Review by Choice Review
As a new father in the 1980s, this reviewer remembers fearing that his children might land in a day-care setting like the ones splashed across television news. At the height of conservative resurgence, dozens of childcare workers across the US were accused and convicted of fantastic crimes against children, though virtually no reliable evidence was uncovered in any single case. The national episode has since been safely closeted in the past; journalist Beck (editor, n+1) pulls it out of the closet and dissects the circumstances, for which there is no word more suitable than "hysteria." "The day-care trials" became "a warning to mothers who thought they could keep their very young children safe while simultaneously pursuing a life outside the home." The book is a history (not investigative journalism) narrating one facet of societal angst over shifting US domestic settings. Strikingly similar stories from across the country reflect social fears and the questionable psychology fueling the prosecutions. The book helps explain how investigators, court officers, and communities were willing to overlook and create evidence to protect themselves against perceived evils, much like the Salem witch trials of the 17th century. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --Richard L Saunders, Southern Utah University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
IN THE SUMMER OF 1983, a California woman named Judy Johnson took her 3-year-old son Matthew to a hospital near her home in Manhattan Beach. She pointed the doctor's attention to her child's anus, which, she said, looked redder than it had that morning, before he had gone to his day care center. Whether out of genuine concern about foul play or to salve a worried mother, the doctor filed a suspected child abuse report. Johnson, who later received a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, took her own suspicions to the police, who soon alerted parents whose children attended the McMartin Preschool to a possible abuser in their midst. Thereby hangs one of the most bizarre tales of recent American history, leading to charges of underground tunnels and child rape orgies. The nation's longest criminal trial on record, the McMartin case, concluded seven years after Johnson's call, during which time it spawned dozens of copycat cases, ruined the lives of numerous falsely accused adults and hundreds of children traumatized by the very people ostensibly devoted to protecting them. It's a story that has been told repeatedly over the years, and it's now reinterrogated through a distinctly partisan lens by Richard Beck, an editor at n+1, in "We Believe the Children." Beck's description of the McMartin case and similar witch hunts contains little that is new. But the details of mass gullibility, prosecutorial overreach, fake science and media exploitation still manage to shock. In Kern County, Calif., and the small town of Jordan, Minn., to name just two examples, authorities seriously entertained accusations against more than 50 adults, who were said to have hung children from hooks in the ceilings of local motels, and forced them to drink the blood and eat the intestines of slain animals, or to watch their captors devour 16 babies. Far from bringing clarity, experts facilitated the madness. In a theory easily disproved later on, doctors assured investigators that a child's anus that opens, or "winks," when touched, as some of the McMartin kids' posteriors seemed to do, was evidence the youngsters had been sodomized. Kee MacFarlane, hired by the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office as an abuse expert, introduced anatomically correct dolls into her interrogations of more than 400 children, seemingly oblivious to the fact that toy sex organs would be as tempting to children as the marshmallows in the famous experiment. Her less-than-scrupulous tactics also included bullying young abuse deniers. ("You're just a scaredy cat. How come you won't tell me?") Beck is generally restrained in his narrative, letting the details pile up to a well-deserved indictment of the many players in the "moral panic." But in explaining how these fever dreams managed to seize the national imagination, he does a little witch-hunting of his own. The frenzy, he tells us, was a backlash by family-values conservatives to the social changes around them. It was a period of "an intense reactionary antifeminism." This is an inexcusably partial interpretation. From Beck's own evidence, feminists themselves were vital players in the hysteria. Gloria Steinem donated money to the McMartin investigation, and Ms. Magazine ran a 1993 cover article "BELIEVE IT! Cult Ritual Abuse Exists," even though, by that time, the general public had grown increasingly skeptical of the idea. In part because of her aggressive pursuit of child abusers - and conviction of a number of people later exonerated - a relatively unknown Dade County state attorney named Janet Reno was picked by President Clinton to become the nation's first female attorney general. According to Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, the authors of "Satan's Silence," MacFarlane had been a lobbyist for NOW before she set about terrifying the children of Manhattan Beach. With his partisan recounting of the child abuse panic of the 1980s, Beck turns what could have been a careful history about one facet of the nation's exhausting culture wars into one more illustration of them. There were accusations of children forced to watch as babies were devoured. KAY HYMOWITZ is the William E. Simon fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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 Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
