Note.
k represents the number of samples;
N is the total number of subjects in the k samples with CSA experiences;
% variance stands for the percent of variability in reactions/effects or symptoms that the moderator accounts for among the CSA subjects.

Values in parentheses indicate the moderate was related to less negative reactions/effects or symptoms.

* indicates a statistically significant result.

Note.
n/a indicates information not available.
Totals include only samples for which all 3 reaction-types are given.
Total percents are weighted by sample size; total Ns reflect a combination of number of experiences and number of subjects.
Percents do not sum exactly to 100 because of rounding.
a Includes mixed reactions.
b Indicates number of experiences. Otherwise, N indicates number of subjects.

Family Environment
Reports of self-perceived negative effects, especially when of a lasting nature, certainly suggest that CSA can cause harm for some persons with certain types of CSA experiences. The issue we focus on here, however, is whether CSA typically causes harm. Previously we saw that CSA was statistically significantly correlated with poorer adjustment, although the magnitude of this relation was small.

One of the most fundamental principles in scientific methodology is that correlation is not causation. That is, for example, just because race is correlated with IQ, that does not mean that race causes differences in IQ. It could be that some third variable, such as home environment or socioeconomic status, is responsible for the race-IQ association.

To illustrate this concept, let’s take this simplistic example, shown in Figure 1. As you go from small towns to small cities, to large cities, the number of churches will increase. Further, as you go from small towns to big cities, the amount of crime also increases. Does this mean that building new churches will increase crime, or tearing some down will decrease crime? No, because there’s a third variable, population, that is responsible for both. As population grows, more churches are built and more crimes occur. If we factored out population size in this example, the correlation between number of churches and amount of crime would probably disappear.

[Original figure1.gif not included]

We examined the relationship between CSA and symptoms using this idea. In this case, the third variable that might be causing both is family environment. A broken home, or one containing physical abuse or emotional neglect, could predispose children or teenagers to counternormative behavior, such as using drugs or engaging in sexual activities that are classified as CSA. A broken home could also impair their adjustment. In this way, the relationship between CSA and symptoms that we found in our meta-analyses could be the result of family environment, rather than the CSA experiences.

From our previous meta-analyses, we know that for college subjects CSA accounted for 0.81% of the adjustment variability. We conducted a series of meta-analyses to determine what percent of the variability in CSA was accounted for by family environment. The result was 1.69%. We next conducted a series of meta-analyses to determine what percent of the adjustment variability was accounted for by family environment. The result was 8.41%. In other words, these results show that family environment was substantially more important in terms of being able to account for adjustment variability than CSA was -- by a factor of 10.

These results also show that CSA was indeed confounded with family environment--those who had CSA tended to come from poorer, more disorganized family settings. These findings together suggest that the statistically significant, but small relationship between CSA and adjustment may not be causal.

Thirteen of the college studies used statistical techniques to factor out, or hold statistically constant, family environment, when examining the relationship between CSA and adjustment (see Table 11). The 14 samples from these studies examined 83 CSA-adjustment relations. Before statistical control, 41% of these relations were statistically significant. After statistical control--that is, after removing the effects of family environment--only 17% were statistically significant. This represents a 59% reduction. Since CSA-adjustment relations within a given study tend to be correlated, we computed the percent reduction in statistical significance by using one overall result per study. Computed this way, the reduction in statistically significant results rose to 83%. These findings strongly support the possibility that many instances of statistically significant associations between CSA and adjustment are spurious. In particular, these findings argue against the popular assumption that CSA typically causes harm.

Our meta-analyses of the relations between CSA and adjustment in both the national samples and college samples showed that CSA is statistically significantly related to poorer adjustment; however, this relationship is small. For boys, CSA accounted for only one half of one percent of the adjustment variability, while for girls, it accounted for only 1%. These small effect sizes are inconsistent with the assumption that CSA produces intense effects. The examination of self-perceived effects and reactions contradict the assumption that CSA has pervasive effects. Analyses of self-perceived effects, as well as the role that family environment plays in the CSA-adjustment relationship, do not support the assumption that CSA typically causes harm. There is support from these data that CSA causes harm in specific cases, but the evidence speaks against harm resulting in the typical case. Finally, a clear and strong difference emerged between how boys and girls respond to experiences classified as CSA. Only a minority of boys react negatively or feel harmed by these episodes; the reverse holds for females. In the college samples, boys who were willing participants in their CSA episodes showed no evidence of impairment, which was not the case for girls. These results strongly suggest that the assumption that boys and girls react in an equivalent manner to CSA should be abandoned.

