reactions to them. Rind was struck by the fact that although a clear majority of women said the experience was a negative one, 25 percent reported neutral feelings, and the remaining 16 percent classified the experience as positive. For boys the results were even more surprising: 26 percent negative, 32 percent neutral, 42 percent positive.46 The authors wrote that a number of factors might explain the diversity of the victims’ responses, but first among these was the rather general scientific meaning of the terms “child” and “abuse.” 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?

  The paper made two recommendations for future studies. First, for research purposes scientists should “focus on the young person’s perception of his or her willingness to participate and his or her reactions to the experience.”47 And second, adolescent-adult encounters should be distinguished from encounters between adults and pre-adolescent children so as to take the developing sexuality of teenagers into account. Finally, Rind cautioned that “lack of harmfulness does not imply lack of wrongfulness”—in other words, that society could well have perfectly good reasons to forbid adult-child sexual encounters even if those reasons could not be grounded in “the presumption of psychological harm.”48

  That final caveat suggested that Rind and his colleagues had a fairly good idea that people might object to their findings, but it is hard to imagine that they could have anticipated the intensity of those objections. Several months after the article’s publication, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), an organization devoted to the idea that homosexuality was an emotional disorder that could be cured through psychotherapy, denounced the paper on its website.49 Three months later a Catholic newspaper called The Wanderer called the paper “pseudo-professional” and “pseudo-academic.”50 That same month, having been alerted to the paper’s existence by one of her listeners, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, host of a daily radio show that reached some 18 million people, spent nearly two days criticizing Rind’s work. She said that meta-analysis was a worthless research technique (it is not), that as a “real scientist,” she knew that scientific studies that contradicted “common sense” should be dismissed, and finally, that “the point of the article is to allow men to rape male children.”51 Then the conservative Family Research Council described the study as providing pedophiles with a “green flag.” In April, Alaska became the first of six states to introduce resolutions condemning the article, and in June the American Psychological Association announced that it would ask an independent agency to review the scientific validity of the paper’s findings, a stunning capitulation from the field’s leading professional organization. On Capitol Hill, Republican Congressman Matt Salmon described the paper as “the Emancipation Proclamation of pedophiles,” and on July 12 the House of Representatives passed Resolution 107, condemning the study and affirming that sexual encounters between adults and children are always harmful. The Senate followed suit on July 30. It was the first time in American history that Congress had condemned a scientific study of any kind.

  As the feminist intellectual Carol Tavris pointed out a year after the passage of HRC Resolution 107, what made the study so incendiary was that it challenged three social assumptions about childhood sexuality. The first is that “any sexual experience that any child has is, by definition, ‘abuse.’” This belief had allowed the set of experiences defined as “abusive” to expand during the 1980s and 1990s to the point at which it included not just unwanted sexual contact but also things like playing doctor, masturbation (in the day care cases this was often taken as a symptom of earlier abuse), and sex play among children and their peers. The second assumption, which follows directly from the first, is that “any sexual experience that any child has is, therefore, inherently traumatic, with long-lived emotional and psychological consequences.” Finally, Tavris wrote, Rind’s work had challenged a widely held belief about teenagers, who are thought “to have no sexual feeling of any kind until they are 16 (at which time they magically become mature adults) [and] are incapable of wishing to have sexual relations.”52 Congress’s insistence that these experiences were always abusive and inherently traumatic was rooted in one of the key tenets of the conservative sexual backlash that had rolled through the culture during the same period as the ritual abuse panic: that people were completely nonsexual beings until they reached the age of majority.

  Tavris and other writers also noted that it is not necessary to maintain a bogus vision of sexual psychology in order to justify laws that prohibit sexual contact between adults and children. What makes an affair between a sixteen-year-old and her teacher abusive isn’t some inherent difference between adult and adolescent sexuality but rather the lopsided distribution of power that inevitably structures their relationship. That’s what abuse is, by definition: an abuse of power. That abusive relationships are primarily defined by power imbalances becomes easier to see when child sexual abuse is considered alongside physical abuse, neglect, domestic violence, and assault. It is the battered housewife’s economic dependence on her alcoholic husband and his full-time job that makes it impossible for her to leave, the predatory coach’s ability to kick players off the team that leaves the student athlete unable to alert the administration, the child’s total dependence on her father that maintains silence.

  Extrapolating out from these intimate power structures of domesticity and personal relationships, the larger social causes of abuse come into view: the sex education curricula that prevent teens from knowing even the first thing about their sexuality, the poverty that always hits women and children harder than men, the social norms that continue to see single mothers as less worthy of aid than their married counterparts. It was exactly this type of analysis, moving from the particulars of individual experience to an analysis of the larger social structure, that characterized the work of the feminist movement in the late sixties and seventies, gave feminism’s
most famous slogan, “The personal is political,” its meaning, and made the movement such a potent force. You will never end these abuses, the argument went, by adding new diagnoses to the DSM or putting abusers in jail for longer periods of time. You will actually have to democratize family life, change relations between the sexes, and work toward a more equitable economy. But beginning with Walter Mondale’s insistence in 1974 that abuse was not a “poverty problem” but a “national problem,” continuing through the day care trials with their relentless focus on deviant perpetrator cults and mostly middle-class, mostly white, often blond victims, and concluding with the horror shows of recovered memory and MPD, these more radical analyses of abuse were systematically forgotten.

  Not everyone reacted enthusiastically to Congress’s unanimous condemnation of science. In September 1999, after being asked by the APA to conduct an independent review of Rind’s findings, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) unexpectedly said it would do no such thing. “We see no reason to second-guess the process of peer review used by the APA journal in its decision to publish the article in question,” AAAS Chair Irving Lerch wrote. He went on to express “grave concerns with the politicization of the debate over the article’s methods and findings,” and the APA would eventually receive many letters from other researchers angered by the way the organization handled the controversy.53