by Jim Peron
The LFE Times
Periodically I read books that make me angry. Two such recent reads are No Crueler Tyranny by Dorothy Rabinowitz (Wall Street Journal Books, 2003) and Harmful to Minors by Judith Levine (University of Minnesota Press, 2002). I'm not angry at the lady authors but I do get angry about the incidents they recount. Very different books from each other, these books complement one another quite well.
Rabinowitz covers some of the child abuse hysteria cases that swept the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. She doesn't dwell on some of the more well known fraudulent cases like that of the McMartin Day Care case in Southern California. Instead she concentrates on some of the lesser known cases and she presents how these cases impacted on the lives of the innocent people so accused.
The politicization of sexual abuse is, of course, what lead to the problems. Special interest groups arose who benefited from the hysteria. Gender feminism with its anti-male ideology was lurking in the dark waiting for something to clutch onto so it could make political points. And the idea of the sexual abuse of children was an issue that would be a winner for them. It had all the ingredients for success.
It was an issue which the media would jump on. Lurid accounts of satanic ritual abuse, true or not, were guaranteed to sell newspapers. Politicians love to solve problems and if the problem doesn't actually exist all the better. After all, any solution to a non-existent problem is bound to look successful. Authoritarian police officers loved the "crisis". The Religious Right could beat their morality drums till the rest of us go deaf from the noise. Social workers would see vast new powers being handed to them. Worried mothers and paranoid fathers would rather be "safe than sorry" and would applaud all the new moves to protect children.
What was forgotten is that the hysteria impacted real families. Real children were hurt, not by the mainly mythological Satanic abusers, but by the abuse sniffers who would save the children. But to raise this point and to question the hysteria immediately makes one suspect. The angry ideological feminist (is there any other kind?) screams: "You're downplaying the real pain of abused children."
Of course one isn't. They assume, and often charge, that to question the hysteria is to claim that no sexual abuse ever takes place. Absurd. To find individuals falsely accused of murder is not to say that murder never takes place. To say that the war on drugs is worse than the drugs themselves is not to say that people should rush out and take illegal drugs.
But in the cases outlined by Rabinowitz it was a very dangerous thing indeed to question the actions of the abuse sniffers. The child abuse hysteria that gripped Wenatchee, Washington proved this to be true. In the witch hunt era of Salem, to question the existence of witches lead to the accusation that the questioner must be a witch as well. In Wenatchee doubts expressed publicly were quickly followed by accusations and arrests of the questioners.
Rev. Robert Robertson of the Pentecostal Church of God House of Prayer learned that first hand. When the arrests started he was troubled and started keeping meticulous notes on the cases. It just didn't seem right to him. The police released a long, articulate confession from one woman. Pastor Robertson knew she was barely literate and couldn't have written the statement. Finally after accumulating enough facts he made a public denunciation of the case. Five days later he and his wife were arrested and charged with the ritual abuse of children. Allegedly Robertson, and his entire congregration, lined up weekly to rape children in the midst of scheduled church services.
Taken to jail, Rev. Robertson was regularly beaten up. It seems the police spread the story to inmates that he was a child abuser. This is often used by the prosecutors and the police to intimidate victims—they call them suspects—of their actions. In addition the Robertsons saw social workers sweep in and take their children from them.
Paul Glassen worked for Child Protective Services. It was his job to investigate some of the evidence for the cases. As a caseworker he reported that one child who had made accusations admitted to him that she invented the charges. This was a mistake on his part. For reporting this incident he was arrested and charged by police with "witness tampering". Child Protective Services fired him. And within days the police and social workers were eliciting accusations from numerous children to the effect that Glassen was one of the abusers.
Glassen packed his wife and young son and moved in with relatives in Canada. He knew what was coming and figured he'd lose his family if he stayed in Wenatchee. He was right. Before the hysteria ended over 40 people in this small town were arrested and in excess of 50 children were taken forcibly from their parents by agents of the state.
In Massachusetts Violet, Cheryl and Gerald Amirault ran the Fells Acres Day Care Center. When accusations were made against them things soon spiralled out of control. The coalition of special interests that make up the child abuse industry came out in full force and in no time all three suspects were in prison in a seemingless hopeless battle to clear their names.
