Celebrity, Pedophilia, and Ideology in American Culture By Jason ...

this belief. In California in 1994 an acquitted defendant demanded $110 million in damages against the county that had prosecuted him in a ritual abuse case. There were also claims that pedophiles were influencing false memory charges to conceal their behavior.⁴⁹ While a shift did occur in 1994 over the belief in stories by adults who cried abuse, concern over children being abused was stepped up. In the United States, the Sexual Offenders Act was introduced, informally known as Megan’s Law, after the murder of seven-year-old Megan Kanka by a convicted sex offender. Each state decides what information will be made available and how it will be disseminated. For example, in California there are over 63,000 registered sex offenders, with 33,500 having their details displayed on the Internet.⁵⁰ In the United Kingdom, there was a call for a similar style of Megan’s Law, known as Sarah’s Law, in 2000; the campaign was led by the sensationalist tabloid newspaper The News of the World after eight-year-old Sarah Payne was murdered by Roy Whiting in July 2000. Whiting had previously abducted and sexually assaulted a girl in 1995, serving just two years and five months, the extra five months for refusing to undergo a sex offenders’ rehabilitation course. A psychiatrist in 1995 claimed he was not a pedophile, with the judge in the Sarah Payne case stating Whiting was not mentally unwell but an evil man. After activity by vigilantes and a public outcry, the government stepped in, with Whiting being given a fifty-year sentence, meaning he would not be up for parole until he was ninety-one. All of these cases reveal the problem with not disclosing details to the public about repeat offenders and raise the question concerning whether juries should be told about previous convictions.

In adult cases, whether recovered or continuously accessible, memories are a combination of accurate and inaccurate components. There is evidence that recovered memories are no more or less likely to be false than continuously accessible memories.⁵¹ Popularly, false memory syndrome is a medical condition with apparent “scientific” validity, but it needs to be stressed this is not the case. The syndrome was invented by those accused of child sexual abuse, but it is clear that false memories do exist. According to Jenny Kitzinger, during the mid-1990s journalists