Childism by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Author:Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2012-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Mass Hysteria and Child

Sexual Abuse

IN THE 1980S, CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE STUDY DID MOVE forward, despite its complexities and the ruptures these produced inside the field of Child Abuse and Neglect, as well as between CAN researchers and feminist theorists and later among criminologists. The American public became more aware of the problem thanks to the efforts of the researchers and advocates who contributed to the study, but they also became more confused. At the same time, a situation was brewing that would soon erupt in mass hysteria and turn that halting, confusing progress back on itself. No comparable phenomenon had arisen to affect research into physical abuse or neglect. But for the next two decades, this social phenomenon would change—and in many respects reverse—the course of the research into sexual abuse, especially in North America and Great Britain, where resurgent social, political, and particularly religious conservatism fueled the hysteria. Both the public and researchers and clinicians began viewing child sexual abuse in a new, regressive light; and another surge of conservatism between 2000 and 2010 has kept this trend going. Child sexual abuse came to be the central front of a cultural civil war in America in which the nation’s collective sense of reality and truth, and even its commitment to equality among citizens, was threatened.

In late 1983 shocking headlines began to appear, particularly in the newspapers of small, ethnically homogeneous cities, concerning young children who were forced by their daycare workers to join in sexual orgies. The orgies not only involved the children and adults; they included forced sexual acts with corpses in which children were afterward forced to eat the flesh of the dismembered bodies. Within a few years, hundreds of investigations into disturbingly similar claims were under way in almost every state of the nation, many of them leading to criminal prosecutions. Accusations proliferated, not just of multiple-abuser child sexual abuse, but of ritual sex involving children, child sacrifice, mutilations of young children, and satanic cults. Soon, two new categories of CAN were given their obligatory abbreviations: MV/MO (multiple victim/multiple offender abuse) and SRA (satanic ritual abuse).

Starting in 1984, national magazines such as Time and Newsweek, as well as television news programs, began to present stories that compared SRA cases from around the country and identified an alleged trend. A huge public outcry arose before any of the reported cases was even heard in court, and the trials often lasted for many months, sometimes years. Parents across the country became afraid to send their children to daycare centers and preschools, while those who had denounced out-of-home childcare as antithetical to “family values” seized on the stories as proof that daycare centers and preschools were staffed by child abusers out to harm and corrupt the nation’s children.

People attached to various kinds of child protective services, as well as police departments and attorneys general, were suddenly swamped with reports of bizarre sexual practices involving children. These experts had no experience in investigating such reports and lacked the historical knowledge of past “moral panics” to help them understand what was happening.

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