SECOND THOUGHTS ABOUT PROJECT JERICHO

January 2004

Canadian newspaper editorialists and television commentators are suddenly able to acknowledge that accusations of child abuse are occasionally false. This newfound objectivity comes after two Saskatchewan men, John Popowich and Richard Klassen, won lawsuits against officials who accused them, in two separate investigations, of being ritual child abusers.

For Richard Klassen, the fight to clear his name drove him to the brink of madness. To him, of course, it seemed like the authorities were the ones who were insane. Klassen was caught up in a wave of ritual abuse accusations that swept the continent fifteen years ago. Hundreds of people were accused of molesting children, sacrificing animals, infanticide, and conducting satanic rites.

We cannot close the door on this twisted chapter in our legal history without revisiting Canada's largest ritual abuse investigation, which started in the town of Prescott, Ontario in 1989. Here was a small community in which social workers, police and prosecutors claimed to find 119 pedophiles engaged in a multi-family, multi-generational orgy of child molestation. 275 children and adults were declared to be victims, 42 children were taken from their homes and 28 were eventually made wards of the crown. Social worker Pam Gummer, who helped coordinate the investigation, later said that "[Prescott] is not a unique situation in terms of abuse," as though almost any town the investigators cared to examine might yield up the same results.

The Prescott investigation started with three children, whom journalist Judy Steed called Lucy, Freddy and Joey in her 1994 book about child abuse, Our Little Secret. Lucy was the oldest at seven and her younger brothers were barely verbal. There is no question that the children were neglected by their mother. It's also a fact that children are more likely to be abused by a live-in boyfriend than by their birth father, and the common-law husband, Billy Elliott, was father to none of the children. The house was a pigsty and the family was being supervised by Child Protective Services. The authorities were right to intervene with this family. But in this case, they took a bad situation and turned it into a nightmare.

Lucy, Freddy and Joey were apprehended and placed in a succession of foster homes. Their third set of foster parents reported that the children were telling bizarre stories of sexual abuse, of strange rites in the basement with groups of adults "dressed in gowns and masks," of being given "yucky juice" to drink, of animal sacrifice, of digging up skeletons from the cemetery, being threatened with guns and knives and being sexually assaulted and videotaped. Steed wrote that the police found "evidence" to corroborate the charges. Whatever the evidence was, it was not videotape. No videotape evidence was ever presented. The only evidence Steed actually mentions is that Lucy claimed to be abused in the basement and lo and behold, investigators found a crawl space under the house and animal bones in the backyard.

Over a period of months, the accusations bloomed to include the murder of a baby named Joshua. The police found no evidence that Joshua ever existed, but the investigation into the charges was called Project Jericho in his honor. As the investigation progressed, Billy Elliott's relatives and acquaintances also came under suspicion. According to Steed, the accused could be described as hillbillies or "white trash." Many were uneducated, poor, on welfare and of below-average intelligence. One man was pulled off the street for questioning because neighbors pointed him out as a weirdo who was always hanging around. Cecil Miller was retarded, illiterate and slightly crazy. He cracked the case wide open for the Prescott investigators -- he admitted to abusing 17 children and he named other adult abusers. Another mentally handicapped man was described as "easily manipulated." He was one of those who pled guilty.

Because the abuse had supposedly persisted for generations, some persons were identified as both perpetrators and victims. So how did a perpetrator fare in court if he did not also claim victimhood? And how could he claim victimhood without accusing others? One young mother said she accused her own parents because that's what the police and social workers wanted to hear. They had apprehended her son, whom she desperately wanted to get back.

One of the accused committed suicide. The web of accusations and counter-accusations grew to ensnare hundreds of people. Entire families were decimated. It's as though a slum clearance project was conducted with social workers instead of bulldozers. Bulldozers would have been kinder.

Many adults were sentenced to prison while the children were sentenced to counselling. In her book, Steed describes the interactions of the therapists with the children. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry while reading this section. In one passage, a little boy is told to make a cardboard suit of armour while the therapist feeds him psychobabble, as though a young child could possibly understand the metaphorical meaning of "armour" and "boundaries." "You got hurt," she tells him, "and you needed armour to protect you but now it's getting heavy and rusty..."

But even as the Prescott investigators pitted one family member against another, California's McMartin day care case disintegrated as the jury realized that the children had been improperly questioned and pressured into making absurd accusations. Even as the police were excavating backyards in the search for baby Joshua, researchers such as Dr. Maggie Bruck of McGill University were doing ground-breaking research into the suggestibility of young children. There was ample evidence to conclude that mass molestation cases must be viewed with suspicion.

While it's possible that some genuine pedophiles were caught in the Project Jericho dragnet, a reappraisal of the case would demonstrate that the investigators wreaked needless harm and wasted millions of tax dollars. The television program The Fifth Estate did much to bring to light the absurd injustice of the Klassen case -- will no one do the same for Prescott? It is reprehensible that no legal or governmental body, nor professional association, nor investigative journalist has re-evaluated Project Jericho in light of today's hard-won wisdom.

January 2005 addendum by Adriaan J.W. Mak:

Note re R .v Francois.

Although Francois, one of the men convicted in this case, had a record of child molestation, the case that send him to jail is a bizarre one.

His accuser denied twice, once in writing that she had sexual relations with anyone prior to age 14. Since Francois was one of the many suspects in the case, following suggestive questioning she recovered allegedly repressed memories that Francois, who was mentally ill, had sexually abused her at a prior age contradicting thereby her sworn statements.

Francois' lawyers took the case into appeal with the Supreme Court of Canada deciding that the repressed memory testimony was more acceptable than the earlier writtten testimony. Along with the similar fact evidence it convicted Francois.

This ruling established the acceptability of repressed memory testimony in Canadian Law.

The Other Side of the Story:

The Project Jericho investigators published a handbook which tells the story of the legal case from the point of view of the social workers:

Jericho - From Crisis to Coordination: An Integrated Community Response to a Multi-Victim
Child Sexual Abuse Crisis - by Sherry Galey