We believe the children
Subtitle: a moral panic in the 1980s
By: Richard Beck
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 323
ISBN-13: 9781610392877
Subjects: Child sexual abuse; Ritual abuse; Moral panics; False arrest; Child care workers; History
Description: "During the 1980s in California, New Jersey, and New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, and elsewhere, daycare 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. Using extensive archival research conducted in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Minneapolis, and elsewhere, 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. Psychiatrists and talk therapists turned dubious theories of trauma and recovered memory into a destructive new kind of psychotherapy. Social workers and detectives employed coercive interviewing techniques that led children to tell them what they wanted to hear. The climate of fear that surrounded these cases influenced a whole series of arguments about women, children, and sex that had been intensifying for some twenty years. At the root of these accusations were competing visions of society and what it was that threatened it most. "--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 271-308) and index.
Table of contents: title: The discovery of child abuse; title: McMartin : allegations; title: Prosecutors; title: McMartin : the preliminary hearing; title: FBI, DSM, XXX; title: McMartin : the trial; title: Two families; title: McMartin : the verdict; title: Therapists and survivors; title: Repression and desire.