Book Review: Richard Beck's "We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s"

   As many of those who follow my work may know, I am currently in the process of writing a book on youth rights issues. When one endeavors to write a book about a topic that one has thought about as deeply and studied as much as I have in reference to youth liberation, it is interesting to realize those areas within your subject area of expertise about which you still possess significant gaps in knowledge. In the introduction that I am currently writing to the book, I was able to write confidently about the relationships among various works of youth liberation theory that appeared in the 1970s and how these works reflected the cultural, social, and political preoccupations of that moment in American history. However, when I came to the point in my narrative where I needed to write about how the moral panics and the reactionary cultural conservatism of the 1980s had winnowed away the preceding decades' advancements in youth liberation, I felt that I needed to do a lot more research to give an accurate account of the dynamics at play in the situation.

   In searching for books about youth and moral panics in the 1980s, one title that kept coming up again and again in my searches was Richard Beck's "We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s." This book, published in 2015 to critical acclaim, deals primarily with a slew of unfounded but highly consequential accusations of the sexual abuse of children by daycare workers in the 1980s and early 1990s. The title of the book initially made me uneasy as a youth liberationist. Since I knew that the book was about the ways in which these accusations of sexual molestation turned out to be overblown and unfounded, was the book called "We Believe the Children" as an ironic note meant to undermine the credibility of young people making accusations of abuse? Certainly no youth liberationist wants to promulgate such a narrative. However, the wonderful reviews for the book allowed me to overcome my hesitation and I am glad that I did for I discovered upon reading this fascinating book that the title is to be read in an entirely different light than I initially presumed.

   Perhaps the key insight of youth liberationism as a philosophy is that child abuse and child protectionism are all too often too sides of the same coin. In an ostensible effort to "protect" children (which in many cases is a euphemism for "controlling" them), children are placed in situations that are far more sinister than the often exaggerated or even imaginary threats from which adult caregivers seek to protect them. And by stripping young people of autonomy and freedom in the process, they then lack the means to escape the real terrors that besiege them. I don't suppose that Richard Beck would call himself a youth liberationist. In fact, I would be surprised if he had even heard that our movement exists. However, he intuitively understands this abuse/protectionism dynamic exceedingly clearly and in many ways, an exploration of this truth can be said to lie at the heart of his book.

   One of the most important things to understand about the pandemic of overwrought yet devastating accusations of sexual abuse by daycare workers in the 1980s that shook the nation is that this was not primarily a moral panic driven by lying children fabricating accusations of sexual abuse. Instead, the panic was almost entirely parent driven and the children caught in the crossfire of the hysteria were ultimately badgered, coerced, threatened, and confused into testifying to sexual molestation by adults that had previously been their caretakers. In addition to parents, social workers, police, prosecutors, child psychologists, and medical professionals were responsible for driving the panic and in many cases eliciting problematic testimonies of alleged abuse from young people. The reasons that these  individuals were so keen to glom onto this narrative of monstrous child abuse by daycare teachers varied. For example, the mother who set off the infamous McMartin Preschool sexual abuse case allegations was dangerously mentally unstable and out of touch with reality. Other parents found that involvement with the anti-molestation movement gave them a cause and an identity. Some prosecutors, police officers, social workers, and psychologists pushed problematic narratives out of careerism. But on a deeper level, Beck suggests, allegations of mass child molestation in daycare centers, ritual abuse hysteria, and the notions of recovered memories and multiple personality disorder really caught on because they all served more or less as a rebuke to the changing family dynamics that the sexual revolution, second wave feminism, and other social movements unleashed in the 1960s and 1970s. Casting daycare centers as hotbeds of child abuse, Beck argues, was a way for society to reassert that women should be in the home and not in the workforce serving as the primary caretakers of young children who should be kept away from those outside of the family unit at all costs.

   In addition to the book's focus on daycare sexual abuse allegations, the book also deals with the notion of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse being discovered by people later in life and then seen as the cause for the person's present psychological maladies with perhaps the most notable being multiple personality disorder. Beck is highly skeptical of the discourses surrounding repressed memory and multiple personality disorder and convincingly demonstrates that much of the supposed science used to support the existence of such phenomena is bogus. However, Beck argues that for many women in particular framing their experiences of oppression, abuse, and unhappiness within the context of the nuclear family in terms of ritual or sexual abuse that they have recovered memories of made sense in the legal, social, cultural, economic, and political context in which they found themselves.