The stories that were told by children subjected to therapy sessions to "root out" the abuse were horrific, incredible and unbelievable. The hallmark of these cases were the fantasies of children running rampant with the encouragement of angry feminists, power hungry bureaucrats and authoritarian cops. Secret tunnels, odd costumes, animal sacrifices and the typical childish preoccupation with excrement, urine and various bodily orifices. Incredibly stupid parents believed that such imaginary tales couldn't possibly come from their innocent children. The absurdity of the stories themselves, they said, proved they were true. Like Augustine who said that he believed because it was absurd these parents accepted the claims of the child abuse cult precisely because they were unbelievable.
For the Amiraults, evidence slowly accumulated proving that a miscarriage of justice had been inflicted. But the bureaucrats are always reluctant to admit that they aren't perfect. Every step of the way the abuse sniffers stepped in to try and save the crumbling facade of a case built on lies.
The family ping-ponged back and forth. One moment they were guilty, then innocent, then guilty again, then up for parole, then denied. A judge overturned the case and issued a scathing denunciation of the prosecutors and social workers who manufactured the charges. Political leverage resulted in his ruling being overturned again. The elderly Violent passed away of stomach cancer during this brief period and died a free (and innocent) woman. The cancer was not diagnosed during her time in prison in spite of consistent stomach problems.
As the story crumbled more and more prosecutors finally agreed to a reduction in the sentence for Cheryl. She was released. But they only agreed to freeing her if she agreed not to challenge the original guilty verdict. They were determined to let the lie survive regardless of what pain they inflicted on an innocent woman. In addition prosecutors were in a panic that Cheryl's release might allow her to reach the public with the truth about they case. As a condition for release they demanded that she be banned from any television interviews. Other media interviews were allowed. After all, the more intellectual members of the community were already on her side. But the child abuse industry feared what would happen if she were allowed to speak to the wider television-watching public.
The case of Gerald only became harder as a result. Prosecutors now changed their claims. Originally they said all three family members were equally guilty. Now they wanted to pretend that Gerald was the main perpetrator and that he dragged his poor mother and sister in with him. Newspaper reporters, who originally and typically had been caught up with the abuse claims, were challenging the story. Too much evidence was accumulating proving that the entire case was a fiction.
The new governor, Republican Paul Cellucci even publicly said the family was wrongly convicted. The Democrat he defeated was Scott Harshbarger who was the prosecutor in the case. At last there was something that could be done for Gerald. An appeal was filed with the Governor's Advisory Board on Pardons and Paroles. Considered one of the toughest such boards in the country people held out little hope.
The board conducted a careful investigation that lasted almost a full year. The journal Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly waded into the case—something they never did. They denounced the case in an editorial titled "Travesty of Justice". They said: "The prosecutors here seem unwilling to admit any possibility that they might have sent innocent people to jail for crimes that never occurred." The Christian Science Monitor, headquartered in Boston, called this a "prosecution that should never have been brought."
After nine months the Board finally released a unanimous decision. They recommended that Gerald Amirault be pardoned as soon as possible. And contrary to tradition they also made statements that the case in question appeared deeply flawed and that the prisoner was possibly innocent of all charges. They called the charges "bizarre" and said it was "clearly a matter of public knowledge that, at the minimum, real and substantial doubt exists concerning petitioner's conviction." This was unheard of.
But in the meantime Governor Cellucci had been appointed as an ambassador and was replaced by Jane Swift. Swift was facing a crisis. Her support in the polls was dropping rapidly. She was trailing her opponent by 60 percentage points. That got her attention. She denied the pardon. According to one of her aides she feared a backlash if she kept Amirault in jail, and she feared a backlash if she let him out. She just figured the backlash would be bigger if he were released. Opinion polls later showed she guessed wrong and shortly after she announced that she wouldn't run for the office that she had inherited.
Surely, if there is a hell, then a politician with the morality of a Jane Swift will occupy the lowest rungs on the ladder of eternal damnation. Swift tried to justify the decision by claiming that Gerald hadn't shown any attempt at self improvement. She meant that he refused counselling for being a sex offender and that he refused to admit his guilt. He wasn't a sex offender and had no guilt to admit. That simple concept couldn't get through her thick skull and she was willing to sacrifice an innocent man in the vain hope of salvaging a political career and all its perks for herself. I can only hope that the likes of Jane Swift have trouble sleeping at night and that she's tormented by the evil that she did. However, I doubt she has the moral character necessary for this to happen.
