We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980's by Richard Beck

Some ritual abuse skeptics have explained the panic as a simple failure of reason, a sudden and violent collapse of the  country's ability to distinguish fact from fiction.  Those failures were real, and it is important, from a forensic and judicial perspective, to identify and remedy them.  However, it hardly explains anything at all to point out that people got their facts wrong.  The more pressing question has to do with the source and cause of this eagerness to mistake a decade-long waking nightmare for the truth.  Of course, the hysteria played on people's fears about the social changes that began to work their way through American society at the end of the twentieth century: the reorganization of private life and the slow but still probably--hopefully--inexorable breakdown of the country's sexual hierarchy.  But people also actively wanted these social changes to take place, even if they often found this was a desire they could not bring themselves to acknowledge, whether in public or in the privacy of their own homes and heads.  The hysteria drew its special character in the 1980s and 1990s from the difficulty people had recognizing this desire and acknowledging that many areas of life were already being transformed to accommodate it.  The difficulty persists today, and as a result, so do the hysteria's effects.

At first blush, Richard Beck's book We Believe the Children seems like a retread of familiar ground.  Beck is clearly familiar with Debbie Nathan's expose on the child abuse scandals of the 1980's, Satan's Silence; he draws frequently on Nathan's work and uses the pseudonyms she establishes.  Like Nathan, Beck focuses most of his attention on the McMartin Preschool trial that became the country's longest and costliest trial and resulted in zero convictions.  (Danny Davis, the lead defense counsel, Beck explains, drew the trial out intentionally, believing--correctly, it seems--that a long trial would outlast the hysteria and outrage around the McMartin allegations.)

But there are two things that make We Believe the Children, and the first is that it's just the most skillfully written of the books I've read on the Satanic panics of this time period, which include Satan's Silence and The Devil's Knot.  Nathan brings a journalist's clarity and reliability to the McMartin story, knowing that the details need do embellishment to seem ludicrous, but Beck uses a freer hand, and often knows exactly the right detail to make the absurdity of the McMartin trial, and others like it, come alive.  Sometimes these details are funny: "I see it's Anus Awareness Week again," says one observer of the trial, after the umpteenth slide show of supposedly "abnormal" conditions of the alleged victims' anus and genitals.  Sometimes the details are heartbreakers: Beck details how defendant Peggy Buckey kept a list of things she was grateful for in a notebook during the trial, beginning with the banal ("God," "Love," "Truth"), stretching to entries like "Seeds," "Fog," Surf boards," and "Trucks."  The last item was "Children."

The other thing that distinguishes We Believe the Children is its efforts to put the McMartin trial in a wider cultural and psychological context.  I appreciated Beck's thorough account of Freud's "Seduction theory," a pre-Oedipal conflict account of suppression and trauma rooted in prepubescent sexual abuse.  Freud abandoned the theory, but modern, often feminist, thinkers have accused Freud of not being willing to face just how widespread such abuse was; these ideas provide the context for the expanded attention to child abuse in general and panics like these specifically.  Beck does a great job finding the parallels between the McMartin case and others, like the tragic family collapse documented in the HBO movie Capturing the Friedmans and the bizarre self-hypnosis of Paul Ingram, a cop who seems to have convinced himself that he molested his daughters.

Beck also makes a convincing case that the roots of sexual abuse panic is rooted in divided attitudes toward the sexual revolution and the dissolution of the American family.  Many of us, Beck theorizes, secretly crave release from the stifling institutions of marriage, family, and the sexual hierarchy, but the strength of social conditioning also produces immense guilt around those cravings.  It explains why the abuse panic centers on daycares, who act as surrogate parents: we desire deeply the freedom that professional daycare provides, but our shame for abandoning our children causes us to lash out.  Ritual and sexual abuse panic, according to Beck, is the conservative id emerging to chastise and punish.  The strength of We Believe the Children is that it forsakes journalism for cultural criticism, and makes the panic of the 1980s sensible rather than merely shocking.  It also makes it clear that, while panic in this specific form seems to have run its course, the conditions for panic, including a retrenched conservative fear of changing moral attitudes, remains very much with us.