   Writes Beck, "What was the source of this pressure that asked women to shoehorn all of their different experiences into a rigidly generic father-daughter incest narrative? Some part of the answer can be found in the legislation that extended the statute of limitations for adult survivors of childhood abuse only if the abuse had been sexual. Those laws did nothing to help adults who may have wanted to bring suit against their parents for physical abuse or neglect, and this created an incentive for women to talk about their childhood traumas in terms of sexual abuse regardless of their actual experience. Delayed discovery laws then created an additional incentive for plaintiffs to claim they had completely repressed memories of the abuse until recently. Plaintiffs who said they had always remembered what happened to them, that what they recently discovered was not the abuse itself but the psychological harm it caused them, had a harder time winning a favorable verdict. Finally, because there is no point in bringing a civil suit against someone who simply does not have much money, the suits that did wind up in front of a judge and in front of the media usually involved upper-middle-class families, who were also usually white. That this archetypal narrative of incest, trauma, repression, and recovery, all taking place in the context of middle-class family life, did not match the vast majority of abuse experiences that people actually had did very little to weaken its appeal. The narrative was a kind of key, and women who would or could not make use of this key found that the doors to social and legal recognition and aid remained closed."

   One particularly fascinating anecdote from the book involves the case of the Ingram family. In this family the father, Paul, was a police officer who excelled at his job and belonged to a tight knit police department. At home, he was rather authoritarian in his parenting style and had difficulty connecting on a personal, human level with his children although he loved them. When he and his wife, Sandy, had gotten married they had been Catholics but later on they became very involved with a charismatic evangelical Protestant church where people spoke in tongues when moved to do so by the Holy Spirit. The couple had five children, including a daughter named Ericka. During the 1980s Ericka was in her teens and early twenties and frequently attended a church camp called Heart to Heart and at one of these retreats, a charismatic preacher/psychic/motivational speaker began to speak about young girls being sexually abused and when a sobbing Ericka took to the stage, she told Ericka that she had been sexually abused by her father.

   In order to understand why Ericka so quickly bought into this notion and even welcomed it, it is worth knowing that Ericka had recently read a book by a woman who had claimed that her ostensibly respectable, Christian family had actually engaged her in horrific Satanic ritual abuse. She had also been hospitalized with pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) and had been told by a doctor that the only thing that could cause PID was sexual intercourse. This is not true as PID can also be caused by ovarian cysts which Ericka had and since Ericka was a virgin at the time the doctor told her this, she was very much rattled by the diagnosis. Thus, when her father was identified as a sexual abuser at the Christian retreat a lot of things probably began to fall into place for Ericka mentally.

   When Ericka went to the police to tell them that her father had been sexually abusing her and had also been involved in Satanic rituals, he did not resist the notion that he was an abuser but instead felt that perhaps it was appropriate that he was arrested despite having no memory of ever having done any of the things which Ericka was accusing him of. Writes Beck, "In 1988 Ingram and his colleagues all subscribed to what was then common wisdom among many police officers about child sexual abuse: victims could repress and forget their trauma for long periods of time and, crucially, so could perpetrators. Ingram himself had attended a statewide crime prevention meeting focused almost entirely on repressed memories, and he thought the presentation he heard there was very convincing." After two hours of police interrogation, the highly suggestible Ingram was ready to confess to all sorts of crimes. Egged on by the police as well as his pastor and his daughters, Paul told all sorts of wild tales of criminality.

   Finally, a professor from the University of California at Berkeley who was a sociologist of religion was called in. The professor was named Richard Ofshe. The police knew that Ofshe had done lots of academic work on the sort of thought reform that cults like the Church of Scientology, the Unification Church, and Syanon as well as the totalitarian governments of Soviet Russia and North Korea subjected people to. The police thought that perhaps the Satanic cult which Paul claimed to have been in had subjected him to mind control and they wanted to know all about it.

   However, the professor had also done academic work on the topic of false confessions. It was not long before he figured out the fact that this man had not done any of the heinous things that he said he had done. Ofshe tested his theory by telling Paul that Ericka had told him of a wild story in which he forced her to have sex with her brother while he watched. Ericka had not made such an allegation, but Paul was quick to confess to the accusation and began providing "memories" of the occurrence to the professor and the police. When Professor Ofshe confronted Paul with the truth, he refused to back down, still insisting that he had in fact done these horrible things. Writes Beck, "Ingram built the memory-generating machine inside himself at great personal cost, and it is not surprising that he would have been so reluctant to relinquish its benefits. It allowed him to say and believe that his daughters always told the truth no matter how crazy their stories became - by confessing his crimes, Ingram was now protecting his children, even if he had betrayed them for years. Ingram's memories also provided him with an elegant solution to the problem of how to be a good cop while being interrogated by cops. That his family and his workplace somehow accidentally conspired to incarcerate him for decades did not weaken Ingram's identification with either institution. He pled guilty and was sentenced to twenty years in prison."

