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Author Beck, Richard, 1986- author.

Title We believe the children : a moral panic in the 1980s / Richard Beck.

Publication Info. New York : PublicAffairs, [2015]
©2015

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 Middletown, Russell Library - Adult Nonfiction  362.76 BEC    Check Shelf
 New Britain, Main Library - Non Fiction  362.76 B38    Check Shelf
 Plainville Public Library - Non Fiction  362.76 BEC    Check Shelf
 University of Saint Joseph: Pope Pius XII Library - Standard Shelving Location  362.76 B393W    Check Shelf
 West Hartford, Noah Webster Library - Non Fiction  362.7609 BECK    Check Shelf
Edition First edition.
Description xxv, 323 pages ; 25 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 271-308) and index.
Contents The discovery of child abuse -- McMartin: Allegations -- Prosecutors -- McMartin: The preliminary hearing -- FBI, DSM, XXX -- McMartin: The trial -- Two families -- McMartin: The verdict -- Therapists and survivors -- Repression and desire.
Summary During the 1980s in California, New Jersey, and New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, and elsewhere, daycare workers were arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of committing horrible sexual crimes against the children they cared for. These crimes, social workers and prosecutors said, had gone undetected for years, and they consisted of a brutality and sadism that defied all imagining. Using extensive archival research conducted in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Minneapolis, and elsewhere, and drawing on dozens of interviews conducted with the hysteria's major figures, n+1 editor Richard Beck shows how a group of legislators, doctors, lawyers, and parents, most working with the best of intentions, set the stage for a cultural disaster. Psychiatrists and talk therapists turned dubious theories of trauma and recovered memory into a destructive new kind of psychotherapy. Social workers and detectives employed coercive interviewing techniques that led children to tell them what they wanted to hear. The climate of fear that surrounded these cases influenced a whole series of arguments about women, children, and sex that had been intensifying for some twenty years. At the root of these accusations were competing visions of society and what it was that threatened it most.
Subject Child sexual abuse -- Investigation -- United States -- Case studies.
Occult crime investigation -- United States -- Case studies.
False memory syndrome -- Case studies.
Child witnesses -- Case studies.
False arrest -- United States -- Case studies.
Moral panics -- United States -- Case studies.
HISTORY -- Social History.
HISTORY -- United States -- 20th Century.
PSYCHOLOGY -- Social Psychology.
Child care workers. (OCoLC)fst00854363
Child sexual abuse. (OCoLC)fst00854640
False arrest. (OCoLC)fst00920095
Moral panics. (OCoLC)fst01740383
Ritual abuse. (OCoLC)fst01098249
United States. (OCoLC)fst01204155
Chronological Term 1900 - 1999
Genre/Form History. (OCoLC)fst01411628
ISBN 9781610392877 (hardcover)
1610392876 (hardcover)
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