We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s

We Believe the Children is about the spate of daycare child abuse cases which hit the news in the 1980s and, as its subtitle reveals, Richard Beck is not impressed at the way those cases were handled: by the police, by the mental health professionals, by the prosecutors, by the judges, by the news media, and even, or perhaps most especially, by the parents. Using the McMartin trial in California as his primary exemplar, Beck explores the political, social, and psychological underpinnings of the hysteria surrounding the daycare child abuse cases, eventually concluding that this hysteria was driven by a conservative society trying to repress - to hide from itself - two unpalatable truths: "First, the nuclear family was dying. Second, people mostly didn't want to save it." As an attorney, I was both fascinated and appalled by the conduct of those who investigated and prosecuted the McMartin case. I was particularly interested in the changes to the criminal justice process advocated by the McMartin parents, including a new hearsay exception which would allow the parents of alleged victims below the age of 8 to tell juries what their children had told them about the abuse, rather than the children testifying themselves. Beck suggests that such an exception would have violated the Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause, an argument with which I might have agreed before the Supreme Court's June 18 decision in Ohio v. Clark. (To be fair, the galley I reviewed pre-dated that decision, so Beck couldn't have taken it into account.) My biggest complaint was that, once Beck began discussing the psychological factors contributing to social hysteria, he spent far too many pages on the debate surrounding multiple personality disorder ("MPD"). While I am generally interested in psychology, and might well want to read a book about MPD, this discussion was only tangentially related to the McMartin case, which I expected to be the focus of this book. We Believe the Children was informative, especially for someone who remembered the daycare ritual abuse panic but didn't know the true story, and many of Beck's insights are equally applicable to more current social issues, from gay marriage to the Confederate flag. I recommend it to anyone interested in sociology, psychology, or the criminal justice process. I received a free copy of We Believe the Children through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.