Goodman, Qin, Bottoms & Shaver (1994) — What the Study Actually Did

[Report #193] 'Characteristics and Sources of Allegations of Ritualistic Child Abuse', Grant No. 90CA1405, Final Report to the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. Gail S. Goodman (PI, UC Davis) with Jianjian Qin, Bette L. Bottoms and Phillip R. Shaver. SCOPE OF WHAT SURVIVES. Only the title page, abstract and a fourteen-page Executive Summary were digitised (NCJ 154415). The full report, with its instruments, tables and coding manual, is not in the collection and could not be obtained. No claim about the study's instruments can be sourced to the retrievable document. WHAT IT DID. Five studies, all surveys or a child laboratory study. Study 1: 19,272 postcards to clinicians, 6,910 valid respondents (35.86%), of whom 2,136 reported at least one case; a detailed questionnaire returned 720 valid responses covering 1,548 cases. Study 2: 21,605 postcards to agencies, 4,655 valid respondents (21.55%) — law enforcement 18.36% — yielding 266 detailed returns covering 739 cases. Total cases with case-level data: 2,287, of which 1,473 ritual cases. The report flags its own oversampling of 'psychiatrists who specialize in dissociative disorders', and cautions that for law enforcement 'the response rate was particularly low... and the results must be interpreted accordingly'. THERE WAS NO INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION OF ANY CASE. All evidence is self-reported by the surveyed professional on a mailed questionnaire. No member of the research team examined a case file, a medical record or a crime scene. A third in-depth phase was planned in the 1991 precursor paper — 'We intend to choose a subset of respondents to pursue in more depth' — and nothing indicates it was carried out. THE FIGURE OF 12,264 DOES NOT APPEAR IN THE DOCUMENT. It originates in press coverage (Daniel Goleman, New York Times, 31 October 1994), which describes accusations the researchers 'had investigated'. Both the number and the verb overstate the retrievable primary. DEFINITIONS. The Executive Summary contains no definition of ritual abuse. The approach survives only in the 1991 precursor: 'Because the literature did not provide a widely agreed-upon definition of ritualistic abuse, we decided to allow respondents to define it for themselves.' On evidence, the report is explicit and maximally permissive: 'We included all relevant evidence in our analysis regardless of its quality.' WHAT IT FOUND, verbatim. 'there was no hard evidence for intergenerational satanic cults that sexually abuse children. There was, however, evidence in a few borderline cases, typically involving a lone individual or two people whose abuse of children involved satanic themes. In contrast, convincing evidence of religion-related abuse was often found.' And: 'hard evidence for satanic ritual abuse, especially abuse involving large cults, was scant to nonexistent.' Counter to expectation: 'Surprisingly, the conviction rate in ritual cases was almost as high as in religion-related cases.' Its conclusion: 'Our research leads us to believe that there are many more children being abused in the name of God than in the name of Satan' — the religion-related abuse was frequently corroborated, including a case in which 'a 14-year-old boy whose eyeball had been plucked out of his head in an exorcism ceremony'. THE AUTHORS' OWN CAVEATS. 'It is impossible to validate with certainty the cases reported to us.' 'our results must be interpreted with caution.' And from the precursor, most directly: 'None of our descriptive evidence proves that ritualistic child abuse does or does not exist, but it clarifies the nature of the allegations.' FRAMING. This is not a study written from the sceptical camp, and it is frequently cited as though it were. It warns at p.3 that 'there is increasing risk that actual victims of abuse, especially sexual abuse, will not be believed', and its principal investigator was simultaneously the leading academic arguing that children are competent witnesses.