Child welfare in Pennsylvania: Dialing up the crazy, part two: Enter the “Penn State Penance Institute”

A new report is a frightening assault on the minimal due process protections meant to stop child welfare agencies from needlessly traumatizing children.

             In yesterday’s post to this blog, I described how the due process protections afforded to people who are listed on Pennsylvania’s statewide blacklist of alleged child abusers or in county child welfare agency records range from minimal to none.  I also discussed how State Auditor Eugene DePasquale launched an attack on the minimal due process protections that exist that was rife with inaccuracy, stunning for its ignorance and even veered toward conspiracy theory territory.

            Well, now it looks like DePasquale has an ally – from part of the latter-day “child saver”* wing of the child welfare research community.  I'm sure they have the best of intentions. But they’ve issued a report that amounts to an assault on due process. The extremism in the document manifests itself in many ways, including a flow chart from the report itself.  This is the lower left quadrant of the chart:

  Can you spot the problem?  I’ll discuss it below, but first, let’s look at the report.

            The report was commissioned by the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, an arm of the Pennsylvania Legislature. They hired a team affiliated with the Penn State “Child Maltreatment Solutions Network.”  Though the report originally was intended to look only at commercial sexual exploitation of children, the authors kept expanding their own mandate, first to all sexual abuse cases and ultimately to broad, sweeping conclusions about the entire system – even though the case sample they examined involved only sexual abuse cases.

            Like DePasquale, the report’s authors express alarm at what they imply is an unusually high rate at which some blacklist decisions are overturned.  They’re also alarmed by the fact that, if a report turns out to be false, the state is not allowed to keep the report forever and use it against a family anyway.

The report acknowledges that blacklist decisions are overturned, by the authors’ own estimate, only 19 percent of the time.  That’s because most of those accused lack the knowledge and/or the resources or both to do anything but lodge a written appeal.  That appeal goes to the same division of the same state agency that runs the state’s child abuse hotline.  At that stage, in 2018 the number of times a child welfare agency decision was overturned was exactly zero. Among those who do have the resources and take it to a real hearing before an independent tribunal, the Board of Hearings and Appeals, about 70 percent are overturned.  (DePasquale mistakenly claimed it was 96 percent.)

            In fact, the 70 percent rate-of-reversal is roughly in keeping with at least three other states. It also makes perfect sense, given the sloppy, one-sided nature of many child abuse investigations.  The Penn State report itself devotes page after page to condemning the poor quality of these investigations. (DePasquale raised similar concerns.) 

The report even admits at one point that “the rate at which cases indicated by [county children and youth services agencies] are overturned on appeal is high, which may both affect and reflect the concerns raised in this research pertaining to the quality, scope, and documentation of investigations.” [Emphasis added.] 

            Yet the Penn State report warns darkly that if decisions by county CYS agencies “are frequently overturned on appeal, this could provide a disincentive to making a finding of indicated on a CYS case.”  This reflects a remarkably dim view of frontline child abuse investigators. It suggests they would rather let child abusers run free than actually work improve their investigations.

Taking out the trash

            Under Pennsylvania law, if the Board of Hearings and Appeals or the courts overturn a listing in the registry, or if the county CYS agency finds it unfounded in the first place, the state must expunge the record so the false allegation can’t be used against a family in the future.

            But the presumption of guilt in child welfare is so strong that many jurisdictions want to keep false reports on the theory that, if there are enough of them, then they can’t be false.  According to Marc Cherna who runs the Allegheny County system, the one that leads the nation in weaponizing false allegations and other junk information against families: “A lot of times, where there’s smoke there’s fire.”

            This is an open invitation for anyone who wants to harass a family – an ex-spouse, an angry neighbor, a school district that wants to collect lunch money, or even an upset dentist – to simply call in more and more reports. But also, in child welfare, where there’s smoke, there’s often just an overwhelmed inexperienced caseworker blowing smoke.

            But in the atmosphere of hysteria that has pervaded Pennsylvania since the scandal over former Penn State football coach, former foster parent and former group home operator Jerry Sandusky, the state now gives permission to counties to keep junk data about families forever.  According to the authors of the Penn State report, even that is not enough. They want to require it, and they want the state to keep all of its junk data as well.

            Their excuse for this recommendation is instructive, but not in the way they had in mind.  First they write that expungement 

…may result in wrongly-accused persons being repeatedly subjected to investigation for allegations that were already investigated when the investigation has been expunged and the exoneration details are no longer available.

