The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Reflections on Knowledge About Child Sexual Abuse and the Impact of McMartin in the State of California.

Responding to Ross E. Cheit's Witch-Hunt Narrative, this article is a commentary chronicling the emergence of child sexual abuse as a social issue in Los Angeles County in the 1980s. Based on the responses to child sexual abuse in Los Angeles County as experienced by one social worker during the McMartin years, it discusses the impact of the McMartin case on the identification and intervention in child sexual abuse cases and tracks the evolution and changes that took place in the 1980s and 1990s in Southern California. It offers some insight into a rationale for the denial of child sexual abuse which continues to this day.