Regarding the differences between how boys and girls react, it is worth reviewing what some of the authors of the college studies had to say. Schultz and Jones noted that males tended to see these sexual experiences as an adventure and as curiosity-satisfying, while most females saw it as an invasion of their body or a moral wrong. West and Woodhouse observed that females’ reactions at the time were "predominantly of fear, unpleasant confusion, and embarrassment...[while men’s] remembered reactions were mostly either indifference, tinged perhaps with slight anxiety, or of positive pleasure, the latter being particularly evident in contacts with the opposite sex."

These gender differences in reactions to CSA experiences are consistent with more general gender differences in response to sex among young persons.

For example, boys and girls report very different reactions to their first experience of sexual intercourse, with girls predominantly reporting negative reactions such as feeling afraid, guilty, or used, and boys predominantly reporting positive reactions such as feeling excited, happy, and mature. It is important to add that males and females may react differently to CSA because they tend to experience different kinds of CSA episodes. Baker and Duncan commented that girls in their national survey in Great Britain may have found their CSA experiences to be more damaging than boys did because they had more incestuous CSA and experienced CSA at younger ages. College males and college females also tended to have different CSA experiences; females experienced incest more than twice as often as males and experienced force about twice as often.

A few additional comments about causality are also in order. The finding that family environment was 10 times more important than CSA in accounting for current adjustment in the college population is consistent with the results of several recent studies using subjects from noncollege populations. In one study conducted by Eckenrode and his colleagues published in 1993, the researchers categorized children and adolescents obtained from a large representative community sample in a small-sized city in New York state into six groups: not abused, CSA, physical abuse, neglect, CSA and neglect, and physical abuse and neglect. They found that CSA children and adolescents performed as well in school as nonabused controls in all areas measured, including standardized test scores, school performance, and behavior. Neglect and physical abuse, on the other hand, were associated with poorer performance and more behavior problems.

In another study conducted by Ney and his colleagues published in 1994, the researchers separated their mostly clinical sample of children and adolescents into categories of CSA, physical abuse, physical neglect, verbal abuse, emotional neglect, and combinations of these. They found that the combination of abuse that correlated most strongly with adjustment problems was physical abuse, physical neglect, and verbal abuse. In the top 10 worst combinations, verbal abuse appeared seven times, physical neglect six times, physical abuse and emotional neglect five times each, whereas CSA appeared only once.

These results jive well with the conclusion of Wiesniewski that we presented before. Again, she studied 32 samples of college students across the U.S. chosen to be representative of the U.S. college population. She concluded that, when taking other forms of abuse into account, CSA was not related to adjustment problems. It was instead, she noted, maltreatment such as physical abuse that directly impacted on adjustment.

In the U.S., in 1974 the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act was passed by Congress. Its original focus was on doing something about the problems of physical abuse and neglect. This initiative set up what became, as many have called it, the child abuse industry, which continues to this day and has spread to other countries around the world. Within a few years of its passage, however, the focus of this act shifted predominantly to CSA. This occurred for a number of reasons. One was that the women’s movement in America had begun raising consciousness about rape and incest in the early 1970s. A second reason was that taboo sex is much more of an emotionally-grabbing issue than physical abuse or emotional neglect. As such, CSA got more media and political attention, and eventually more funding and a much greater following in child-protection circles. The results of our research, as well as those of others just mentioned, suggest that this major shift of attention away from physical abuse and neglect to CSA may have been misdirected.

Child Sexual Abuse as a Construct Reconsidered
At the outset of our presentation, we discussed problems with the term child sexual abuse. It is now appropriate to return to this issue in light of the empirical findings we have just presented. These findings strongly imply that it is misleading to label both the repeated rape of a young female child in an incestuous context and a willing sexual encounter between a mature male adolescent and an unrelated adult as child sexual abuse. It is misleading because abuse implies harm to the individual.

The empirical data, based on generalizable samples, that we have presented clearly suggest that only the first of these two scenarios is likely to produce harm for the individual. The second scenario is only abuse in that it violates contemporary social norms.

