Text Patterns

In North Carolina, children said that their teachers had thrown them out of a boat into a school of sharks. In Los Angeles, children said that one of their teachers had forced them to watch as he hacked a horse to pieces with a machete. In New Jersey, children said their teacher had raped them with knives, forks, and wooden spoons, and a child in Miami told investigators about homemade pills their caretakers had forced them to eat. The pills, the child said, looked like candy corn, and they made all of the children sleepy.

Many day-care workers were brought to trial, and some were convicted, even though “No pornography, no blood, no semen, no weapons, no mutilated corpses, no sharks, and no satanic altars or robes were ever found.” One trial, that of the owners of the McMartin preschool in California, became the longest and most expensive trial in American history, and ended with no convictions — because there was no evidence that the charges were true.

Prosecutors, parents, and therapists dealt with this problem by repeating what became a common refrain. Set aside the lack of corroborating evidence, they said, and consider this basic fact: children all over the country were fighting through fear and shame to come forward and say they had been abused — how could a decent society ignore these stories? Therapists pointed to their own profession’s long and inglorious history of ignoring children who tried speak out about abuse, and they said this was a mistake the country could not afford to repeat. “All children who are sexually abused anywhere,” one abuse expert said at the National Symposium on Child Molestation in 1984, “need to have their credibility recognized and to have advocates working for them. Among the things that is most damaging is the sense of being alone and having no one to talk to.”

Thus the book’s title: We Believe the Children.

We don’t hear many claims these days that day-care workers, or anyone else, are forcing children to participate in Satanic rituals. But reading Beck’s narrative, I couldn’t help reflecting on the ways in which certain structures of presumption that drove that “moral panic” thirty years ago are still in place and still having massive social effects — just in somewhat different contexts. There’s a standard sequential logic practiced primarily by therapists and counselors but widely adopted by observers. It goes like this: