The New Yorker, Oct. 3, 1995
CHILD-CARE DEMONS What are we projecting on those to whom we entrust our 
children?

by Lawrence Wright

   In San Diego, in 1991, a physically deformed and mildly retarded former 
Sunday-school teacher's aide named Dale Akiki was charged with molesting, 
torturing, and kidnapping nine boys and girls, aged three and four, who 
had been entrusted to his care during church services two years earlier.  
The case arose four months after Mr. Akiki quit teaching, when a girl 
belatedly accused him of exposing himself to her on the job.  At first, 
none of the other children supported her account, but eventually they 
produced stories that Mr. Akiki had slaughtered a giraffe and an elephant 
in the classroom, forced the children to drink blood, sacrificed a human 
baby, and cooked monkeys.  Almost all the children's complaints were 
recanted or changed, but the district attorney decided to prosecute 
anyway.  The trial took seven months; the jury took seven hours to acquit 
the defendant.  Mr. Akiki, however, had by then spent two and a half years 
in jail.  In June of this year, a grand jury investigating the prosecution 
of the case condemned the prosecutors for prodding therapists to act as 
investigators.  "When children initially say that nothing happened to 
them, a misguided therapist labels them as being in denial,"  the grand 
jurors warned.  "Then 'therapy' is sometimes continued for months or 
sometimes years until the children disclose answers the therapists want to 
hear."
      Certainly abuses occur in child-care situations, and no doubt 
pedophiles will be drawn to situations where children can be under their 
control But since the first major case of this kind--the 1983 McMartin 
Preschool case, in Manhattan Beach, California, in which the longest and 
most expensive criminal trial in American history resulted in no 
convictions of any of the seven defendants--court dockets across the 
country have become congested with emotionally devastating, financially 
ruinous, and legally bewildering cases in which there is little or no 
physical evidence and the primary witnesses are children.  The spawn of 
McMartin--Little Rascals, Wee Care, Breezy Point, and Fells Acres, among 
more than a hundred such cases--have typically included fantastic 
allegations of torture, ritual abuse, and animal sacrifice.
   The controver[s]y over the credibility of children's testimony has 
congealed into a debate between those who demand that we "believe the 
children' no matter how outlandish their allegations and those who 
maintain that children are inherently so suggestible that their testimony 
can never be relied upon.  An interesting question that remains in why 
children are not believed when, as often happens, they specifically deny 
charges at the time they first arise.
   In 1989, Kaare and Judy Sortland, a couple in Tacoma, Washington, were 
accused of sexually abusing three young boys in a day-care center that 
Judy operated in their home.  The charge arose when a mother discovered a 
suspicious red substance in her child's diapers.  The children in question 
repeatedly denied that anything had happened to them, but parents and 
therapists persuaded them to change their stories.  "We'll talk to these 
kids until they're twenty years old, if necessary, to get a believable 
story to the jury," one parent vowed.  When a jury nonetheless found the 
Sortlands not guilty in one case, the judge threw out the other charges 
and awarded the defense a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars in 
sanctions.  Despite their acquittal, the Sortlands were hounded for the 
next two years by anonymous vandals.  On Haqlloween night in 1992, Kaare 
Sortland was shot to death in his front hard.  His wife heard him cry "I 
didn't do it!" just before the six shots were fired.
   In the summer of 1985, Margaret Kelly Michaels, who was then a 
twenty-six-year-old-day-care worker in Maplewood, New Jersey, was charged 
with a number of hideous, bizarre forms of abuse, such as making children 
eat her feces, raping and assaulting them with silverware, licking peanut 
butter from their genitals, and playing "Jingle Bells" on the piano in the 
nude.  During the investigation, a social worker asked a child, "Do you 
think that Kelly was not good when she was hurting you all?"
  "Wasn't hurtin me, I like her," the child responded.
  "I can't hear you, you got to look at me when you talk to me," said the 
social worker.  "Now, when Kelly was bothering kids in the music room--"
  "I got socks off," said the child.
   As the interview progressed, the social worker asked, "Did she make 
anybody else take their clothes off in the music room?"
   "No," said the child.
   "Yes," said the social worker.
   "No,"  said the child.
    What's going on here?  Why isn't the child allowed to say no?  A 
widening body of research shows that repeated questioning of children, 
especially by authoritative adults with a specific bias, will often lead 
to answers that conform to the interviewers' expectations.  At Ms. 
Michaels' trial, which lasted for ten months, the bulk of the significant 
evidence of abuse that was presented consisted of the coerced testimony of 
children.  A psychiatrist name Roland Summit explained to the jury that 
when children deny that sexual abuses happened the denial can be evidence 
that the abuses actually did occur.  The name he gave to the Catch-22 
logic was the Child Sexual Abuse Accommodations Syndrome.  In part because 
of his expert testimony, a jury convicted Ms. Michaels of a hundred and 
fifteen counts of abuse against nineteen children.  She spent five years 
in prison before being freed on appeal.  This June, the Supreme Court of 
New Jersey ruled that the State would have to prove "by clear and 
convincing evidence" that children's testimony is credible--a ruling that 
sets what may become a welcome new standard in similar cases nationwide.
   Why is there such a cultural bias toward stories of abuse--and 
especially toward grotesque and absurd tales, even when there is no 
reliable evidence that any crime occurred in the first place?  The very 
people we count on to protect our society--prosecutors, police, social 
workers, jurors, even parents--are eliciting fantasies from children that 
express our worst collective fears.  No doubt children are victimized.  
But the truth is that sexual abuse is far more likely to occur at home 
than in schools or nurseries.  Scapegoats carry the burden of the guilt 
inside us all.  They are presumed to be the incarnation of evil, the cause 
of every social ill.  The libel that our society has imposed on child-care 
workers is a kind of projection of guilt for the damage that we ourselves 
have done, as parents and as a society.  We have given our children to 
strangers to rear, and it makes us uneasy and fearful.  Is it any wonder 
we have a bad conscience?  Divorce, neglect, unsafe neighborhoods, bad 
schools--these primary social problems are not the fault of the people to 
who we have entrusted our children.  Forcing children to invent stories of 
abuse is abuse.