Day-care sex-abuse hysteria was a moral panic that occurred primarily during the 1980s and early 1990s, and featured charges against day-care providers accused of committing several forms of child abuse, including Satanic ritual abuse. The collective cases are often considered a part of the Satanic panic. A 1982 case in Kern County, California, United States, first publicized the issue of day-care sexual abuse, and the issue figured prominently in news coverage for almost a decade. The Kern County case was followed by cases elsewhere in the United States, as well as Canada, New Zealand, Brazil, and various European countries.
Causes
Anxiety During the late 1970s and early 1980s, many more mothers were working outside of the home, resulting in the opening of large numbers of day-care facilities. Anxiety and guilt due to leaving young children with strangers may have created a climate of fear and readiness to believe false accusations.
Suggestibility of children
Children are vulnerable to outside influences that can result in fabrication of testimony. Their testimony can be influenced in a variety of ways. In an article published by the American Psychological Association and titled Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children’s Testimony, by Maggie Bruck—a professor within the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine—wrote that children incorporate aspects of the interviewer's questions into their answers, as an attempt to tell the interviewer what the child believes is being sought. Studies also show that when adults ask children questions that do not make sense (such as: "is milk bigger than water?" or "is red heavier than yellow?"), most children will offer an answer, believing that there is an answer to be given, rather than understanding the absurdity of the question. Furthermore, repeated questioning of children causes them to change their answers. This is because the children perceive the repeated questioning as a sign that they did not give the "correct" answer previously. Children are also especially susceptible to leading and suggestive questions. Research has found that, in the absence of being prompted, it is uncommon for children to make fictitious reports of sexual abuse.
Interviewer bias also influences child testimony. When an interviewer has a preconceived notion as to the truth of the matter being investigated, the questioning is performed so as to extract statements that evidence these beliefs. As a result, evidence that could disprove the belief is never sought by the interviewer. Additionally, positive reinforcement by the interviewer can taint child testimony. Often, such reinforcement is given to encourage a spirit of cooperation by the child, but impartiality can quickly end as the interviewer nods, smiles, or offers verbal encouragement to "helpful" statements. Some studies show that when interviewers make reassuring statements to child witnesses, the children are more likely to fabricate stories of past events that never occurred.
Peer pressure also influences children to fabricate stories. Studies show that when a child witness is told that his or her friends have already testified that certain events occurred, the child witness is more likely to create a matching story. The status of the interviewer can also influence a child's testimony, because the more authority an interviewer has, such as a police officer, the more likely a child is to comply with that person's apparent agenda.
Finally, while there are endorsers of the use of anatomically correct dolls in questioning victims of sexual abuse/molestation, there are also critics of this practice. These critics say that because of the novelty of the dolls, children will act out sexually explicit acts with the dolls even if the child has not been sexually abused. Another criticism is that, due to conflicting claims about how children tend to play with these dolls (some studies suggest that children who have been sexually abused play with them in a more sexually explicit manner, while other studies have found no correlation), no meaningful conclusions can be drawn from how a particular child plays.
Timeline 1982 – Kern County child abuse cases. 1983 – McMartin preschool trial in California. 1984 – Fells Acres Day School in Massachusetts. 1984 – Bernard F. Baran Jr. convicted in 1985, exonerated 2009. 1984 – Georgian Hills Daycare Center, Memphis, Tennessee 1985 – Bronx Five case. 1985 – Wee Care Nursery School in New Jersey in April. 1986 – Child Development Center, Presidio of San Francisco in San Francisco. 1987 – Cleveland child abuse scandal in England. 1987 – Friedman cases begin. 1987 – The Army announces it will be closing and demolishing the Presidio Child Development Center. 1987 – Baptist minister and Presidio teacher, Gary Hambright, is charged with sexually abusing 10 boys and girls. Hambright was charged with molesting only 10 children because other victims were so young they would not be allowed to testify in court, according to an assistant United States attorney, Peter Robinson. At least 4 children were found to have Chlamydia during physical examinations. 1988 – Remaining charges against Gary Hambright are dropped at the request of parents and prosecutors. San Francisco prosecutors decline to bring charges against Lt. Col. Michael Aquino, founder of the Temple of Set, who was involved in the Presidio investigation. 1989 – Glendale Montessori sexual abuse case in Stuart, Florida. 1989 – Little Rascals Day Care Center scandal in Edenton, North Carolina. 1989 – Gary Hambright dies of AIDS on November 8. The previous year, Army officials recommended the children get tested due to a "rumor" circulating about Hambright having AIDS. Due to confidentiality laws, the results of those tests are unknown. 1990 – Acquittals in McMartin preschool trial; remaining charges dropped. 1991 – Dan and Fran Keller, Fran's Daycare Center, Oak Hill, Texas. 1991 – Christchurch Civic Creche, New Zealand, involving Peter Hugh McGregor Ellis. 1992 – Kaare Sortland is killed, in Tacoma, Washington, after being found not guilty of child abuse. 1992 – Martensville Scandal, Martensville, Saskatchewan, Canada. 1994 – Wenatchee child abuse prosecutions 1996 – Convictions in the Kern county child abuse case overturned. 1997 – "Day of Contrition" in Salem, Massachusetts 2013 – Dan and Fran Keller released from prison, four years before being ruled innocent of the charges against them.
