The great sex panic
• Sexual Health
In the 1980s, as McNally relates, day care workers risked prosecution and imprisonment on the coerced testimony of bewildered and intimidated three-year-olds who were prodded to "remember" nonexistent molestations. Meanwhile, poorly trained social workers, reasoning that signs of sexual curiosity in children must be "behavioral memories" of rape, were charging parents with incest and consigning their stunned offspring to foster homes. And most remarkably, whole communities were frantically attempting to expose envisioned covens of Satan worshipers who were said, largely on the basis of hypnotically unlocked "memories," to be raising babies for sexual torture, ritual murder, and cannibal feasts around the patio grill.
Frederick C. Crews, The New York Review of Books: The Trauma Trap

Comments
Posted by: Bob King | February 29, 2004 11:42 AM
Posted by: Richard | February 29, 2004 12:33 PM
Posted by: Bob King | March 1, 2004 09:17 AM