For all this talk about us being a nation at war with child abuse, and for all the media hype about witch-hunts and false allegations – and don't ever let anyone use the word witch-hunts about this; there were no witches – the fact remains that in 1994, it is extremely difficult to come forward with allegations of sexual abuse. And the external forces of denial are almost overwhelming. If a case as verified as mine meets with denial, I dread to think about the experience of people who don't have the kind of corroboration that I do. And I really worry that we're getting close to a point where it's going to be impossible to prosecute child molesters, because we don't believe children, and now we don't believe adults. (Cheit "Paper presented at the Mississippi Statewide Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect" Jackson, April 29 1994.) . Ross Cheit
I felt like an animal, and animals don’t know sin, do they?
-
Jess C. Scott
Millions of sane people would each be sexually attracted to their own parent or child if they were not related to them.
-
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud...
-
Anne Lamott
She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.
-
Cynthia Voigt
When shame is met with compassion and not received as conï¬rmation of our guilt, we can begin to see how slant a lens it has had us looking through. That awareness lets us step back far enough to see that if we can let it...
-
Maureen Brady
More Quotes By Ross Cheit
The book argues that even though many cases have been held up as classic examples of modern American “witch hunts, ” none of them fits that description. McMartin certainly comes close. But a careful examination of the evidence presented at trial demonstrates why, in my...
The Legend of Robert HalseyThis article examines the criminal conviction of Robert Halsey for sexually abusing two young boys on his school-van route near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Mr. Halsey's name has been invoked by academics, journalists, and activists as the victim of the “witch hunt” in...
The witch-hunt narrative is a really popular story that goes like this: Lots of people were falsely convicted of child sexual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s. And they were all victims of a witch-hunt. It just doesn’t happen to line up with the...
Interview from Ross E. Cheit about The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children (Oxford University Press, February 2014).In the foreword to your book you mention a book titled Satan’s Silence was the catalyst for your research. Tell us about that. Cheit:...
The witch-hunt narrative is now the conventional wisdom about these cases. That view is so widely endorsed and firmly entrenched that so widely endorsed and firmly entrenched that there would seem to be nothing left to say about these cases. But a close examination of...
