← The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall
The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall
Episode 3: Moral (Panic) Entrepreneurship
00:44:53
<p>Mary de Young had always been interested in deviants and deviance. As a social-psychologist, she studied “behavior that broke the rules,” and whether the worst parts of a person’s behavior were innate, nurtured, or misunderstood. So when news broke in 1983 about a “new” form of child abuse that she had never heard of before, she was — as a researcher — intrigued, and — as a person — horrified. But as she began to investigate the cases, the details didn’t add up.</p>
Loading summary
Transcript85 lines
- [00:00]
Gavin Crawford
Hi, it's me, Gavin Crawford, host of the comedy podcast Because News. It's a show where I quiz a panel of comedic friends on the latest headlines. This week we have a superstar lineup featuring Tom Hearn, Courtney Gilmour, and Martha Chavez. I'll be quizzing them on Canada's trade troubles. We'll find out why Alberta's new slogan has hit a roadblock, and I'll ask the panel if they're all hot and bothered by the latest trend in soniculture. Take a break from the baseball madness and catch up on some of the other news by following because news on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere that dispenses podcasts for free. This is a CBC podcast.
- [00:39]
Sarah Marshall
Just a heads up that this episode contains discussions about child sexual abuse. Please take care while listening.
- [00:51]
Mary DeYoung
I was really interested in what might generically be referred to as deviant behavior. I was really interested in whether the the worst part of that was something that was born or nurtured.
- [01:07]
Sarah Marshall
You met Mary DeYoung back in episode one.
- [01:11]
Mary DeYoung
I'm an emerita professor of sociology from Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan.
- [01:20]
Sarah Marshall
Now we're talking with her about the early 80s. Three's company is ending, girls are flashdancing across America, and Ronald Reagan is campaigning for a second term. At the time, Mary is an up and coming researcher.
- [01:35]
Mary DeYoung
I did a lot of clinical work and a lot of research on the sexual abuse of children.
- [01:43]
Sarah Marshall
The issue was about to become somewhat ubiquitous.
- [01:47]
Mary DeYoung
We were allegedly dealing with a form of sexual abuse that we had not heard of before.
- [01:58]
Sarah Marshall
One day, Mary received an intriguing phone call.
- [02:02]
Mary DeYoung
I was at the university, and this person called the office. Hello. The person who called me was an investigator from the prosecutor's office asking if I would be willing to testify that the children were telling the truth and that the interviews were done properly.
- [02:23]
Sarah Marshall
This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that Mary was asked to be an expert witness in a court case. But it would be the first time that she'd encounter a different type of child abuse.
- [02:35]
Mary DeYoung
And I said, well, I'd have to see all of the interview videotapes, if you have them, read all of the transcripts. And the person said to me, no, we're not going to have you do that. And I said, well, I can't. You know, I can only talk very, very theoretically about interviews and about children's credibility, but I don't think I'd be the strongest person to do that anyway. I'm not a developmental psychologist, and I never heard anything again.
- [03:13]
Sarah Marshall
The case in question alleged that people working at a preschool in California were abusing the children in their career and that this abuse was being perpetrated for the sheer glorification of Satan.
- [03:28]
Mary DeYoung
I was stunned. I was in the process during that period of time and testifying in a number of cases as an expert witness on child sexual abuse. And in every case when there was something specific that had to do with the credibility of the child or something like that, was always given access to information, I couldn't imagine how anybody would go on the stand and say yes, from what you described, the interviews were done properly and the children were telling the truth. Without having all of that information available. I just couldn't believe that anybody would even ask that.
- [04:13]
Sarah Marshall
For a jury to take these children seriously, they needed expert witnesses to tell them that there could be no explanation and but satanic ritual abuse on a massive scale. But Mary would not be one of them.
- [04:29]
Mary DeYoung
I think it probably did increase my skepticism a bit. Why would you even ask somebody to do that, especially with the wealth of information you had available to allow that person to give a really informed opinion? Why would you shortcut that?
- [04:50]
Sarah Marshall
The case they called about eventually became the longest and one of the most expensive in U.S. history. The McMartin preschool trial and its so called experts brought the idea of satanic ritual abuse into public consciousness in a new urgent way. Because as a parent, a teacher, a social worker, a therapist, a neighbor, even if you found these stories unbelievable, well, what if you were wrong? I'm Sarah Marshall. This is the devil you know. Teenage Satanists spraying pentagrams on barn floors, covens in black dresses out in the forest. If urban legends were the kindling of the satanic panic and the book Michelle remembers was the matches, then the McMartin trial was the gallon of gasoline poured over the fire authorities as child molesters.
