Last week, in reviewing Netflix’ new docuseries The Outreau Case: A French Nightmare, I brusquely went over a subject near and dear—the daycare sex abuse scandals of the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. In addition to the books I recommended to you (by Richard Beck, Debbie Nathan, etc.), there are a litany of other articles and books on the subject. For the McMartin trial in particular the resources of Paul and Shirley Eberle are indispensable (read The Abuse of Innocence: The McMartin Preschool Trial and The Politics of Child Abuse).
However, for those of you interested in the subject, you might come across another book: Ross E. Cheit’s The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children. While it may seem strange to criticize a book from ten years ago, it has implications that threaten to turn what they call today the “narrative” in Cheit’s favor. If Cheit had been successful, it would have revictimized the victims. As it is, there is no book I’m more ashamed to own than his. In fact, Oxford University Press should be ashamed for publishing it.
A handsomely designed and well-cited volume, Cheit attempts to “take back” the narrative by claiming, through what I’m sure was arduous research, that abuse did occur in all of the cases. Needless to say, the “Satanic Panic” has been thoroughly debunked and none of the convictions (save one, thanks to the blindered view of Janet Reno) have ever held muster. Because, again, nothing happened.
It was an example of rampant mass hysteria—a moral panic I hope we never go through again as a society. Cheit has continued periodically to add to his case through blog posts on his website. The extent to which his book is taken seriously, I can’t be sure. When it first arrived, the Catholic Church cases and Penn State were happening and actual child abuse was being taken seriously. Since then, particularly after the last seven years, the subject of sexual abuse in general has been so widespread, I fear Cheit’s tome will reach the hands of those not intelligent enough to see the smoke screen Cheit weaves.
It is a delicate subject, so I will try to go easy on him. In point of fact, Cheit should have never written the book given he himself was the subject of child sex abuse. In elder language, he has a dog in the fight. He desperately wants the children to be believed as we non-deluded folk want the real victims (those accused) to be believed and fully exonerated. To mention that I feel for Dr. Cheit’s childhood experience should go without saying, but the subject being what it is, his work would be akin to someone who had been robbed trying to find guilt in everyone accused of theft. It is an impossibility and, in the end, sad.
I’m beginning to hate the word “narrative” in its contemporary context. Other words like iconic, gaslighting, lenses, etc. follow suit for me. They sound intelligent and, given their wide-spread usage through social media, I think people feel they’re smart when they use them, but really it is just an example of everyone talking like everyone else. Given the internet’s ubiquity (and I realize the irony as you’re reading this online), we will all eventually have no culture, no words specific to region, no color to our speech due to the internet autocorrecting not only our thoughts, but our ideas. Just as I typed this, the computer changed “auto-correcting” to “autocorrecting.”
Professor Cheit’s book is aptly titled given his premise. He goes through all the cases—with the most weight given to McMartin—and cherry picks “evidence” from the trials to spin the narrative back to something happened even if it did not revolve around Satanic Ritual Abuse (another myth that got caught up in the mix). Cheit opened old wounds that had not even healed in a (probably) sincere attempt to recapture the public’s imagination from a different side, given the fact that he had supposed eagle-eyed vision, writing nearly a decade after the last cases were winding down.
In the end, Cheit’s book might as well be a proponent of the flat-earth theory. The nearly one hundred pages of footnotes (that often attack good-faith writers critical of the trials at the time and after, especially the Eberles) could denote to the undiscerning reader that Cheit knows what he’s talking about. This is a Professor at an Ivy League institution, of course. But I’ve read books where half the page-length is devoted to notes and often see it as simple over-compensating for avoiding the truth.
I bought Cheit’s book as soon as I heard of it. I’ll admit I bought it under the presupposition that Cheit agreed with virtually every psychological and sociological assessment of the situation, but I was wrong. I should have gathered his argument from the title, but I was so consumed by the subject at the time, that I didn’t even read the blurb. When the book arrived at home, I dove head-first into it as I often do with non-fiction (fiction takes a lot more time for me to digest and process). It is a book of utter delusion from (again, I think) a sincere human being who wants to “believe the children.”
That catchphrase, used by Beck for his concise telling of the McMartin case, was on many a hastily-put-together poster board in the ‘80s. If you even dared to question the cases at that time, you were open to death threats and all kinds of chicanery. In fact, after HBO premiered Indictment: The McMartin Trial, the Mann home (Abby and Myra Mann, the screenwriters) was burned to the ground, most likely by McMartin parents who still, according to a recent Oxygen documentary, still believe something happened.
I feel for Cheit’s childhood psychological scars, but his book is one of many which proves all you have to do is twist evidence and shape-shift quotes to prove your point. Harold Bloom noted, correctly, in the mid-‘90s that a feminist or Marxist reading of a play by William Shakespeare will teach you a lot about feminism and Marxism, but not anything about the play. Included in this is the various Freudian readings of Sophokles and Shakespeare. His views tell you something about Freudianism, not about the great tragedies of antiquity. Likewise, Cheit cuts the cloth to fit his fashion and presents his own “narrative.”
And Freud is a good note to end on. Because of his salacious (and wrong) Seduction Theory which even he recanted, the world caught onto the idea of repressed memories in the ‘80s. Such cases broke up many homes and destroyed countless lives and they are related to the false memories implanted by therapists in the daycare cases. While Cheit is not as good a writer as Freud (the most generous thing I can say about Freud is he was a gifted creative essayist but not in any way a clinician), they both espouse/d ideas dangerous to society. The truth rarely matters.
Or at least we hope it does.
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