Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [48]
The second major epidemic was a panic about the sexual abuse of children in daycare centers. In 1983, teachers at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, were accused of committing heinous acts on the toddlers in their care, such as torturing them in Satanic rituals in underground chambers, slaughtering pet rabbits in front of them, and forcing them to submit to sexual acts. Some children said the teachers had taken them flying in an airplane. The prosecution was unable to convince the jury that the children had been abused, but the case produced copycat accusations against day-care teachers across the country: the Little Rascals Day Care case in North Carolina, Kelly Michaels in New Jersey, the Amirault family in Massachusetts, Dale Akiki in San Diego, and alleged molestation rings in Jordan, Minnesota; Wenatchee, Washington; Niles, Michigan; Miami, Florida; and dozens of other communities. Everywhere, the children told bizarre stories. Some said they had been attacked by a robot, molested by clowns and lobsters, or forced to eat a frog. One boy said he had been tied naked to a tree in the school yard in front of all the teachers and children, although no passerby noticed it and no other child verified it. Social workers and other psychotherapists were called in to assess the children’s stories, do therapy with the children, and help them disclose what had happened. Many later testified in court that, on the basis of their clinical judgment, they were certain the day-care teachers were guilty.3
Where do epidemics go when they die? How come celebrities have not been turning up on talk shows lately to reveal their recovered memories of having been tortured as infants? Have all the sadistic pedophiles closed down their day-care centers? Most of the teachers who were convicted in the day-care cases have been freed on appeal, but many teachers and parents remain in prison, or are confined to house arrest, or must live out their lives as registered sex offenders. The heyday of the recovered-memory movement is past, although many lives were shattered and countless families have never been reunited. But cases still occasionally appear in the courts, in the news, in films, and in popular books. 4 Martha Beck’s Leaving the Saints, which describes how her Mormon father had allegedly subjected her to ritual sexual abuse when she was a child, neglects to tell readers that she had forgotten all about it until she consulted a recovered-memory psychotherapist who taught her self-hypnosis.
Thus while the epidemics have subsided, the assumptions that ignited them remain embedded in popular culture: If you were repeatedly traumatized in childhood, you probably repressed the memory of it. If you repressed the memory of it, hypnosis can retrieve it for you. If you are utterly convinced that your memories are true, they are. If you have no memories but merely suspect that you were abused, you probably were. If you have sudden flashbacks or dreams of abuse, you are uncovering a true memory. Children almost never lie about sexual matters. If your child has nightmares, wets the bed, wants to sleep with a night-light, or masturbates, those might be signs your child has been molested.
These beliefs did not pop up in the cultural landscape overnight, like mushrooms. They came from mental-health professionals who disseminated them at conferences, in clinical journals, in the media, and in bestselling books, and who promoted themselves as experts in diagnosing child sexual abuse and determining the validity of a recovered memory. Their claims were based largely on lingering