- [06:07]
Gavin Crawford
She sat in her wheelchair with teddy bear pins on her blouse and Snoopy earrings on her ears. Virginia McMartin, the owner of the preschool in which kids were allegedly scared into silence about sexual assaults by being forced to watch animals being mutilated. Virginia McMartin, indicted for child molesting, is in police custody on $50,000 bail. Her grandson Ray Bucky, once a feature.
- [06:33]
Sarah Marshall
KABC in Los Angeles, which you just heard from, was the first to cover this increasingly bizarre story. McMartin Preschool was a family run daycare center in Manhattan Beach, California. McMartin was beloved by the community and one of those daycares that parents had to get started pretty early on, getting their child enrolled in the first allegation comes in the summer of 1983, when Judy Johnson, whose son is two and a half, goes to the police. She claims that he was sexually abused by a male teacher, Ray Buckey. The police began investigating and strange details began to emerge. Slaughtered animals, figures in capes, tunnels under the school filled with bones. The police send a letter to the McMartin parents with a very long, very horrible list of things they think could have happened to their children, suggesting that photos may have been taken of children without their clothing or that they had been tied up. The list concluded with sodomy. The police asked parents for their help in the investigation, and the letter continued. Please question your child to see if he or she has been a witness to any crime or if he or she has been a victim. The fifth paragraph of the letter began. We ask you to please keep this investigation strictly confidential because of the nature of the charges and the highly emotional effect it could have on our community. But that was the fifth paragraph, and if I were a parent, I would have been calling everyone I know by the time I was in the middle of the third one. If you've never experienced anxiety about daycare or childcare, part of it then and now is based on simply not knowing what your small child has been up to all day, especially in a time when you couldn't watch them on a streaming video platform. You're sending a toddler into a place where. Where they will have an experience you essentially can know nothing about. Your child will come home offering you a sketchy account of what they experienced that day, or not telling you anything at all you may not understand, based on the way young children describe their experiences or their concepts of the past and the future, exactly what they're saying to you, or whether it was imaginary or real. And when a society is feeling anxious, generally a daycare center can be one of the perfect places to focus that anxiety on, because they're full of some of our most vulnerable citizens, and we don't really know what they do all day in there. In less than a year, police interviewed hundreds of current and former McMartin students and determined that an entire network of adults was involved and that nearly 400 students had been abused at the daycare. This is what one child involved in the McMartin case said in a taped TV interview with ABC's 20 20. They showed us pictures of bodies that were burned alive, and they said, this.
- [09:57]
Mary DeYoung
Is what's going to happen to you and the rest of your family if.
- [10:01]
Sarah Marshall
You tell the McMartin preschool case goes to trial and shows up in the News. In early 1984, eight people, including Virginia McMartin, who owned the daycare, and her son Ray Bucky, who worked there, are indicted for child sexual abuse. Here is more coverage from kabc.
- [10:25]
Gavin Crawford
Dollars BAIL his mother, Peggy Bucky, wants the director of the Preschool held on $350,000 bail. Her daughter Peggy Ann 50,000 Teacher Betty Raider 250,000 Teacher Marianne Jackson 100,000 Bab Spitler 125,000 those high bails had been set when the seven were indicted. Defense lawyers.
- [10:47]
Sarah Marshall
Prosecutors were building the case on the credibility of the children involved, many of whom were as young as three and four and who had been interviewed in high pressure settings by social workers who, confident as they might have been, had only just begun working in this capacity. And over the next decade, strangely, similar cases start appearing across the country. Parents around the country are very upset about the allegations of sexual abuse, some of them actually proven as fact in some of our daycare centers.
- [11:21]
Mary DeYoung
In fact, in Massachusetts alone currently, the.
- [11:23]
Sarah Marshall
Office for Children have started investigations in no less than 33 daycare centers since September. Startling as these cases were litigated, the prosecution was often supported by expert witnesses in psychological, medical and social fields who attested to the signs of satanic ritual abuse. Experts like Lawrence Pazder, co author of Michelle Remembers. People would be called in to do preliminary testing or evaluate evidence, identify lingering questions or gaps in the case of or provide an initial opinion at trial. They take the stand and offer their opinions about what happened, all positioned as independent and neutral. In fact, Dr. Pazder had been there at the very beginning. He was brought on to consult in the McMartin case, and he was the one who had told social workers that they should look not just for sexual abuse, but for satanic ritual abuse. And where they looked for it, they seemed to find it. On a new season of Heaven Bent Son of a Prophet My name is Jedediah Hartley. Like, my name is very specific. Like, he named me based off of a prophetic dream that he had. Like, my very identity is, like, tied to my father, who my father is, who he was. He couldn't just be a liar. Listen to season eight of Heaven Bent wherever you get your podcasts.
- [13:09]
Mary DeYoung
Suddenly we were allegedly dealing with a form of sexual abuse that we had not heard of before, certainly not in recent history.
- [13:21]
Sarah Marshall
Here's more from my conversation with Dr. Mary DeYoung.
- [13:25]
Mary DeYoung
And in the most innocuous of places, your local daycare center run by, for the most part, middle aged white women. You know, they were very conforming, and they were doing traditional women's work. They were caring for children for very little money and very little gratitude. And that was extremely appealing to me to take a very, very serious look at that.
- [13:55]
Sarah Marshall
I wonder about what your reaction was when you first began to hear these accounts of, I guess, seemingly an unprecedented kind of child abuse. And, I mean, do you remember?
- [14:06]
Mary DeYoung
I really remember it very well, as a matter of fact. I mean, I was completely stunned, really scared that all of this really was true and that there was this horrific abuse of children that we had known absolutely nothing about. I think what you young folks don't recognize because you didn't live through the experience is what a shock it was even a decade earlier when words like incest and child molestation crept into the vernacular. And we were realizing that the family next door, that you might have played with their kids when you were little, you know, something horrible was happening to those kids. Kids. And you encountered people who had kept a secret of their abuse for long, long periods of time. I can't put a, you know, an exact date on it because it didn't occur with a particular case as much as it did. I think largely, but not solely as a product of the women's movement growing in the 60s and the 70s. And really the women's movement focus, particularly the more, if you will, radical end of the women's movement, really wanting to focus on patriarchy. And that meant unpacking the traditional family and looking at patriarchal themes within families and to a lesser extent, I think, within institutions. And so we had some very unpleasant things that were thrust into consciousness. The sexual abuse of children within families, domestic violence, these all became part of public discussion. So they were really kind of the primer, I think, for dealing with the sexual abuse of children and recognizing the extent of the problem. So when the satanic ritual abuse case came up through the McMartin case, it was plausible that something horrible that was very difficult to get your head around actually had been happening to children. Because, after all, we had already dealt with the shock of this occurring within homes, within churches, within schools, when we had never known that before or had failed to recognize it.
- [16:46]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah. And I mean, how would you describe a moral panic?
- [16:51]
Mary DeYoung
Well, it's a collective process that usually has always, I should say not usually, its origins in social change or social disruption that's causing some degree of conflict or anxiety or concern. Much of this then draws our attention away from structural issues that may be very problematic and having influences on people's lives. And we have essentially In a moral panic, A somewhat regressive movement in terms of the fact that it's trying to restore old moral lines or old cultural habits, you know, kind of like the good old days that the social change was really threatening to upend. It's built up by what moral panic theory calls moral entrepreneurs. I really like that term. But people who emerge, who sell the idea and target a particular group of people who are known as the folk devils, as being the source of the problem. I found moral entrepreneurs in the satanic panic to be absolutely fascinating because within a relatively short period of time, all of a sudden, we had experts popping up on satanism, on cults, on satanic cults, even on ritual abuse, which was a brand new term. And here were all these experts. So people were saying, well, there may not be proof, but you just have to believe these are little kids and they're going through something absolutely terrible.
- [18:39]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah, yeah. And that kind of culture clash seems interesting because you're in a field that, you know, is a science. So why was that possible?
- [18:52]
Mary DeYoung
You know, in those early years, that child trauma field was a very, very new field, and I think that people were going in a number of different directions. So that field was welcoming of new information. And since satanic ritual abuse Was a brand new phenomenon, it could have contributed very significantly if indeed people were looking at it from that lens of childhood trauma. The best place for people to act as moral entrepreneurs on all of this Were not so much maybe in professional conferences as in training conferences. These tended to draw a lot of people who were in allied professions Dealing with children in some way. You know, the counseling and care of children in the 1980s was not strongly regulated, so a lot of people could call them themselves counselors, for example, without having an advanced degree or without having a license.
