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Article Excerpt
It has been more that two decades since the notorious McMartin Preschool case created a day care ritual abuse master-narrative that recruited many social workers into becoming involved in case-finding, investigations, interviewing and advocacy. The purpose of this article is threefold: it introduces a sample of 22 day care employees who were convicted in day care ritual abuse cases; it updates their current legal status; and it discusses the relevance of these cases to social workers who currently are being recruited by today's new master narratives about extra-familial sexual threats to children, whether from neighborhood pedophiles, child pornographers, parish priests or internet predators.
Keywords: day care, ritual abuse, social work
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It has been more than two decades since the notorious McMartin Preschool case came to public attention. At the "Nightmare Nursery," as the Manhattan Beach, California preschool was quickly tagged by the popular press (Green, 1984), more than 350 past and present enrollees accused their providers of sexually abusing them in rituals that included such acts as blood-drinking, cannibalism and infant sacrifice.
The appalling nature of the allegations in the McMartin Preschool case not only contributed to that era's rising social anxiety about the sexual abuse of children (Best, 1990), but necessitated the coinage of a new term for talking about it. "Ritual abuse" was that term, and although there has never been a consensus definition of it, generally it is understood to refer to sexual abuse that is systematic, stylized and terrorizing, and that is carried out in the context of satanic, occult or magical rituals (APSAC, 1996).
Just as the earlier "discovery" of incest had created what Davis (2005, p. 28) describes as a "socially recognized story of victimization" that led to a "massive outpouring of victim testimonies," so the McMartin Preschool case created an "archetypically familiar plot," or master-narrative, of day care ritual abuse that led to aggressive case-finding by child protectionists; many of whom were social workers (deYoung, 2004, p. 25). As bizarre, improbable and wholly unsubstantiated as that master-narrative was, it was repeated over the ensuing decade in the investigations of as many as 100 day care centers in large cities and small towns across the country.
From its creation in the McMartin Preschool case, the master-narrative was a profoundly moral story. The alleged offender was depicted not just as a person who intends harm, but as evil; the alleged victim was seen not just as naive, but as innocent and thoroughly traumatized, and thus worthy of more than just sympathy and support, but of rescue and protection. This moral framing ideologically and materially recruited many social workers, that is, it influenced them to think and to act in ways that reified the narrative and constructed day care ritual abuse into an urgent social problem (deYoung, 2000; Victor, 1988).
It is important to emphasize that not all social workers were persuaded by this narrative. The profession was, and remains to this day, deeply divided over whether the allegations in these cases are credible accounts of ritual abuse, symbolic representations of some other form of abuse or trauma, or imaginative stories formed in conversational partnership with zealous interviewers and investigators. Those who were persuaded, however, often became involved in local case-finding, investigation, interviewing and/or advocacy. Thus, their recruitment had legal consequences for those day care employees who came under suspicion as ritual abusers.
In 1990, after the longest and most expensive criminal trial in U.S. history, Peggy McMartin Buckey was acquitted of all charges in the McMartin Preschool case. Her son, Raymond Buckey, was acquitted of all but 13 charges against him; retried on 8 of those charges, a mistrial was declared when the jury deadlocked, and all charges against him then were dismissed (Butler, Fukurai, Dimitrius, & Krooth, 2001). By the time the two McMartin Preschool providers had finally come to trial, professional, public and media skepticism about the day care ritual abuse cases and the roles that social workers played in them had swelled. So did scientific skepticism, as well-designed and controlled empirical studies revealed just how easily young children can be led to make outrageously false allegations (Ceci & Bruck, 1995: Garven, Wood, Malpass, & Shaw, 1998; Poole & Lindsay, 1995), and sociological studies anatomized the cultural, ideological and professional forces that constructed an imaginary threat to children and then made acting on that threat not only possible, but exigent (deYoung, 2004; Frankfurter, 2006; Murray, 2001).
In the face of this "escalating chorus of criticism" (Myers, 1994, p. 17), often referred to as "the backlash," social workers' interest in day care ritual abuse waned. While the recent comment that they "ran for cover and stopped talking about it" after the last case was prosecuted in 1992 (Ross, 2003) is certainly hyperbolic, the fact remains that currently the cases are rarely the topic of discussion or analysis in the conferences, workshops and professional journals that link social workers across the country.
Analytic Strategy
This article seeks to redress the silence about the day care ritual abuse cases. The purpose of the article is threefold. First, given the fact that not all of these cases were the subjects of national news and therefore are not widely known, it introduces a sample of 22 employees who were criminally convicted in day care ritual abuse cases. Second, because much of the legal activity on behalf of these convicted day care employees postdates the interest and involvement of social workers in these cases, it updates the current legal status of each of the sample employees. Third, the article discusses the relevance of these cases to social workers who are currently being recruited by today's new narratives about extrafamilial sexual threats to children, whether from neighborhood pedophiles, child pornographers, parish priests or internet predators.
For the purposes of this article, a day care employee was included in the sample if all of the following criteria were met: (1) she or he was employed by, or otherwise affiliated with, a public or private day care center, nursery or preschool; (2) she or he was publicly accused of sexually abusing any or all of the young children in care during the performance of stylized and terrorizing rituals; (3) she or he was convicted in a court of law by a jury or judge; (4) her or his arrest, trial and sentencing occurred between 1984 and 1992; and (5) there are sufficient archival materials in the form of published legal decisions, interview and court transcripts, investigative reports, and local news articles to track her or his case from its beginning to the present.
Sample of 22 Convicted Day Care Employees
Table 1 presents the sample of 22 convicted day care employees. They ranged in age at the time of arrest from 19 to 62 years old; 18 are White, 3 are Hispanic, and 1 is African-American. All of the employees who were convicted in the Fells Acres and the Gallup Christian case are family members; the two convicted in the Fran's day care case are spouses.
As Table 1 reveals, the role responsibilities of the 22 convicted day care employees varied along gender lines. The women who owned their day care centers combined administrative work with the direct care of young children; the men who owned their centers, on the other hand, usually had other primary employment and therefore were not in daily contact with the young enrollees. In response to the "Baby Boom" generation's unprecedented need for childcare outside of the home (Waites, 2000), all of the employees in the sample, with the exception of...
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