Day-care sex-abuse hysteria

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Daily sexual harassment hysteria is a moral panic that occurred mainly in the 1980s and early 1990s that featured allegations against child care providers of some form of child abuse, including Satan's ritual abuse. A prominent case in Kern County, California first brought the issue of daily sexual abuse to the forefront of public awareness, and this issue stands out in news coverage for nearly a decade. The Kern County case is followed by cases elsewhere in the United States as well as Canada, New Zealand, Brazil, and various European countries.

Video Day-care sex-abuse hysteria

Cause

Anxiety

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, more and more mothers worked outside the home, resulting in the opening of a large number of daycare centers. Anxiety and guilt for leaving young children with strangers may have created a climate of fear and readiness to believe in false allegations.

False suggestions and allegations when interviewing children

Children are vulnerable to outside influences that lead to the making of testimony. Their testimonies can be influenced in various ways. Maggie Bruck in her article published by the American Psychological Association writes that children incorporate aspects of the interviewer's questions into their answers in an attempt to tell the interviewer what the child believes he or she is looking for. Studies also show that when adults ask questions to unreasonable children (such as "is milk bigger than water?" Or "red is heavier than yellow?"), Most children will offer answers, believing that there is an answer to given, rather than understanding the absurdity of the question. Furthermore, repeating children's questions causes them to change their answers. This is because children perceive repetitive questions as a sign that they are not giving the "right" answer before. Children are also very vulnerable to questions that lead and lead. Some studies show that only a small percentage of children produce fictitious reports about sexual harassment. Other studies have shown that children minimize the incidence of abuse.

Interviewer bias also plays a role in shaping the testimony of the child. When an interviewer has a preconceived idea of ​​the truth of the matter being investigated, the question is done by extracting a statement that supports this belief. Consequently, evidence that can deny beliefs has never been sought by the interviewer. In addition, positive reinforcement by the interviewer may undermine the testimony of the child. Often such reinforcement is given to encourage the spirit of cooperation by the child, but an unbiased tone can quickly disappear when the interviewer nods, smiles, or offers a verbal encouragement to the "help" statement. Some studies show that when interviewers make convincing statements to child witnesses, children are more likely to make up stories about past events that never happened.

Peer pressure also affects children to make stories. Studies show that when a child witness is informed that his friends have testified that certain events occurred, child witnesses are more likely to create a suitable story. The status of the interviewer may also affect a child's testimony, because the more an interviewer's authority such as a police officer, the more likely the child is to obey the person's agenda.

Finally, while there are proponents of the correct use of anatomical puppets in questioning victims of sexual abuse/persecution, there is also criticism of this practice. These critics say that because of the novelty of the dolls, children will act sexually explicit with the doll even if the child has not been sexually abused. Another criticism is that because the study comparing the difference between how abused and non-harassed children play with these dolls is contradictory (some studies show that sexually abused children play with puppets that are anatomically correct in a way that more sexually explicit than children who are not abused, while other studies show that there is no correlation), it is impossible to interpret what is meant by how a child plays with these dolls.

Maps Day-care sex-abuse hysteria

Timeline

• 1982 - Kern's child torture case
• 1983 - Preschool McMartin trial in California
• 1984 - Fells Acres Day Care Center
• 1984 - Bernard F. Baran, Jr., convicted January 30, 1985.
• 1985 - Bronx Five letters
• 1985 - Wee Care Nursery School in New Jersey in April
• 1987 - Cleveland child abuse scandal in the UK
• 1987 - Friedman case begins
• 1989 - Glendale Montessori sexual harassment case in Stuart, Florida
• 1989 - Little Day Care Center scandal in Edenton, North Carolina
• 1990 - All fees are dropped in McMartin's preschool court
• 1991 - Dan and Fran Keller, Fran's Daycare Center, Oak Hill, Texas
• 1991 - Christchurch Civic Creche, New Zealand, involves Peter Hugh McGregor Ellis
• 1992 - Kaar Sortland is murdered after being found not guilty of child abuse
• 1992 - Martensville Scandal, Martensville, Saskatchewan, Canada
• 1994 - Case of Wenatchee Sex Ring
• 1996 - Denial in case of child abuse in reverse Kern region
• 2013 - Dan and Fran Keller are released from prison, four years before being ruled not guilty of charges against them

