We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s

by Richard Beck

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610392877
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	08/04/2015
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Richard Beck is an editor at n+1 magazine and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Table of Contents

Author's Note ix

Introduction xi

Chapter 1 The Discovery of Child Abuse 1

Chapter 2 McMartin-Allegations 31

Chapter 3 Prosecutors 65

Chapter 4 McMartin-The Preliminary Hearing 93

Chapter 5 FBI, DSM, XXX 115

Chapter 6 McMartin-The Trial 147

Chapter 7 Two Families 169

Chapter 8 McMartin-The Verdict 195

Chapter 9 Therapists and Survivors 215

Chapter 10 Repression and Desire 241

Acknowledgments 269

Notes 271

Index 309

Editorial Reviews

…[an] intellectually nimble history of the [child] abuse scare…[Beck's] argument should prove far more enduring than all the lies and self-deceptions, so credulously believed in the 1980s, that this book does a devil of a job correcting.

The New York Times - Mark Oppenheimer

★ 06/08/2015
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. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

“Ambitious and meticulously researched… Beck, an editor of the avant-garde literary journal n+1, is an able historian and a clear writer. His thorough analysis of media reports, police records and court transcripts successfully brings this nightmarish cultural episode to life. The book is a devastating indictment of the earnest but irresponsible detectives and psychologists who effectively projected their own fantasies into young children's imaginations over the course of extended interrogations, and of overzealous prosecutors—including such high-profile figures as Janet Reno and Martha Coakley—who put innocent people in prison.” —American Interest

“Remarkable… Painstakingly researched.” —The Sunday Times [UK]

“A very lucid piece of historical analysis that shows how easily the wildest gossip and accusations are believed by the legal system and the public.” —Connecticut News

“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… An absorbing dissection of a panic whose tremors still affect us today.” —Publishers Weekly

“Compelling, eye-opening…. In Beck's well-researched, fascinating work, he begins with the McMartin trial, the longest trial in US history and one which was launched on the fevered imaginations of a divorced mother with severe emotional issues. Many remember the name McMartin and Beck covers it with scrupulous care.” —BookFilter

“Richard Beck's We Believe the Children is a superb reconstruction of a dark chapter in our recent history, and an engaging introduction to complicated mysteries of the psyche. It must be read.” —Mark Greif, author of The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973

“We Believe the Children is a brilliant, steely portrait of a country in the midst of a counter-revolution. Not only a dramatic narrative of the child abuse scandals that dominated headlines in the 1980s, it's also an incredibly smart history of the strange alliances that fueled modern ‘family values' conservatism. There is something to surprise and startle on every page.” —Nikil Saval, author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace

“Richard Beck's fascinating book is written with an incredible lucidity of thought and prose. His witnessing seems at an ideal distance, and his voice is an appealing synthesis of the questing mind, and the mind that already knows how frighteningly and unfortunately easy it is for us to deceive others and ourselves.” —Sheila Heti, author of How Should A Person Be?: A Novel from Life

“We've had other books on the culture of fear and panic that seized this country in the 1980s and 1990s, but none like this. Through diligent reportage, an informed sense of history, and plainspoken prose, Richard Beck narrates a terrifying story of how the US reacted against the liberation of women and the transformation of the family after the Sixties: by conjuring an army of pedophiles, daycare workers, and Satanic abusers, all bent on doing harm to ‘our kids.' If there is any saving grace to this story, it is the calm and patience of its teller, whose dedication to reason, fact, and truth serves as a beacon across a fog of unreason and ill will.” —Corey Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin

“[Thirty] years ago America was described as experiencing an ‘epidemic' of sexual abuse in day care. Richard Beck, an editor at N+1, does a herculean job of investigating why this happened in his absorbing book We Believe The Children.” —Washington Post

“In this sharp, sensitive debut [Beck] deftly examines all the forces that came together in this strange moment in our history.” —Boston Globe

“Beck argues, convincingly, that the sexual revolution of the '60s and '70s provoked a conservative backlash in the '80s, fueling parental paranoia. The social and political conditions at the time set the stage for the most destructive moral panic since the Salem witch trials.” —The Daily Beast

“Passionately argued…Beck's narrative is compellingly drawn, and his research is exhaustive; he seems to have exhumed every document pertaining to the McMartin case, as well as several similar episodes elsewhere.” —Harper's

”Detailed and provocative…. We Believe the Children reshaped my understanding of the relationship between feminism, cultural politics, and mothering. It takes a chapter of contemporary history that could be easily dismissed as an insignificant and bizarre aberration, and shows it to be anything but.” —Boston Review

A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2015
A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015

“Intellectually nimble… [Beck's] argument should prove far more enduring than all the lies and self-deceptions, so credulously believed in the 1980s, that this book does a devil of a job correcting.” —New York Times

“Understanding a moral panic requires perspective—distance from the emotional heat of anger and anxiety. Sometimes it is precisely those who didn't live through it who are best suited to providing that perspective. In We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s, Richard Beck accomplishes this difficult feat, and he does so calmly, detail by meticulous detail…. A thorough account... His important book gives readers who don't know the story—or who think it is over, so 20th century—an understanding of its lingering, pernicious effects on our lives…. Mr. Beck's book is valuable because it is timely and comprehensive. He not only tells the story of a moral panic with a fresh eye but provides context, identifying the forces that preceded it as well as those that fed it and have kept it going today.” —Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

05/15/2015
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

Library Journal

2015-05-06
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.

Kirkus Reviews