Day care sexual abuse hysteria

Day-care sex-abuse hysteria was a moral panic that occurred primarily in the 1980s and early 1990s featuring charges against day-care providers of several forms of child abuse, including Satanic ritual abuse. A prominent case in Kern County, California first brought the issue of day-care sexual abuse to the forefront of the public awareness, and the issue figured prominently in news coverage for almost a decade. The Kern County case was followed by cases elsewhere in the United States as well as Canada, New Zealand, Brazil, and various European countries.

The McMartin Preschool case was the first daycare abuse case to receive major media attention in the United States. The case centered around the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, where seven teachers were accused of kidnapping children, flying them in a plane to another location, and forcing them to engage in group sex as well as forcing them to watch animals be tortured and killed. The case also involved accusations that children had been forced to participate in bizarre religious rituals, been used to make child pornography. The case began with a single accusation, made the mother - who was later found to be a paranoid schizophrenic - of one of the students, but grew rapidly when investigators informed parents of the accusation and began interviewing other students. The case made headlines nationwide in 1984, and seven teachers were arrested and charged that year. When a new district attorney took over the case in 1986, however, his office re-examined the evidence and dropped charges against all but two of the original defendants. Their trials became one of the longest and most expensive criminal trials in the history of the United States, but in 1990 all of these charges were also dropped. Both jurors at the trial and academic researchers later criticized the interviewing techniques that investigators had used in their investigations of the school, alleging that interviewers had "coaxed" children into making unfounded accusations, repeatedly asking children the same questions and offering various incentives until the children reported having been abused. Most scholars now agree that the accusations these interviews elicited from children were false. Sociologist Mary de Young and hitorian Philip Jenkins have both cited the McMartin case as the prototype for a wave of similar accusations and investigations between 1983 and 1995, which constituted a moral panic.

...
Wikipedia