Sex Hysteria!

“My Lie: A True Story of False Memory“ is a new book by Meredith Maran that describes how she was caught up in the recovered memory hysteria of the 80s and 90s.  Recovered memory syndrome has now been almost universally disgraced as being a disease created by the cure.  It was a widespread belief that children who are sexually abused commonly repress the memories of it, only to have them reemerge later in life.  This hysteria paralleled another well known witch hunt of the era as criminal justice journalist Steve Weinberg reports:

As researchers like me are painfully aware and as Maran discusses in her memoir, a variation of recovered memory accusations played out in day care centers and similar preschool locales, where adults abetted children in revealing alleged sex abuse rings.

Hundreds of child care workers and others in cities across the nation – with Bakersfield as a prominent example – ended up in prison for supposedly abusing countless preschoolers in fantastical ways.

Social workers, police detectives, psychologists, psychiatrists, prosecutors, jurors and judges became complicit in the mass hysteria that led to the wrongful convictions.

It would be hard to find another phase in American history where mass hysteria marching under the flag of saving children laid waste so many innocent lives.  Like so many crusades, the goal was to win at all costs. The ends justified the means.  This site dedicates a page solely to that era and its cast of characters.

Since those days, exploiting people’s emotional compassion for children has become the preferred strategy to justify new legislation, restrictions on freedom, censorship, higher taxes, and greater regulation.   Politicians invoke child danger scares to gain votes, news outlets capitalize on it to attract viewers, and nonprofit as well as governmental organizations pump it up it to justify more funding.

Saving children is big business.