Remembering Sex-Abuse Hysteria

The Retro Report looks back at the McMartin Preschool catastrophe:

Starting in 1983, with accusations from a mother whose mental instability later became an issue in the case, the operators of a day care center near Los Angeles were charged with raping and sodomizing dozens of small children. The trial dragged on for years, one of the longest and costliest in American history. In the end, as with the Scottish women, lives were undone. But no one was ever convicted of a single act of wrongdoing. Indeed, some of the early allegations were so fantastic as to make many people wonder later how anyone could have believed them in the first place. Really now, teachers chopped up animals, clubbed a horse to death with a baseball bat, sacrificed a baby in a church and made children drink the blood, dressed up as witches and flew in the air — and all this had been going on unnoticed for a good long while until a disturbed mother spoke up?

Still, McMartin unleashed nationwide hysteria about child abuse and Satanism in schools. One report after another told of horrific practices, with the Devil often literally in the details.

Criminal cases of dubious provenance abounded. One that received great attention involved Margaret Kelly Michaels, convicted in 1988 of rampant sexual abuse at the Wee Care Day Nursery in Maplewood, N.J., where children said she had sexually abused them with knives, spoons and forks, and had urinated in their mouths. None showed signs of injury. Six years later, Ms. Michaels’s conviction was overturned. Another prominent case from those days involved charges of rape and sodomy brought against the operators of the Little Rascals Day Care Center in Edenton, N.C. As with McMartin, there were bizarre allegations early on about babies being murdered and children thrown in with sharks. Though defendants were found guilty, their convictions were later overturned and charges were dropped.

I think this hysteria sprang from two sources: anxiety over women moving into the workforce and leaving their children in the hands of strangers, and the slow uncovering of the real extent of child sex abuse in America. This made people feel that their children were highly vulnerable, and people who feel vulnerable sometimes lash out in bizarre ways.

The satanic elements are a bit of a puzzle. Thinking over this, I imagine it is a reminder of the huge current of apocalyptic Biblical religion that runs beneath the secular surface of American life. Millions of Americans believe that mainstream society is infected with Satan worship, knowing or unknowing, and they are always looking for signs that confirm their suspicions about the unchurched masses.