Violet Amirault was the owner of the Fells Acres Day School where both her children Gerald and Cheryl worked. Accusations against them began when a parent believed that her son was molested by Gerald. She started extensively questioning her son until finally he told his mother about "a secret room and sexual acts Gerald had him perform each day" (NCT 7). Gerald was arrested immediately; and the accusations towards the Amiraults only worsened until all three of them were charged with molesting 31 of their students (NCT).
How and why did this happen:-The testimony of pediatric nurse Susan Kelly
-The testimony of child abuse expert Eileen Treacy
-The media
The nurse:
As a persistent pediatric nurse, Kelly “promised rewards if the children talked about the bad things” (NCT 29). By wanting and gaining rewards, the children were merely coerced-compliant; which represents how they did not actually believe that they were molested, but confessed that they were in order to gain an award. Susan Kelly also implanted suggestibility into the children by telling the students that others had confessed to being molested, and by repeatedly asking the children if they had been molested. By telling the children that others had confessed to being molested, Kelly was contributing to the children’s bias as a sin of memory. She would get children to lie about being molested because their memories were being influenced by the present knowledge of their classmates supposedly being molested. Kelly would continue to persist regardless of the children's denial. For example, Kelly told a girl’s parents that their child had been molested even after the girl “repeatedly denied” it (NCT 32). By misdiagnosing children, Kelly was able to create hysteria among parents who then began to worry about their children.
The child abuse "expert":
Treacy enforced parental hysteria by weakly arguing that children were in a suppressed stage when they denied being abused (NCT 14). This reasoning implies that the children would always be viewed as being molested. When will no actually mean no? Treacy contributed to a form of bias as a sin of memory by proposing how nightmares, bedwetting, and lack in appetite for tuna fish and peanut butter were all signs of the children being abused (NCT 15). What the parents had once viewed as merely normal child behavior was being rewritten in their heads as negative signs that contributed to their child’s molestation- a form of bias as a sin of memory. However, because Treacy was a child abuse expert, the majority of victims’ parents and the jury viewed her words as truth. This resulted in the reinforcement of the media to portray the Amiraults in a bad light, and discouraged the minority of parents, who disagreed with the prosecution, from speaking up.
What was wrong?:
-There was no physical evidence to suggest that the children were telling the truth.
The aftermath:
-Violet died of cancer during the process
-Cheryl finally got out of jail with 10 years of parole
-Gerald spent the most time in jail and was labeled as a level three sexual offender when he finally got out (NCT)
-This was not an isolated case, there were multiple day care centers and preschools in the 80s whose fate was similar to that of the Fells Acre Day Care Center.
*Video to watch:
Sources:
-No Curler Tyrannies (NCT) by Dorothy Rabinowitz
-My psychology and law professor Ellsworth Fersch
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