Opinion | Children were sexually abused in German foster care, the so-called experts shouldnt hav
Have you read last week’s New Yorker yet? I cannot exactly recommend it — yet I must insist you do.
Rachel Aviv’s article on German children who were sexually abused in foster care is beautifully written, sensitively narrated and one of the most depraved stories you’ll ever read. Desperate to look away, compelled to keep going, I searched for some clue about how such horrors could have been abetted by bureaucrats who presumably went home at night to have nice dinners with their families and relax in front of the television.
Dear Lord, how could they?
There are many plausible answers, but the one that stood out for me was a failing all too common in our own country’s history, particularly among our elite class: a pathological willingness to give in to expert authority, even when all reason suggests they’re wrong.
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Aviv’s story centers around Marco, a neglected child placed in foster care with a man named Henkel who he says abused him, along with several other boys.
Follow this authorMegan McArdle's opinions“I didn’t think what was happening was good,” the now-adult Marco told Aviv, “but I thought it was normal.”
Red flags were flying all over Marco’s childhood, but when concerns were raised, they were swatted aside by academic Helmut Kentler, who the magazine notes was described by the newspaper Die Zeit as Germany’s “chief authority on questions of sexual education.”
“What Mr. Henkel needs from the authorities,” Kentler advised the youth welfare office, “is trust and protection.” Thanks to Kentler, he got it.
It gets worse: Starting in the 1970s, Kentler oversaw a government program that placed children with pedophiles deliberately. Aviv lets Gunter Schmidt, a former president of the International Academy of Sex Research, explain: “ ‘I thought … if Kentler is there it’ll be fine.’ He added, ‘And the Berlin Senate is also there.’
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Obviously, the German Senate, which authorized the program, wasn’t in the homes where children were vulnerable to abuse.
As it happens, I’d recently been reading a different story about the sexual abuse of children: a wave of accusations, mostly in the 1980s, against U.S. parents, day-care workers and others who were accused of the most wicked crimes imaginable, including satanic ritual abuse.
We now understand, as therapists and police interrogators of the day did not, how easy it is to elicit false memories — particularly from young children. But adults aren’t immune; one sheriff’s deputy came to believe that he had molested his own daughters, in what memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus called “one of the most dramatic cases of false memory of abuse ever documented.” He later recanted, but nonetheless spent years in prison.
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In those episodes, two things are strikingly reminiscent of the Kentler story. First, a scientific theory that has little empirical support but is well-suited to its political moment. In postwar Germany, eager to cleanse the last vestiges of Nazism, an ideology of total sexual liberation sought to replace the repressiveness of the old Germany. Here, in the twilight of the Cold War, a theory of recovered memory and cult abuse joins therapeutic liberalism with a resurgent law-and-order politics, spearheaded by a conservative movement suspicious of the sexual revolution.
Second, there was an extraordinary level of deference to this theory from ordinary people. Disturbingly often, authorities instructed people to believe child witnesses who described such things as nonexistent secret tunnels, abuse in hot-air balloons or by robots, or gruesome tortures that somehow left no marks — and they believed.
In the deputy’s case, a man apparently ignored not just the implausibility of a satanic cult operating in Olympia, Wash., but also his own memories, in favor of the theory that he might have just forgotten the years he’d spent abusing his kids. In Germany, credence was given to a sexual education “authority” arguing that children should be housed with pedophiles for the sake of the children. In both cases, an unimaginable number of people had to choose between the obvious and the expert theory, and somehow followed the experts.
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Sometimes, of course, we should listen to experts over our instincts. The germ theory of disease isn’t exactly intuitive. But germ experts are more than happy to explain their theory and show the germs on the microscope and how well antibiotics work. And so we must never forget to ask those questions, especially of the “experts” waving credentials rather than sound data, and demanding deference rather than a skeptical eye. Above all else, we must question closely if what they are saying contradicts basic common sense — no matter how impressive the résumé or earnest the claims to be doing what’s best for the kids.
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