            Aside from the fact that no one could read this report and believe that the authors give a damn about “wrongly-accused persons” (as is discussed below, it’s not even clear they think such persons exist) they contradict this argument in the very next sentence:

At the same time, expungement may also allow serial perpetrators of child sexual abuse to go undetected. That is, expungement of unfounded allegations disallows consideration of the accumulation of allegations, patterns, and reports that are often critical to exposing serial perpetrators of child sexual abuse.

            In other words, “Where there’s smoke …”  If they believe their own second sentence then there’s no way a pile of unfounded reports clears anyone – it just makes them more suspect.

            Indeed, this mindset is confirmed, accidentally, by a spokeswoman for the state Department of Human Services – which loves the prospect of being able to keep files on the innocent forever. She told the Daily Item:

“Prior abuse reports, regardless of substantiation, are a strong indicator of risk of future abuse … Counties should be aware of all prior incidents, including unfounded or invalid reports, when investigating a new report.”

           

But there is no real evidence for this. The research that supposedly shows this actually shows only that prior reports make it more likely that there will be more reports – in other words, it amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Workers who assume that where there’s smoke there’s fire are more likely to check the equivalent of the box marked “fire” when the next report comes in.

            And, of course there is a simple way to solve the problem of someone who is innocent not having a record of a false allegation: Send a copy of the record, minus anything that genuinely violates privacy, to the accused, so they can keep it and show it to the caseworker the next time that disgruntled neighbor, ex-spouse, dentist or school district demanding lunch money files a false report, or the next time a well-meaning reporter is simply mistaken.

            The report’s recommendation in this area appears under the header “Stop deleting data.”  But a key principle in any use of data is “garbage in, garbage out.”  Expunging false reports is not deleting data.  It’s taking out the trash.

Another assault on due process

            You can’t convict someone of murdering a child without proof beyond a reasonable doubt.  But in most states you can tear a child from a loving home and consign her or him to the chaos of foster care, indefinitely, using the lowest standard of proof in American jurisprudence – “preponderance of the evidence.” That means you were able to convince a judge that it is slightly more likely than not that the allegations are true and foster care is necessary.  It’s the same standard used to decide which insurance company pays for a fender-bender.

            That’s part of the reason it’s so easy to do so much harm to children. First, confuse family poverty with neglect, then take away the child (in every state workers can do that on their own authority or ask law enforcement to do it for them). Then, after-the-fact, go to court for a hearing – usually a secret hearing - where the family probably has either no lawyer or someone they just met five minutes before the hearing. The state has had plenty of time to prepare its case – and it barely has to “prove” it at all.

            In theory, Pennsylvania is a little different.  In Pennsylvania, CYS agencies eventually – though not immediately - have to meet the middle standard of proof, known as “clear and convincing.” That’s still lower than “beyond a reasonable doubt” but, theoretically, higher than “preponderance of the evidence.”

            In contrast, all it takes to blacklist the accused is a caseworker’s conclusion – with no hearing or impartial fact finding beforehand – using the preponderance standard.

            So what does the Penn State report say? While never explicitly calling for lowering the standard for holding a child in foster care, it’s clear where the authors come down. They write:

This creates a scenario in which it is known that a child is at risk of harm but no action to protect the child can be taken without the consent of the parent, who may themselves be the identified perpetrator.

           But that is inaccurate.  

            First of all, in Pennsylvania a child can, in fact, be in foster care for up to 13 days or more before this higher standard ever kicks in. That happens – in theory -- at a later hearing to determine if the child needs to stay in foster care.

But more important, the whole point of a court hearing is to find out if the child actually is “at risk of harm” and whether the parent is, in fact, the perpetrator. If a caseworker’s guess based on preponderance of the evidence were enough we could just abolish the entire court system.

The Penn State report’s framing also flunks the balance of harms test. It fails to acknowledge the enormous harm of intervention itself. It ignores the evidence that in typical cases children do better in their own homes even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.  It ignores the high rates of abuse in foster care itself.  One should, indeed, have clear and convincing evidence before putting a child at risk harm by needless placement in foster care.

And finally: The “clear and convincing” standard does not stop Pennsylvania from taking away children at a rate above the national average. And it doesn’t stop Philadelphia from taking away children at the highest rate among America’s largest cities.

