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.