- [20:10]
Sarah Marshall
One field where these experts Were suddenly appearing Was social work. Take a listen to this 1988 report from KANU, Kansas Public Radio.
- [20:21]
Gavin Crawford
Speaking to a crowded room of kansas social workers, Helen swan of kansas city said ritualistic abuse refers to the repeated physical, sexual, mental, and spiritual abuse of children Combined with the systematic use of symbols and ceremonies. Swann explains several case examples of children in satanic cult environments.
- [20:41]
Sarah Marshall
They'll do things such as have the.
- [20:43]
Mary DeYoung
Children observe violence or murder and masturbate them at the same time.
- [20:48]
Sarah Marshall
So they began to.
- [20:50]
Mary DeYoung
Conferences were kind of the 80s and maybe early 90s version of social media. You know, they were the primary ways that information was conveyed to people who were practicing within a given field. It's the way that you really learn the Cutting edge. You know, publishing is a little bit challenging for getting to the cutting edge because you have to put a paper together. If it's in a good professional journal, it has to be peer reviewed. That takes some time. So it is easier to get cutting edge material into conferences and meetings of various kinds. So that became a very good source of sharing information about the alleged ritual abuse of children.
- [21:44]
Sarah Marshall
And it turns out that people involved in the McMartin trial, like the ones who evaluated and interviewed the children, weren't just spreading their findings at conferences.
- [21:54]
Mary DeYoung
I mean, they went to various communities, they did presentations, they did workshops, they spoke at conferences, both in this country and abroad. That base built up rather quickly, mailing out of xeroxed material, reams of it, going from one place to another. We had television talk shows which were, maybe you can analogize those to the Internet, but we're kind of our early version of the Internet. Very popular shows. You know, Oprah, Sally, Jessie, Raphael, Geraldo, Phil Donahue. All of those shows had segments on satanic ritual abuse. And virtually all of them featured usually the parents of some of the children who were involved in the cases, rarely the children themselves.
- [22:56]
Sarah Marshall
What were the signs of satanic ritual abuse meant to be or what was supposed to be? You know, were people told to look out for particular pieces of theoretical evidence?
- [23:07]
Mary DeYoung
You want me to quickly read for you the signs and symptoms of Ritual Abuse, 1988?
- [23:15]
Sarah Marshall
Absolutely.
- [23:16]
Mary DeYoung
This is from Kathryn Gould, who was a very big moral entrepreneur, to use that term. This was very widely circulated. So there's under sexual problems quickly. Fear of touch, excessive masturbation, Bathroom avoidance. Problems associated with the supernatural. Fear of ghosts, monsters, witches, devils, odd songs and chants. Fear of attending church. Problems associated with confinement. Fear of closets, Fear of being tied up. Problems associated with death, preoccupation with death. Fear of doctors. Fear of injections. Fear of removing clothes. Fear of the colors red and black. Eating problems, Refusal to eat red or brown food. Fear that food is poison. Emotional problems, Mood swings, Anxiety, poor self esteem Withdrawal regression. Learning disorders, nightmares. Family problems. Separation anxiety. Play and pure problems. Destroys toys. Inability to engage in fantasy play Other fears, Imaginary friends. Fear of police. Fear of aggressive animals. Fear of cemeteries. Fear of something foreign inside the body, for example, a bomb or the devil.
- [24:44]
Sarah Marshall
Would you say that it would be difficult to find a child who this list didn't apply to after a certain point?
- [24:50]
Mary DeYoung
Yes, yes. What you have is a list that does not differentiate developmentally based fears, that does not differentiate a satanic, ritually abused child from a child undergoing other kinds of Traumas or stressors. I think even people who were very careful about putting lists together were also failing to understand the trauma of being identified as a victim or the potential trauma because family dynamics changed. Children were being questioned and monitored and supervised in ways they never had before. And we know that children are reactive to those kinds of changes.
