THE POLITICS OF A PANIC.

The McMartin preschool case is the most famous example of the child abuse hysteria that swept across the nation three decades ago, and it is the focus of Richard Beck’s ambitious and meticulously researched new book, We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s. But it is not the only case, or even the most bizarre one, that Beck describes. In Kern County, a working-class area in central California, a couple was convicted of “selling their children for sex in area motels and abusing them while the children hung from hooks in the ceiling,” and other children “claimed their abusers wore black robes and brandished inverted crosses.” A Texas prosecutor said at trial that children were abused by a group of men “dressed as monsters and werewolves.” The panic was a national phenomenon, with communities descending into witch-hunt style investigations from Washington to Minnesota to Massachusetts.

Beck, an editor of the avant-garde literary journal n+1, is an able historian and a clear writer. His thorough analysis of media reports, police records and court transcripts successfully brings this nightmarish cultural episode to life. The book is a devastating indictment of the earnest but irresponsible detectives and psychologists who effectively projected their own fantasies into young children’s imaginations over the course of extended interrogations, and of overzealous prosecutors—including such high-profile figures as Janet Reno and Martha Coakley—who put innocent people in prison.

But We Believe The Children is not only, or even primarily, a work of history. It is first and foremost a sophisticated culture war polemic. Woven throughout Beck’s measured, journalistic accounts of the investigations and prosecutions is a radical political argument—an all-out attack on “the patriarchal nuclear family,” an institution that he sees as having no function whatsoever except to suppress individual freedom. It is the “patriarchal nuclear family,” Beck insists, that is the real cause of child sexual abuse. The heroes in his narrative are the radical feminists who sought to dismantle the family in the 1960s and 1970s. And the villains are the Reagan-era social conservatives who sought to stem its decline. According to Beck, these reactionaries created the 1980s hysteria by terrifying parents into thinking that alternative social arrangements would put their children in peril. . . .

There is something quite strange about Beck’s casual association, over and over again, of “the patriarchal nuclear family” with child abuse. As W. Bradford Wilcox and Robin Fretwell Wilson have pointed out, the data show that children living with their married biological parents are an order of magnitude less likely to be abused—sexually or otherwise—than children living in other social arrangements. Children are more likely to be abused by someone they live with than by a stranger, but stepfathers and men cohabitating with the child’s mother are among the most frequent perpetrators. One can debate the extent to which poverty factors into these statistics—poor children are more likely to live with single parents or step-parents—but there is no dispute that children living in the “patriarchal nuclear family” that Beck so despises are least likely to be harmed at the hands of their guardians. So Beck is standing more on ideological than empirical footing when he insists that the weakening of the family as a social institution from the 1960s onward was an unalloyed good, and that the conservative campaign to shore up the family is born purely out of fear, bigotry, and reaction. But that is his view, and he is certainly not the only person on the cultural left to see things that way. . . .

The large-scale feminist complicity with the hysteria would seem to undermine the notion that it was an anti-feminist enterprise. But Beck claims that the panicky, censorious, victim-oriented feminism that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s was merely a byproduct of the period’s conservative revival. Conservative arguments about sex had “gained so much momentum,” he writes, “that even some feminists joined in, arguing that the liberalization of sex had gone too far and produced not freedom but anarchy, danger, pornography, victimization and psychological trauma.” It might be the case that this type of feminism (as opposed to the more libertarian, sex-positive, 1960s version) was merely a projection of the culturally conservative mood of the 1980s, but it seems unlikely—not least because social conservatism today is weaker than it has ever been before, and yet what might be called “MacKinnon feminism” is as strong as ever, especially on college campuses.

One wonders if Beck deliberately chose to publish this book in the midst of the national outcry over campus rape in order to draw implicit parallels between the 1980s hysteria and what is taking place today.

Well, that’s certainly a parallel.