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Case significant

McMartin Preschool

The McMartin Preschool case is the first childcare abuse case to be receiving major media attention in the United States. The case centers on McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, where seven teachers are accused of kidnapping children, flying them on planes to other locations, and forcing them to engage in group sex and forcing them to witness animals being tortured and killed. The case also involves allegations that children are being forced to participate in strange religious rituals, and have been used to make child pornography. The case began with a single charge, made by the mother - who later found to be a paranoid schizophrenic - one of the students, but grew quickly when the researcher told parents about the allegations and began interviewing other students. The case made national headlines in 1984, and seven teachers were arrested and charged that year. When a new district attorney took over the case in 1986, his office re-examined the evidence and dropped charges against all but two of the original defendants. Their trial became one of the longest and most expensive criminal tribunals in the history of the United States, but in 1990 all of these allegations were also imposed. The two jurors in the trial and academic researchers then criticized the interview techniques used by researchers in their investigations at school, alleging that the interviewer had "persuaded" the children to make baseless allegations, repeatedly asking the same questions to children and offering incentives until the children are reported to have been abused. Most scholars now agree that the allegations obtained from these children's interviews are wrong. Sociologist Mary de Young and historian Philip Jenkins have cited the case of McMartin as a prototype for a wave of allegations and similar investigations between 1983 and 1995, which is a moral panic.

Country Walk

In 1985, Frank Fuster - owner of Country Walk Babysitting Service on the outskirts of the Country Walk in Miami, Florida - was found guilty of 14 counts of abuse. He was sentenced to a minimum 165 years in prison. Fuster's victims testify that he leads them in Satan's rituals and terrorizes them by forcing them to watch him chop birds, a lesson for children who may reveal abuse. Fuster had previously been convicted of murder and for stroking a 9-year-old boy. The testimony of children in this case was caused by University of Miami psychologists Laurie and Joseph Braga. Fuster's wife retracted her court testimony in an interview with Frontline, saying that she has remained naked in solitary confinement and experienced other forms of physical and psychological pressure until she agrees to testify against her husband.

The case was tried by state lawyer Dade County, Janet Reno. In June 2017, Fuster continued to serve 165 years in prison. The incident also inspired a book and movie made for TV titled Unspeakable Acts (1990).

Fells Acres Day Care Center

In April 1984, Gerald Amirault was arrested and accused of abusing children in his care at the Fells Acres Day Care Center in Malden, Massachusetts. After Gerald had replaced the pants with a boy who had soaked himself, his mother, uncle, and child therapist questioned him for several months, until the boy alleged that Gerald had sexually harassed him. The child's mother then calls the child abuse hotline to report that her son has been sexually abused, and Gerald was arrested shortly afterwards. In the 1986 trial, Gerald was convicted of attacking and raping nine children and sentenced to thirty to forty years in a state prison. In a separate trial, his mother, Violet Amirault, and his sister, Cheryl Amirault LeFave, were also convicted of similar charges and sentenced to prison terms for eight to 20 years. According to Richard Beck, the case developed "in the usual way" compared to other moral panic cases, with more and more children leveling the increasingly inconsistent allegations against the accused during the investigation. The allegations include reports of "bad clowns," robots, "magic spaces", and animals being tortured. According to Beck, one of the prosecutors in charge of the case commented that persuading the children issued charges such as "taking blood from a rock."

