Sex, Lies, and Audiotapes - hysteria over rape and sexual child abuse

Women's Quarterly, Summer, 2001 by Rael Jean Isaac

No member of the staff (including the head teacher) at Wee Care had noticed anything amiss in all those months and no child had complained to his parents. So, while, in his summing up, Judge William Harth adjured the jury to "use your common sense, neither he nor the jury showed much of that vital commodity. Michaels had been imprisoned for five years before the appeals court threw out her conviction on the grounds that the children's testimony had been tainted by improper interviewing techniques.

As for the women with "repressed memories" who cut themselves off from their parents, even going so far as to sue them in civil or criminal court, many have recanted their accusations or reestablished ties without saying they were wrong. Many families remain permanently estranged. Many of the women convicted in the daycare or sex ring cases have by now been released (the men are another story). But the lives of all those involved were shattered, and it is hard to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

The feminists who rallied around Florence Rush believed that they could end child abuse by abolishing the patriarchal family, which was its "cause." Instead they launched a child abuse hysteria in which pseudo-science has flourished. Both men and women have been its victims.

Rael Jean Isaac is most recently co-author of Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill (Free Press).