So yes, there’s a problem with the “clear and convincing” standard in Pennsylvania law: Judges keep ignoring it.

The bias that permeates the report

            I noted above that it’s not clear the authors believe there’s really any such thing as a false report.  Indeed, the overall message conveyed in the report is: If you’re accused you’re guilty until proven innocent – and no one is really innocent.

That’s based on, among other things, the flow chart I mentioned at the top of this post.  The flow chart is misleading on one count and flat wrong on another.  Take another look: 

            It is misleading in that it suggests, as does the report narrative, that those accused of child abuse have a wondrous array of options before them and chance after chance to prove their innocence.

            In fact, that’s only true if they’re rich, can hire great lawyers, and convince court after court to hear their appeals.  In the real world, there’s the BHA – and often, not even that.  (And remember, in most neglect cases there is no right to appeal at all.)

            The error of fact appears over and over in the lower left quadrant of the chart. That’s where, time after time after time the report lists a tribunal’s options as either “ruling in favor of CYS” or “ruling in favor of perpetrator.” [Emphasis in original.]

            The problem, of course, is that if the tribunal says the allegation was false, then the accused is not a perpetrator.  To claim that ruling that the state could not meet the bare minimum required to “indicate” an abuse allegation equals “ruling in favor of perpetrator” is like saying “the jury found the murderer not guilty.”

           

Of course sometimes a jury gets it wrong and does acquit a murderer.  And a system as arbitrary, capricious, and cruel as child welfare undoubtedly errs in all directions – including wrongly exonerating some child abusers.  But both in the flow chart and often, though not always, in the narrative, this report labels the accused as perpetrators even after a finding of abuse is overturned.

            The fact that a document purporting to meet academic standards includes this mistake, over and over and over, and no one apparently noticed, speaks volumes about the mindset of the research team.  Indeed, in reading the report, I kept thinking of something said by a prosecutor who had falsely accused large numbers of parents as part of the mass molestation hysteria in the 1980s. Said the prosecutor: “I am sick to death of things like the presumption of innocence.”

Beyond the flow chart

            The whole report has a tone reminiscent of the worst excesses of that era, the time of  cases like the McMartin Preschool, allegations of mass child abuse by Satanic cults, and so on. 

            Particularly frightening is a section concerning non-offending parents in cases of alleged sexual abuse, including parents who were unaware of any alleged abuse. The report contends that any such parent (usually the mother) who does not immediately believe the allegations, turn against the alleged offender (usually the father) and do whatever is demanded by child protective services is herself a child abuser. 

According to the report, agreeing to keep the alleged abuser away while the case is being investigated is not enough.  In classic 1984 style, you must believe the charges, and the belief must be immediate, absolute and unwavering.  Because, apparently, those same caseworkers who do those slipshod investigations can’t ever be wrong when they accuse someone of sexual abuse.

            I know of no studies documenting how many families are destroyed when a parent either accepted these demands or rejected them – and it later turned out the allegation was false.  But having been around during the McMartin-era hysteria I can say that, anecdotally, such cases arose over and over.  Children were not only taken from both parents, but loving relatives were denied custody if they did not convince authorities that they believed the charges.

            The justification for this, according to the report: If a parent is not an instant true believer ‘it is possible” that parent may “[pressure] the child to recant or deny the abuse allegations.”

           

The report is filled with speculation about what “could” or “may” happen – with no evidence or studies cited. (Recall for example the claim that if the BHA does its job and reverses the results of slipshod investigations it “could provide a disincentive” to indicating a case. [Emphasis added.]) That’s not scholarship, that’s fearmongering.

            But, to put it as they might, it could be that this is only to be expected when the organization doing the research was born out of a quest to burnish an institution’s image.

            The Penn State Child Maltreatment Solutions Network should really be called the Penn State Penance Institute.

            The Network was a public relations tactic; part of Penn State’s effort to rehabilitate its image after the Sandusky scandal.  But for the p.r. strategy to work, Penn State has to show that it’s tougher than anyone on child abuse. That leaves little room for nuance or for recognizing the need to balance the harm that may have been committed by the alleged perpetrator against the harm done to children by needless intervention.

            There is plenty in the Penn State report to suggest that the authors have a genuine passion for easing the plight of abused children.  But there is nothing in it to suggest the ability to keep biases in check that is needed for reliable scholarship.

