The Salem epidemic - comparison of ritual child sex abuse cases to Salem witchcraft trials

National Review, Sept 3, 1990

IT'S A RARE occasion when we agree with anything in The Village Voice, but Debbie Nathan's article "The Ritual Sex Abuse Hoax" (June 12) is such a case. Miss Nathan reviews the recent rash of ritual-child-sex-abuse cases, the most infamous being that of the Virginia McMartin Pre-School, and concludes they're mostly hysteria. Her conclusions have been retrospertively validated by the failure, on the second attempt and after seven years of ruthless and clearly improper prosecutorial tactics, to convict Raymond Buckey of a single one of the 75 original charges against him.

It had been a plausible criticism of such cases until recently to say that they were like witch-craft trials. But as Miss Nathan demonstrates, similarity does not come into it. They are witchcraft trials with prosecutors alleging satanic sex rituals, the slaying of animals, robed abusers, and the full paraphenalia of Hammer horror movies.

"Investigations usually began because of vague medical symptoms.... The first allegations sometimes seemed plausible. But in remarkable departures from traditional forensics, police, social workers, doctors, and therapists badgered children to name more victims and perpetrators, ignoring answers that contradicted a ritual-abuse scenario." Despite bullying and legal corner-cutting, most cases have ended in acquittals and dropped charges.

Kelly Michaels, a young woman who worked at a day-care center in New Jersey, was not so lucky [see "The Week," May 281. She was charged with over one hundred counts of torturing and abusing the children in her care, almost all of them self-evidently absurd, none of them supported by anything but the flimsiest medical evidence and the tortuously extracted testimony of infants. The jury, influenced by extraordinary public hysteria, nonetheless found her guilty, and locked her away until the next millennium. The state of New Jersey has an obligation to redress this injustice. And prosecutors nationwide have an obligation not to defame reputations and destroy lives on the basis of utterly absurd allegations.