Because the Sorensen and Snow study is most frequently cited as supporting the notion that sexually abused children deny and recant (see Table 2, Column 6), it is important to carefully review this study and the characteristics of the sample.
Sorensen and Snow (1991) selected 116 cases of confirmed CSA from a larger sample of 633 children who were involved in CSA allegations from 1985 to 1989. Sorensen and Snow reported that 72% of children denied abuse when first questioned by either a parent or an investigative interviewer; only 7% of these deniers immediately moved into an “active disclosure” stage, which involved detailed, coherent, first-person descriptions of the abuse. Seventy-eight percent moved into a “tentative disclosure” stage, with partial, vague, or vacillating disclosures of sexual abuse. Eventually, 96% of children made an active disclosure....
This raises the issue that the reported patterns of disclosure were consequences of the specific therapeutic practices (of the authors)
rather than of reflections of the manner in which children disclose abuse under formal interviewing conditions. This raises the hypothesis that many of the children in their sample may not have been abused (see Ceci & Bruck, 1995).
A glimpse of the authors’ clinical practices and cases can be gleaned from a review of the social science and legal records.
First, in 1990, Snow and Sorensen(1990) published an article entitled “Ritualistic Child Abuse in a Neighborhood Setting,” in which ritualistic abuse was defined as repetitive, bizarre sexual, physical, and psychological abuse of children that included supernatural themes and/or religious activities.
Of the 575 cases of alleged child abuse in which the authors served as therapists and/or evaluators between 1985 and 1988, 52 were identified as ritualistic child abuse. Of the 52 children, 39 were allegedly abused in a neighborhood setting. In a number of these cases, the children were first brought in for therapy because of allegations of ritualistic abuse by a nonfamily member; during the course of therapy, the children came to make the following types of disclosures:
Cross-dressing, masks, and costumes (31%) included red and black robes, men’s wearing of women’s erotic underwear and dresses, clowns and devil’s masks, capes, and costumes such as a lion, bear, snake, witch, devil, Darth Vader, vampires, skeleton, and leather loin cloths.
The killing of children and infants was identified by six children in four neighborhoods (15%). Thirteen percent of the children said that they had participated in eating flesh. (Snow & Sorensen, 1990, p. 483)The disclosures resulted in trials and convictions of two adults. One of the cases, State v. Hadfield (1990), was successfully appealed. In addition, five adolescents from other neighborhoods were accused, three of whom were acquitted, and two pleaded guilty.
There is a high probability that a number of the children classified as ritually abused were included in Sorensen and Snow’s (1991) study, which sampled the same but slightly smaller population that was described in their 1990 study. In addition, because the accused in their neighborhood cases either made pleas or were convicted, these cases met criteria for substantiated cases of abuse.
The problem with the inclusion of these types of cases into studies of disclosure patterns is that there is no evidence to support the once popular belief that ritualistic sexual abuse is common (see Nathan & Snedekor, 1995, for examples).
Numerous authorities have failed to find any physical evidence to support the many allegations that have been made and that were the basis of many of the multivictim, multiperpetrator criminal trials of the 1980s and early 1990s (e.g., Lanning, 1991).
Furthermore, it appears that the large proportion of reported cases of ritualistic abuse can be accounted for by the practices of a small minority of clinicians (Bottoms, Shaver, & Goodman, 1996; Lanning, 1991). Because Sorensen and Snow diagnosed so many “ritually abused” children in their practice, this, by inference, leads to the possibility that these children’s allegations were a product of the practices and beliefs of these clinicians. This information would undermine the reliability of the results of the Sorensen and Snow (1991) disclosure study, rendering them scientifically doubtful.
Reviews of the court records for two trials in which patients of Snow testified about allegations of sexual abuse provide support for the view that the children’s allegations were associated with biased suggestive interviewing practices:
Defendant offered several witnesses at trial who described the suggestive and coercive interviewing techniques allegedly utilized by Dr. Snow and one police officer who described how the children in Dr. Snow’s care were able to reproduce specific information after he had suggested to Dr. Snow that such information should be presented in their statements. (State v. Hadfield, 1990, p. 508)On the basis of Snow’s testimony in State v. Bullock (1989), one of the judges in the case concluded,
Indeed, Dr. Snow herself admitted that she used interrogation procedures that were not intended to sift truth from error. She forthrightly admitted she was not a neutral interviewer; rather she was “an ally for the child”, “biased”, and not a fact collector like the police. . . .
She also testified in effect that there was nothing in her methods that served as a standard for determining the truthfulness of the stories she produced by her interrogation. . . .
But since she starts an interrogation with the assumption that abuse occurred, she then proceeds to prove that point. . . .
In short, any claim that scientific principles or Dr. Snow’s own expertise and experience validated her conclusions and procedures is devastatingly refuted by her own statement, “I didn’t believe any of those kids when they told me it didn’t happen.”
(State v. Bullock, 1989, p. 175)Given the nature of the “validated” cases in the Sorensen and Snow (1991) sample, as well as in the apparently biased and suggestive interviewing/therapeutic techniques, the results of the study are uninterpretable.
http://www.wondercatdesign.com/mecasa/i ... d%20sa.pdf