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The Witch-Hunt Narrative - Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children (Hardcover)
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The Witch-Hunt Narrative - Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children (Hardcover)
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In the 1980s, a series of child sex abuse cases rocked the United
States. The most famous case was the 1984 McMartin preschool case,
but there were a number of others as well. By the latter part of
the decade, the assumption was widespread that child sex abuse had
become a serious problem in America. Yet within a few years, the
concern about it died down considerably. The failure to convict
anyone in the McMartin case and a widely publicized appellate
decision in New Jersey that freed an accused molester had turned
the dominant narrative on its head. In the early 1990s, a new
narrative with remarkable staying power emerged: the child sex
abuse cases were symptomatic of a 'moral panic' that had produced a
witch hunt. A central claim in this new witch hunt narrative was
that the children who testified were not reliable and easily swayed
by prosecutorial suggestion. In time, the notion that child sex
abuse was a product of sensationalized over-reporting and far less
endemic than originally thought became the new common sense. But
did the new witch hunt narrative accurately represent reality? As
Ross Cheit demonstrates in his exhaustive account of child sex
abuse cases in the past two and a half decades, purveyors of the
witch hunt narrative never did the hard work of examining court
records in the many cases that reached the courts throughout the
nation. Instead, they treated a couple of cases as representative
and concluded that the issue was blown far out of proportion.
Drawing on years of research into cases in a number of states,
Cheit shows that the issue had not been blown out of proportion at
all. In fact, child sex abuse convictions were regular occurrences,
and the crime occurred far more frequently than conventional wisdom
would have us believe. Cheit's aim is not to simply prove the
narrative wrong, however. He also shows how a narrative based on
empirically thin evidence became a theory with real social force,
and how that theory stood at odds with a far more grim reality. The
belief that the charge of child sex abuse was typically a hoax also
left us unprepared to deal with the far greater scandal of child
sex abuse in the Catholic Church, which, incidentally, has served
to substantiate Cheit's thesis about the pervasiveness of the
problem. In sum, The Witch-Hunt Narrative is a magisterial and
empirically powerful account of the social dynamics that led to the
denial of widespread human tragedy.
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