by Michael Hill
Professor of Sociology, Victoria University of Wellington (c)
>...Two other figures who were involved in the McMartin case, one of
whom has considerable importance in New Zealand, are David Finkelhor
and Astrid Heger. Finkelhor gathered evidence of day-care cases
throughout the country between 1983 and 1985, finding some three dozen
ritual abuse scandals. No attempt was made to evaluate the reliability
of the allegations involved and the study simply assumed that all were
valid, even if no arrest or conviction arose from a case. And given
the mounting hysteria about this newly discovered phenomenon, it is
not surprising that this number of allegations had arisen. It was
Finkelhor, a sociologist with a conservative attitude to sexual
relationships, who disseminated the notion of multiple victim,
multiple perpetrator abuse: this was to figure prominently in other
child-care investigations, and when his jointly written book Nursery
Crimes eventually appeared in 1988 it became 'a Bible for ritual abuse
believers' (Nathan and Snedeker: 132)
The book's introduction begins with a discussion of the McMartin case, and sceptical reviewers immediately sensed its potential to fuel the satanic panic. In the opinion of one of these:
This is a truly remarkable book, primarily because of the monumental irresponsibility of the authors, who have taken public monies...and used it [sic] to compile statistics based on nothing more than opinions of a few beleaguered investigators. The wasted money will be the least of it, however, for this book promises to do much harm. (Coleman, 1989:46)
Though his previous research into child abuse might have made him sceptical of the large percentage of women among those accused in this new form of child abuse, he disposed of this problem by arguing that a new type of woman had emerged from the sexual revolution of the 1960s - one that was so obsessed with power and control that dominating men was no longer adequate: the "mortification" of innocent children was now the goal (Nathan and Snedeker:133). It is more than a little curious that Finkelhor became a champion of the SRA scenario which was to be taken up so enthusiastically by some radical feminists.
Dr Astrid Heger was the fourth McMartin investigator to popularise a diagnostic technique which became influential in other parts of the world. In particular, under the tutelage of her colleague Bruce Woodling (Nathan and Snedeker:78), her investigation of children's genitals, and especially her belief that sexual abuse could be detected by the size and shape of young girls' hymens became an abuse indicator in the Christchurch child abuse investigation at the Glenelg Health Camp, while the related 'anal wink' or dilation test which was supposed to indicate molestation triggered a major sexual abuse investigation in Cleveland, Britain, in 1987 (Pendergrast, 1998:413-414). Evidence gradually accumulated to show that these alleged stigmata of child sexual abuse were meaningless, and although Heger was aware of these studies she still persisted in maintaining her original diagnoses when the McMartin case came to trial in 1987 (Nathan and Snedeker:197-8)
By the time the case came to trial charges had been dropped against five women defendants, and after a 28-month trial (the longest criminal proceeding in American history) there was an acquittal of the remaining woman defendant and not-guilty and hung verdicts for the remaining male defendant. There was also a hung jury at the second trial and the charges were finally dismissed, allowing the male defendant to be released from jail after a five-year imprisonment (Nathan and Snedeker: 92). Despite this outcome, the satanic claims-makers have continued to insist on the reality of the McMartin abuse, and subsequent allegations have closely parallelled the McMartin pattern.
Two other American figures, both social workers, were to have a significant impact on the dissemination of the satanism scenario. First, Pamela Klein, a rape crisis worker from Illinois, drew up a set of "satanic indicators" which included such symptoms as bed wetting, nightmares, fear of monsters and ghosts, and a preoccupation with faeces, urine and flatulence: these were to feature in a number of subsequent investigations of alleged satanism in several countries. Her credentials had been questioned by an Illinois judge, who stated that she was "not a legitimate therapist" and was not licensed to practise (Pope, 1991). In July 1985 she settled in Britain and was very influential in generating a network of satanic claims-makers through her contributions to conferences and seminars, including one involving senior police officers. Among her early associates was Ray Wyre, who introduced the satanic dimension to the Nottingham child abuse investigation: he was later to make four lecture tours of Australia, the most recent in July this year. As we will see, Klein was also influential in New Zealand.
Pamela Hudson is the other key figure. She too produced a list of satanic symptoms and forms of abuse which had wide distribution among abuse workers. Of particular importance was her list of 16 reported forms of physical and psychological abuse. These included being locked in a cage, being buried in the ground in a coffin or box, being tied upside down or hung from a pole or hook, participating in a mock marriage, seeing children or babies killed, having blood poured over them, and being taken to churches and graveyards for ritual abuse. Hudson had a particular interest in the robes and masks which perpetrators were alleged to wear, and the cover of her book, which received wide circulation, shows just such an image which a child had supposedly drawn (Hudson, 1991). As Jean La Fontaine has pointed out, 'it looks more like a cross between a ghost and a Ku Klux Klan figure'. (La Fontaine, 1998:54)