Editor's note: In May, 1998, The New Republic fired writer Stephen Glass. Editors disclosed after a review of his work that Glass had fabricated all or parts of 27 out of 41 articles he had written for The New Republic. One, "Don't You D.A.R.E.," published March 3, 1997, attacked the popular drug-education program. On the basis of The New Republic article, Rolling Stone asked Glass to write a second article about D.A.R.E., which it published March 5, 1998. After The New Republic fired Glass, D.A.R.E. sued the author for $10 million. That libel suit was settled when Glass agreed to a provide a substantial financial settlement to D.A.R.E., to provide D.A.R.E. with information about the "origins, preparation, and editing" of his story, and to write a letter of apology to the organization. On February 2, 1999, D.A.R.E. filed a $50 million libel suit against Rolling Stone. Glass's letter appears below.
January 25,1999
Mr. Glen Levant, President
D.A.R.E. AMERICA
9800 La Cienega Boulevard, Suite 401
Inglewood, California 90301
RE: "Don't You D.A.R.E." - The New Republic, March 3, 1997
"Truth & D.A.R.E" - Rolling Stone, March 5, 1998
Dear Mr. Levant:
I want to express my regret and apology for falsely disparaging D.A.R.E. in the above-referenced articles by willfully fabricating several incidents and quotes about D.A.R.E. and its supporters in the articles, mostly attributed to anonymous sources. I did this in order to sensationalize the stories without regard to the harm and detriment my fabrications and falsehoods would cause to D.A.R.E. and people affiliated with D.A.R.E.
As the articles reflect, I communicated frequently with people and organizations whom I knew to support, and who (in some cases) told me they supported, legalization of illegal drugs and were anti-D.A.R.E. In preparing the articles, I gave credence to what I heard from the anti-D.A.R.E. people and did not credit the information D.A.R.E. supplied me. Officials at D.A.R.E. provided me with information such as copies of evaluations of the program's effectiveness, most of which I discounted and was not ever published in the articles.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, I specifically acknowledge that, contrary to statements in the articles, I did not ever learn from D.A.R.E. critics or anyone else of any threats or other wrongful or criminal activity in which D.A.R.E. or any of its employees or supporters ever engaged. To my knowledge, such conduct as stated in the articles did not take place.
I further acknowledge that the March 1997 article in The New Republic, which contains many of the same fabrications as are in my March 1998 article for Rolling Stone, played a significant role in attracting the interest of Rolling Stone and its editors. In editing the Rolling Stone article, I referred Rolling Stone's fact checkers to my prior article in The New Republic, or to sources cited therein.
In closing, I want to reiterate my sincere regret for the harm, damage and detriment I have caused D.A.R.E. America, its D.A.R.E program, the thousands of D.A.R.E instructors and volunteers and the millions of school children who benefit from their efforts.
Sincerely,
Stephen Glass
Saturday, June 21, 2008
The Young and The Feckless
Stephen Glass
Sept. 15, 1997 The New Republic
For the past year, the Nike athletic wear company has been the object of intense scrutiny, thanks to reports of widespread labor abuse by its subcontractors in Asia. In Vietnam, 800 laborers walked off the job to protest what they said were poor working conditions; in Indonesia, thousands of workers ransacked their factory this spring, claiming Nike hadn't been paying the $2.50-a-day minimum wage. Tales of exploitation have also sparked demonstrations back home in New York, Los Angeles and Seattle. On February 22, hundreds of activists filled San Francisco's Union Square on the opening day of Niketown, a multi-floor Nike superstore. Outside the entrance, hundreds of protesters chanted, "Just don't do it!" and urged prospective customers to stay away.
Two days after the San Francisco incident, Nike CEO Phil Knight announced that his company was taking swift--and, it would turn out, savvy--action to shore up its meticulously maintained but suddenly threatened public image. Nike was commissioning an independent investigation of its Asian operations: it would make all facilities and internal documents available to a team of inspectors, and it would then allow the inspectors to make their findings public. "Nike has always been a business about excellence and achievement," Knight proclaimed. And, to prove it, Nike would hire not just any old corporate hack to lead the investigation into its overseas operations, but a man of famous independence and renowned stature--a man who had first gained recognition as a civil rights hero, who had won wide acclaim as the mayor of Atlanta, who had served his country as ambassador to the United Nations and who had co-chaired the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games. The honorable Andrew Young, Knight said, would get to the bottom of this.
