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Sex, Lies, and Audiotapes - hysteria over rape and sexual child abuse
Women's Quarterly, Summer, 2001 by Rael Jean Isaac
The Amirault case did not involve "recovered" memories but rather the testimony of small children. Florence Rush once made the valid point that, traditionally, investigators had been too quick to dismiss children's accounts of abuse. Rush argued that children differentiate between make-believe and reality "often more accurately than adults."
Indeed, a number of judges and juries have found defendants guilty on the assumption that children could not make such things up. What they have failed to recognize is the role of therapists in evoking stories of hideous abuse from little children, who recount their stories with such conviction on the witness stand. In Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children's Testimony, psychology professors Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck examined hundreds of transcripts of therapist interviews of small children in the daycare cases.
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They described the mechanisms by which children who initially denied that anything bad had happened were led eventually to recount lurid tales of abuse. These children had been subjected to, among other things, repeated questioning by multiple interviewers who refused to take "nothing happened" for an answer and selective reinforcement--children were rewarded with police badges in exchange for incriminating statements and berated when denying that abuse occurred.
There was also peer pressure (the children were told what other children had supposedly revealed and were told they could help their friends by saying the same things). The children also had to answer leading questions. The use of special anatomical dolls with enlarged genitalia also provided ample opportunities for misinterpretation. Ceci and Bruck point out that a child may insert a finger into a doll's genitalia simply because of its novelty, just as a preschooler, given a doughnut, is likely to put a finger into the hole.
One of the worst stories is that of Kelly Michaels. Ceci and Bruck devote special attention to the questioning of children in the Michaels case. Freshly graduated from a small Catholic college near Pittsburgh, Michaels was arrested in 1986, charged with sexually abusing dozens of children at the Wee Care daycare center in New Jersey. After a lengthy jury trial, Michaels was sentenced to forty-seven years in prison. Ceci and Bruck filed an amicus brief in her appeal. Signed by forty-six child psychologists, the brief argued that testimony had been elicited from children in "a shocking manner" by frightening and bullying them and through sexually explicit interviewing.
IT 15 WORTH NOTING that in the Michaels case, as in the other daycare cases, the improbability of the entire scenario disturbed nor judge, jury, or media. Michaels was accused of raping almost all the children in the daycare center with knives, forks, spoons, Lego blocks (one child testified she had forced the socket end of a light bulb into her vagina)--all during regular school hours for a period of seven months. Audiotapes of the children's original testimony showed that some children testified their parents were present during these goings-on. One child asserted that the head teacher had walked in as Kelly was penetrating the children with assorted utensils, took the silverware, and put it in her briefcase. The prosecution disposed of such inconvenient testimony by explaining that these were rescue fantasies."
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