*-In the 19^th Century, advocates for tearing apart the families of impoverished immigrants proudly called themselves “child savers.”  They left a legacy of bigotry that permeates today’s system.

New columns on the "new normal" for Black children - and other child welfare system horrors

There’s a new study out which includes some frightening estimates about the likelihood that a child abuse investigation will be a part of one’s childhood. If the study is correct, enduring such an investigation is the new normal for African-American children. Unfortunately, the researchers were not frightened.  I wrote about it here. 

I spoke to Errol Louis, anchor of Road to City Hall on NY1, a local all-news cable channel about foster care panic.  The video is here.

I also have a column in Youth Today challenging the common interpretation of HHS data on the increase in entries into foster care 

Other columns deal with:

--How the McMartin Preschool case was child welfare's prelude to #Pizzagate

--How one writer's proposed "New vision" for foster care is just another call to go back to orphanages 

--The real lesson from the closing of a California group home: Group homes don't work.

McMartin: Child welfare’s prelude to #pizzagate

How could anyone believe that a popular gathering place for children actually was a front for a child sex abuse ring, with secret tunnels used to hide the nefarious goings on?

How could anyone believe that innocent signs and logos actually were secret codes for child sexual abuse and Satanic rituals?

Enough people believed such claims about Comet Ping Pong, a popular pizza place in Washington D.C., to rain down misery on the owners and employees. First, it was threats and harassment online. Then a man who said he wanted to “self-investigate” claims that Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, were running a pedophilia ring from the store, walked in and allegedly fired shots.

The 2016 election campaign and its aftermath have been awash in fake news stories created by everyone from right-wing extremists to clickbait entrepreneurs. But we seem especially vulnerable when purveyors of fake news add two magic words: child abuse.

Before there was even an internet, in the 1980s, stories like Pizzagate spread across the country – and did even more damage. They weren’t spread by fringe groups. They were spread by people in the mainstream of American child welfare, and by the same mainstream media that now demands we all look more skeptically at fake news.

Mainstream Professionals …

A pedophilia ring hiding in secret tunnels? That was the claim at the heart of the notorious McMartin Preschool case. As The New York Times put it in a story looking back on the hysteria of that era:

Some of the early allegations were so fantastic as to make many people wonder later how anyone could have believed them in the first place. Really now, teachers chopped up animals, clubbed a horse to death with a baseball bat, sacrificed a baby in a church and made children drink the blood, dressed up as witches and flew in the air — and all this had been going on unnoticed for a good long while until a disturbed mother spoke up?

Oh, but they believed; how they believed. As the Times explained, it didn’t stop with McMartin:

 McMartin unleashed nationwide hysteria about child abuse and Satanism in schools. One report after another told of horrific practices, with the Devil often literally in the details.

 There were hundreds of arrests across the country, more than 70 people were convicted – and later exonerated.

As for secret signs and symbols, consider what happened to a San Diego couple whose grandchildren were taken because a mentally unstable relative, after much “therapy,” had come to believe much of her family was part of a Satanic cult. The relative reported the grandparents to child protective services, which assigned the case to a worker who was a prominent member of the San Diego County Ritual Abuse Task Force.  

As the San Diego Union Tribune reported in 1991, when the grandparents wanted to send one of the children a birthday card, their child protective services caseworker said the card could not have animals on it – because, she claimed, devil worshipers use such images to send subliminal signals to the children in their thrall. No clowns either, for the same reason. The caseworker already had confiscated all the letters the grandparents had written to their grandchildren, claiming they contained subliminal Satanic messages.

This was no rogue caseworker. The Ritual Abuse Task Force actually trained caseworkers and mental health professionals.  The task force produced a widely circulated booklet informing fellow professionals, the press and the public that:

Numerous cults exist which have sophisticated suppliers of sacrificial persons, from kidnappers through ‘breeders’ (women who bear children intended for sexual abuse and sacrifice)…

… and Mainstream Media

Instead of Alex Jones spreading bizarre conspiracy theories on the radio in the middle of the night, there was one mainstream news organization after another accepting preposterous claims uncritically. There was even a made-for- television movie on CBS featuring a thinly disguised version of McMartin. But in this version, the hero bursts in on the villainous day care center operators just as a satanic ritual is getting underway.

Reporters at the Union Tribune, the Memphis Commercial Appeal and author Debbie Nathan were among a few notable exceptions. By and large, media performance was so bad that when the Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize in connection with McMartin the prize went to its media critic for a multi-part series decrying the lack of skepticism and critical thinking in the coverage, at the Times and elsewhere.