In 1995, The Wall Street Journal journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz questioned testimony from children who had been raised with questionable interrogation techniques, writes, "no sane person who reads this interrogation transcript can doubt the fabrication of goods evidence on a large scale. where this case was built. "Rabinowitz was a finalist for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper column on the subject, and made the Amirault case the centerpiece of his book No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusations, Counterfeit Witnesses, and Other Terrors of Our Time. Violet and Cheryl were granted a new court in 1997, on the grounds that they had been denied the right to face their accusers and were not adequately prosecuted in court, but Violet died and a judge reduced Cheryl's sentence to the time before a new trial could be processed. in 2001, the Massachusetts Board of Pardons recommended that Gerald's sentence be lightened, citing "substantial doubt" about his mistake.He was granted parole in 2003. Writing about the case at the time of Gerald's release, The Economist suggested in editorial that while Amirault has long maintained their innocence and has attracted "a series of pendu kung leading "who believe they have been wrongly punished," many others continue to believe that Mr. Amirault committed a crime. "

Bernard Baran

On October 4, 1984, drug-addicted couples who acted as police informants called their contacts in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the police department to accuse Bernard Baran of mistreating their son. The child has attended the government-run Early Childhood Development Center (ECDC) where Baran, a 19-year-old gay, works as a teacher assistant. The previous accusers complained to the board of directors that they "did not want any homosexual" around their son.

Within days of the first allegations, the ECDC organized puppet shows and sent letters to parents telling them about a child in care with gonorrhea. Five other allegations arose. Baran was tried in Berkshire court 105 days after the first allegation, the speed recorded in a subsequent court ruling. The courtroom was closed during the testimony of children, whom Baran claimed violated his right to a public court. Baran's defense lawyers were then ordered ineffectively. Baran was convicted on January 30, 1985, on three counts of a child's rape and five counts of indecent assault and battery. He was sentenced to three life sentences plus 8 to 20 years for each charge. He maintained his innocence throughout his case. In 1999 a new legal team took its case. In 2004 the trial began with a motion for a new trial. In 2006, Baran was given a new trial and was released on bail of $ 50,000. In May 2009, the Massachusetts Appellate Court confirmed a new court ruling, setting aside the conviction of 1985. The Berkshire District Prosecutors Office dismissed the original allegations and Baran's notes were removed.

The Bronx Five

Prosecutor Mario Merola brought a prosecution that led to the conviction of five people, including Nathaniel Grady, a 47-year-old Methodist minister, from child sexual abuse at childcare centers across the Bronx. Grady spent ten years in prison before being released in 1996.

Three other Bronx childcare center employees were arrested in August 1984 for allegedly abusing at least ten children in their care. Federal and urban researchers then questioned dozens of children in day care. They use 'puppets, soft words and quiet approaches.' More children are reported to be sexually abused, increasing the total to 30. Three child care centers are also being investigated for sexual harassment. On August 11, 1984, federal funds were cut for the Head Start preschool program at Praca Day Care Center and three employees have been arrested. In June 1985, the daycare center was reopened with a new sponsor.

In January 1986, Albert Algerin, working at Day Care Care center, was sentenced to 50 years for rape and sexual harassment. In May, Praca's employee, Jesus Torres, a former teacher assistant was sentenced to 40 years. Praca Franklin Beauchamp's employee had canceled his case at the New York Appeal Court in May 1989.

All five convictions were eventually canceled.

Wee Care Nursery School

At Maplewood, New Jersey, in April 1985, Margaret Kelly Michaels was charged over 299 offenses in connection with the sexual assault on 33 children. Michaels denied the allegations. "Prosecution produces expert witnesses who say that almost all children show symptoms of sexual abuse." Prosecutorial witnesses testify that children "have retreated into behaviors such as wetting and defecating in their clothes, witnesses say that children are afraid of being left alone or living in the dark." Several other teachers testified against it. "The defense argued that Michaels did not have the time or opportunity to go to a location where all the activities could happen without someone seeing him."

Michaels was sentenced to 47 years in a "sex case." Michaels "told the judge that he believed his conviction would be canceled at the appeal." After five years in jail, his appeal was successful and the sentence was dropped by the New Jersey appeals court. The Supreme Court of New Jersey upheld the decision of the appeals court and declared "the interviews of these children are extremely inappropriate and use coercive methods and are too suggestive." Three panel judges ruled that he had been denied a fair trial, because "the prosecution of the case depended on the testimony that should have been excluded because it improperly used the theory of an expert, called the child abuse sexual abuse syndrome, to establish guilt." The original judge was also criticized "for the way he allowed the children to give television testimony from his rooms."

