In his new book, We Believe The Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s, Beck recounts the feverish years when Reagan-era America panicked over allegations of ritualistic sexual abuse visited upon children by networks of secretly Satanist daycare workers, and analyzes the reactionary political and intellectual backdrop that kept the heat on.
How did you move from writing essays to writing your first book?
For a couple years, n+1 had a separate research collective. We could take as much time as we wanted to investigate whatever topic we wanted to. One of our projects was looking into the legacy of radical second-wave feminism in the U.S. I became interested in why the women’s movement broke down over the course of the ’80s. That’s when I first heard about these trials, and took them up as an ancillary project of my own. From the idea to write it to sending it to press, it was about three and half years.
What hooked your interest in the trials?
No one I talked to under the age of 30 had any recollection of them whatsoever. Because they were such big news in the ’80s, for them to be forgotten suggested that there were things about them that remain unresolved, that it wasn’t yet a comfortable story.
Where do you see its lingering effects?
The kind of threats people imagine their children face, like abduction by stranger pedophiles. When in fact, children today are safer than they’ve ever been in many decades.
Why focus on this particular panic?
My interest is in this period of conservative political resurgence, and its sexual politics. One narrative says that all conservatives actually care about is lowering taxes for rich people, and while they say they care about family values, abortion, and gay marriage, they don’t. They let that stuff happen. But I think conservatives have pursued a sexual politics project in a very real way. The antifeminist backlash in the ’80s was extraordinarily powerful and in many ways a success. And I think that’s part of what’s been forgotten. My interest in this panic is part of a developing interest in the cultural politics of these decades.
The only other thing I would say, because I like to call attention to this when I can: in one sense, this particular panic has obviously ended. There are no longer new daycare workers being thrown in prison all over the place, no allegations of satanic ritual abuse flying around. However, for many of those affected, things are very much not over. Jesse Friedman [who against all evidence pleaded guilty to sexual crimes he didn’t commit in an attempt to win the judge’s sympathy] is trying to get himself exonerated because he is still classified as a Level 3 sex offender. Dan and Fran Keller [who served 21 years for child abuse based on testimony from an expert witness that a district attorney only recently called faulty] are still trying to get a finding of actual innocence. It has lingering effects that aren’t just cultural, but tangible and involve real people.
