The Nation's Pulse/Hug Your Kid, Go to Jail
Kirp, David L.
THE NATION'S PULSE HUG YOUR KID, GO TO JAIL by David L. Kirp Until he was arrested last August, charged with having sexually molested a nine-year-old girl, Brian Taugher had never been in trouble...
...Taugher had it right the first time...
...In 1984, the National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect gathered more than a million-and-a-quarter reports of abuse, up nine times in the past two decades and 20 percent in just one year...
...Nor did the prosecutor's medical evidence hold up...
...They are even reluctant to hug a crying child or let a youngster climb into their lap for a story, out of fear that someone will observe and misinterpret what is going on...
...This hysterical concern feeds on itself...
...Meanwhile, in a vain attempt to elicit a confession from Taugher, the sheriffs office convinced the girl's mother to make an accusatory phone call to Taugher, which was secretly taped...
...After the comic character Spider-man let his young readers know that he had been sexually abused as a child, thousands of youngsters stepped forward with their own accounts of molestation...
...Taugher himself was ambivalent about the meaning of his ordeal...
...That is the rationale for acting faster on reports of molestation...
...Some of the youngsters in Jordan were questioned as often as 29 times by as many as five different interrogators, whose queries were often phrased suggestively...
...Armed with this report and no more-no thorough questioning of the girl, no interrogation of Taugher at all-the police picked laugher up and jailed him overnight...
...Gillett was carried off, handcuffed, by the local police...
...For their part, social workers who are supposed to be looking after the interests of children are buried under the mountains of reports that the doctors and teachers and pharmacists are submitting...
...Sex abuse is now the stuff of multi-part newspaper stories and a big-ticket item for the networks, which run "docu-dramas" about child molestation to boost audience size during the ratings sweeps period...
...It is as if, at its most extreme, the anti-sex abuse squad had borrowed its tactics from Joe McCarthy...
...Little of this skepticism is apparent in the news reports, which treat molestation as if it were the AIDS of the young...
...The program includes dramatizations of child abuse situations and a great deal of induced self-disclosure, as the classroom is transformed into a collective analyst's couch...
...These numbers have triggered what California Congressman George Miller calls a "three-alarm fire" in Congress...
...Now we are in danger of finding it when it is not there...
...dozens more have been added this term...
...Last year, New York City Mayor Ed Koch reported that fingerprint checks of 82 day-care workers found 36 with criminal records...
...My case wasn't typical...
...But in attending to the heretofore unmentionable, matters have gotten entirely out of hand...
...In a not atypical case, a Southern California junior high school girl accused her teacher, William Gillett, of molesting her...
...Some children do lie...
...And the suspicions also touch the lives of countless individuals, children and adults, whose names never show up on police blotters...
...They are reluctant to change an infant's diapers...
...According to her later accounts, Taugher waited until all six girls were asleep...
...In that job, laugher was a vocal advocate of stiffer child abuse laws...
...Half of our staff is just taking reports, building a paper record," says the head of the San Mateo, California social welfare office...
...There are some who remain convinced that Taugher got off only because of who he is...
...All California children, as well as youngsters in school districts throughout the country, are now participating in a classroom program aimed at helping them to distinguish "good touch" from "bad touch," and so handle the dirty Uncle Harrys of the world...
...David L. Kirp, a professor at the School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, is associate editor of the Sacramento Bee and co-author of the forthcoming Gender Justice (University of Chicago Press...
...Amateur psychologists have posited that the girl may indeed have been molested, but by someone closer to her-and thus harder to accuse- than Taugher...
...a youngster who hadn't been abused, he admitted, might have had exactly the same reaction...
...Lawmakers are outdoing themselves with diatribes against "this carnage [that] must stop-now" and a challenge, issued by California Governor George Deukme-jian to the state's police officers, to "stop this sickness...
...But on cross-examination the psychologist acknowledged that his "syndrome" was nothing more than a description of how children behave...
...The case against Taugher began falling apart when it came to court in December...
...The new hysteria over child sex abuse, and the panicky overreactions that this hysteria is generating, may be as dangerous as the repressions that have been cast aside...
...There they were given full body searches, as one of the daughters testified in court, grilled for hours, and pressured into admitting that their father had molested them too...
...What's more important is that, for children, the line between lying and truth-telling, between experience and fantasy, is far from clear...
...He had spent his entire professional life in California's criminal law enforcement bureaucracy before being named California attorney general John Van De Kamp's chief legislative aide...
...What gets lost in the pop culture blitz and the political posturing is the fact that most reported instances of sex abuse-eight out of every ten-turn out to be unfounded...
...Reports of sexual molestation have increased at twice as rapid a rate, and now number more than a quarter of a million annually...
...This latest campaign has indeed banished indifference about the sexual abuse of children, and that's all to the good...
...The girl had spent the night at a slumber party at Taugher's home, celebrating the birthday of one of his daughters with hot dogs, cake, and a showing of Popeye...
...But others, insensitively taught, will come home scared of intimacy, suspicious of all forms of affection- loving and nurturing as well as abusive-and incapable of distinguishing the one from the other...
...His two daughters, with him at the time of arrest, were not taken to the home of his ex-wife, who has legal custody, but were delivered to the county Children's Receiving Home, which usually houses abused and abandoned youngsters...
