WHO: Ross Cheit, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, Brown University

WHEN: Friday, April 25, 2014, 12:00pm - 2:00pm.

WHERE: Columbia University, Knox Hall, Room 207, 606 West 122nd Street, 5th floor. Campus Map.

ABOUT: In the 1980s, a series of child sex abuse cases rocked the United States.  By the latter part of the decade, the assumption was widespread that child sex abuse had become a serious problem in America. Yet within a few years, the concern about it died down considerably.  In the early 1990s, a new narrative with remarkable staying power emerged: the child sex abuse cases were symptomatic of a 'moral panic' that had produced a witch-hunt. A central claim in this new witch-hunt narrative was that the children who testified were not reliable and easily swayed by prosecutorial suggestion. 

But did the new witch-hunt narrative accurately represent reality?  Drawing on years of research into cases in a number of states, Cheit shows that the issue had not been blown out of proportion at all. In fact, child sex abuse convictions were regular occurrences, and the crime occurred far more frequently than conventional wisdom would have us believe. Cheit's aim is not to simply prove the narrative wrong, however. He also shows how a narrative based on empirically thin evidence became a theory with real social force, and how that theory stood at odds with a far more grim reality. The belief that the charge of child sex abuse was typically a hoax also left us unprepared to deal with the far greater scandal of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church, which, incidentally, has served to substantiate Cheit's thesis about the pervasiveness of the problem.  

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