What is problematic is that the use of the term child sexual abuse in the latter case, whether by the media, legislators, or mental health professionals, conveys the meaning of harm to the individual as opposed to violation of social norms. This in turn reinforces, incorrectly, the notion that the adolescent in such an episode really was harmed psychologically or emotionally. This adolescent is then perceived to be a victim and treated as a victim, which can become a self-fulfilling prophesy in that he will become the victim he is supposed to be.

The reality of labeling effects has been well established in psychology and sociology. The history of sexual attitudes provides numerous examples. Masturbation was formerly labeled "self-abuse" after the 18th century Swiss physician Tissot transformed it from a moral to a medical problem. From the mid-1700s until the early 1900s, the medical profession was dominated by physicians who believed that masturbation caused a host of maladies ranging from acne to death. So destructive was masturbation seen to be in America in the 1800s that inventors created cages with locks and keys to keep children’s hands away from their genitals, boys underwent circumcision on a wide scale so that they would not have to wash under their foreskin and thereby potentially "abuse" themselves, and physicians such as J. H. Kellogg created products such as Kellogg’s Cornflakes to prevent boys from engaging in "self-abuse."

Countless people suffered pangs of guilt for having indulged and were mortified at the possibility of developing a disease or a disorder as a result. For example, the famous sex researcher Havelock Ellis recounted the case of a respectable married woman who was involved in a social purity movement. When reading a booklet that described masturbation, she became aware that she had been unwittingly engaging in this behavior. As Ellis noted, "The profound anguish and hopeless despair of this woman in the face of what she believed to be the moral ruin of her whole life cannot be well described."

Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey complained a half century ago that the scientific classifications of sexual behavior in his day were based on theology, not biology. In 1952 in the first edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -- also known as DSM--sexual behaviors such as masturbation, homosexuality, fellatio, cunnilingus, and sexual promiscuity were codified as pathological--as forms of mental illness. Countless homosexuals suffered because their desires were labeled by the medical profession, and by the general public as well, as perversions. Indeed, the history of sexual attitudes shows that labeling sexual behaviors has generally been based on morality, not science, even when it is scientists rather than lay persons who are using the labels, and that labeling can have negative consequences.

In science, abuse implies that harm is likely to result from a behavior. The results for male college students who had experiences defined as CSA highlight the questionable validity of the construct child sexual abuse as defined and used in the professional literature. For these male subjects, 37% viewed their CSA experiences as positive at the time they occurred. In the two studies that inquired about positive self-perceived effects, 24% to 37% viewed their CSA experiences as having a positive influence on their current sex lives. Importantly, males who participated willingly in their CSA episodes were as well adjusted psychologically as control subjects. The positive reports of reactions and effects, along with normal adjustment for willing participants, are scientifically inconsistent with classifying these male students as having been abused. Their experiences were not associated with harm, and there appears to be no scientific reason to expect such an association. On the other hand, a minority of males did report negative reactions and negative self-perceived effects; moreover, unwanted CSA was associated with adjustment problems for them. For these students, the term abuse seems much more appropriate.

Some researchers have questioned their original definitions of sexual abuse after assessing their results. For example, Fishman defined sexual abuse of boys mostly on the basis of age discrepancies (that is, sex between a boy of 12 or less and someone at least 5 years older, or between a boy aged 13 to 16 with someone at least 10 years older), stating that age differences implied sufficient discrepancy in developmental maturity and knowledge to indicate victimization. He found that the males with CSA experiences in his study did not differ from controls on measures of adjustment and that they reported a wide range of reactions to their CSA experiences (mostly positive or neutral). In-depth interviews confirmed and elaborated the quantitative findings, leading Fishman to question his original assumptions. He noted that the men's stories altered his universal beliefs about the impact of inappropriate sexual experiences on children, and stated that "to impose a confining definition onto someone's experience does nothing to alter the realities of that experience for the person." Fishman concluded by arguing for the use of language of a more neutral nature rather than labels such as abuse, victim, and molestation--in short, for use of empirical and phenomenological criteria in conceptualizing early sexual relations, rather than using legal or moral criteria.

