LOCATING SEXUAL ABUSE IN THE TV MOVIE, FROM DANGEROUS DADS TO DAY CARE
BY JENNIFER WALLIS

When locating underage sex in the TV movie, the earliest examples are the slightly salacious “tearaway teen” movies—those productions of the 1970s in which teenage girls become embroiled in drugs, drinking, and prostitution in scenes that often evoke the swinging sixties. Go Ask Alice (1973), Born Innocent (1974), and Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker (1979), while emphasizing the dangers facing modern teenagers, relied just as much for their appeal on the appearance of their young female stars (Linda Blair is down to a bra within fourteen minutes of Born Innocent’s opening credits).¹

The 1980s, though, saw less of the tearaway teen and more of the much younger abused child. Although the physical abuse of children had come to prominence in the 1960s with the emergence of the “battered child” syndrome, it wasn’t until the 1970s that the sexual abuse of children gained widespread attention as the American child protection system expanded. If the TV movies of the 1970s showed something of a preoccupation with the rape of adult women (see ‘Rape-revenge and rape-response’, this volume), those of the 1980s and 1990s showed an increasing interest in the sexual abuse of children. The idea of what constitutes child abuse changes over time (alterations to the age of consent, for example), and TV movies of this period neatly demonstrate late twentieth century developments that situated sexual abuse in two distinct locations: the family and the day care center.²

DANGEROUS DADS & AVENGING MOMS

Coverage of the sexual abuse of children in the 1970s frequently framed the issue as something of a “last taboo”—an aspect of human sexuality that had gone unaddressed in the supposedly liberated discussions of the 1960s. The recognition that threats to children could come not just from the dirty old man in a raincoat, but from individuals much closer to home, began to make its way into the popular press, with Ms. magazine running a piece on incest in 1977. The issue was ideally suited to the TV movie, then; a format which relied upon current news stories and events to appeal to viewers.

Many TV movies of the 1980s took the form of “domestic melodramas,”³ with the juxtaposition of the familiar home environment and sinister or harmful acts transforming the home into a somewhat uncanny site.⁴ Helen Wheatley describes “Gothic television” as a genre reliant upon “writing stories of unspeakable family secrets and homely trauma large across the television screen.”⁵ While her analysis is not concerned with TV movies, many of the characteristics she identifies in Gothic television can be found in the TV movie: family secrets, menace within the home, and the use of flashbacks. Typifying this model is Child of Rage (1992), in which a couple adopt a young girl who quickly exhibits some disturbing personality traits. Catherine tortures animals, plans to stab her new parents in their bed, and— in a particularly disturbing scene—offers to give her adopted grandfather “whatever he wants” if he will take her fishing, describing herself as “so hot.” As her abuse at the hands of her real parents is divulged in therapy sessions, flashbacks fill in the details of her previous life—her father rasps “You’re so hot for Daddy, aren’t ya?” Flashbacks are also employed in 1992’s The Boys of St. Vincent, the use of this method betraying contemporary interest in what was popularly known as “recovered memory.”⁶ Child of Rage goes rather over-the-top, both with its level of detail and its depiction of Catherine’s behavior—for the first half of the film she could be read as a genuinely evil rather than troubled child, bringing to mind Patty McCormack’s performance in The Bad Seed (1956).

Incest in these films invariably occurs between father and daughter— Something about Amelia (1984), Liar, Liar: Between Father and Daughter (1993), Stop at Nothing (1991)—with the revelation of abuse a shock to wives and mothers. In some sense, the movies might be viewed as aids to spotting abuse: trademark behaviors such as violent play with soft toys or irrational anger occur repeatedly.⁷ As with the “rape-response” film, the legal system is held to account for its inadequate reaction. In contrast to the relative lack of action by women in response to rape, however, the mother of the abuse victim is often given significant agency, and indeed may be presented as heroic in her actions. The figure of the “vigilante mom” appears in Stop at Nothing (1991; working with a group of women to kidnap her daughter after her husband is awarded custody), Don’t Touch My Daughter (1991; she kills her daughter’s molester but is not charged), and While Justice Sleeps (1994; she shoots her daughter’s abuser in court when it becomes clear that his police buddies will get him off). The latter echoes the real-life case of Ellie Nesler, who in 1993 shot the man accused of molesting her son and several other boys. Her arrest and incarceration prompted protest, with “Free Ellie Nesler” bumper stickers sported by some supporters.

Cases like Nesler’s were intimately bound up with television coverage. Interviewed by Oprah Winfrey in 1995, Nesler was just one of many individuals who appeared on the talk show circuit of the 1990s to relate personal stories of abuse. Shari Karney, an attorney, appeared on several shows to raise awareness of incest after “recovering” her own memories of childhood abuse during her work on an incest case; her story was dramatized in the 1993 TV movie, Shattered Trust. The value of “breaking the silence” had been emphasized since the 1980s, with children as well as adults encouraged to tell their stories—both to raise public awareness of child abuse and as a step toward their own recovery. Indeed, the positioning of the TV movie as a form of “therapy” was made explicit by the broadcasting of helpline numbers after a screening. The tide was turning, however, as exhortations to “believe the children” began to be questioned, and the media circus surrounding child sex abuse claims came under fire from several quarters. Underlying all of this was the specter of Satanic Ritual Abuse, brought to public attention in the high profile McMartin case.