   While in prison, Paul came to realize that he had not in fact done any of the things which he had been accused of doing and tried to appeal his conviction. However, as he explained to a journalist while he was incarcerated, real feelings of guilt about his parenting caused him to plead guilty to imaginary ritualistic and sexual crimes. He had been distant and emotionally abusive and occasionally physically abusive. Paul's guilt at his authoritarian parenting style ultimately led him to confess to bizarre sex crimes that he did not commit.

   Another important insight offered by Beck's book is the extent to which preschool aged youth were inundated with questions and suggestions about sexual abuse until some of them ultimately agreed that they had been abused in order to get the people pushing the abuse narrative off their backs. Ultimately these youth were abused, not by the supposed pedophiles and Satanic child molesters, but by the parents, social workers, psychologists, and police officers that harassed and harangued them. For instance, Bruce Woodling was a doctor that spent much of the 1980s "looking for ways to find medical evidence of chronic abuse in children" in Beck's words. The book goes into detail regarding Woodling's colposcope and his "wink response" test which involved probing the anuses, vaginas, and other genitals of the youth in his care. The fact that this was all done with good intentions only exacerbates the matter. Importantly, Richard Beck does not attempt to argue in We Believe the Children that the youth at the heart of these sexual panics escaped completely psychologically unscathed from their ordeals. However, what he does make clear is that those who most seriously harmed these young people were in actuality those most invested in promulgating a narrative of child protection in reference to them. While I was recently reading Dr. Lawrence R. Ricci's book What Happened in the Woodshed: The Secret Lives of Battered Children and a New Profession to Protect Them (which I also reviewed here on The Youth Rights Blog), I found myself thinking that some forensic markers of ostensible child abuse that attempt to locate the fact of abuse on the body of the child in question by reference to physically visible bodily signs could ultimately undermine efforts to protect children by leading to false negatives and undermine the rights of those falsely accused of child abuse by leading to false positive. The information that Richard Beck offers about this topic in We Believe the Children would appear to suggest that those are indeed pertinent concerns.

   One insight that I took away from this book as a youth liberationist and which I think that all youth liberationists should take away as well is the fact that it is ultimately self-defeating and irresponsible for youth liberationists to refuse to engage on the issue of sexual rights for young people and pushing back against the climate of sex panic that has increasingly come to permeate American culture, society, law, and politics in reference to young people. This is because exaggerated fears of adult sexual predators that ostensibly prey on youth and exaggerated conceptions of childhood and adolescent asexuality and immaturity lie at the root of so much ageist repression that has since extended a long way into domains that increasingly have less and less to do with sex. But if youth liberationists care about securing any liberties for young people, we cannot afford to be hesitant or avoidant in terms of pushing back against problematic narratives surrounding youth, adults, and sexuality. Instead we must insist on sexual freedom for all people regardless of age (while also being unafraid to draw upon the nuanced account of the harms that sometimes result from sexual objectification and exploitation regardless of the ages of those involved that second wave feminist thinkers like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon provide us with, thinkers and activists whom Beck is quick to disavow but who I strongly believe have important insights to offer about the nature of sexual exploitation and abuse that are not ultimately rooted in ageist notions of sex panic that the book describes as fueling the daycare and Satanic ritual abuse panics of the 1980s).

   Beck's account of 1980s sex panics is also useful for the way in which it situates these cultural phenomena squarely within the context of pervasive societal sexism and homophobia. A number of those falsely accused of committing child sexual abuse were gay, lesbian, or bisexual (or in some cases inaccurately thought to be so). This contributed to a sense that they were inherently guilty in the eyes of all too many average Americans in the 1980s. Similarly, men who worked as teachers, daycare providers, or other types of caregivers for youth were seen as inherently suspect as a result of doing so for reasons rooted in misandry and homophobia. Finally, misogyny was a major driving force of these moral panics. As more and more women moved into the workforce during the 1970s and 1980s and therefore looked to daycare providers, babysitters, nannies, and other non-family providers of childcare, society struggled to reconcile itself to women's increased activity within the public sphere and negative judgements leveled at women who did not fulfill traditional gender roles by choosing to work outside the home and therefore to entrust others with some of the day to day care for their children were regarded as behaving in a problematic way. Constructing daycare centers as sites of rampant child abuse was one way that society attempted to force women back into their traditional roles as full time wives and mothers who did not regularly work or volunteer outside the home to such an extent that it could be said to interfere with their full time child rearing responsibilities.

