The Condemned Meta-Analysis on Child Sexual Abuse Good Science and Long-Overdue Skepticism

In July 1999, the prestigious journal Psychological Bulletin published our review of fifty-nine studies that had examined psychological correlates of child sexual abuse (CSA) (Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman 1998). We soon achieved an unexpected honor: our paper was unanimously condemned by Congress. In the aftermath, SKEPTICAL INQUIRER has published two commentaries, one denouncing Congress (Berry and Berry 2000), and the other denouncing our study (Hagen 2001). We would like to offer our own thoughts about this astonishing story of politics, pressure, and social hysteria--the antitheses of critical and skeptical thought.

We conducted our research in the spirit of scientific skepticism, an attitude sadly missing in the CSA panic that arose throughout much of the 1980s and early 1990s. Beginning in 1984, sensational cases of satanic ritual abuse in daycare centers proliferated in the U.S., from McMartin in the West, to Fells Acres in the Northeast, to Little Rascals in the South. Staff workers were accused of such things as assaulting four-year-olds with swords and curling irons, forcing them in ritualistic style to consume feces and drink the blood of sacrificed babies, and molesting them in outer space or on ships at sea surrounded by sharks trained to prevent them from escaping. Meanwhile, by the late 1980s, a billion-dollar recovered memory movement had developed, and diagnoses of multiple personality disorder (MPD) mushroomed. All over the country, women were entering therapy with vague complaints such as feeling unhappy without knowing why, then emerging with "recovered memories" of bizarre childhood victimization--such as being sexually assaulted with hardware tools or vegetables--sometimes for many years, even decades, without "remembering." Often, these women were led to believe that this purported victimization had fragmented their personalities into a dozen, a hundred, or even a thousand alters.

Yet, over time, skeptics emerged-- social scientists, lawyers, and others who questioned the stories coming from daycare cases and therapists' offices. They provided empirical evidence showing how even bizarre memories can be implanted, how children can be manipulated and coerced into telling preposterous stories, how people can be induced to believe they have thousands of "personalities." Daycare cases ceased; convictions were overturned; some of the more egregious practitioners of MPD therapy were successfully sued for malpractice. But few people were willing to critically examine the core assumptions that led to these hysterical epidemics: that child sexual abuse is distinctively horrible (more horrible than any other traumatic experience or than family pathology), inevitably leaving scars that last throughout life (at least, without therapy). It was time to examine those assumptions.

Freud was the first to formalize a relation between CSA and psychological maladjustment. In his "seduction theory," he claimed that all adult neuroses are traceable to premature sex with an older person. He based this notion on a dozen or so patients, whom he pressured to recall seduction episodes using the same discredited techniques that would later be used in modern recovered memory therapy. He soon abandoned his theory, and it lay dormant until the women's movement of the 1970s, where it was revived by advocates and victimologists who found political and economic value in it for attacking the "patriarchy" and increasing a patient base.

As historian Philip Jenkins (1998) documented, virtually overnight in the 1970s a new orthodoxy emerged, in which CSA was elevated to the most destructive experience a child could have. Who is a "child"? GSA came to include any kind of sexual encounter between a minor under eighteen and, someone five or more years older. And what is "abuse?" Victimologists began with rape and incest, but then stretched definitions of CSA to include non-contact episodes (e.g., flashing), sex between children of differing ages, and episodes of mature adolescents willingly participating in sex with older teens or adults. Yet they maintained that all these encounters were traumatizing, using dramatic analogies such as slavery, head-on car crashes, being mauled by a dog, and torture to convey their belief about CSA's nature.

But sex, in general, is not like being mauled by a dog or torture, which are always painful and traumatic. Sex is often just the opposite--the most pleasurable experience one can have. It therefore cannot be assumed a priori that a fourteen-or fifteen-year-old, for example, will react with trauma rather than pleasure just because his or her partner is older. In fact, teens of this age often do not react as the orthodoxy insists they must, as the following example illustrates. It was related by Dan Savage, in reaction to the attacks on our study, in his nationally syndicated column "Savage Love" (July 29, 1999):

Why is this controversial? Speaking as a survivor of CSA at fourteen with a twenty-two-year-old woman; sex at fifteen with a thirty-year-old man--I can back the researchers up; I was not traumatized by these technically illegal sexual encounters; indeed, I initiated them and cherish their memory. It's absurd to think that what I did at fifteen would be considered "child sexual abuse," or lumped together by lazy researchers with the incestuous rape of a five-year-old girl.