Glendale Montessori

James Toward and Brenda Williams were accused of kidnapping and sexual harassment of six boys who attended Glendale Montessori in Stuart, Florida, as preschoolers in 1986 and 1987. Researchers claimed to know up to 60 victims, mostly from ages 2 to 5.

In 1988, Williams, an office manager, was sentenced and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He claimed there was no contest for sex and tried allegations of kidnapping involving five boys and he was released from prison in 1993 after serving five years. In 1989, Towards, owner of Glendale Montessori School, pleaded guilty to child sexual abuse allegations and received a 27-year sentence. While technically maintaining his innocence, he allows a guilty plea to be inserted against him, punish him for abusing or kidnapping six boys. Towards placed on an involuntary commitment due to Jimmy Ryce's Law. Although he maintained his innocence, Toward said he agreed to avoid a life sentence.

Little Rascals

In Edenton, North Carolina, in January 1989, parents accused Bob Kelly of sexual harassment. Over the next few months, investigations and therapy led to accusations against dozens of other adults in the city, culminating in the arrest of seven adults.

Despite the severity of some alleged actions, parents do not notice abnormal behavior in their children until after the initial allegations are made. Bob Kelly's trial lasted for eight months and on April 22, 1992, he was found guilty of 99 of 100 charges against him. In 1995, the North Carolina Appeals Court granted a new trial to two defendants, including Kelly. Allegations were eventually dropped for both.

The rest of the defendants received various sentences.

Dale Akiki

Dale Akiki, a man with delayed development with Noonan syndrome, was accused of performing a demonic torture ritual in 1991. Akiki and his wife were volunteers at Faith Chapel in Spring Valley, California. The charge begins when a young girl tells her mother that "[Akiki] showed me his dick," after which the mother contacted the police. After the interview, another nine children accused Akiki of killing animals, such as giraffes and elephants, and drinking their blood in front of the children. He was found not guilty of 35 counts of child abuse and kidnapping in his 1993 trial.

In 1994, the San Diego County Great Jury reviewed the Akiki case and concluded there was no reason to pursue the theory of ritual abuse. On August 25, 1994, he filed a lawsuit against San Diego County, Faith Chapel Church, and many others, which were settled for $ 2 million. Public Defenders Akiki received a Public Defender of the Year award for their work defending Akiki.

Oak Hill demonic ritual torture

Frances Keller and her husband Dan Keller, both from Austin, Texas, were convicted of sexually harassing a 3-year-old girl in their care, and they spent 21 years in prison until they were released in 2013.

The case began on August 15, 1991, when a 3-year-old girl told her mother that Dan Keller had hurt her. Mother and daughter are on their way to a scheduled appointment with the girl's therapist, who pulls out details that include Keller defecating on her head and sexually assaulting her with a pen. During the time leading up to the trial, two other children from daycare gave similar accusations. According to the children, the couple served Kool-Aid blood-laced and forced them to have video sex with adults and other children. The Keller, they say, sometimes wear white robes and light a candle before hurting them. The children also accused the Keller of forcing them to watch or participate in the killing and slaughtering of cats, dogs and crying babies. Bodies were dug in graves and new holes were dug to hide the newly killed animals and, once, passing adults were shot and mutilated by chainsaws. Children recall several airplane trips, including one to Mexico, where they were sexually abused by soldiers before returning to Austin in time to meet their parents in day care.

The only physical evidence of abuse in this case was submitted by Dr. Michael Mouw, an emergency room physician at Brackenridge Hospital who examined the 3-year-old girl in 1991 on the first night she accused Dan Keller of harassment. Mouw testified at Keller's trial that he found the two tears on her hymen consistent with sexual abuse and determined that the wound was less than 24 hours. Three years after the trial, while attending a medical seminar, Mouw said the slide presentation on the hymens of "normal" children included photos identical to what he observed to the girl.

