Murky Justice Served in 1980s Child Sex Abuse Cases

During the 1980s in over nine states, some 190 day care workers were formally charged with sexual crimes against the children they cared for. In We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s, Richard Beck argues that many of these day care workers may not have received fair trials. There was a decade-long outbreak of collective hysteria, and social workers and detectives employed coercive techniques when interviewing children that led to unwittingly false confessions.