Rabinowitz's book accounts for numerous other cases. All show the same patterns of the abuse of power over others. Social workers demand guilty pleas or threaten their suspects with the permanent loss of their children. Little do the victims of the abuse sniffers realize that they'll lose their children even if they confess in the hopes of ending the nightmare. Children are intimidated and coerced into making accusations. Evidence is ignored. Self-appointed experts who are anointed because they bought into the gender feminist agenda come in and explain away the obvious with absurd theories that are presented to juries as facts. And in case after case innocent people are jailed. Children are abused by the abuse sniffers themselves and families are destroyed.
Judith Levine's book Harmful to Minors is very different. She investigates the ideological assumptions of the abuse sniffers. She questions the very foundation of their case: that children have to be protected from sexuality. How she managed to persuade the University of Minnesota to publish her book I don't know. But Levine is a leftist and a rather strident one at that. She should be lining up behind her fellow Leftists and joining the crusade. Perhaps it's that bias that allowed her to get the book in print.
Her political bias is both her strong point and her major weakness. She makes absurd remarks that seem to imply that all social problems are rooted in economic inequality. She spreads the false claim that economic inequality is rising (as if inequality mattered). She wants to place the blame for social problems on the lack of good, caring welfare policies and the interventionist state. She weeps over the fact that America doesn't have a socialist medical care system, quotes Left-wing special interest groups to bolster her case and condemns welfare reform.
But that said she does question what has happened in the United States in the last twenty years. She wants to know how it is that sex suddenly became something that was considered vile and horrific. And she questions whether most of the claims made by the antisex coalition of Left-wing feminists and Right-wing religionists are even true. She thinks not.
She shows how the ideas that were being pushed a couple of decades ago are now playing themselves out. For most of human history it was assumed that children were sexual. The more religious amongst us didn't even deny this. In fact they tended to think it proved the innate sinfulness of humankind. Age of consent was uniformly ten years of age in pre-Progressive Era America. Many youths in their early teens were independent and often had families of their own that they supported—without Levine's beloved welfare state.
But the modern feminist movement wanted to portray children as sexless beings victimized by evil men. Little did they realize that as a result of their campaign many of the innocent victims of child abuse charges would be female day care workers. In a short span it became commonly accepted that children had no sexuality at all. In fact it was assumed that any display of sexuality was now proof of abuse.
Where parents had previously been told that they should expect their children to engage in masturbation or sex play with other children the now common assumption is that both activities are symptoms of something more serious.
And one of the results is a spate of horrific cases where young children themselves are being incarcerated and tagged as sexual offenders and child molesters. Prepubescent children are labelled "budding sex offenders". Playground kisses end up with expulsions from school for sexual harassment. In Vermont an eight-year-old girl was listed in school records as being guilty of sexual harassment because she gave a boy a note saying she wanted to be his girlfriend.
Kee McFarland, one of the counsellors who manufactured abuse claims in the McMartin case, wrote a book When Children Abuse to present the child as abuser claim. What had for generations been curiosity and considered normal, even if frowned upon, now became something far more sinister. I'm glad Ms. McFarland didn't live in my neighborhood when I was growing up or I suspect that virtually all the children would have ended up in prison or treatment. And it should be remembered that in many ways this is far worse than the previous phony crisis McFarland helped manufacture. We are now talking about children who are being incarcerated. And because they are receiving treatment, instead of being punished for a crime, there is no clear cut end to their incarceration.They undergo "treatment" until their psychiatric jailers tire of the exercise and free them.
McFarland says that we are uncomfortable about the idea that children are sex offenders so "we've had to deny their existence and/or minimize their behaviour until now. We've called their behaviour 'exploration' or 'curiosity' until they were old enough for us to comfortably call it what it is: sexual abuse of other children." McFarland said that 90 percent of such cases are unreported and she wants that stopped. Those 90 percent have to be apprehended and treated.