But Young was not just another pretty public servant summoned from an idyllic private life to answer duty's call. He was a businessman. And his fledgling business was to stimulate investment in developing countries--a mission statement that, it seems, includes helping companies deal with the p.r. messes that can come with such overseas endeavors. To conduct this business, Young had recently founded a firm in Atlanta called GoodWorks International. With Young at the helm, GoodWorks was perfectly positioned to take advantage of an emerging niche market: recently, Texaco, General Motors and Mitsubishi had all invited well-respected former government officials to serve as independent arbiters of complaints made by employees or consumers.
Nike was GoodWorks's first big client, its first chance to send corporate America evidence that GoodWorks did, from the businessman's point of view, good work. And when, four months after Knight's announcement, Young's firm published its seventy-five-page, full-color report on Nike's Asian operations, the client certainly had reason to feel it had gotten its money's worth. There was, Young had concluded, "no evidence or pattern of widespread or systematic abuse or mistreatment of workers" in the twelve operations he examined. To hammer home the point, GoodWorks packed the report with photographs--many taken by Young himself--of smiling workers playing a guitar on their break and relaxing around a television in their dorm. Young had a few criticisms, but his only substantive recommendations were that the shoemaker "consider" independent labor monitoring, that it establish better grievance procedures and that it distribute business cards with the company's "Code of Conduct" translated in the local language, so all foreign workers could read it. Nike wasted no time publicizing word of its vindication. It bought full-page ads in The New York Times and other major newspapers, touting the GoodWorks report. And the good news was hailed in the unpaid media, too. "In several ways," gushed The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Young's hometown paper, "the job is classic Andy Young--a man who ... has spent his life bridging the gaps between rich and poor, black and white, business, government and the international community."
But if the Nike report was "classic Andy Young," it was also a classic sham, marred not just by shoddy methodology but by frequent misrepresentations. The report lists consultants who were never consulted and includes photos of union representatives who, it turns out, were not union officials. Young deliberately avoided the most obvious and controversial question--whether Nike paid its employees fair wages--and, when gathering testimony, he relied almost exclusively on translators employed by the Nike factories. Phone calls to Young's office were referred to a GoodWorks spokesman, who insists Young did his best; he says that looking at these details misses "the big picture" of the report. Young, he notes, never claimed to be an expert on labor issues. But then Nike didn't need a labor expert. This was a public relations problem, and the world's largest sneaker company did what it does best: it purchased a celebrity endorsement. Andrew Young was happy to oblige.
The most obvious and important flaw in the GoodWorks report comes at the end, where there is a list of thirty-four "Non-Governmental Organizations With Whom GoodWorks Met or Spoke." This is the section that gives the publication intellectual credibility: it suggests that Young consulted with some of the leading minds in the field, who could have provided him with the context and guidance to judge whether Nike's operation was abusing workers. But, in a number of cases, Young did not consult with these experts at all. Anita Chan, a researcher who has studied China extensively at the National University of Australia in Canberra, appears on the list. Chan, interviewed by tnr, says she was never contacted by Andrew Young or anybody at GoodWorks. Logan Ide, a GoodWorks spokesman, explains that Chan was included accidentally because her name was on an internal office memo of people they should call. "It was just a simple mistake," Ide says, adding that GoodWorks has formally apologized to Chan and that she has accepted the apology. But that, too, is wrong, according to Chan. "I have never heard from them," she said. "No, they have never called me."
Maniza Naqvi, a child labor expert at the World Bank, did not even know that she was listed in the appendix until she was called by tnr. "My only connection to Nike is that I wear their shoes for running," she says. "I had nothing to do with this study. I wish I wasn't in there." Naqvi recalls but one communication with GoodWorks: she called on March 3 to ask if GoodWorks would send her the report when it was finished. The call lasted less than a minute.
