We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s
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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.
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Richard Beck. (2015). We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s. PublicAffairs.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Richard Beck. 2015. We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s. PublicAffairs.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Richard Beck, We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s. PublicAffairs, 2015.
MLA Citation (style guide)Richard Beck. We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s. PublicAffairs, 2015.
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- 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. - reviews
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Starred review from June 8, 2015
N+1 editor Beck surveys the wild allegations, surreal trials, and sensational atmosphere of a child abuse panic that gripped the United States during the 1980s, while lucidly analyzing the intellectual and political climate that made it possible. From affluent Southern California to America’s heartland, allegations of molestation quickly escalated into lurid investigations of supposed networks of Satanic cults abusing children. The case of the McMartin preschool, where therapists and social workers interviewed hundreds of children as part of an investigation leading to a 105-count indictment against five teachers (and, at six years, the longest trial in American history), lends the book its narrative arc. Interspersed chapters document the reactionary backlash against the sexual revolution and the welfare state in favor of the nuclear family (where most child abuse actually happens), as well as the emergence of radical theories in psychology that enabled gross coercion and muddied legal waters. Beck marshals extensive research into an absorbing dissection of a panic whose tremors still affect us today. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic.
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June 1, 2015
An attempt to explain the hysteria that surrounded the child sex abuse cases that swept the United States in the 1980s. Beck, associate editor of n+1, argues that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s triggered a backlash from conservatives in the '80s, which caused widespread panic about child abuse in the preschools. The McMartin Preschool case in Manhattan Beach, California, one of the longest and most expensive in American history, takes center stage, with individual chapters on allegations, the preliminary hearing, the trial, and the verdict. The author also cites another California case and ones in Michigan, Texas, Florida, and Massachusetts. Through interviews and archival research, Beck shows how therapists and detectives (the line between them is blurry) induced youngsters to tell wild, even fantastic, tales of sexual abuse, sometimes involving bloody Satanic rituals, by their caretakers. The title comes from posters carried by parents in Manhattan Beach incensed that their children's incredible stories, not backed by actual evidence, aroused skepticism in some quarters. Beck also shows the role of the media and of overeager prosecutors and mental health professionals in creating a situation that destroyed the lives of innocent people, many of whom spent years in jail. Comparisons with the Salem witch trials are inevitable, but the author points out a difference: the victims of that one later received apologies. Beck sees the day care trials as a warning from conservatives to career-minded mothers who chose to pursue lives outside the home and entrust their children to others. He looks to the source of the hysteria in people's fears about the social changes taking place in American society. Unfortunately, the author devotes much more of his text to a rehash of the McMartin case and less to exploring theory about the causes of the hysteria surrounding child sexual abuse. An intriguing but uneven treatment of a subject that has not received much attention in years.COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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May 15, 2015
Using research and interviews with those involved, Beck attempts to show that in the 1980s an atmosphere of hysteria existed surrounding the issue of child molestation, primarily at day care centers, and that children were coaxed into making false accusations that led to numerous wrongful convictions. The author, an editor at n+1, a New York-based literary magazine, details cases of child abuse at day care centers and babysitting services in states such as California, Texas, Florida, and New York that gained media attention. Many related convictions were later overturned. While a helpful history, information comparing the reported cases of child abuse from the 1980s to the present would have been beneficial. Hysteria may have existed in the 1980s, but it is difficult to determine what has changed in the way child abuse accusations have been handled since then. VERDICT Academic libraries may want to acquire this title as will psychotherapists and counselors who work with children who may find the descriptions insightful; especially timely with recent frenzies over unlicensed or unregulated day care providers.--Karen Venturella, Union Cty. Coll. Libs, Cranford, NJ
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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