Seal Books Description: This 265 page book is an emotional report of a 150 day trial involving a mother, father, the mother's boyfriend, and two girls. The case involved alleged pornographic videotaping in a TV studio, graveyard murders with cannibalism, and sexual acts by all adults involved with the two girls. Only the last charges were sustained by the court which ordered the girls into a state supervised foster home. The case involved the Hamilton-Wentworth Unified Family Court. In 20 chapters, the author selectively reports various sequences of events, including the trial. Although the judge allowed only six reporters into the court at any one time, the case still turned into a media circus. To add to this, the mother of the two girls, who was described as a "nut case" by her first husband, screamed and cried during the trial and finally laid on the floor in a fetal position. After the judge studied the 15,000 pages of testimony, he ruled that the two girls should be made wards of the province. The author quotes Roland Summit, who warned the agency staff
not to believe everything a child says, and Ralph
Underwager, who said that there was no empirical
data to support the children's material. The book ends with a small outdated set
of references. Discussion: The case is a sad commentary on Canada's child protection service. Although the two girls had complained of sexual abuse to a social worker at the Metro-Toronto Children Aids Society, they were not placed in a foster home for three years, when they were placed at the mother's insistence. While the girls were in the foster home, the foster mother made notes of their alleged verbal utterances on paper bags. While the author is concerned that children may be victims of deception or may fabricate, he does not discuss the effects this may have had on the family and medical or social agencies, which did not communicate with each other. The police department and the social service agency failed to cooperate with each other. The police, who could find no evidence to support a crime by the parents, closed the case five times, only to reopen it when the social agency threatened to sue them. One of the girls claimed that her mother had killed somebody named Elizabeth and had dumped the body in the woods. Police were unable to find a body or locate a person named Elizabeth. After the two girls were interviewed by a social worker, they said that their mother had committed oral-vaginal acts with both and taught both how to insert their fingers into their vaginas. Later, the oldest girl told her younger sister not to talk so much about their mother, but to talk about the mother's boyfriend. It was while watching television that the girls first made statements about the pornographic videotaping in a TV studio. However, no VCR equipment was found when the house was searched. It was at this point that the youngest girl reported that ten children were murdered and buried by a TV person, but that they (the two girls) had killed the "Blob." None of this information seemed incongruous to the people who believed the abuse was real. The author takes a sanctimonious tone in advancing his arguments, which border on the hysterical. This sentimentality is a poor match for the hard reality of the situation and this book is not recommended. Reviewed by LeRoy Schultz, Professor of Social Work, West Virginia University.
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