Other experts cited say they, too, had only fleeting contact with the firm. Conrad MacKerron, the former director of social research for Progressive Asset Management Inc., says he had "just a courtesy call" with GoodWorks, and that it lasted less than ten minutes. "It seems a bit disingenuous to put me there," he says. Thuyen Nguyen, the founder of Vietnam Labor Watch, who has toured Nike's factories before, says someone from GoodWorks called him once, for a brief conversation, and that he was told that more substantive contact would follow, but no one ever called him again. Medea Benjamin, the director of Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human rights group, says her lone phone conversation with GoodWorks was over in five minutes. She says she asked for a meeting with Young, but no one called her back.
Not that the conversations would have been so productive anyway. In a conversation that lasted less than fifteen minutes, Jeff Ballinger from Press for Change, a Washington-based labor rights group, says he realized that the folks from GoodWorks "had no idea what they were talking about. I mean they didn't know even the basics."
Logan Ide, GoodWorks's spokesman, says the organization is sorry that so many people feel the report overstates their contributions. GoodWorks was not, he insists, trying to create a false impression. "It surprises me that people will say that," Ide says. "The heading only says we spoke with them. Sometimes it just may have been very, very briefly."
Recently Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" comic strip featured a series in which Kim, an Asian American character, visits a relative working in one of Nike's Vietnamese factories. In the series, the Nike translators manage to render the workers' pleas of mistreatment into joyous reports of a labor paradise. Just a case of Trudeau taking artistic license? No, more like art imitating GoodWorks.
In their field visits to Nike's factories, where they interviewed Nike workers about work conditions, Young was hampered by the fact that he wasn't fluent in the languages of the workers. No problem: Nike provided translators. And Young chose to use Nike's translators, although he could have easily hired his own. "We regularly provide translation for government officials and the media who visit," Nike's spokesman, Veda Manager, says. "By any standard those were acceptable translators."
Any standard? Not quite. In 1980, the International Law Association established the Belgrade Minimal Rules, to set common rules for the inspection of human rights conditions around the world. Rule Number 10, which most human rights groups consider essential, stipulates that analysts should provide all of their own experts. Diane Orentlicher, an international law professor at American University and author of Bearing Witness: The Art and Science of Human Rights Fact-Finding, says that rule certainly applies to translators: "Don't even worry about the Belgrade Rules, doesn't it just violate common sense?" she said. "How can you speak freely when your employer is listening or someone who might talk to the employer is literally in the room?"
Even journalists, who for the most part do not follow the same rigorous rules of inquiry as human rights organizations, and who work under much tighter time constraints, usually meet this basic requirement of fact-finding. Except when it is impossible--when, for instance, state or military authorities insist on providing official translators--experienced foreign correspondents hire their own translators, often at significant cost.
Ide says Young decided to use Nike translators when he was planning the trip with Nike officials; according to Ide, Young thought it would be the most convenient way. Ide concedes that Young had no way of knowing whether the translations were accurate. "We didn't follow [the Belgrade Rules] since we don't have all the technical expertise," Ide adds. "This was not designed to be a great academic study."
Another basic precept in labor and human rights investigations is to spend enough time at the job to really investigate. Young reports that his investigators spent, on average, up to three to four hours in each factory--a fact that prompts derision from veteran inspectors who have worked for manufacturers and unions in the past. Generally, these experts say, inspection teams on a tour will visit each factory at least ten times--for several hours at a shot. Graham Honiker, a consultant for two European apparel manufacturers, said he was "appalled" when he learned that Young spent only four hours in a factory. "You have got to be kidding me," Honiker said. "He might as well have been at Disneyland on a little factory [ride]. You know, where they can all sing, `It's a small world after all.' You know, `It's a world of laughter, a world of tears.'"
Some of the very labor rights experts whom GoodWorks listed as consultants say Young was told that he was not spending enough time on the ground to conduct a thorough study. One such consultant says he personally warned GoodWorks about this on five separate occasions. He was ignored, he says: "Young said he didn't really want to do the project anyway and made clear [that his attitude was] let's get in, get out, get the check and be done with the whole thing." (Young has said before that he was wary of taking the Nike contract: "I was reluctant to get involved with Nike in its Asian shoe conflicts because it would inevitably put me back into the `reasonable moderate' role I agonized over throughout my civil rights career," he wrote in a letter to The New York Times.) "Let's not beat around the bush, it takes you two years on the ground in [a foreign country] before you understand what is really going on," says another consultant. "If you are superhuman, and Andrew Young is, you can do it in one year. You're not going to see or hear anything meaningful being [in a foreign country] for three or four days."