The foregoing discussion does not imply that the construct child sexual abuse should be abandoned, but only that it should be used less indiscriminately in order to achieve better scientific validity. Its use is more scientifically valid when early sexual episodes are unwanted and experienced negatively--a combination commonly reported, for example, in father-daughter incest. In general, findings from the review of college students suggest that sociolegal definitions of CSA have more scientific validity in the case of female children and adolescents than for male children and adolescents, given the higher rate of unwanted negative experiences for females. Nevertheless, because some women perceive their early experiences as positive, do not label themselves as victims, and do not show evidence of psychological impairment, it is important to be cautious in defining abuse for both males and females in attempts to validly understand these sexual experiences.

Before we conducted the two quantitative literature reviews that we just discussed, we conducted our own qualitative literature review. We gathered together all the studies published on boys' sexual experiences with adults based on nonclinical samples. The rationale for this research was twofold. First, previous reviewers of the literature had generally either neglected boys' sexual experiences with adults, focusing instead on those of girls, or they had just assumed that boys' experiences were the same as girls. And second, previous reviewers, when they did pay attention to boy-adult sexual experiences, focused on clinical samples. These shortcomings indicated the need to focus on boy-adult experiences, particularly in the nonclinical population. We want to emphasize once again that, to reach a valid understanding of this kind of sex, or any other kind for that matter, we cannot rely on clinical samples because of a host of problems that we discussed earlier in this presentation.

Altogether, we located 35 usable studies for analysis. Sixteen of them were based on college samples and four were based on national samples. These studies were also included in our two meta-analyses. The remaining 15 studies used samples that were obtained in a variety of ways. A few were based on community samples; others were based on responses to print advertisements; still others were based on personal contacts or referrals; one was based on responses to a computer bulletin board. These latter samples are what we call "convenience samples"--the researcher obtains whom he can through whatever means are available to him. These samples cannot be considered to be representative of the population, just as clinical samples cannot be. Nevertheless, they offer yet another opportunity to examine boy-adult sexual experiences apart from the traditional approach, which has been to focus on the clinical population.

We have already exhaustively reviewed reactions and psychological correlates from national and college samples in the meta-analyses. Here, let's move on and talk about the results from the convenience samples. The study based on a computer bulletin board revealed that 58% of males regarded their boy-adult sexual experience to have been positive, while 27% regarded it as negative. In a convenience sample from Knoxville, Tennessee, 36% of males regarded this experience as positive, 24% neutral, and 40% as negative. Sixty-six percent saw the experience as not having a negative effect on their current sex lives, while 34% did see it as having a negative effect. Another study, consisting of homosexual males recruited from sexually transmitted disease clinics, found that 58% experienced their boy-adult sexual experiences as negative. In this study, a large percent (50%) were forced in their encounter, which may account for this higher than typical figure.

In these three studies, the first and third had higher and lower rates, respectively, of positive encounters, while the second study had a profile very similar to the college samples discussed earlier. Other convenience samples have shown predominantly positive reactions. Sandfort in the Netherlands found that 24 of the 25 boys he interviewed reported predominantly positive emotions about the sexual aspects of their relationships with men.

Critics have tended to reject this study as invalid for a variety of reasons, one being that the boys were recruited into the study by their adult partners who may have had an agenda. Many of these critics have assumed the relationships had to be negative, arguing that the boys were pressured to provide positive reports. Our review of the college studies, as well as data from the other convenience samples just presented, suggests clearly that a sizable minority of boys do experience these contacts positively, which argues for the validity of Sandford's findings. The unusually high percent of positive reactions in his study probably has to do with the fact that these sexual contacts occurred within the context of a friendship. Other convenience samples on boys experiencing sex with adults in friendship relationships have yielded generally the same results. One such study was reported in England by Father Ingram; another was reported in the U.S. by the psychologist Tindall.

Child abuse researchers often provide anecdotes from case studies to vividly illustrate the "horrors of child-adult sex". For example, in the case of boys, Finkelhor in his 1979 report of his study based on a college sample noted that 38% of his boys reacted negatively, meaning that the majority, 62%, reacted positively or neutrally. Parenthetically, for experiences occurring between ages 12 and 15, Finkelhor only inquired about unwanted episodes, which undoubtedly inflated the percent of negative experiences. Finkelhor gave us no insight into the nonnegative cases, but did provide several examples of negative experiences. In one, the interviewer asked a male student to compare his boy-adult encounter with other life experiences. The student remarked: "Much more traumatic at the time. Very anxiety-producing. Probably there wasn't anything in my life as anxiety-producing." The interviewer then asked if this was the biggest trauma of his life. The student answered:

Oh, without a doubt. Mostly because I went through like two months of avoidance. I was very conscious of where I was, who I was with, and was the group large enough so he couldn't single me out, and, you know, it was pretty terrifying. "Can I go outside? Is it safe to go outside?" Nothing really as traumatic as that.

