IPT Book Reviews

Title: Witch Children: From Salem Witch Hunts to Modern Courtrooms  Positive Review
Author: Hans Sebald
Publisher: Prometheus Books, © 1993

Prometheus Books
59 John Glenn Drive
Buffalo, NY 14228-2197
(716) 837-2475
$22.50 (c)

Hans Sebald is a German sociologist who has completed a history of European witch craft, mostly in Germany.  His goal of this book is (1) to cover history, (2) to give the history of the witch bay in detail, (3) to give an introduction of child psychology, and (4) to compare today's witchhunts with those of the past.  He covers 1, 2, and 4 quite well but lacks details on child development.

Sebald notes that Europe experienced some 100,000 deaths of witches and witch children by burning at the stake.  He observes that "The accusation of witchcraft was a convenient weapon with which to exact revenge because it required little, if any empirical proof" (p. 41).  He warns that "Accusations of witchcraft commonly implicated members of the community against whom children held a grudge and against whom they could not apply other forms of revenge and punishment" (p. 55).

He presents painfully gathered research on the number of children killed in Europe because they were assumed to be possessed by the devil.  The "state of possession" used by the courts and community as proof contained weapons and strategies designed to accuse people with impunity and to give credibility to the most exotic evidence.  Children were viewed as "esteemed mediums" no matter what they said.

Sebald criticizes Philippe Aries' Centuries of Childhood (1962, New York: Vintage Books) (Paperback) for its failure to look at children drawn into the witch trials.  He also notes that Aries did not deal with the children of common people and disagrees with the suggestion that the concept of children did not exist prior to the 17th century.  He similarly decries Rousseau's impact on our assumptions about children's development and our naive belief in children's concepts of fairness, honesty, and caring.

Sebald refers to the "American witch syndrome" and is disturbed by the fact that we are repeating this same syndrome today. He refers to Jean Piaget's observations about suggestibility and draws several conclusions about children and suggestibility:

1. The younger the child, the more suggestible he or she is.
2. Recall can be thoroughly distorted by biases and notions internalized by the child prior to interrogation.
3. The incomplete mental Gestalt of child allows for unencumbered responses, sometimes of an exceedingly inventive and imaginative nature.
4. The very incompleteness of child's mental Gestalt allows self-brainwashing, the belief in the reality of one's confabulations.
5. Closeness in world view between the questioner and the questioned furthers the persuasion process.
6. Young children tend to experiment with lies, often testing the limits of adults' credulity.
7. Absolutism in attitudes contrasts with behavioral relativism; that is, children defend honest and fair play on the verbal level but violate them on the behavioral level.
8. Older children develop the type of situational ethics whereby they see nothing wrong with lying if it leads to the punishment of a "bad person."
9. Information or misinformation embedded in the questions deepens children's suggestibility if such material is supplementary rather than contradictory to the key issue.
10. Suggestibility is significantly enhanced by the interrogator's status: the higher the status, the higher the suggestibility.
11. Interpretive and leading questions are powerful magnets extracting the right responses.
12. Repetitive questioning deepens the child's tendency to cater to the leading question.
13. Once suggestions are planted, children can carry them over to succeeding interrogators.
14. The stronger an interrogator conveys his or her view, the more suggestible the child becomes and the greater the compliance with the view.
15. The greater the ambiguity of the key event, that is, the more it resembles a social Rorschach situation with an amorphous structure, the more productive the impact of leading questions.
16. Children's testimony may contain personal motives, such as punishing certain individuals or sometimes simply reveling in the glory of feeling powerful.
17. Children believe in legendary figures, illusory as they may be, if told so by parents.  Children whose parents tell them otherwise exhibit disbelief in the figures.

Maybe the assumption of children's innocence was needed to support the need for protective service in some people's mind, despite much research to the contrary.  Not even sibling abuse challenges this assumption.  This book is recommended for all therapists, attorneys, social workers, expert witnesses, and psychologists who by mistake may be the new inquisitors.

Reviewed by LeRoy Schultz, Emeritus Professor, West Virginia University.

Order this book: Hardcover

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