Throughout his trip, Young and other members of his research team took photographs of cheery workers; the glossies, reprinted in the report, show the workers flashing the peace sign or working busily at their jobs. But these photographs are somewhat misleading. On page ten is a picture of Young sitting at a table with a group of Vietnamese men and women. The caption says, "Andrew Young meeting with plant management and union representatives in Vietnam." One man and one woman from the photo appear again on page twenty-two, posing with Young in front of a sign that says "Trade Union." Here the caption reads: "Andrew Young with union representatives at Vietnamese factory."
This picture comes as something of a shock to the Vietnamese Confederation of Labor, which represents workers at the Nike factory. Faxed a copy of the photograph, the confederation's officials said they do not know who the individuals are. When pressed, Veda Manager, Nike's spokesman, said they are Nike employees, who collect their salaries from the company, not the union or the government. "But they represent the workers," Manager says: although they have regular jobs in the factory, they are also supposed to look out for the workers' rights.
So, these workers were not exactly union officials, but they were, in Nike's account, still union representatives of a sort, the equivalent of shop stewards in a factory. And, by GoodWorks's own say-so, its investigators' process for identifying the appropriate union representatives was less than what you might call searching. GoodWorks spokesman Ide says the team simply allowed Nike to point out the appropriate union representatives with whom Young should speak. "Vietnam has a less developed understanding of organized labor and unions," Ide explains. "They don't have unions like we do. And these were the people."
Perhaps they were. And perhaps they did indeed give Young valuable information about conditions in the Nike factory from the union perspective. But, if they did, there is no evidence of this in Young's report. There is no quote, positive or negative, from any union representative; there is no account of how the management treats the union representatives or any information about whether the union representatives have any say in the factory's operation. And, while Vietnam may indeed have a different union structure from the West, a well-developed union system does exist there, and this system boasts union officials who are not paid by the company. Young and his team did not speak to these people.
One can understand why Nike might be reluctant to arrange a meeting with Hoang Thi Khanh, the union official who is in charge of the plant, since she has a reputation for being "tough as nails" when it comes to negotiating for better factory conditions; she also publicly criticized Nike earlier this year. Not only is Hoang Thi Khanh the vice chairman of the Vietnam Labor Confederation, she is also editor-in-chief of The Laborer, one of the best-selling local newspapers. Young could have met with Khanh--but, oddly, he declined repeated opportunities to do so. Thuyen Nguyen, the head of Vietnam Labor Watch, called Young's office two or three times to set up the meeting. At the time of the calls, Khanh was actually in the U.S. for several weeks, meeting with federal officials in Washington, D.C., and was anxious to visit Young; Khanh even offered to visit Atlanta if it was more convenient, Nguyen says. But Nguyen was told that GoodWorks wasn't interested.
And the photographs of would-be union officials aren't the only ones to raise questions about Young's examination of the factories. On page thirty-four appears a picture--also taken by Young--of several female workers, many with their arms crossed, sitting at a table. The caption says that these are the women who were "forced to run around Vietnamese factory." The reference is to a well-publicized event in which factory supervisors forced fifty-six Vietnamese factory workers to run laps around the factory because they had not worn proper shoes to work or had not met production quotas. The run was so strenuous that twelve of the women had to be hospitalized. After a wire story reported the incident, Vietnamese police arrested the supervisor.
At the time, the event was widely condemned in the media. But, in an interview with The Atlanta Journal and Constitution earlier this summer, Young said the women were "laughing and joking about it" and were "pretty easy with the experience." Young added that he felt most sorry for the supervisor, who did not speak Vietnamese and who was facing court charges.
Young's decision not to consider questions about whether Nike pays its workers minimum wage also seems baffling--after all, that is the labor activists' primary complaint. While the human rights groups have filed scattered reports of worker abuse, activists say nearly all of their complaints are that Nike is not paying the local minimum wage. Nike denies that it is breaking the law.