“Believe the Children”

The media believed in large part because a whole lot of medical professionals and therapists told them to believe. “Believe the children,” they said. “Children don’t lie,” they said. And if you don’t believe the children, then you’re little better than a child abuser yourself.

But the children were coached. Sometimes bribed, sometimes cajoled, sometimes bullied until they told the “professionals” what they wanted to hear.

In what is probably the best account of all this, Nathan and Michael Snedeker’s book, Satan’s Silence, the authors describe how Dr. Astrid Heger, then of the Children’s Institute International, which fomented the McMartin hysteria, questioned one girl who repeatedly denied being abused. Heger tells the little girl:

I don’t want to hear any more “no’s. No, no! Detective Dog and we are going to figure this out. Every little boy and girl in the whole school got touched like that … I think there’s something to tell me about touching.”

Yet to this day, Heger is taken seriously, and is quoted in publications such as this one, where she continues to make questionable claims, in this case about the supposed value of parking place shelters.

If the professionals who did nothing to stop the 1980s satanic panic have issued a big, public formal apology to the victims of the panic they did so much to foment, I have not seen it. And the organization that grew, in part, out of the panic, the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC), has bestowed awards on some of the worst offenders. 

Kee MacFarlane, who led the questioning of children in the McMartin case, served on APSAC’s board – and received the group’s “Outstanding Professional” award – a decade after McMartin. And in 1997, three years after writing an article promoting the idea that there really were secret tunnels under the McMartin Preschool, Roland Summit, another former board member (and “technical consultant” for the made-for-TV movie discussed earlier), received the group’s “Lifetime Achievement” award.

We’re still living with the failure to learn the lessons of McMartin. Prof. Roger Lancaster of George Mason University argues that hype and hysteria from decades ago

…have left deep cultural residues, and these include the acceptance of exaggerated claims about the number of child trafficking victims, and the incidence and forms of organized child sexual abuse. Pizzagate relies [in part] on these inflated fears to seem plausible …

And, as always, the harm isn’t limited to the children needlessly taken from their homes. Once people realized they’d been “had,” there were complaints that the ritual abuse hysteria made it harder for victims of actual abuse to be believed. That, too, is dangerous, because sometimes pillars of the community really are child abusers. Case in point: football coach, and foster parent, Jerry Sandusky.

But after Sandusky was caught, child welfare “professionals” were back in full-hype mode, promoting wildly exaggerated numbers, just as they did in the 1970s and 1980s. The media fell back into old patterns too, spreading paranoia through entire communities.

The seeds of Pizzagate were planted at the McMartin preschool, then grown and nurtured by a lot of “professionals” who should know better. At a minimum, the rest of us should consign these professionals to well-deserved obscurity, instead of continuing to take their pronouncements about child welfare seriously.

Child abuse at Penn State: The ugly road from Happy Valley, part two:

Too little skepticism, and too much, both can hurt children.

UPDATE, NOVEMBER 22: This example of child abuse hysteria occurred last year.  But there will be a lot more of it if we don't start curbing post-Penn State paranoia.

            In the previous post to this blog, I wrote about how the Penn State horrors threaten to spark a revival of the witchhunt mentality that dominated child welfare during the 1980s.  Today’s “child savers” to use the term their 19^th Century counterparts gave themselves, are reviving a series of myths about child abuse that hurt huge numbers of children more than two decades ago.

            Because so much time has passed, many people have forgotten the lessons of that era, or never knew them.  There was a time when I could use simple shorthand to remind reporters – I could just say “McMartin.”  But there are reporters on the job today who hadn’t been born when the lurid allegations about mass molestation at the McMartin Preschool in Los Angeles first made headlines.  So it’s well worth reviewing the lessons from that era.

SORRY, WRONG NUMBERS

            One of those lessons has to do with phony numbers that nobody bothers to check – absurd claims about the prevalence of child sexual abuse that appear to have been pulled from thin air.

            By 1990, there were studies attempting to estimate the percentage of people sexually abused during childhood that had come up with results ranging from one percent to 62 percent.  The studies used widely varying definitions of abuse, some of them breathtakingly broad, and usually included abuse by anyone, not just cases subject to the jurisdiction of child protective services.

