women?feminism?

[Katha Pollitt]

Re Satanic day care panic. I think it's worth mentioning that the
Satanic stuff was not how the panics started. In the mcMartin, amirault
and kelly Michaels cases, in fact in all the cases I've read about, the
first allegations were quite ordinary: a teacher touched a child's
genitals while changing a diaper, stuff like that. It was only as the
accusations proliferated, with kids being pressured and manipulated by
therapists and police, that the charges got wild as the kids started
saying anything, to get the adults off their back. But you can see
(well, I can see) why someone might believe that the original
accusations were true -- but that the later ones were not. ie: where
there's smoke there's fire.  And in fact, in some of these cases it
seems likely there WAS fire -- abuse in the family.

  Also, Charles, ingenious as was your riff on daycare centers and
corporate capitalism, the centers in the daycare cases were small,
local, family-run affairs, where the directors had roots in the
community.

   there was one case in England (forget name, as usual) of a sex-abuse
panic.  It was sort of like the Wenatchie case here: a whole small town
of working class parents accused of molesting dozens of kids.

Katha