In the report, Young writes, "I was not asked by Nike to address compensation and `cost of living' issues which some in the human rights and NGO community had hoped would be part of this report." But was he really not asked? According to a January 15 letter from Phil Knight to Young, which was made public in the report, GoodWorks agreed to undertake an independent study of Nike's Code of Conduct, which outlines the basics of Nike's labor practices for its contractors, including prohibitions on child or forced labor and mandatory overtime. The code explicitly discusses wages: "Employers [meaning the subcontractors that run the factories Nike uses] shall pay employees, as a floor, at least the minimum wage required by local law or the prevailing industry wage, whichever is higher, and shall provide legally mandated benefits." Which means that looking at wages was in the code and was therefore well within the scope of Young's assignment. As if that were not enough, the January 15 letter gave Young plenty of room for expansive interpretation: it said he could look into anything he thought was important.
Young has a second explanation for his decision not to consider the wage issue. Determining what is a "`fair wage' in a foreign country is a very complicated process," he writes. "Such an exercise was well beyond the technical capacity of our small firm." Yet, as Nike's critics rightly point out, salary compensation is the one area of foreign labor on which so much has been written that even a novice could quickly get a basic handle on what fair wage estimates are. Provided with a copy of the report, a pro-business economist from the University of Pennsylvania said, "That's idiotic. When I read that, I knew the author was doing a p.r. job, not a serious look. If he really believes it, then he can only be a truly stupid man."
Or a smart one. If Young had excoriated Nike, GoodWorks's first major client, GoodWorks might have had a tough time attracting the next client looking to cleanse its shaky reputation. Young's whitewash perfectly positions GoodWorks International as the public relations agent for future multinationals. But GoodWorks is better than a p.r. firm. The media naturally discount anything they hear from paid spokespeople. But praise from a civil rights leader--now that's something worth paying for.
Speaking of which, Nike and GoodWorks won't say how much the company received for the study. Young wrote in the report: "The total compensation I have personally received for this report is less than I am usually paid for one speech." Note the careful phrasing: Young says nothing about how much Nike paid to GoodWorks (as opposed to Young personally), through which Young, as co-chairman, would presumably profit. Manager, Nike's spokesman, referred all questions on compensation to GoodWorks; he declined to say whether Nike had paid GoodWorks as well as Young. Ide, GoodWorks's spokesman, also declined to comment on pay, referring tnr to what Young wrote in the report.
Sadly, Young appears to be aware that the truth about Nike's operations is more complex than his report indicated. After returning from Asia on May 14, Young held a meeting in Washington with some of the experts whom he actually did consult. By all accounts, Young was unusually candid throughout the meeting. Notes taken by three separate individuals indicate that Young was much more critical at the meeting than he would be one month later in his report. Each set of notes, for instance, quotes Young as saying he knew he had been "snowed" at Nike's Chinese factories. William Conklin of the Asian American Free Labor Institute wrote in an interoffice memo the next day: "On China, AY said he went in expecting the worst but saw relatively good working conditions in the factories. In fact he felt `snowed' in China because the conditions were the best of all the factories." The notes said that Young thought Nike had difficulty recognizing problems in foreign countries.
Young's report makes no mention of these qualms. "I was surprised when I saw how fluffy the report was," said one of the people in the meeting. "That's not how Young was talking in May." Nike's spokesman Manager says the company can't comment on the meeting since its representatives did not attend; Manager stresses that Nike did not pressure Young to come to any specific findings.
Whatever the motivation, the document's physical character has the distinct feel of a public relations ploy--not a serious analysis. While the report weighs in at a hefty seventy-five pages, that's mostly due to the very large typeface and frequent use of boldface throughout. It's actually less than 7,000 words. Reduced to a more standard size of twelve-point text (which is actually 14 percent larger than the type you are now reading), and single- spaced, that comes to just thirteen pages of text. To pad the report even more, GoodWorks inserted photographs on every other page. That's "highly unorthodox," "bizarre" and "totally unprofessional" for a factory analysis, according to three individuals who have done similar analyses for other companies. They say the photographs of smiling, happy workers were inappropriate. (Young, if he had wanted to be critical of Nike, could have just as easily replaced his photos with news pictures of factory workers protesting low wages, which are widely available.)