But because large numbers attract more attention than small numbers, all through the 80s it was claimed, repeatedly that "one out of three girls and one out of ten boys will be sexually abused" during childhood.

Most of those claims, at least for the girls, could be traced back to a single, highly-publicized study which used extremely broad, vague definitions.  But at least there was one study.

In the wake of Penn State, one news account after another claims that one out of four (or sometimes one out of three) girls and one out of six boys will be victims of child sexual abuse during their childhoods.

Typically the figure appears with no attribution at all, except some vague reference to “experts say” or  “most experts believe.”  I have yet to find a news account that cites an actual study of any kind, let alone a valid one.  Instead there are quotes about how these crimes are so awful that we desperately want to “turn away” and refuse to face up to how widespread they are.  In other words: if you try to check facts, you’re “in denial.”

Then, a segment of NPR’s Tell Me More last week, Dr. Leslie Walker of Seattle Children’s Hospital took things a step further, declaring:

I think you have to remember that one in three girls under the age of 18 do get sexually abused. And it's no different, it's the same number of boys under, before puberty. So when someone says that they have been abused you have to assume that it happened immediately … One in three people have been abused …”

Could we stop and think about that for a second?  Most of us have at least one sibling.  So if Walker’s number is correct, at least two-thirds of American adults either were sexually abused as children, or are siblings of a child sexual abuse victim.

If there are that many victims the number of perpetrators must be astronomical as well.  Then you must add all the parents and others who are guilty of “neglect” because they should have known it was happening and “failed to protect” their children.

So if nothing else, if these claims were true the entire American child welfare system would have to be dismantled immediately – because if there are that many child molesters out there, the odds that children taken from their parents and placed in foster care will be molested are so staggering that foster care is way too dangerous an option.  (As it happens, there is solid research indicating that there is child abuse in one-quarter to one third of foster homes, with an even worse record for group homes and institutions.  Jerry Sandusky, who stands accused in the Penn State cases, was a foster parent and his charity began as a group home.)

THE REAL NUMBERS ARE BAD ENOUGH

The best evidence we have concerning the true prevalence of child sexual abuse comes from two comprehensive reviews of the scholarly literature.

The first is a review of 20 different studies conducted by seven Canadian researchers, published in 1991. They found that the studies with the best methodology consistently indicated that between 10 and 12 percent of girls under age 14 are sexually abused by someone during their childhoods. The 1980s study that produced the "one out of three" claim was singled out for criticism by these researchers.

A decade later, another comprehensive review of the literature put the actual figure at 9 to 11 percent for girls and 5 to 6 percent for boys.  The review found that studies which met  two fundamental tenets of good research, high response rates and large sample size, tended to find lower rates of abuse than the smaller, less representative studies.

Odds are the figure is lower today, since, as the Associated Press reports, there is strong evidence that the rate of child sexual abuse has declined significantly in recent years.

Those figures, like all of the best evidence concerning the true extent of child abuse in America, are cause for concern and action. The real numbers are bad enough. Exaggeration serves only to panic us into seeking "solutions" that hurt the children they are intended to help.

Right now, this kind of exaggeration and fear mongering can do even more harm.

HOW IT HURTS CHILDREN

In the 1980s, the rhetoric about “children don’t lie,” discussed in the previous post to this blog, and the absurd numbers made it easy for people to suspend reasonable skepticism when “child savers” started talking about satanic cults operating out of day care centers. 

All those claims in the previous post about secret tunnels and child molesters with wings grew out of the way children were interrogated about allegations of sexual  abuse in their day care centers or at the hands of their own parents.  The result was a series of witchhunts across the country lasting all the way into the 1990s.  The McMartin Preschool was only the most notorious.  There were witchhunts that tore apart communities in Massachusetts, New Jersey, San Diego, Kern County, California, Jodan, Minnesota, and Wenatchee Washington, among others.

Hundreds of innocent people had their lives ruined, many were jailed.  In the end, in almost every case, almost everyone accused was exonerated.

But they were not the ones who suffered most.  As usual, the best efforts of the child savers backfired against the children.  There were the children who suffered when they were separated from their jailed parents.  There were the children who suffered when, at a very young age, they actually were persuaded by caseworkers and therapists that they’d been abused when they hadn’t.  Some believe it to this day.