A hysteria that started out to protect children by the mid 90s had become a movement to incarcerate them. Levine reports: "In the mid-1990s, catalogues of child-abuse literature devoted more and more pages to this young deviant, much of it... self-published, meaning it did not undergo peer review of a university press or professional journal. Training tapes and symposia proliferated and were costly: in 1996, an audiotape sold for fifty dollars, today the bill for a two-day workshop is in the several hundreds."
Anyone who has investigated the origins of the child sex abuse industry will recognize the pattern. This is precisely what happened in the late 70s and early 80s. This is what created the child abuse industry in the first place. MacFarland was paid massive sums of government money to sniff out abuse. This is not unusual. Almost the entire child abuse industry is funded via government programs of one sort or another.
But, after McMartin and dozens of other high profile ritual abuse cases, the cat was out of the bag. The industry was run by ideologues with no concern for the facts. Very few of the children were actual victims of abuse. Most of those arrested were innocent. The evidence that was accumulating didn't justify the theory. So the abuse industry turned on the very people they pretended to be protecting. They started pointing their accusing fingers at the children.
According to Levine the first center to "help" children "who abuse" was started by the rabid McFarland in 1985. Within a few years one data base alone listed 50 residential and 394 nonresidential programs "for kids under twelve with 'sexual behaviour problems' and over 800 programs for teens."
But Levine points out the decision to brand children as sexual deviant was done without any understanding of what child sexuality is like. Studies are forbidden. Any attempt to actually determine what is the norm would be roundly condemned by the abuse sniffer coalition. Levine says: "In spite of a paucity of empirical data, we know that masturbation is ubiquitous from early on, more noticeably among little boys than little girls. So is 'playing doctor,' inserting fingers into orifices, and other such past times. In the so-called latency years, from about seven to eleven, children continue to masturbate, touch each other, and have crushes on their classmates and friends."
More and more children are having their lives ripped apart because they have sexual feelings that the abuse sniffers deny should exist. To fire their hysterical crusades of the past they invented a sexuality-free child. That made the alleged abuse seem even worse. But the abuse cases fell apart. And now the allegedly nonsexual children ended up being very sexual. The only conclusion they could come up with is that children were now not victims but victimizers. Like every revolution they eventually turned on the very people they claimed to represent.
The LFE Times
Periodically I read books that make me angry. Two such recent reads are No Crueler Tyranny by Dorothy Rabinowitz (Wall Street Journal Books, 2003) and Harmful to Minors by Judith Levine (University of Minnesota Press, 2002). I'm not angry at the lady authors but I do get angry about the incidents they recount. Very different books from each other, these books complement one another quite well.
Rabinowitz covers some of the child abuse hysteria cases that swept the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. She doesn't dwell on some of the more well known fraudulent cases like that of the McMartin Day Care case in Southern California. Instead she concentrates on some of the lesser known cases and she presents how these cases impacted on the lives of the innocent people so accused.
The politicization of sexual abuse is, of course, what lead to the problems. Special interest groups arose who benefited from the hysteria. Gender feminism with its anti-male ideology was lurking in the dark waiting for something to clutch onto so it could make political points. And the idea of the sexual abuse of children was an issue that would be a winner for them. It had all the ingredients for success.
It was an issue which the media would jump on. Lurid accounts of satanic ritual abuse, true or not, were guaranteed to sell newspapers. Politicians love to solve problems and if the problem doesn't actually exist all the better. After all, any solution to a non-existent problem is bound to look successful. Authoritarian police officers loved the "crisis". The Religious Right could beat their morality drums till the rest of us go deaf from the noise. Social workers would see vast new powers being handed to them. Worried mothers and paranoid fathers would rather be "safe than sorry" and would applaud all the new moves to protect children.
What was forgotten is that the hysteria impacted real families. Real children were hurt, not by the mainly mythological Satanic abusers, but by the abuse sniffers who would save the children. But to raise this point and to question the hysteria immediately makes one suspect. The angry ideological feminist (is there any other kind?) screams: "You're downplaying the real pain of abused children."
Of course one isn't. They assume, and often charge, that to question the hysteria is to claim that no sexual abuse ever takes place. Absurd. To find individuals falsely accused of murder is not to say that murder never takes place. To say that the war on drugs is worse than the drugs themselves is not to say that people should rush out and take illegal drugs.
