Overview

A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2015 A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015 A brilliant, disturbing portrait of the dawn of the culture wars, when America started to tear itself apart with doubts, wild allegations, and an unfounded fear for the safety of children.During the 1980s in California, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, and elsewhere, day care 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. The dangers of babysitting services and day care centres became a national news media fixation. Of the many hundreds of people who were investigated in connection with day care and ritual abuse cases around the country, some 190 were formally charged with crimes, leading to more than 80 convictions.It would take years for people to realize what the defendants had said all along,that these prosecutions were the product of a decade-long outbreak of collective hysteria on par with the Salem witch trials. Social workers and detectives employed coercive interviewing techniques that led children to tell them what they wanted to hear. Local and national journalists fanned the flames by promoting the stories'salacious aspects, while aggressive prosecutors sought to make their careers by unearthing an unspeakable evil where parents feared it most.Using extensive archival research 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. The climate of fear that surrounded these cases influenced a whole series of arguments about women, children, and sex. It also drove a right-wing cultural resurgence that, in many respects, continues to this day.

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9781610392877

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Reviews

The symbol of the innocent child drove domestic politics in 1980s America, and nowhere more so than in the unwavering conviction that day-care centers, places meant to nourish and protect our young, were actually sites of unfathomably terrible abuse. In We Believe the Children Richard Beck gives us an account that is both riveting and judicious. Most importantly, he deftly situates this terrifying witch-hunt within its times--a period not just of antifeminist backlash, but also of unprecedented ambivalence about the nuclear family. --Alice Echols, Professor of History & Gender Studies at USC and author of Hot Stuff, Shaky Ground and Scars of Sweet Paradise Richard Beck frames his fascinating account of moral panic in the 1980s as history, but I advise reading it as a diagnosis of our own moment as well. The trope of the endangered child lurks just beneath the surface in a whole series of current arguments about women, vulnerability, trauma, sex, and power, especially on college campuses. We're not repeating history, we're regressing to it. --Laura Kipnis, author of Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation

Author Information

Richard Beck is an editor at n+1 magazine and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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