But children also suffered as a result of the climate and fear and paranoia spread by the child savers.  Teachers and day care workers became afraid to hug their students – sometimes actually telling them to “give yourselves a pat on the back.”  (Among the potential side effects: Children denied normal affection are easier prey for actual child molesters.)  Men were largely driven out of pre-school teaching.  Children were taught not simply to be prudent in dealings with adults but to be constantly fearful and on guard.

That seems to be making a comeback, too.  One post-Penn State news story after another warns parents to never, ever let their children be alone with any other adult.  (That’s going to make it rather difficult for teachers to meet with students having trouble with their homework or for guidance counselors to help them with personal problems, or for mentors to help kids with school projects.)

A Washington Times columnist warns that “sports are the perfect hunting ground for perverts, pedophiles and other assorted monsters.”

Some go further.  One Huffington Post blogger raged against  “how we encourage our kids to abandon their sense of self-trust -- their instinct and intuition -- in order to be polite through showing physical affection to adults.”  He is referring to parents who, at holiday gatherings “pressure” the kids to “give your uncle a hug and kiss."

This blogger seems to suggest a child reluctant to do this, knows by “instinct and intuition” that uncle is a child molester.  The possibility that uncle may just have bad breath or a scratchy beard does not seem to occur to him.

There was plenty of paranoia before Penn State (check out this list of absurdities, which I first discovered thanks to Lenore Skenazy at her Free-Range Kids blog. This one is my favorite).  So it would be understandable if adults now hesitated to so much as smile at a child for fear of being accused of “grooming” that child into a sexual abuse victim.  In fact, if this story from Florida is any indication, the paranoia is back, with a vengeance.

But there’s another way all this hurts children.

After the hysteria of the 80s came the skepticism of the 90s.  There are children who almost certainly suffered because some people may have become too skeptical.  In the wake of the collapse of the mass molestation cases there are bound to have been children who really were abused, but were not believed.  Given how far back the allegations go, some of the Penn State victims may even be among them.  As I wrote in my book, Wounded Innocents, in 1990: If so, the blame rests squarely with the child savers.  They have managed to find one more way to destroy children in order to save them.

Ultimately, the Los Angeles Times would win a Pulitzer Prize for some of its writing about the McMartin case.  But not for coverage of the case itself.  Rather, the late David Shaw, the paper’s media critic, won it for a series asking why the media accepted all the wild claims from the child savers so easily.  The headline in the first installment summed it up: “Where was skepticism in media?” it said.

Is it too much to ask for a little more skepticism this time, before it’s too late.

Child abuse at Penn State: The ugly road from Happy Valley, part one

UPDATE 1: CHECK OUT THIS TIMELY REMINDER OF THE PITFALLS OF FORCED CHILD ABUSE REPORTING FROM PHILADELPHIA CITYPAPER


UPDATE 2: IN CASE ANYONE STILL BELIEVES THE HYSTERIA OVER REPORTING CHILD ABUSE WON'T CAUSE PEOPLE TO DO SOME REALLY STUPID THINGS: APPARENTLY, IT ALREADY HAS


UPDATE 3: IN THE CASE DISCUSSED IN THIS STORY, THE CHILD REALLY WAS ABUSED.  IMAGINE WHAT IT'S LIKE FOR A CHILD WHO WAS NOT.


                ● The myth that “children don’t lie” is back

            ● The hype is back: One “expert” suggests that two-thirds of Americans either were victims of child sexual abuse – or have a sibling who was.

            ● The 1980s witchhunt mentality may be making a comeback, too – and it’s children who really have been abused who are going to suffer most.

            As I listened to the end of a segment of NPR’s Tell Me More on Tuesday, I felt as though I’d been transported back in time.  Suddenly it was the 1980s again, when a bizarre, hyperbolic, myth-fueled reaction to the serious and real problem of child sexual abuse led to a whole series of tragedies of its own.  In the wake of the Penn State horrors, it looks like those myths are making a comeback.

            Anchor Michel Norris was leading a discussion of  “how to teach children to be alert to potentially abusive behavior and how to get them to speak up …”

            At the very end, Norris raised an issue that, as far as I know, no other journalist has had the courage even to mention since the Penn State story broke:

            There is an awful other side to this and there have been examples of false accusations … a group of girls were angry at a gym teacher because he had punished them for passing notes or talking and so they made up an accusation which turned out to be false. So how do you recommend that parents navigate such a thing?