THE DARK SIDE OF DAY CARE

The McMartin preschool scandal is now a byword for moral panic, hysteria, and modern day witch-hunting. The allegations made by a mother in 1983 that her son had been raped by McMartin staff member Ray Buckey sparked a string of similar allegations in preschools across America. The tales of abuse became increasingly bizarre, with children claiming to have been involved in satanic rituals, flown across the country to take part in orgies, and witnessing their teachers flying. The McMartin trials ran for seven years at a cost of $15m, and resulted in no convictions.

Ted McGinley exposes the evils of chat rooms in Every Mother’s Worst Fear.

Pam Dawber asks Brian Bonsall Do You Know the Muffin Man?

The media frenzy surrounding McMartin and other preschools offered an array of outlandish and confusing details. How could so many people be involved with a national underground network of Satanists and be unknown to the authorities? But then how could children make up such fantastic stories if there were no substance to them? This feeling of conflict between children’s testimony and commonsense comes across in several TV movies of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Do You Know the Muffin Man? (1989) depicts the key features of the trials that were most criticized by contemporary commentators. The tendency of adults to ask leading questions (a mother persistently asks her son if anyone at school has touched him “in a bad way”) and the coaching of children by therapists (how else would a young child be familiar with words such as “vagina” or “penis”?) are both covered, as is the public’s prurient interest in sex abuse claims. During the trial in Muffin Man, the details of a satanic ritual offered by one of the child witnesses leads to an outburst by the defense lawyer, who thunders “Is Geraldo going to rush in here now?!” It’s a surprise, then, when the final ten minutes of the film reveal the claims to be true: photographs of children in their underwear are found in the apartment of one of the accused and a Hammer-horror style ritual in a classroom is crashed by investigating officers. This conflict between narratives can also be seen in some of the incest dramas. Liar, Liar suggests throughout that the daughter has fabricated her claims of abuse to get back at her father for his frequently violent discipline, with her mother expressing annoyed exasperation: “I don’t know what story you’re cooking up now, but I don’t like it.” Like Muffin Man, however, the allegations turn out to be true, and a similar narrative arc can be seen in Stop at Nothing.

A more straightforward (and damning) depiction of the McMartin trials was the HBO production Indictment: The McMartin Trial (1995). Coming after the abandonment of the trial, Indictment is confident enough of the viewer’s basic knowledge of the case to go straight into the action with no preamble, beginning with the arrest of Ray Buckey and other members of the McMartin family. The main focus of the film is the court case and deliberations of the defense and prosecution, many of whom are uncomfortable with the case being tried at all. The fast pace of the film perfectly conveys the hankering of the press for lurid detail, and the speed with which events developed after the initial allegation had been made. At the end of the film, as the freed McMartin family walk along the seafront with their lawyer, they wonder how people could have been carried away by the allegations rather than “listening to God” for guidance—because, says grandmother Virginia, “they were all too busy watching television.”

While day care centers and preschools were the key sites associated with child abuse in the TV movie at this time,⁸ the church was also coming under scrutiny as settlements began to be paid to abuse victims from the mid-1980s. The Boys of St. Vincent, though emphasizing that it was not a direct portrayal of a single case, took its inspiration from the Newfoundland Mount Cashel Orphanage scandal, where several priests were found to be involved in systematic physical and sexual abuse. Unlike the mythical network of Satanists, the conspiracy of silence surrounding sexual abuse in the church was emphasized as an all too real—and intractable—problem. “Have you ever tried to go above the Catholic Church?” asks one character, and the film’s finale is decidedly downbeat as a new group of equally corrupt priests are brought in to replace those recently dismissed.

Partly due to the collapse of the McMartin trial and increasing skepticism about Satanic Ritual Abuse, TV movies in recent years have been less persistent in their pursuit of the child abuse theme. Threats to children still exist, but their location is often more complex than the family/day care dichotomy. The Internet is one plot device that allows the threat to children or teenagers to be simultaneously inside the home and out in the wider world, revamping the “stranger danger” for a modern age—as in Every Mother’s Worst Fear (1998). In many ways, this is a continuance of the Gothic character of the TV movie, with predators’ ability to transgress the boundaries of the home possessing something of a supernatural undercurrent. As a” homely” format, then, the TV movie itself brings its fair share of fear, unease, and paranoia into the American home.

 

1There are some examples of the tearaway teen movie in the later period, such as 1993’s Why My Daughter? or 1990’s Daughter of the Streets, but these are more concerned with the parents’ journey to rescue, or seek justice for, their child than with the details of that child’s life.

2I. Hacking, “The Making and Molding of Child Abuse”, Critical Inquiry 17, p.274.

3J. Feuer, Seeing through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism, p.31.

4H. Wheatley, Gothic Television, p.7.

5Ibid., p.1.

6Recovered memory proponents claim that traumatic memories can be buried in the subconscious and retrieved in psychotherapy. The phenomenon was widely discussed during the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of the 1980s and 1990s, and popularised in the 1980 book Michelle Remembers, written by a psychiatrist and his patient (later wife).

7The importance of medical examination in confirming or revealing abuse to the mother is also made clear in many films. Liar, Liar’s Kelly undergoes a pelvic exam, and in several instances evidence of abuse is uncovered by doctors examining the child for some other reason, such as the cuts and bruises Samantha sustains in a fight in While Justice Sleeps.

8Another notable example is Unspeakable Acts (1990), based on the Miami Country Walk case of 1985. A few TV movies positioned the high school as a place of threat, the victims in these cases being teenage girls—who might also be used as ‘bait’ by police to entrap predatory teachers, as in Hush Little Baby Don’t You Cry (1986) and Broken Silence (1998).