   Of particular interest to youth liberationists is the way that Beck stresses the extent to which the daycare, ritual abuse, and incest sex panics of the 1980s served to invisibilize any form of youth abuse, neglect, exploitation, or maltreatment that was not primarily sexual in nature. While social services aimed at ameliorating the challenging material conditions of poor and working class youth and their families were increasingly gutted and the physical and emotional abuse, oppression, and neglect of youth within the family was increasingly tolerated or even valorized in the name of patriarchal notions of parental rights, the increasingly exaggerated specter of the child molester whose monstrous crimes were defined in contrast to the norms of the nuclear family loomed large in the popular imagination of the era.

   In the excellent final chapter of Beck's book, he makes explicit the ways in which the legacy of the sexual moral panics which he chronicles continue to militate against the freedoms and liberties afforded to young people in America today and the disastrous consequences this has had for women and youth alike. He cites several examples of women who have been prosecuted for allowing their children to play unsupervised for limited periods of time in local parks or to sit by themselves in a car while the mother attended a job interview. Beck appears to imply that such negative state imposed consequences of allowing young people a certain measure of freedom tend to accrue to poor women and women of color in particular. Beck also writes about how the moral panics of the 1980s have led to all too many normal childhood and adolescent sexual experiences being pathologized to the detriment of youth who have done nothing seriously wrong. This can be especially troubling whenever the law gets involved and permanently labels increasingly younger and younger individuals as sexual offenders. In summary, Richard Beck gives a wide ranging and persuasive account of the myriad ways in which the fears unleashed upon American society by the sex-oriented moral panics of the 1980s functioned then and continue to function now as an important means of social control with ramifications for youth, women, men, poor and working class people, working mothers, people of color, and sexual and gender minorities in particular.

   Richard Beck's interest in the phenomena of repressed and subsequently ostensibly recovered memories of sexual and ritual abuse is another major part of the book's narrative. Beck carefully notes the many ways in which an increasing body of scientific and psychological literature on these topics has cast credible aspersions on the credibility of the memories of trauma and sexual abuse that individuals claim to recover in therapy. But Beck's analysis goes even deeper than that. According to Beck, the narratives surrounding these phenomena served to depoliticize the issues of rape, sexual abuse, incest, and patriarchal oppression within the family which feminists had worked so hard to politcize previously. Writes Beck in the book's penultimate chapter, "An earlier feminist analysis of incest and abuse had placed blame squarely on the nuclear family as an institution, as a way of distributing power among small groups that allowed fathers and husbands to exercise dangerous amounts of control over their children and wives. But recovered memory discarded this argument and replaced it with horror-movie plots and a parade of traumatized child-women. The isolation these women experienced in treatment, their dependence on the therapist as a surrogate parent figure, and the unprovability of their allegations rendered them completely nonthreatening from a political point of view."

   In conclusion, I would urge every serious youth liberationist to read this book. I would add the caveat that I believe that Beck's account of the feminist anti-pornography movement of the 1980s caricatures it to a certain extent and inappropriately lumps this movement in with other phenomena to which it may arguably bear a superficial resemblance but which I think is fundamentally different in kind from the sexual moral panics chronicled in We Believe the Children although an elaboration of this critique of the book and an explication of my interpretation of the works of Andrea Dworkin (one of my favorite feminist philosophers and a woman that I believe had deep youth liberationist sympathies as well) and other anti-pornography feminists is beyond the scope of this post. That criticism aside, I strongly endorse the rest of the analysis presented in this book. It will give you a deeper and fuller understanding of how we got to where we are in the current American legal, political, social, economic, and cultural moment in reference to youth issues. I was hoping that this book would contribute to my understanding on that front which is why I read it in the first place and it ultimately did all of that and more. I highly recommend this excellent book and cannot say enough wonderful things about it.

This excellent book was published in 2015 by Public Affairs Press.