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It sounded like a story straight out of the dark imagination of the Brothers Grimm.

Children abandoned in the forest by their parents during a famine in Germany. In real life, there was no forest and no famine in the United States. There was a daycare center, and parents who had to work to support their families and give their children the best life possible.

In the fairy tale, the children find a gingerbread house in the middle of nowhere. In real life, that house was a playroom full of toys and brightly painted walls. According to the story, a witch lived there disguised as a kind old woman. She lured the children in, fattened them up, and ate them (curiously, there have been real cases of cannibalism in Germany). In reality, they were middle aged women whose job was to look after children while their mothers worked. Nothing more. At some point, the line between the fairy tale and reality was completely erased. And that confusion cost innocent people their freedom.

It is true that child abuse began to be taken seriously starting in the 1970s. That was necessary. But the statistics tell a different story from the one presented in the courts. Most abuse occurred at home, not at school. And in the vast majority of cases, it was committed by a family member, not a stranger.

A rule was imposed that sounded noble but proved devastating: believe everything a child said, no matter how strange it sounded. The problem wasn’t the children. The problem was unprepared adults who, with the best of intentions, ended up feeding children’s imaginations until they became legal evidence. Many of the worst evils committed by human beings begin with good intentions.

The most brutal example was the McMartin Preschool case in California in the early 1980s. Yes, there was abuse. But it didn’t happen at that school, nor was it committed by the accused teachers. Nor were there really hundreds of cases (up to 400 accusations). What actually happened was this: a group of “experts” began interrogating three year old children using occult fantasy books as a guide, including the infamous Michelle Remembers. It wasn’t science. It was fiction dressed up as investigation.

Children, unknowingly guided by these questions, began talking about sacrificed animals, secret tunnels under the school, videotaped pornography, and witches who flew. The adults believed everything. Absolutely everything, even after excavations found nothing beneath the school.

Innocent people spent years in prison with no evidence against them other than the testimony of a three year old describing satanic rituals in churches. The McMartin trial became the longest and most expensive in the history of the United States: 7 years and 15 million dollars. A collective hysteria of the same scale, or greater, than the Salem witch trials nearly two centuries earlier.

But this was not a cultural accident. It was a reaction. The massive entry of women into the workforce deeply unsettled the most conservative sectors of American society. And some of them were willing to do whatever it took to push women back into the home. Fanning the rumor that the country’s daycares were nests of satanic cults systematically abusing children was, for them, the perfect tool.

In the fairy tale, it is the evil stepmother who forces the father to abandon the children in the forest. In real life, it was working mothers who were blamed for dangers that existed mostly in the imagination of those who could not stand to see them outside the kitchen. There was no forest. There was no witch. There was fear, ignorance, and a society that needed someone to blame so it wouldn’t have to face the real place where almost all child abuse actually occurs: the home.

McMartin Preschool: The Witches That Never Existed