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• "rHE FRANKLIN COVER·UP
been badly abused. But this was done, they concluded, by
persons other than those the young people named. Bonacci, too,
was indicted for perjury. Two other victim-witnesses, whose
stories buttressed those of Owen and Bonacci, recanted under
immense pressure. Alisha Owen and Paul Bonacci refused
to recant.
• • •
America is suffering an epidemic of child abuse. "S.O.S.
America," a 1990 report from the Washington, D.C.-based
Children's Defense Fund (CDF), said that "a survey by the
American Association for Protecting Children indicates that
2.2 million children were reported abused, neglected, or both
in 1987-a 225 percent increase since 1976, and a 48 percent
increase in the previous five years." CDF and other estimates
caution, however, that only one in every five cases of abuse
and neglect gets reported. "The dimensions of the abuse are
staggering," Dr. A. Nicholas Groth, director of the sex offender
program at the Connecticut Correctional Institute, told the New
York Times in 1990, "If we saw these same numbers of children
suddenly developing some kind of illness, we'd think we had
a major epidemic on our hands."
Shocking as the numbers are, the nature of the crimes is more
so. Ever more frequently, abuse involves what law enforcement
officials refer to as "sadistic, ritualistic" features, or, to speak
plainly, satanism. What the victims of this type of abuse describe
is so horrific, that parents, teachers, and even child
welfare workers have great difficulty to grasp what they are
being told. The mind recoils from such evil, inflicted on the
most innocent of all people, children.
In recent months, news media around the country have been
full of propaganda to the effect that children who report abuse
are just telling what they fantasized, or stories fed to them by
adults. As for satanic or ritualistic abuse, many newspapers
declare that it does not even exist, as the New York Village
Voice did in a June 1990 article, which attacked "the great
ritualistic abuse hoax."
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