Discussion of Case:
Kelly Michaels'
nightmare began on Apil
30, 1985 when a four-year-old boy who was a student of hers at the Wee
Care Day Nursery said, when a nurse put a thermometer in his rectum,
"That's
what my teacher does to me at nap time at school." When asked
what
he meant, the boy replied, "Her takes my temperature."
That one
comment--easily capable
of an innocent interpretation-- began a criminal investigation that
would
lead to Michaels being charged with 131 counts of sexual abuse against
twenty children. She allegedly raped and assaulted her three to
five-year-old
charges with knives, spoons, and Lego blocks. Prosecutors also
contended
she licked peanut butter off of the children's genitals, played piano
in
the nude, and made the kids drink her urine. All of this abuse,
according
to prosecutors, somehow went unnoticed by other teachers, parents, or
administrators
during the seven months she worked at the Wee Care Nursery. Michaels,
age
twenty-six, would be convicted of 115 counts of abuse, and in 1988
sentenced
to forty-seven years in prison.
The blame for
this travesty of
justice must rest largely on investigators and prosecutors.
"Believe
the children" became the motto for the trial.
Division of Youth and
Family Service
Investigators, convinced of Michaels' guilt and determined to uncover
the
full extent of her treachery, repeatedly questioned children about
possible
sexual abuse. Most children said at first that they liked Kelly
and
that she did nothing wrong. Investigators called this "the denial
phase." The investigators pressed on, pulling out implements and
anatomically
correct dolls, telling them that other kids had revealed Kelly's
misdeeds,
telling them that Kelly was in jail. Kids want to please
adults.
They are easily moved to change answers by suggestive questions.
Eventually the kids provided the answers investigators were
looking--indeed,
hoping--to hear.
Parents were given
"symptom charts,"
and asked to report behavior that might be indicative of past sexual
abuse--things
like bedwetting and nightmares. Not surprisingly, symptoms were
found.
In the atmosphere of
intimidation and
moral hysteria, those that should have come forward to defend Michaels
did not. Other teachers said later that they believed expressions
of support for Michaels might have led to the filing of charges against
them as well.
Dorothy
Rabinowitz, writing about
the Michaels case in Harper's Magazine, offered this reflection on the
case:
We are a society that, every
fifty years or so,
is afflicted by some paroxysm of virtue--an orgy of self-cleansing
through
which evil of one kind or another is cast out. From the
witch-hunts
of Salem to the communist hunts of the McCarthy era to the current
shrill
fixation on child abuse, there runs a common thread of moral
hysteria.
After the McCarthy era, people would ask: But how could it have
happened?
How could the presumption of innocence have been abandoned
wholesale?
How did large and powerful institutions acquiesce as congressional
investigators
ran roughshod over civil liberties--all in the name of a war on
communists?
How was it possible to believe that subversives lurked behind every
library
door, in every radio station, that every two-bit actor who had belonged
to the wrong political organization posed a threat to the nation's
security?
Years from now people doubtless will
ask the same questions
about our present era--a time when the most improbable charges of abuse
find believers; when it is enough only to be accused by anonymous
sources
to be hauled off by investigators; a time when the hunt for child
abusers
has become a national pathology.
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