Nike, meanwhile, remains as pleased as punch with the report. The company promises to "exceed his recommendations"--meaning it will do better than giving the workers business cards. Adds Manager, "Are you questioning the integrity of Andrew Young?"
Sept. 15, 1997 The New Republic
For the past year, the Nike athletic wear company has been the object of intense scrutiny, thanks to reports of widespread labor abuse by its subcontractors in Asia. In Vietnam, 800 laborers walked off the job to protest what they said were poor working conditions; in Indonesia, thousands of workers ransacked their factory this spring, claiming Nike hadn't been paying the $2.50-a-day minimum wage. Tales of exploitation have also sparked demonstrations back home in New York, Los Angeles and Seattle. On February 22, hundreds of activists filled San Francisco's Union Square on the opening day of Niketown, a multi-floor Nike superstore. Outside the entrance, hundreds of protesters chanted, "Just don't do it!" and urged prospective customers to stay away.
Two days after the San Francisco incident, Nike CEO Phil Knight announced that his company was taking swift--and, it would turn out, savvy--action to shore up its meticulously maintained but suddenly threatened public image. Nike was commissioning an independent investigation of its Asian operations: it would make all facilities and internal documents available to a team of inspectors, and it would then allow the inspectors to make their findings public. "Nike has always been a business about excellence and achievement," Knight proclaimed. And, to prove it, Nike would hire not just any old corporate hack to lead the investigation into its overseas operations, but a man of famous independence and renowned stature--a man who had first gained recognition as a civil rights hero, who had won wide acclaim as the mayor of Atlanta, who had served his country as ambassador to the United Nations and who had co-chaired the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games. The honorable Andrew Young, Knight said, would get to the bottom of this.
But Young was not just another pretty public servant summoned from an idyllic private life to answer duty's call. He was a businessman. And his fledgling business was to stimulate investment in developing countries--a mission statement that, it seems, includes helping companies deal with the p.r. messes that can come with such overseas endeavors. To conduct this business, Young had recently founded a firm in Atlanta called GoodWorks International. With Young at the helm, GoodWorks was perfectly positioned to take advantage of an emerging niche market: recently, Texaco, General Motors and Mitsubishi had all invited well-respected former government officials to serve as independent arbiters of complaints made by employees or consumers.
Nike was GoodWorks's first big client, its first chance to send corporate America evidence that GoodWorks did, from the businessman's point of view, good work. And when, four months after Knight's announcement, Young's firm published its seventy-five-page, full-color report on Nike's Asian operations, the client certainly had reason to feel it had gotten its money's worth. There was, Young had concluded, "no evidence or pattern of widespread or systematic abuse or mistreatment of workers" in the twelve operations he examined. To hammer home the point, GoodWorks packed the report with photographs--many taken by Young himself--of smiling workers playing a guitar on their break and relaxing around a television in their dorm. Young had a few criticisms, but his only substantive recommendations were that the shoemaker "consider" independent labor monitoring, that it establish better grievance procedures and that it distribute business cards with the company's "Code of Conduct" translated in the local language, so all foreign workers could read it. Nike wasted no time publicizing word of its vindication. It bought full-page ads in The New York Times and other major newspapers, touting the GoodWorks report. And the good news was hailed in the unpaid media, too. "In several ways," gushed The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Young's hometown paper, "the job is classic Andy Young--a man who ... has spent his life bridging the gaps between rich and poor, black and white, business, government and the international community."
But if the Nike report was "classic Andy Young," it was also a classic sham, marred not just by shoddy methodology but by frequent misrepresentations. The report lists consultants who were never consulted and includes photos of union representatives who, it turns out, were not union officials. Young deliberately avoided the most obvious and controversial question--whether Nike paid its employees fair wages--and, when gathering testimony, he relied almost exclusively on translators employed by the Nike factories. Phone calls to Young's office were referred to a GoodWorks spokesman, who insists Young did his best; he says that looking at these details misses "the big picture" of the report. Young, he notes, never claimed to be an expert on labor issues. But then Nike didn't need a labor expert. This was a public relations problem, and the world's largest sneaker company did what it does best: it purchased a celebrity endorsement. Andrew Young was happy to oblige.