...It's also the rationale for easing the burden on youngsters who testify in sex abuse cases by shortening the cross-examination, physically removing children from the intimidating presence of the alleged abusers, and providing them with the counsel of a "special friend" while testifying...
...A neighbor testified that the girl had a bad habit of embroidering the truth...
...After all, there's not much of a market for ambiguity out there...
...But according to his young accuser, there was another Brian Taugher-the man who "hurt me...
...Nor should it remain a secret shame, as it was until very recently...
...In so doing, it has turned the most intimate-and often the most innocent-of relations between the generations into the seedbed of distrust...
...That's double the ratio of five years ago...
...In a country whose collective attention span sometimes resembles that of a two-year-old, it may be that indifference can be overcome and popular interest generated only by turning a complex social reality into a simple morality play...
...Koch was uncharacteristically silent when it turned out that, among some 6,000 day-care workers and job-seekers, just 3.8 percent had criminal convictions, less than half of one percent for felonies...
...Neither Taugher nor the child made a sound during that time...
...That story eventually collapsed on itself, with an admission by the talebearer that he had made it all up, in hopes of getting a reduced jail term for molestations that he had indeed committed...
...But, she adds, "the serious cases often got lost in the shuffle," disappearing into what caseworkers euphemize as "the Bank...
...This course will doubtless keep some children free from sexual harm...
...It translates into about 200,000 false alarms a year...
...Trust the children," argue those who have made the cause their own, "because children don't lie...
...The statistics on child abuse reflect this growing attention...
...A septuagenarian grandmother, who for decades ran a day-care program in Southern California, is reported to have presided over orgies featuring the slaughter of animals- and threats that the children would suffer similar fates if they unbuttoned their lips...
...And to complicate things further, adults' expectations can shape children's perceptions...
...Those who care for the young, especially day-care workers and schoolteachers, find themselves on the defensive...
...But when Taugher appeared, a week later, as the star witness for the attorney general's commission on child abuse, he sang a very different song...
...Three weeks later, after Gillett had quit his job, the girl admitted that she had made up the story to "get" him for giving her a low grade...
...then, with uncharacteristic dispatch, they passed legislation mandating national standards for day-care centers...
...Tougher enforcement of laws against child molestation is urgent, he declared...
...THE NATION'S PULSE HUG YOUR KID, GO TO JAIL by David L. Kirp Until he was arrested last August, charged with having sexually molested a nine-year-old girl, Brian Taugher had never been in trouble with the law...
...Immediately after the verdict was announced, he observed that "for years, we didn't find child abuse when it was there...
...Taugher was acquitted...
...Then he entered the room, unzipped the girl's sleeping bag, and lay on top of her, nude, for several minutes...
...When children are turned into objects for the sexual pleasure of grownups, the perpetrators should be locked up for a very long time...
...But the verdict hasn't really settled things...
...Once accused, suspicion lingers, as the Brian Taughers and William Gilletts have learned...
...A pediatrician who examined the young girl concluded that the vaginal bruises, the only corroboration of her story, were actually-and innocuously-a small vein under the surface of the skin...
...Some weeks later, when the girl told her mother what had occurred, the child was taken to a doctor who found what he labeled "abrasions," bruises in the vaginal area...
...A psychiatrist, appearing on behalf of the prosecution (at $1,000 a day), claimed that the child's behavior -not crying out, appearing altogether normal the morning following the alleged incident, waiting weeks before saying anything to her mother-was consistent with what he termed the Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome...
...But when the word of a child is the only evidence- unlike instances of physical abuse, there is usually no corroboration of molestation-trust should be given carefully and conditionally...
...The legislators first offered a symbolic response, naming April 1984 "National Child Abuse Month...
...Investigations and arrests at day-care centers in half a dozen states, including New York and Illinois, suggest that these places aren't havens but Sadean rings...
...Cities and states have been even more active...
...that's also 200,000 badly wounded reputations...
...When coached and cajoled by adults intent on rooting out sexual mistreatment, it is small wonder that, after a while, some children will try to please their elders by telling them what they so manifestly want to hear...
...The topic, once a television taboo, has become a media cliche: "Drug-addicted child runs away after being molested by parents who have Alzheimer's disease and drive when drunk" is how Los Angeles Times television critic Howard Rosenberg summarizes the standard plot...
...Panic spread to the heartland with tales of incest, sodomy, bestiality-even ritual murders-in the farm community of Jordan, Minnesota...
...Indeed, the 37-year-old Taugher epitomized the law...
...But taking the lid off the topic has also put the accusation of molestation on too many lips and in too many minds...
...In California, more than 50 child abuse bills, concerning everything from parent training to longer jail terms and new reporting requirements, were introduced in 1984...
...It is impossible to pick up a daily newspaper without coming across another accusation, some as mundane as the indiscretions of a dirty Uncle Harry, others every bit as lurid as historic accounts of witches' sabbaths...
...But people still wonder aloud just how many real Jordans might be out there, undiscovered...
...Sex abuse is not just a product of the overheated imaginations of the young and the misplaced solicitude of their elders...
Vol. 18 • June 1985 • No. 6