It is important to present anecdotes that represent the other types of reactions as well to get a full picture of boy-adult experiences. Unfortunately, child abuse researchers seldom, if ever, provide us with neutral or positive anecdotes. The effect is that the noncritical reader may see that a majority reacts nonnegatively, but the vividness of the negative example sticks in their memory, biasing their perception of these relationships.

In psychology, this biasing influence is a well established phenomenon and is referred to as the vividness effect. The vividness of this memory in turn creates an illusory correlation, which means, in the present case, an exaggerated impression of the association between boy-adult sex and harm. To provide balance, we will now present a positive anecdote that comes from the nonclinical literature to give a fuller picture of how boys may react. This example comes from Tindall in 1978, who gathered 200 case studies of boy-man relations based on his interviews as a school psychologist over many decades of work. Tindall also followed up on many of these cases well into the boys' adulthood.

Denver was referred at age 13 for taking part in vandalism directed toward a junior high school followed by running away from home. He was of high average ability and reading at grade level. He was quite interested in machinery and mechanics.

Denver reached pubescence by age 14. He was introduced to mutual masturbation at age 13 by peers, some of whom were more developed sexually. During his 14th year he began spending his spare time around a service station, where he became acquainted with a master mechanic who was then in his early 40s, married and childless. The mechanic and Denver began engaging in recreational pursuits together. On a fishing trip, during a break on an island, they began talking about sex, which led to Denver's being fellated by the mechanic and to masturbation of the mechanic by Denver. For the next 5 years mutual fellatio occurred two or three times per week. Sexual activity with the mechanic ceased at about age 19, but a close relationship continued to exist until the mechanic's death.

Denver is now 44 years of age. He was married and fathered two sons. He and his first wife were divorced and he raised his boys. One boy went to college and the other boy to a technical school. Denver remarried and has been a valued mechanic with the same company for 20 years. He has a supervisory position and believes that his relationship with his mechanic friend helped him reach his goals. He says he would have approved a similar relationship for either of his sons, had he become aware of such a situation. He reports no desire to have sex with males since approximately age 20.

Both of these anecdotes represent real experiences. Some boys react with fear, as in the first case. Others react with pleasure, as in the second.  Many other examples of the second type could be presented coming from the other convenience samples included in our review. What is problematic is that child abuse researchers, the media, and the lay public seem to be willing to acknowledge the validity only of the former type--the negative case study. They may think this way because they feel that positive examples are so rare that either they are not genuine or, if there is some truth to them, then they can be summarily dismissed as irrelevant. But our data from a large number of samples demonstrate that positive occurrences are just as frequent as negative ones, and so both types should be acknowledged. To do otherwise is a distortion of reality. Having acknowledged that both positive and negative relations occur, the question shifts to what makes one relationship positive and the other negative.

In 1981 Constantine presented a useful model to account for these positive and negative reactions. This model holds that two key elements are critical. First is the child's or adolescent's perceived willingness in the sexual encounter. Perceived willingness means freedom to participate or to say no. Constantine concluded from his own review of the literature available at that time that this perception of willingness to participate was strongly tied to reactions: positive reactions were associated with willing encounters, negative reactions followed being forced or coerced or tricked into sex. Second is the young person's knowledge about sex. Complete ignorance could lead to anxiety during or after the episode; also, having absorbed the "conventional moral negatives" about sex -- that is, that it is bad or dirty -- could also lead to guilt or shame and other negative reactions. The results of our review of boy-adult sex based on the nonclinical literature are consistent with this model. Force and coercion in the studies we reviewed were invariably associated with negative reactions, but willing participation was not. Ignorance and a sense of shame about sex were also associated with negative reactions; but knowing about sex and not feeling ashamed about it were not.

In Table 13 we see the results from a large scale study performed by the Kinsey Institute in the early 1960s. Based on court records, the researchers classified level of consent by boys and girls in sexual encounters with men as either encouraging, passive, or resistant. As you can see, there is a big sex difference for children under 12: a small majority (52%) of boys were encouraging, while very few girls (13%) were. On the other hand, twice as many girls resisted (80% vs. 40%). For minors (aged 12 to 15), a majority of male and female adolescents were encouraging (70%), but again twice as many females resisted as males (30% vs. 16%). These numbers from this legal sample are consistent with the greater willingness of boys to participate and their generally more neutral or positive reactions that have been repeatedly presented in the nonclinical literature.