Significant cases Nearly all of those accused in these cases were eventually freed, but no U.S. Governor has pardoned a prisoner convicted falsely as a result of the hysteria. On January 14, 1997, many of those freed attended a "Day of Contrition" conference in Salem, Massachusetts.
McMartin Preschool
The McMartin Preschool case was the first daycare abuse case to receive major media attention in the United States. The case concerned the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, where seven teachers were accused of kidnapping children, flying them in an airplane to another location, and forcing them to engage in group sex, as well as forcing them to watch animals being tortured and killed. The case also involved accusations that children had been forced to participate in bizarre religious rituals, and being used to make child pornography. The case began with a single accusation, made by a mother—who was later found to be a paranoid schizophrenic—of one of the students, but grew rapidly when investigators informed parents of the accusation, and began interviewing other students. The case made headlines nationally during 1984, and seven teachers were arrested and charged that year. However, when a new district attorney took over the case in 1986, his office re-examined the evidence, and dismissed charges against all but two of the original defendants. Their trials became one of the longest and most expensive criminal trials in the history of the United States, but in 1990, all of these charges were also dismissed. The trial was met with disapproval by both its jurors and academic researchers, who criticized the interviewing techniques that investigators had used in their investigations of the school, alleging that interviewers had "coaxed" children into making unfounded accusations, repeatedly asking children the same questions, and offering various incentives until the children reported having been abused. Most scholars now agree that the accusations these interviews elicited from children were false. Sociologist Mary de Young and historian Philip Jenkins have both cited the McMartin case as the prototype for a wave of similar accusations and investigations between 1983 and 1995, which constituted a moral panic.
Country Walk
Frank and Ileana Fuster owned the Country Walk Babysitting Service in the Country Walk suburb of Miami, Florida, United States. In 1985, Frank was found guilty of 14 counts of abuse. He was sentenced to prison with a minimum length of 165 years. Fuster's alleged victims testified that he led them in Satanic rituals, and terrorized them by forcing them to watch him mutilate birds—a lesson to children who might reveal the abuse. Fuster had been previously convicted for manslaughter and molesting a 9-year-old child. Testimony from children in the case was elicited by University of Miami child psychologists Laurie and Joseph Braga, who resorted to coercive questioning of the alleged victims when the desired answers were not forthcoming. Fuster's wife, Ileana, recanted her court testimony in an interview with the television program Frontline, saying that she had been kept naked in solitary confinement, and subjected to other forms of physical and psychological duress until she had agreed to testify against her husband.
The case was prosecuted by Dade County state's attorney Janet Reno, who also prosecuted day-care sex-abuse cases against Grant Snowden and Bobby Fijnje. Ileana said that Reno visited her in jail and pressured her to confess. The incident also inspired a 1986 book and a 1990 made-for-television movie named Unspeakable Acts. Fuster continues to serve a 165-year prison sentence, making him the last person imprisoned by the hysteria.
Fells Acres Day School
During April 1984, Gerald Amirault was arrested and charged with abusing children in his care at the Fells Acres Day School in Malden, Massachusetts, United States. After Amirault changed the pants on a young boy who had wet himself, the boy's mother, uncle, and therapist questioned him over a period of months, until the boy alleged that Amirault had been sexually abusing him. The boy's mother then telephoned a child abuse hotline to report that her son had been abused sexually, and Amirault was arrested soon thereafter. As a result of the 1986 trial, Amirault was convicted of assaulting and raping nine children, and sentenced to 30 to 40 years in state prison. In a separate trial, his mother, Violet Amirault, and sister, Cheryl Amirault LeFave, were also convicted of similar charges, and sentenced to jail for 8 to 20 years. According to Richard Beck, the case developed "in the usual way" compared to other moral panic cases, with more and more children making increasingly bizarre allegations against the accused during the course of the investigation. The allegations included reports of "bad clowns," robots, "magic rooms," and animals being tortured."Profile: Case of Gerald Amirault, a convicted child sex offender, and the prosecution of child sexual molestation cases." All Things Considered, April 19, 2000. General OneFile (accessed May 3, 2017). According to Beck, one of the prosecutors responsible for the case commented that coaxing allegations out of the children had been like “getting blood from a stone.”