But in the cases outlined by Rabinowitz it was a very dangerous thing indeed to question the actions of the abuse sniffers. The child abuse hysteria that gripped Wenatchee, Washington proved this to be true. In the witch hunt era of Salem, to question the existence of witches lead to the accusation that the questioner must be a witch as well. In Wenatchee doubts expressed publicly were quickly followed by accusations and arrests of the questioners.
Rev. Robert Robertson of the Pentecostal Church of God House of Prayer learned that first hand. When the arrests started he was troubled and started keeping meticulous notes on the cases. It just didn't seem right to him. The police released a long, articulate confession from one woman. Pastor Robertson knew she was barely literate and couldn't have written the statement. Finally after accumulating enough facts he made a public denunciation of the case. Five days later he and his wife were arrested and charged with the ritual abuse of children. Allegedly Robertson, and his entire congregration, lined up weekly to rape children in the midst of scheduled church services.
Taken to jail, Rev. Robertson was regularly beaten up. It seems the police spread the story to inmates that he was a child abuser. This is often used by the prosecutors and the police to intimidate victims—they call them suspects—of their actions. In addition the Robertsons saw social workers sweep in and take their children from them.
Paul Glassen worked for Child Protective Services. It was his job to investigate some of the evidence for the cases. As a caseworker he reported that one child who had made accusations admitted to him that she invented the charges. This was a mistake on his part. For reporting this incident he was arrested and charged by police with "witness tampering". Child Protective Services fired him. And within days the police and social workers were eliciting accusations from numerous children to the effect that Glassen was one of the abusers.
Glassen packed his wife and young son and moved in with relatives in Canada. He knew what was coming and figured he'd lose his family if he stayed in Wenatchee. He was right. Before the hysteria ended over 40 people in this small town were arrested and in excess of 50 children were taken forcibly from their parents by agents of the state.
In Massachusetts Violet, Cheryl and Gerald Amirault ran the Fells Acres Day Care Center. When accusations were made against them things soon spiralled out of control. The coalition of special interests that make up the child abuse industry came out in full force and in no time all three suspects were in prison in a seemingless hopeless battle to clear their names.
The stories that were told by children subjected to therapy sessions to "root out" the abuse were horrific, incredible and unbelievable. The hallmark of these cases were the fantasies of children running rampant with the encouragement of angry feminists, power hungry bureaucrats and authoritarian cops. Secret tunnels, odd costumes, animal sacrifices and the typical childish preoccupation with excrement, urine and various bodily orifices. Incredibly stupid parents believed that such imaginary tales couldn't possibly come from their innocent children. The absurdity of the stories themselves, they said, proved they were true. Like Augustine who said that he believed because it was absurd these parents accepted the claims of the child abuse cult precisely because they were unbelievable.
For the Amiraults, evidence slowly accumulated proving that a miscarriage of justice had been inflicted. But the bureaucrats are always reluctant to admit that they aren't perfect. Every step of the way the abuse sniffers stepped in to try and save the crumbling facade of a case built on lies.
The family ping-ponged back and forth. One moment they were guilty, then innocent, then guilty again, then up for parole, then denied. A judge overturned the case and issued a scathing denunciation of the prosecutors and social workers who manufactured the charges. Political leverage resulted in his ruling being overturned again. The elderly Violent passed away of stomach cancer during this brief period and died a free (and innocent) woman. The cancer was not diagnosed during her time in prison in spite of consistent stomach problems.
As the story crumbled more and more prosecutors finally agreed to a reduction in the sentence for Cheryl. She was released. But they only agreed to freeing her if she agreed not to challenge the original guilty verdict. They were determined to let the lie survive regardless of what pain they inflicted on an innocent woman. In addition prosecutors were in a panic that Cheryl's release might allow her to reach the public with the truth about they case. As a condition for release they demanded that she be banned from any television interviews. Other media interviews were allowed. After all, the more intellectual members of the community were already on her side. But the child abuse industry feared what would happen if she were allowed to speak to the wider television-watching public.
The case of Gerald only became harder as a result. Prosecutors now changed their claims. Originally they said all three family members were equally guilty. Now they wanted to pretend that Gerald was the main perpetrator and that he dragged his poor mother and sister in with him. Newspaper reporters, who originally and typically had been caught up with the abuse claims, were challenging the story. Too much evidence was accumulating proving that the entire case was a fiction.