Conclusion

The results of our reviews clearly show that the assumptions of most mental health professionals, legislators, law enforcement personnel, media workers, and the lay public that sexual relations defined as CSA cause intense harm pervasively for both boys and girls are vastly exaggerated. This exaggeration has been part and parcel of a new kind of black and white thinking that disallows shades of gray to enter. This thinking, in turn, potentiates hysterical reactions, which have been all too common in America, starting in the 1980s. One striking example involves the Satanic sex abuse hoax in child day care centers that spread across the U.S. 15 years ago. To understand the implications of a sex abuse hysteria based on vastly exaggerated beliefs about CSA, let's consider some examples.

In 1983 in Manhattan Beach, California, the mother of a two-year-old boy claimed that her son was sexually abused at the McMartin Preschool by Ray Buckey, a staff member and grandson of the owner. Over the span of the next few months, her accusations became increasingly bizarre. She claimed her son was flown in a plane to another city where there was a goatman. There, Ray Buckey flew in the air; his mother was dressed up as a witch and gave the two-year-old an enema. Staples were put into the two-year-old's ears, nipples, and tongue. Scissors were put into his eyes. Animals were chopped up; a baby's head was cut off, and the two-year-old had to drink the baby's blood.

The two year old's mother was delusional, but police and therapists showed little or no skepticism. Instead, they vigorously investigated whether other children were involved. Parents, frightened into suspecting that their children were also victims, questioned them repeatedly. Police and social workers interviewed 400 current or former McMartin children. All children denied any type of abuse initially. But the social workers pressed on until they got accusations from most of these children, which included wild stories of abduction by hooded figures, ritual mutilation of animals and babies, and sexual orgies in tunnels under the McMartin building. To evoke these accusations, the social workers made extensive use of disinformation, coercion, bribery, and modeling, among other techniques.

For examples of these techniques, and for powerful experimental evidence of their effectiveness in producing false memories, we refer you to a 1998 article by Garven and colleagues in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Vol. 83, 347-359). In the end, after two trials that lasted seven years and cost about 20 million dollars, making them America's longest and most expensive criminal trials in history, no convictions resulted. Nevertheless, Ray Buckey had to spend five years in jail before winning his freedom.

Consider these additional examples. In 1985 in New Jersey, Kelley Michaels was accused of assaulting her preschoolers with peanut butter, swords, bloodied tampons, urine, feces, and death threats. She was said to have committed these crimes against dozens of children daily, for seven months in a crowded facility without any adults seeing her and without leaving any physical evidence. The jury believed the charges; she was convicted and sentenced to nearly 50 years in prison. After spending five years in prison, her conviction was overturned.

Dale Akiki, a former San Diego Sunday-school teacher, was accused by young pupils of sacrificing rabbits, killing an elephant and a giraffe, sodomizing the children with a curling iron, putting them in a shower and altering the water between hot and cold until they vomited, sticking their heads in toilets, forcing them to ingest feces and urine, and killing a baby and making them drink its blood. As with Kelley Michaels, all this was supposed to have happened while other adults were nearby who noticed nothing. And, as with Kelley Michaels, not a scintilla of physical evidence was recovered. Yet, prosecutors put him on trial, with a conviction meaning a life sentence. He was fortunate--he was acquitted after spending only two and a half years in jail. Robert Kelly, co-owner of the Little Rascals Day Care Center in North Carolina was prosecuted on similar charges in that state's longest and most expensive criminal trial in history; he was convicted and sentenced to 12 consecutive life terms in prison. His conviction was overturned after he had spent five years in jail.

Let's consider this one last example, certainly relevant to a Dutch audience such as yourselves. One day in 1989, as he was preparing to go to work dressed up in his Burger King uniform, Bobby Fijnje--a Dutch citizen--was arrested at his home in southern Florida, accused of molesting and abusing in Satanic rituals young children for whom he baby-sat. What makes this case remarkable is that Bobby was only 14-years-old at the time--and a youngish 14-year-old at that, as revealed in photos of him at that age. In other words, Bobby was just a boy. Despite this, the police, the media, and prosecutors showed him no mercy. As Bobby later recounted, his arresting officer, Detective Martinez, told him as he was being escorted to the squad car, "Before I knew you, I knew you were guilty. But now that I see you, I definitely know that you're guilty."

