The Sexual Abuse Paradigm in Historical Perspective: Passivity and Emotion in Mid-Twentieth-Century America

WHAT MORE CAN HISTORIANS say about the sexual abuse recovery movement of the 1980s and 1990s? Its rise and fall are now well known. In the early 1980s Americans were shocked to learn that incest and child sexual abuse, formerly believed rare, were widespread. Mandatory reporting laws were passed. Statistics skyrocketed, with the percentage of American women who were "survivors of childhood sexual trauma" estimated to be between 10 and over 50 percent. In 1982 the media reported horrifying allegations by children of a sadistic and possibly satanic child sex ring run out of the McMartin preschool center in Manhattan Beach, California; similar cases emerged across the nation. Therapists discovered new techniques to encourage children to talk about their sexual victimization. With the help of empathetic therapists, women too began to remember or "recover" long-forgotten memories of their childhood sexual victimization. News shows and made-for-TV movies described the horrors these women had endured as children and the drama of their recovered memories. Sympathetic legislators passed laws extending the statute of limitations on abuse cases to three years after the victim first remembered the crime. Celebrities spoke of their own incest experiences. Books about incest and sadistic child abuse flooded the market. ¹

In the early 1990s, as claims made by women who had recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse became more extreme, as they described being sexually tortured not just by their parents but by devil worshipers and extraterrestrial aliens, the tide turned. New studies showed that therapeutic techniques to encourage children to talk about sexual trauma served to mold children's testimonies to adult expectations. Critics argued that therapists were pressuring their patients to produce stories of child abuse as the key to all their emotional difficulties. Studies of memory conclusively proved that methods used by some therapists to help women recall their past such as hypnosis, guided imagery, and "body work" heightened women's suggestibility and that such procedures tended to produce new, emotionally charged narratives that were then mistakenly taken to be accurate memories of past events. These memory studies seriously undercut adults' claims that they could recall vivid details of long-forgotten episodes of abuse. The claims of some high-profile "survivors" of satanic ritual abuse were exposed as frauds, and the close relationship between satanic ritual abuse narratives and paranoid theories of anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitic blood-libel myths were elaborated. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation was founded. Some women who had accused their parents of horrible acts "recanted" and blamed their earlier accusations on their therapists' influence. ² By the mid-1990s, a new plot for television had emerged: a sobering tale of the "witch-hunt" for child abusers, instigated by a confused or malevolent therapist and leaving a train of heartbroken elderly parents in its wake. By then, doubts had reemerged about incest claims, while stranger molestation—the least common form of child abuse but the one most amenable to conservative law-and-order campaigns—continued to draw interest. ³

Attempts to explain the late-twentieth-century fascination with child sexual abuse and the consequent sexual abuse recovery movement often blame the sensationalist media or fasten upon abstract factors such as anxiety over social change. Most observers also agree that feminists played a major role in the sexual abuse recovery movement. Sexual abuse theorist Judith Herman claims that her book, Trauma and Recovery, "owes its existence to the women's liberation movement," and it is undeniable that feminists and therapists with feminist sympathies elaborated and promoted the sexual abuse paradigm. Several recent studies examine the relationship between feminism and the sexual abuse paradigm. Joan Acocella's Creating Hysteria accuses feminists of causing an upsurge in female mental illness by falsely raising women's hopes for fulfilling lives...