[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 143 (Wednesday, October 5, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: October 5, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
CHILD-CARE DEMONS
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HON. ANDREW JABOBS, JR.
of indiana
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, October 5, 1994
Mr. JACOBS. Mr. Speaker, I insert the following article from the
first New Yorker edition of October of this year.
As a former police officer, I applaud this article's contribution to
common sense.
To be sure, there are heinous causes of child abuse. But to be
equally sure, children have vivid imaginations; and careful analysis of
allegations; including other evidence, should be made of such charges
where action is taken in order to avoid tragic injustice.
Child-Care Demons
(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 doctors 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 controversy 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 is 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 Halloween night in 1992, Kaare Sortland
was shot to death in his front yard. His wife heard him cry
``I didn't do it!'' just before 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 hurting 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 named 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 this Catch-
22 logic was the Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation
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 whom we have entrusted our children. Forcing
children to invent stories of abuse is abuse.
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