The most obvious and important flaw in the GoodWorks report comes at the end, where there is a list of thirty-four "Non-Governmental Organizations With Whom GoodWorks Met or Spoke." This is the section that gives the publication intellectual credibility: it suggests that Young consulted with some of the leading minds in the field, who could have provided him with the context and guidance to judge whether Nike's operation was abusing workers. But, in a number of cases, Young did not consult with these experts at all. Anita Chan, a researcher who has studied China extensively at the National University of Australia in Canberra, appears on the list. Chan, interviewed by tnr, says she was never contacted by Andrew Young or anybody at GoodWorks. Logan Ide, a GoodWorks spokesman, explains that Chan was included accidentally because her name was on an internal office memo of people they should call. "It was just a simple mistake," Ide says, adding that GoodWorks has formally apologized to Chan and that she has accepted the apology. But that, too, is wrong, according to Chan. "I have never heard from them," she said. "No, they have never called me."
Maniza Naqvi, a child labor expert at the World Bank, did not even know that she was listed in the appendix until she was called by tnr. "My only connection to Nike is that I wear their shoes for running," she says. "I had nothing to do with this study. I wish I wasn't in there." Naqvi recalls but one communication with GoodWorks: she called on March 3 to ask if GoodWorks would send her the report when it was finished. The call lasted less than a minute.
Other experts cited say they, too, had only fleeting contact with the firm. Conrad MacKerron, the former director of social research for Progressive Asset Management Inc., says he had "just a courtesy call" with GoodWorks, and that it lasted less than ten minutes. "It seems a bit disingenuous to put me there," he says. Thuyen Nguyen, the founder of Vietnam Labor Watch, who has toured Nike's factories before, says someone from GoodWorks called him once, for a brief conversation, and that he was told that more substantive contact would follow, but no one ever called him again. Medea Benjamin, the director of Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human rights group, says her lone phone conversation with GoodWorks was over in five minutes. She says she asked for a meeting with Young, but no one called her back.
Not that the conversations would have been so productive anyway. In a conversation that lasted less than fifteen minutes, Jeff Ballinger from Press for Change, a Washington-based labor rights group, says he realized that the folks from GoodWorks "had no idea what they were talking about. I mean they didn't know even the basics."
Logan Ide, GoodWorks's spokesman, says the organization is sorry that so many people feel the report overstates their contributions. GoodWorks was not, he insists, trying to create a false impression. "It surprises me that people will say that," Ide says. "The heading only says we spoke with them. Sometimes it just may have been very, very briefly."
Recently Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" comic strip featured a series in which Kim, an Asian American character, visits a relative working in one of Nike's Vietnamese factories. In the series, the Nike translators manage to render the workers' pleas of mistreatment into joyous reports of a labor paradise. Just a case of Trudeau taking artistic license? No, more like art imitating GoodWorks.
In their field visits to Nike's factories, where they interviewed Nike workers about work conditions, Young was hampered by the fact that he wasn't fluent in the languages of the workers. No problem: Nike provided translators. And Young chose to use Nike's translators, although he could have easily hired his own. "We regularly provide translation for government officials and the media who visit," Nike's spokesman, Veda Manager, says. "By any standard those were acceptable translators."
Any standard? Not quite. In 1980, the International Law Association established the Belgrade Minimal Rules, to set common rules for the inspection of human rights conditions around the world. Rule Number 10, which most human rights groups consider essential, stipulates that analysts should provide all of their own experts. Diane Orentlicher, an international law professor at American University and author of Bearing Witness: The Art and Science of Human Rights Fact-Finding, says that rule certainly applies to translators: "Don't even worry about the Belgrade Rules, doesn't it just violate common sense?" she said. "How can you speak freely when your employer is listening or someone who might talk to the employer is literally in the room?"
Even journalists, who for the most part do not follow the same rigorous rules of inquiry as human rights organizations, and who work under much tighter time constraints, usually meet this basic requirement of fact-finding. Except when it is impossible--when, for instance, state or military authorities insist on providing official translators--experienced foreign correspondents hire their own translators, often at significant cost.