The media barrage attacking Bobby was unceasing. Soon the media were telling viewers that Bobby's parents were members of an international pornography ring and that Bobby had been leading children in ghastly rituals, which involved cooking and devouring a baby. Prosecutors charged him as an adult, meaning that if he were convicted on just one of the seven charges against him, he would be sentenced to life in a maximum security prison, never eligible for parole. During the trial, prosecutors tried their best to make a monster of the boy. Their dogged determination to ensure that this boy would die of old age in prison is amply shown by the fact that they spent 3 million dollars on this trial, making it Florida's most expensive criminal trial ever.

In the end, after spending nearly two years in jail, and after enduring a trial that lasted 3 months, Bobby was acquitted of all charges. Crucial to this outcome was the testimony of Dr. Stephen Ceci, a Cornell University developmental psychologist, who did ground-breaking research demonstrating how overzealous questioners can implant false memories in children, thereby eliciting false accusations of abuse. His research since has formed the basis for reversing numerous child abuse convictions involving daycare workers around the U.S.

Responsible for this merciless assault on Bobby was Janet Reno, the chief prosecutor in southern Florida then. She was a self-styled crusader for children, who was especially concerned to prosecute sex abuse cases, believing sex abuse to be the ultimate evil and believing that children never lie about sex abuse. Her "Miami method," as it came to be called and emulated by prosecutors around the country, involved the kind of aggressive interviewing used in the McMartin case. Reno's method, however, was more apt to plant "ominous seeds in the minds of children," as a recent New York Times article was entitled, than to elicit veridical memories.

Reno personally oversaw Bobby Fijnje's prosecution. When the jury reached a verdict, Bobby had to wait a nerve-racking two and a half hours to hear it so that Reno could be present in the courtroom, presumably to take the credit for his conviction. Thanks to Ceci's testimony showing how the "child abuse experts" had corrupted the children's testimonies, Reno's trip to the courthouse that day was wasted. In a recent interview with Bobby (who is now in his 20s) shown on American television in October this year, Bobby was asked what he would say to Reno today, if he had the chance to speak with her. His answer was:

Why did you spend so much money trying to convict a 14-year-old kid? Why even try to place a kid who's 14 in a maximum security prison? Why would you even think of doing something like that, if you're a crusader for children?

These cases of daycare madness are just a few among many more such cases that spread throughout the U.S. in the 1980s and eventually spread to other parts of the world, including Holland. This madness centered on the vastly exaggerated view that CSA is so destructive that caution need not apply in rooting out this "evil." This hysteria was not confined to day care centers; in the later 1980s the recovered memory movement gained strength, based on the belief that CSA is so traumatic that children repress these memories in order to cope. Many therapists began probing aggressively into their patients' childhood, searching for hidden memories of CSA, that they believed were the cause of all their patients' psychological problems. Using the same coercive techniques used in the day care center investigations, these therapists implanted false memories in many a vulnerable patient. Adult patients then turned around and accused and then often sued their parents, ripping families apart. As it turns out, there is no science behind the recovered memory idea, just passion driven by exaggerated beliefs about CSA.

From a psychological perspective, it is documented that children in the day care centers in whom false memories of being raped in tunnels and sodomized by curling irons were implanted developed various pathological symptoms in the clinical range after, not before, the interrogations by the child protection workers began. It is also well documented that many a patient in recovered memory therapy got worse, not better, after this treatment began. These pathological responses in the interrogated children and the patients in treatment clearly reflect the effects of the intervention. What makes matters even worse is that researchers in the child abuse industry have seized upon these newly developed symptoms as further evidence for the pathogenicity of CSA.

In closing, we want to emphasize that our presentation should not be taken to advocate behaviors labeled as CSA. But we also want to emphasize that exaggeration of the nature of CSA is unacceptable, because it can and has substantially aggravated the problem. It is imperative that social discourse on behaviors labeled CSA be rationally based, rather than emotionally driven. Otherwise, problems of the types just discussed may continue to occur. As the social critic Goya observed in one of his sketches, "El sueño de la razon produce monstruos," or, "The sleep of reason produces monsters."