The pediophilia panic

I just got an extremely loud series of beeps on my cell phone. It was an Amber Alert, asking me (and every other owner of a cell phone in Colorado) to look out for a red Kia Sorrento. Ironic, because I was just reading a piece by Julia Yost at First Things, who writes that in the 1980s

Our mother was reacting to news reports that America was creeping and crawling with child predators. These were people undetectable by the casual observer but secretly organized in rings or cults dedicated to the violation of children, whether recreationally or as stipulated by satanic rites. Often they operated preschools or daycare centers as fronts for culling.

A new book by n+1 editor ­Richard Beck recalls this extraordinary popular delusion and the secondary delusions entailed by it: the fantastical orgies; the intricate high-reaching conspiracies; the magical ability of children to sustain gross physical injury without scarring; the pseudo-psychiatric theories of traumatic repression and recovered memory.

It was a strange time. Beck is solid on the history, chronicling several high-profile criminal cases with an emphasis on the nonsense. And he belabors an irony that cannot be belabored enough. His sarcastic title is We Believe the Children. During the daycare and preschool abuse panic, grownups were required to “believe the children,” or else be denounced for collaborating with evil. “Children never lie” about sex abuse, we were told. On the contrary, as Beck details, children could often be induced to tell untruths about sex abuse. Prolonged and harassing interrogation would do the trick; evocative psychotherapy, aided by hypnosis or psychopharmaceuticals, was a subtler method. Whatever it took to get the children to say what the grownups wanted to hear.

Beck gives much of his attention to the paradigm case, that of the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California. Chapters on McMartin alternate with chapters on the various copycat cases that arose in small towns and great cities across the country. ­McMartin spanned the heyday of the daycare panic, beginning in 1983 and ­continuing for seven years—the longest criminal proceeding in the history of the United States.

The McMartin Preschool was well regarded by the affluent families of Manhattan Beach, until its seven teachers were accused of full-­spectrum child abuse. Prosecutors said the McMartin teachers had hosted orgies, on school grounds and off—sodomizing the children, demanding oral sex, lacerating them with bullwhips. They had cast the children in pornographic film and photo shoots. They had kidnapped the children to a California ranch, there to witness the slaughter of horses, and to a national park in Montana, and up in a hot-air balloon, and to a local car wash. They had committed acts of bestiality and levitation. They had flushed the children through sewer pipes. In catacombs beneath the school, they had donned robes and capes and celebrated satanic liturgies at which cats were boiled alive.

Law enforcement recovered no physical or documentary evidence: no pornographic films or photos, no satanic vestments, no bullwhips, no horse carcasses, no hot-air balloon, no catacombs. The children’s bodies bore no traces of physical trauma, except for minute anatomical variations (alleged “microtrauma”), later demonstrated to be utterly normal.

How had these bogus ­charges arisen? A schizophrenic woman, speaking for her toddler son, had placed a series of lurid phone calls to the police. (Her mental capacity would not become public knowledge until well into the trial.) Investigators fanned out. Then began the Chinese whispers in the supermarket aisle. McMartin parents began to quiz their kids: Did the bad man touch you? No? Are you sure? Are you sure you’re sure?

The civil authorities enlisted a therapist, inexperienced but zealous in matters of forensic psychology, to extract allegations from reticent children. Using hand puppets and bully tactics, the therapist wrested from forty-one children the 321 florid counts of the indictment. ­Preliminary hearings ensued, and dismissals of charges, and trials and mistrials and retrials, and an acquittal, and two hung juries, and defections and elections of district attorneys, and the McMartin defense team carried on, until the list of defendants had dwindled to one, young Raymond Buckey, a surfer dude who had not seen the sun in years, whose charges were finally dismissed in 1990.

...Beck’s theory fails to account for the majority of false abuse allegations. Neither so lurid nor so stupid as the daycare nightmares, but vastly more numerous, were allegations of incestuous child abuse, which were all the rage in the 1980s and remained so well into the 1990s.

These cases relied on a therapeutic technique that had figured in a number of the daycare cases, namely recovered-memory therapy. This therapy was based on a dubious account of the operations of memory, whereby traumatic events cause instant amnesia (“repression,” in a misuse of that Freudian term). Memories of trauma exist in the unconscious, unreachable by the ordinary processes of recollection, but recoverable by an analyst. The theory and practice of recovered memory were discredited in the late 1990s—not before thousands of fathers, grandfathers, brothers, uncles, and teachers had been jailed, sued, or just estranged over recovered memories of ­pedophilic abuse.

This phase of the pedophilia panic, which wrought far more destruction by the numbers than had the daycare and preschool cases, hardly seems an initiative of the Reagan administration for the restoration of patriarchy. Indeed, it proved extremely useful to feminists and theorists on the left. A feminist critique of domestic relations held that the nuclear family was a power structure set up to enable and conceal the abusive predations of men. For academic trauma studies, which draws on feminism, Marxism, post-colonialism, and other -isms, ­recovered-memory therapy recuperates the silences of alterity, over against the patriarchal signifying order. In academic theory or in clinical practice, down with patriarchy!

...Contraception has made children—once blessings and burdens—into optional luxuries. We still must sacrifice for our children if we have them, but when and whether we have them is for us to decide. Even a child that has been conceived may be disposed of if it is not desired. To an unprecedented degree, children today exist at—and for—our pleasure.

We are haunted by the knowledge that we have placed our desires before our duties to children. We know that children make transcendent claims on us. We know that we ought to be at their disposal, not the other way around. We repress the knowledge of our failings and compensate by insisting, rather too forcefully, that we do honor children and their transcendent claims. Seeking an occasion for this performance, we fantasize Someone Out There. This imagined monster subordinates children to his desire in ways we know we never would. His depravity incenses us, obscuring our more subtle sins.

...Pedophilia is popularly imagined to be an incurable mental disorder entailing uncontrollable criminal desires. (This belief lies behind our draconian sex offender registries.) Studies consistently show, however, that pedophilic offenders have a low recidivism rate compared with that of other criminals. Try applying this fact to any public controversy, and see where it gets you.

...We should rejoice that many children who are molested are not broken, and that many offenders will never offend again. Instead, we fantasize villainy and eternal wreckage. Indulging in hysterics over their safety and purity, we assure ourselves that though we have commodified our children, we will honor them if the stakes are high enough.

...We’re all repressing our contraceptive mentality. As Congress knew, there is no ­constituency for being halfway reasonable about child sex abuse. Until we place our duty to children above our own desires, we will have special reason to go on “believing” them. The pedophile will reign as our most feared and loathed criminal figure for some time yet.

Read more here.