- [25:40]
Sarah Marshall
Something that I can't help but think about, not as a parent, but as someone who has spent time around kids in my life the way that I know young children to be, and how the kind of logic begins to be very strained by this idea of, well, you know, only a child who was ritually abused would repeat gruesome details. And it's like, I don't know, they just kind of like. They like talking about this stuff. I don't know what to tell you. That's my analysis anyway.
- [26:10]
Mary DeYoung
I don't think you're wrong on that. And the fundamental error of the assumption that. And this was a very common assumption during that period of time is that children can't tell you something like this unless they've experienced it. The fundamental error of that is that most of the children were not telling at all. They were confirming. So when transcripts of the interviews that were being conducted with the children in various daycare cases around the country started to be made public, it was really clear that the story was not being told by the child. It was being told by the interviewer, who already believed that such a thing was possible and then was very determined to get to the bottom of it.
- [27:04]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah. And I wonder. I would love for you to maybe take us through an example with how this type of questioning process worked.
- [27:13]
Mary DeYoung
There was more often a whole set of questions of did this happen? And when this happened, how did you feel? What were you thinking? And even some degree of peer pressure. Remember, are very little kids that all of your friends told us this happened. So if you're saying it didn't, you know, are you lying? You know, you want to be friends with your friends, so make sure that you tell the story essentially in the way that they were. I can tell you that I took a transcript from an interview in the McMartin case, and I took a black marker and I crossed out everything that the interviewer said so that I only had what the child said in the interview. And I looked at page after page of the child saying, okay, yeah, yes, all right, yeah, that happened. So the child was really in a position of confirming the bias of the interviewer. This was something called the child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome. This was a theory that was going around at the time. And it really informed the interviewing of the children in the daycare cases. And the idea was that children do not disclose spontaneously. You have to interact with them in a somewhat leading and suggestive kind of way to get the narrative going. And that in the case of ritual abuse, children are going to tell the worst part of it as the interview goes on. And the analogy was like to peeling an onion. And that's what the interviewer has to do. And the problem with that is if you actually peel an onion, you get to the core of it and you know when the onion stops, but you don't know that when you're interviewing someone. And so a child may say, yeah, we drank blood. And yeah, that did occur. Well, what else did? Where did the blood come from? Did you kill an animal? Did you kill another child? And it just kept going and going and going. And every fear that the interviewer had is being loaded into the middle of this. And so many of those fears are then confirmed by the children.
- [29:41]
Sarah Marshall
I mean, I. I remember being a child and being at the age where I got stuck in a line of questioning with a parent where I had like lied about something and then I had to answer follow up questions about it. And I was just like. And my main motivation, I think consistently was that I wanted to get back to the show I was watching. And, you know, and that was enough for me to say probably anything.
- [30:03]
Mary DeYoung
Right, right. And that was with your parents. And then when you're dealing with an interviewer, you need to think also of the developmental stage of the child and the fact that children are in a state of dependency. Children need to please adults in order to live their lives and be okay. So if somebody's kind of going after you on something, it can feel very urgent to disclose.
- [30:38]
Sarah Marshall
I mean, it seems to me that there's this paradoxical thing where people are talking about it's the worst abuse you can possibly imagine. But also we cannot bring ourselves to stop talking about it. What's that about?
- [30:53]
Mary DeYoung
I don't know exactly. I think it's an attempt at mastery in a way. The more I can talk about it, the more I can get some degree of control over it, Even a certain degree of distance. And there may have been elements associated with all of that. And I don't want to be too basic with all of this, but I think there is a certain reputation enhancement that goes along with that. You're fighting evil, you are doing incredible work with something that, that no one has ever heard of before.
- [31:34]
Sarah Marshall
Right. And Then, you know, imagine that you're at the barbecue and you're like, oh, hey, how's being an accountant going? Oh, that's nice. You know what I'm doing, right?
- [31:45]
Mary DeYoung
You know, it is kind of what sociologists call an enchantment. You know, a lot of the people who were doing the initial work, particularly on the. On the daycare cases, were social workers, were police officers or detectives in juvenile bureaus. That work can be very routine and very bureaucratized, and you can walk out of that in the end of the day wondering, really if you've done any good. But this is to talk about satanic ritual abuse, to confront it, to deal with it, really. Repositions. I think the person elevates or enhances the person's status and importance. And I don't want to sound crude and suggest that this is like a conscious, deliberate motivation. I think it's maybe an unintended consequence of what happened, but it was a rewarding and reinforcing consequence for a lot of people. But back in the day, this kind of stuff plays. People pay attention. They go out of their way to listen and to. And to think about it. And dabbling with something that is allegedly evil, that is allegedly sexual, you know, it has some element of attraction, I think, for folks. I think it was almost a form of pornography for people. I really do.