            This is where the trip through time began, led by Dr. Leslie Walker of Seattle Children's Hospital.  It was 1980s mythology all over again as Walker declared:

I think you have to remember that one in three girls under the age of 18 do get sexually abused. And it's no different, it's the same number of boys under, before puberty. So when someone says that they have been abused you have to assume that it happened immediately … One in three people have been abused …”

The one-in-three number is utter nonsense, and I’ll deal with it in a post on Monday. 

For now, consider the fact that, though she didn’t use the exact words, Walker was leading us back to the era of those 1980s catchphrases “children don’t lie” and “believe the children.”

It’s been such a long time since those phrases were all the rage, and such a long time since the hyped numbers were in vogue, that I had to go back to the book I wrote in 1990, Wounded Innocents (Prometheus Books, 1990, 1995) to review what happened and how much harm was done to children.

“CHILDREN DON’T LIE”

            The issue of the truth of claims attributed to children wasn’t simple then, and it’s not simple now.

            Of course, it is extremely unlikely that a very young child would make up out of whole cloth a story of being sexually assaulted. 

            In other cases, there is strong evidence that the children are not only telling the truth, but showing extraordinary courage in coming forward – courage for which they deserve wholehearted support.  I would put the Penn State cases in that category.

            But many allegations of sexual abuse involve situations that are far less clear-cut.  So, for example, in Upstate New York, authorities concluded that children who had heard one of the now-ubiquitous “good touch / bad touch” lectures that supposedly prevent sexual abuse wound up falsely accusing their substitute teacher.  But the children weren’t lying.  They had confused normal affection with “bad touching.”

            In addition, young children aren’t the ones who pick up the phone and call child abuse hotlines.  Adults do that.  And by that time the child might have been questioned repeatedly by a concerned parent or a therapist, or someone else who asked so many leading questions that what gets phoned into the hotline may bear little resemblance to what the child actually said.

            Or the children are rewarded with praise for “disclosing” abuse and badgered if they don’t – a common problem in the “mass molestation” nightmare cases of the 1980s – cases that produced some remarkable allegations.

            ● If children don’t lie about abuse, then Bakersfield California was a hotbed of cannibalism.

            ● If children don’t lie about abuse there was a secret underground amusement park near Fort Bragg, California.  You got in from the ocean by submarine.

            ● If children don’t lie about abuse, then they were being flown from day care centers all over the country in planes to be molested, then returned in time to be picked up by their parents.  Some of the molesters didn’t need a plane.  They could fly through the air all by themselves.

            ● If children don’t lie about abuse, some children in El Paso Texas had their eyes removed – and then put back,

            Or the allegation may not come from a child at all.  Consider this actual report to a child abuse hotline in Rochester, New York, about a young girl in the 1980s:

            The victim and the suspect have been seen holding hands and walking while the suspect had his arm around the victim.  The source also stated suspect used to live with the victim’s mother and the victim.  He had moved out in the recent past but visits the home every day.  The source also stated the victim goes away with the suspect for long periods of time.  Source stated victim wears dresses, tights, and shoes.  Source said it is rumored by children that the victim may be sleeping with suspect.  No other information is available…

            That was enough to prompt both Child Protective Services and the police to investigate.  Here’s what they found out:

           

            ● A doctor found no evidence of sexual abuse.

            ● The man was a friend of the family.

            ● According to both  mother and child, when he slept over he slept on the couch.

            Why was the little girl so nicely dressed when the man took her out?  Because he was taking her to church.

            And of course, older children may, in fact, have all sorts of reasons to lie, as in the case cited by Michel Norris (and notice how Walker simply ignored the case in her “answer.”)

            Another key element of the “children don’t lie” myth was the claim, made with equal certainly, that in one situation children are always lying: when they recant.  Any notion that a child could recant because the allegation was not, in fact, true – perhaps it had been the result of a coercive interrogation – is dismissed out of hand.  Children only recant, it was said, to cover up for the abuser.

            And sure enough, Walker revived that claim as well.  Walker claimed she never, ever had a child claim abuse when it wasn’t true.  But, she said,

I have seen kids recant, though. And kids back down from what really happened a lot of times because they feel like they're breaking up the family. They feel guilty. They feel that it's overwhelming and the community and people are all coming against them and they recant, but it doesn't mean that it didn't happen. I would always err on the idea that it did happen.

Too bad it’s the children themselves who often pay for that kind of error.

On Monday: Phony claims bolstered by phony numbers, and how it all hurts children