The new governor, Republican Paul Cellucci even publicly said the family was wrongly convicted. The Democrat he defeated was Scott Harshbarger who was the prosecutor in the case. At last there was something that could be done for Gerald. An appeal was filed with the Governor's Advisory Board on Pardons and Paroles. Considered one of the toughest such boards in the country people held out little hope.
The board conducted a careful investigation that lasted almost a full year. The journal Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly waded into the case—something they never did. They denounced the case in an editorial titled "Travesty of Justice". They said: "The prosecutors here seem unwilling to admit any possibility that they might have sent innocent people to jail for crimes that never occurred." The Christian Science Monitor, headquartered in Boston, called this a "prosecution that should never have been brought."
After nine months the Board finally released a unanimous decision. They recommended that Gerald Amirault be pardoned as soon as possible. And contrary to tradition they also made statements that the case in question appeared deeply flawed and that the prisoner was possibly innocent of all charges. They called the charges "bizarre" and said it was "clearly a matter of public knowledge that, at the minimum, real and substantial doubt exists concerning petitioner's conviction." This was unheard of.
But in the meantime Governor Cellucci had been appointed as an ambassador and was replaced by Jane Swift. Swift was facing a crisis. Her support in the polls was dropping rapidly. She was trailing her opponent by 60 percentage points. That got her attention. She denied the pardon. According to one of her aides she feared a backlash if she kept Amirault in jail, and she feared a backlash if she let him out. She just figured the backlash would be bigger if he were released. Opinion polls later showed she guessed wrong and shortly after she announced that she wouldn't run for the office that she had inherited.
Surely, if there is a hell, then a politician with the morality of a Jane Swift will occupy the lowest rungs on the ladder of eternal damnation. Swift tried to justify the decision by claiming that Gerald hadn't shown any attempt at self improvement. She meant that he refused counselling for being a sex offender and that he refused to admit his guilt. He wasn't a sex offender and had no guilt to admit. That simple concept couldn't get through her thick skull and she was willing to sacrifice an innocent man in the vain hope of salvaging a political career and all its perks for herself. I can only hope that the likes of Jane Swift have trouble sleeping at night and that she's tormented by the evil that she did. However, I doubt she has the moral character necessary for this to happen.
Rabinowitz's book accounts for numerous other cases. All show the same patterns of the abuse of power over others. Social workers demand guilty pleas or threaten their suspects with the permanent loss of their children. Little do the victims of the abuse sniffers realize that they'll lose their children even if they confess in the hopes of ending the nightmare. Children are intimidated and coerced into making accusations. Evidence is ignored. Self-appointed experts who are anointed because they bought into the gender feminist agenda come in and explain away the obvious with absurd theories that are presented to juries as facts. And in case after case innocent people are jailed. Children are abused by the abuse sniffers themselves and families are destroyed.
Judith Levine's book Harmful to Minors is very different. She investigates the ideological assumptions of the abuse sniffers. She questions the very foundation of their case: that children have to be protected from sexuality. How she managed to persuade the University of Minnesota to publish her book I don't know. But Levine is a leftist and a rather strident one at that. She should be lining up behind her fellow Leftists and joining the crusade. Perhaps it's that bias that allowed her to get the book in print.
Her political bias is both her strong point and her major weakness. She makes absurd remarks that seem to imply that all social problems are rooted in economic inequality. She spreads the false claim that economic inequality is rising (as if inequality mattered). She wants to place the blame for social problems on the lack of good, caring welfare policies and the interventionist state. She weeps over the fact that America doesn't have a socialist medical care system, quotes Left-wing special interest groups to bolster her case and condemns welfare reform.
But that said she does question what has happened in the United States in the last twenty years. She wants to know how it is that sex suddenly became something that was considered vile and horrific. And she questions whether most of the claims made by the antisex coalition of Left-wing feminists and Right-wing religionists are even true. She thinks not.
She shows how the ideas that were being pushed a couple of decades ago are now playing themselves out. For most of human history it was assumed that children were sexual. The more religious amongst us didn't even deny this. In fact they tended to think it proved the innate sinfulness of humankind. Age of consent was uniformly ten years of age in pre-Progressive Era America. Many youths in their early teens were independent and often had families of their own that they supported—without Levine's beloved welfare state.
