Abstract
History, and in particular the history of science, indicates that the path to truth is not a straight road but more like a hiking path with ups, downs, and occasionally taking the wrong trail. In time, with sound science, knowledge does get back on the best path to truth. Efforts of professionals, courts, and the public to understand children’s reports of sexual abuse in the late 1980s and 1990s serve as a good illustration of this developmental nature of knowledge. Wild claims on both sides of a complex issue, often made by advocates and not scientists, baseless testimony of so-called experts, and actions of professionals, at times based more on belief than evidence, had profound impacts on the lives of some children and adults.
Thankfully, over this same time period, researchers in a variety of disciplines brought the scientific method to understanding children’s capacity to give evidence, and the errors of the past are hopefully no longer taking place. Nonetheless, things said in court, in the press, and in academic publishing from that time period continue to haunt the perspectives of some today. Historians in the future, adults who as children were caught up in the legal process in which these wild claims were used to affect the outcome of the process, and indeed professionals of today, will benefit from a careful reexamination of the legal cases that had such an impact on professional and public views of children in the courts. In one of the most important works of scholarship in the modern history of efforts to understand childhood sexual abuse, Ross Cheit’s The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children (Oxford University Press, 2014) has given history and those concerned with children a detailed guide to the wrong path taken in the 1980s and 1990s in what became infamous court cases involving children’s reports of sexual abuse. Journal of Interpersonal Violence (JIV) regards the scholarship of Professor Cheit as so important that we asked Kathleen Faller and Colleen Friend to serve as guest editors for the following special issue. In part, the special issue points to the fact that the matters discussed here have not reached a consensus but it is our hope that these manuscripts will further the discussion.