On 26 November 2013, Travis district attorney's office announced that Fran Keller, now 63 years old, was released with the bond and her husband, Dan Keller, who was punished at the same time, would be released within a week on a deal reached by lawyers. "There is a reasonable possibility that false testimony (medical experts) affects judges' judgment and violates Frances Keller's right to a fair trial," the district attorney said.

On June 20, 2017, Travis district attorney's office announced that the case against Kellers had been dismissed, arguing that he was innocent. They got $ 3.4 million in compensation from the state of Texas for the 21 years they spent in jail.

Prosecution of child abuse Wenatchee

In Wenatchee, Washington, in 1994 and 1995, the country's police and social workers did what was then called the nation's most extensive child sex abuse investigation. Forty-three adults were arrested for 29,726 child sex abuse allegations involving 60 children. Parents, Sunday school teachers and a pastor are accused, and many are punished for abusing their own children or other people's children in society. However, prosecutors can not provide physical evidence to support the allegations. The main witness is 13-year-old foster daughter Robert Perez, who has investigated the case. The jury found the town of Wenatchee and Douglas County, Washington, negligent in the 1994-1995 investigation. In 2001, $ 3 million was awarded to couples who had been wrongly accused in the investigation.

Christchurch Civic CrÃÆ'¨che

Peter Ellis, a childcare worker at Christchurch Civic CrÃÆ'¨che in New Zealand, was found guilty of 16 counts of child sexual abuse in 1992 and jailed for seven years. Parents of abuse victims allegedly entitled to claim NZ $ 10,000 (equivalent to approximately US $ 11,000 in 2010) in compensation for any allegation of the Accident Compensation Corporation, regardless of whether the allegations are proven or not. Many of the victims' families made several allegations. Four female colleagues were also arrested on 15 counts of abuse, but were released after the allegations were handed down. Together with six other co-workers who lost their jobs when the center was closed, they were given $ 1 million in compensation by the Labor Court in 1995, although this amount was reduced on appeal. Peter Ellis has consistently denied abuse, and the case is still considered controversial by many New Zealanders.

Martensville sex scandal

In 1992, a mother in the central city of Saskatchewan, Martensville, alleges that a local woman who runs childcare and child care at her home has sexually harassed her child. Police began an investigation, which led to a sharp increase in allegations. More than a dozen people, including five police officers from two different powers, eventually face more than 100 allegations related to running a demonic sect called The Brotherhood of the Ram, who allegedly sexually harassed the rituals of many children in "The Church of Satan".

The son of the day-care owner was tried and convicted, then the Royal Canadian Mounted Police task force took over the investigation. It concludes the original inquiry was motivated by "emotional hysteria." In 2003, the defendant was sued for the wrong prosecution. In 2004, Richard and Kari Klassen received $ 100,000 each, from a $ 1.5 million compensation package awarded for a malicious prosecution.

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See also

• Suspicions are wrong about child sexual abuse
• Wrong memory
• Moral panic
• Korikan conspiracy theory
• Restricted memory
• Salem Wizard Court
• Satanic ritual violations
• Witch hunt
• The syndrome of child sexual abuse accommodation
• The Hunt (2012)

Documentary

• Catch Friedmans , controversial 2003 documentary.
• Witch Hunt, The 2008 documentary produced and narrated by Sean Penn, on the Kern County children torture case
• Unleash Bernie Baran, 2010 documentary on one of the earliest cases
• The indictment: The McMartin Trial , 1995 HBO docudrama

src: www.nydailynews.com

Notes and references

Note

References

• Ceci, SJ; Bruck M (1996). Jeopardy in the courtroom . American Psychological Association. ISBN: 1-55798-282-1.

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Further reading

• Hechler, David (1988). Battle and Rejection - Child Sexual Abuse War . Lexington, MA: Book of Lexington. ISBNÃ, 0-669-14097-X. Ã,
• Lyon, Kathryn (1998). Witch Hunting: The True Story of Abused Social Hysteria and Justice . Avon Books. ISBNÃ, 0-380-79066-1.

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External links

• Ross E. Cheit, David Mervis, "Myths About Country Travel Cases" Journal of Child Sexual Abuse , Vol. 16 (3) 2007

Source of the article : Wikipedia