- [33:23]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah. And how so? What do you think it offered to them?
- [33:26]
Mary DeYoung
Well, you know, you have illicit and bizarre and secretive sex. You have all of these trappings make all of this kind of unreal. There's a dramaturgical element associated with this. Abusers dressed in robes or costumes or masks or whatever the situation might be. I think it's appealing, but it's also archetypal, isn't it? I mean, it's part of our culture, deeply ingrained within folklore about monsters chasing little children and evil forces being banished by brave and heroic people. Its motif plays out in ways that are familiar to us. And ultimately, it is a morality tale. I mean, it's evil going after innocence. Not just good, but innocence, pure innocence, banished, confronted by, resolved by, destroyed by heroic rescuers. And so you have that triangle of perpetrator, victim, and rescuer that is really heightened in these accounts and ultimately becomes a morality tale about good triumphing over evil. And that's satisfying as well for a lot of people.
- [34:59]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah, well. And this is maybe just you know, less meaningful than I want to make it. But there's this Reagan campaign ad from 1984 that I've been fascinated by for years. And it's just footage of a bear. And the voiceover is like, there's a bear in the woods.
- [35:17]
Gavin Crawford
There is a bear in the woods. For some people, the bear is easy to see.
- [35:22]
Mary DeYoung
Others don't see it at all.
- [35:25]
Gavin Crawford
Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it's vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who's right, isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear if there is a bear?
- [35:40]
Sarah Marshall
But wouldn't you want to be as strong as the bear? And you're like, like, what is this about? Is it about Star Wars? Is it about crime? But it's such a perfect campaign ad because it's like the bear is anything you're afraid of and Reagan is going to take it down.
- [35:59]
Mary DeYoung
That's right. I mean, in the end, it really is about fear, isn't it? And mobilizing against the fear. And if you don't know what the source of the fear is, you're in a state of readiness for virtually anything that is credibly defined as the fear for you.
- [36:19]
Sarah Marshall
Well, and you know, speaking of, at the beginning of this conversation, we talked about distracting from structural problems. How do you see that? What kinds of structural problems do you see us distracting ourselves from here?
- [36:32]
Mary DeYoung
I think the moral panic distracted us from the fact that. That children are at greatest risk with people who should be caring for them and should be loving for them. And so the family is a place of risk. Schools, other social institutions that the child may be involved in, or organizations within the community, those are high risk areas. And we're looking back now with a degree of, I think, proper shock at how terribly involved those larger systems were in the abuse of children. Whether you're talking about the scandal in the Catholic Church, Boy Scouts, where were all of these allegations? Why were children not coming forward? The question doesn't really lie with the child. It lies with us. It lies with the context, whether it's the family, the courts, the law itself, society in general. That's where the problem was. And so that lack of readiness to accept all of this in somewhat cynically, I might call ordinary kinds of ways.
- [37:51]
Sarah Marshall
Well, but. Right. I mean, it is kind of within the fabric of everyday life, and that's the fabric that we don't want to alter, I guess.
- [38:00]
Mary DeYoung
Yeah.
- [38:03]
Sarah Marshall
One of the things that this also makes me think about is how certain vulnerabilities within the legal system were revealed that are still there.
- [38:11]
Mary DeYoung
The legal system remains very uninviting for cases of sexual abuse, whether they occur to children or cases of rape or sexual assault as they would occur to adults. It is not a place where most people are going, first of all, even be able to enter as a complainant, as a victim, or are going to find any kind of satisfaction when they do. So. It really does point to the fact that we continue to need an awful lot of changes to make that a viable route for people to deal with a resolution or towards the resolution of what happened to them.
- [38:56]
Sarah Marshall
And do you think that there is any benefit to cultures creating these panics or is it all just destruction and a distraction?
