[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

                                 ______


                        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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