Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [57]
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“Believing is seeing” was the principle that created every one of the day-care scandals of the 1980s and 1990s. Just as in the McMartin case, each began with an accusation from a disturbed parent or the whimsical comments of a child, which provoked an investigation, which provoked panic. At the Wee Care Nursery School in New Jersey, for example, a four-year-old child was having his temperature taken rectally at his doctor’s office when he said, “That’s what my teacher [Kelly Michaels] does to me at school.”26 The child’s mother notified the state’s child protection agency. The agency brought the child to a prosecutor’s office and gave him an anatomical doll to play with. The boy inserted his finger into the rectum of the doll and said that two other boys had had their temperature taken that way, too. Parents of children in the preschool were told to look for signs of abuse in their own children. Professionals were called in to interview the children. Before long, the children were claiming that Kelly Michaels had, among other things, licked peanut butter off their genitals, made them drink her urine and eat her feces, and raped them with knives, forks, and toys. These acts were said to have occurred during school hours over a period of seven months, although parents could come and go as they pleased, no child had complained, and none of the parents had noticed any problems in their children.
Kelly Michaels was convicted of 115 counts of sexual abuse and sentenced to forty-seven years in prison. She was released after five years, when an appeals court ruled that the children’s testimony had been tainted by how they had been interviewed. And how was that? With the confirmation bias going at full speed and no reins of scientific caution to restrain it, a deadly combination that was the hallmark of the interviews of children conducted in all the day-care cases. For example, here is how Susan Kelley, a pediatric nurse who interviewed children in a number of these cases, used Bert and Ernie puppets to “aid” the children’s recall:
Kelley: Would you tell Ernie?
Child: No.
Kelley: Ah, come on [pleading tone]. Please tell Ernie. Please tell me. Please tell me. So we could help you. Please … You whisper it to Ernie … Did anybody ever touch you right there? [pointing to the vagina of a girl doll]
Child: No.
Kelley: [pointing to the doll’s posterior] Did anybody touch your bum?
Child: No.
Kelley: Would you tell Bert?
Child: They didn’t touch me!
Kelley: Who didn’t touch you?
Child: Not my teacher. Nobody.
Kelley: Did any big people, any adult, touch your bum there?
Child: No.27
“Who didn’t touch you?” We are entering the realm of Catch-22, Joseph Heller’s great novel, in which the colonel with the fat mustache says to Clevinger: “What did you mean when you said we couldn’t punish you?” Clevinger replies: “I didn’t say you couldn’t punish me, sir.” Colonel: “When didn’t you say that we couldn’t punish you?” Clevinger: “I always didn’t say that you couldn’t punish me, sir.”
At the time, the psychotherapists and social workers who were called on to interview children believed that molested children won’t tell you what happened to them until you press them by persistently asking leading questions, because they are scared or ashamed. In the absence of research, this was a reasonable assumption, and clearly it is sometimes true. But when does pressing slide into coercion? Psychological scientists have conducted experiments to investigate every aspect of children’s memory and testimony: How do children understand what adults ask them? Do their responses depend on their age, verbal abilities, and the kinds of questions they are asked? Under what conditions are children likely to be telling the truth, and when are they likely to be suggestible, to say that something happened when it did not?28
For example, in an experiment with preschool children, Sena Garven and her colleagues used interview techniques that were based on the actual transcripts of interrogations of