But the modern feminist movement wanted to portray children as sexless beings victimized by evil men. Little did they realize that as a result of their campaign many of the innocent victims of child abuse charges would be female day care workers. In a short span it became commonly accepted that children had no sexuality at all. In fact it was assumed that any display of sexuality was now proof of abuse.
Where parents had previously been told that they should expect their children to engage in masturbation or sex play with other children the now common assumption is that both activities are symptoms of something more serious.
And one of the results is a spate of horrific cases where young children themselves are being incarcerated and tagged as sexual offenders and child molesters. Prepubescent children are labelled "budding sex offenders". Playground kisses end up with expulsions from school for sexual harassment. In Vermont an eight-year-old girl was listed in school records as being guilty of sexual harassment because she gave a boy a note saying she wanted to be his girlfriend.
Kee McFarland, one of the counsellors who manufactured abuse claims in the McMartin case, wrote a book When Children Abuse to present the child as abuser claim. What had for generations been curiosity and considered normal, even if frowned upon, now became something far more sinister. I'm glad Ms. McFarland didn't live in my neighborhood when I was growing up or I suspect that virtually all the children would have ended up in prison or treatment. And it should be remembered that in many ways this is far worse than the previous phony crisis McFarland helped manufacture. We are now talking about children who are being incarcerated. And because they are receiving treatment, instead of being punished for a crime, there is no clear cut end to their incarceration.They undergo "treatment" until their psychiatric jailers tire of the exercise and free them.
McFarland says that we are uncomfortable about the idea that children are sex offenders so "we've had to deny their existence and/or minimize their behaviour until now. We've called their behaviour 'exploration' or 'curiosity' until they were old enough for us to comfortably call it what it is: sexual abuse of other children." McFarland said that 90 percent of such cases are unreported and she wants that stopped. Those 90 percent have to be apprehended and treated.
A hysteria that started out to protect children by the mid 90s had become a movement to incarcerate them. Levine reports: "In the mid-1990s, catalogues of child-abuse literature devoted more and more pages to this young deviant, much of it... self-published, meaning it did not undergo peer review of a university press or professional journal. Training tapes and symposia proliferated and were costly: in 1996, an audiotape sold for fifty dollars, today the bill for a two-day workshop is in the several hundreds."
Anyone who has investigated the origins of the child sex abuse industry will recognize the pattern. This is precisely what happened in the late 70s and early 80s. This is what created the child abuse industry in the first place. MacFarland was paid massive sums of government money to sniff out abuse. This is not unusual. Almost the entire child abuse industry is funded via government programs of one sort or another.
But, after McMartin and dozens of other high profile ritual abuse cases, the cat was out of the bag. The industry was run by ideologues with no concern for the facts. Very few of the children were actual victims of abuse. Most of those arrested were innocent. The evidence that was accumulating didn't justify the theory. So the abuse industry turned on the very people they pretended to be protecting. They started pointing their accusing fingers at the children.
According to Levine the first center to "help" children "who abuse" was started by the rabid McFarland in 1985. Within a few years one data base alone listed 50 residential and 394 nonresidential programs "for kids under twelve with 'sexual behaviour problems' and over 800 programs for teens."
But Levine points out the decision to brand children as sexual deviant was done without any understanding of what child sexuality is like. Studies are forbidden. Any attempt to actually determine what is the norm would be roundly condemned by the abuse sniffer coalition. Levine says: "In spite of a paucity of empirical data, we know that masturbation is ubiquitous from early on, more noticeably among little boys than little girls. So is 'playing doctor,' inserting fingers into orifices, and other such past times. In the so-called latency years, from about seven to eleven, children continue to masturbate, touch each other, and have crushes on their classmates and friends."
More and more children are having their lives ripped apart because they have sexual feelings that the abuse sniffers deny should exist. To fire their hysterical crusades of the past they invented a sexuality-free child. That made the alleged abuse seem even worse. But the abuse cases fell apart. And now the allegedly nonsexual children ended up being very sexual. The only conclusion they could come up with is that children were now not victims but victimizers. Like every revolution they eventually turned on the very people they claimed to represent.