- [39:06]
Mary DeYoung
To be honest with you, when I first approached this theoretically, I really thought it was all destruction, that this was a really regressive movement. It was trying to create the way we never were all over again. It was moral regulation in the most repressive sense of the term. But looking more carefully, carefully at that panic, particularly in regards to the daycare elements of it, I really see that the panic had some positive outcomes. I think they were unintended, but it occurred nonetheless. It really did draw attention to the state of daycare in America, the availability and affordability of it, the licensing of it. And the panic drew attention to that dilemma. It drew attention eventually to the way that children were being interviewed and really encouraged the development of protocols for interviewing in all sexual abuse and then later all trauma related kinds of cases. So that really was a positive outcome. So it wasn't all bad, but it was pretty high price to pay to get those outcomes.
- [40:30]
Sarah Marshall
The McMartin trials went on from 1983 to 1990.
- [40:36]
Gavin Crawford
The verdict, not guilty. The trial began nearly three years ago. On trial were 63 year old Peggy McMartin Buckey and her 31 year old son Raymond. They were charged with 65 counts of molesting children at their preschool in Manhattan Beach, California.
- [40:54]
Sarah Marshall
As PBS NewsHour reported here in 1990, no one was ultimately found guilty of satanically abusing hundreds of children, at least in the eyes of the law. But after talking with Merida Young, I still wondered who did get that expert witness shot? Kee MacFarlane and others at Children's Institute.
- [41:16]
Gavin Crawford
International, a Los Angeles agency that counsels.
- [41:19]
Sarah Marshall
Abused children, videotaped interviews with nearly 400 former McMartin students. I know how to relate to children.
- [41:28]
Mary DeYoung
How to talk to them.
- [41:29]
Sarah Marshall
Kay McFarlane was one of a few expert witnesses. She had a master's in social work and she was one of the first people to question many of the McMartin students during the pre trial hearings. Another expert witness was Dr. Roland Summitt. He is actually the one credited with formalizing the interview tactic that Mary DeYoung talked child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome. So these expert witnesses and others lent credence to the satanic ritual abuse theory. But they also introduced significant reasons to doubt. Here is what two jurors told reporters afterward. Children were never allowed to say in.
- [42:18]
Gavin Crawford
Their own words what happened to them. And to me that was crucial.
- [42:26]
Sarah Marshall
Parents involved in the McMartin case formed an advocacy organization called Believe the Children. And that phrase became an unofficial slogan of the Satanic Panic as a whole. But what it seemed to really mean, especially as the panic grew, was believe the children when they tell us what we want to hear. A popular theory, and one followed by McMartin's own expert, held that a child denying they had been abused was in fact proof that abuse had taken place place. So when McMartin students said no one had done anything to them, their questioners often pressed them to corroborate another child's story, sometimes treating them more like co conspirators than victims. McMartin holds many lessons for us, lessons we have mostly managed to ignore. But one of them is that we should believe the children and that we can't protect them if we don't listen to them. Have you ever lived in a drafty old house during a really cold winter? You know how on some days it just becomes very clear how many places the cold has to leak in? Around the windows, under the floorboards, through the drawers. The McMartin case was like that for the American legal system. Looking at it now, it is so easy to see those weak spots. The moral entrepreneurs who lent so called scientific heft to the search for Satan in daycares also offered a kind of wish fulfillment that is very understandable. If we could just find the most evil person person and get rid of them, that would be justice. The world would be safe. Don't go poking around our most cherished institutions, the church, the nuclear family. A threat to your children or yourself will always look like the most evil thing you can conceive of. And it always leaves clear, incontrovertible, tangible evidence that you can uncover if you know what you're looking for. Convict the Satanists, save the children. Thank you for listening to the W Know. Our producer is Mary Stephanhagen. Fact checking by Katherine Barner Production assistants by Nicole Ortiz. Thanks to Jay Cowett for voice voice coaching. Your voice actor in this episode was Janet Varney. In previous episodes you've heard the vocal talents of River Butcher, Aubrey Gordon, Michael Hobbs and Jamie Loftus. I've been your host, Sarah Marshall Sound design by Evan Kelly and Julia Whitman. Rookhni Nair is our Coordinating Producer. Our Senior Producer is Jeff Turner. Executive Executive Producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is Manager of Growth for CBC Podcasts. Arif Nurani is Director of CBC Podcasts. Listen to every episode early on the CBC True Crime YouTube channel. For early and ad free listening, subscribe to the CBC True Crime Premium Channel on Apple Podcasts.
- [46:05]
Gavin Crawford
For more CBC Podcasts go to CBC CA Podcasts.