Ide says Young decided to use Nike translators when he was planning the trip with Nike officials; according to Ide, Young thought it would be the most convenient way. Ide concedes that Young had no way of knowing whether the translations were accurate. "We didn't follow [the Belgrade Rules] since we don't have all the technical expertise," Ide adds. "This was not designed to be a great academic study."
Another basic precept in labor and human rights investigations is to spend enough time at the job to really investigate. Young reports that his investigators spent, on average, up to three to four hours in each factory--a fact that prompts derision from veteran inspectors who have worked for manufacturers and unions in the past. Generally, these experts say, inspection teams on a tour will visit each factory at least ten times--for several hours at a shot. Graham Honiker, a consultant for two European apparel manufacturers, said he was "appalled" when he learned that Young spent only four hours in a factory. "You have got to be kidding me," Honiker said. "He might as well have been at Disneyland on a little factory [ride]. You know, where they can all sing, `It's a small world after all.' You know, `It's a world of laughter, a world of tears.'"
Some of the very labor rights experts whom GoodWorks listed as consultants say Young was told that he was not spending enough time on the ground to conduct a thorough study. One such consultant says he personally warned GoodWorks about this on five separate occasions. He was ignored, he says: "Young said he didn't really want to do the project anyway and made clear [that his attitude was] let's get in, get out, get the check and be done with the whole thing." (Young has said before that he was wary of taking the Nike contract: "I was reluctant to get involved with Nike in its Asian shoe conflicts because it would inevitably put me back into the `reasonable moderate' role I agonized over throughout my civil rights career," he wrote in a letter to The New York Times.) "Let's not beat around the bush, it takes you two years on the ground in [a foreign country] before you understand what is really going on," says another consultant. "If you are superhuman, and Andrew Young is, you can do it in one year. You're not going to see or hear anything meaningful being [in a foreign country] for three or four days."
Throughout his trip, Young and other members of his research team took photographs of cheery workers; the glossies, reprinted in the report, show the workers flashing the peace sign or working busily at their jobs. But these photographs are somewhat misleading. On page ten is a picture of Young sitting at a table with a group of Vietnamese men and women. The caption says, "Andrew Young meeting with plant management and union representatives in Vietnam." One man and one woman from the photo appear again on page twenty-two, posing with Young in front of a sign that says "Trade Union." Here the caption reads: "Andrew Young with union representatives at Vietnamese factory."
This picture comes as something of a shock to the Vietnamese Confederation of Labor, which represents workers at the Nike factory. Faxed a copy of the photograph, the confederation's officials said they do not know who the individuals are. When pressed, Veda Manager, Nike's spokesman, said they are Nike employees, who collect their salaries from the company, not the union or the government. "But they represent the workers," Manager says: although they have regular jobs in the factory, they are also supposed to look out for the workers' rights.
So, these workers were not exactly union officials, but they were, in Nike's account, still union representatives of a sort, the equivalent of shop stewards in a factory. And, by GoodWorks's own say-so, its investigators' process for identifying the appropriate union representatives was less than what you might call searching. GoodWorks spokesman Ide says the team simply allowed Nike to point out the appropriate union representatives with whom Young should speak. "Vietnam has a less developed understanding of organized labor and unions," Ide explains. "They don't have unions like we do. And these were the people."
Perhaps they were. And perhaps they did indeed give Young valuable information about conditions in the Nike factory from the union perspective. But, if they did, there is no evidence of this in Young's report. There is no quote, positive or negative, from any union representative; there is no account of how the management treats the union representatives or any information about whether the union representatives have any say in the factory's operation. And, while Vietnam may indeed have a different union structure from the West, a well-developed union system does exist there, and this system boasts union officials who are not paid by the company. Young and his team did not speak to these people.
One can understand why Nike might be reluctant to arrange a meeting with Hoang Thi Khanh, the union official who is in charge of the plant, since she has a reputation for being "tough as nails" when it comes to negotiating for better factory conditions; she also publicly criticized Nike earlier this year. Not only is Hoang Thi Khanh the vice chairman of the Vietnam Labor Confederation, she is also editor-in-chief of The Laborer, one of the best-selling local newspapers. Young could have met with Khanh--but, oddly, he declined repeated opportunities to do so. Thuyen Nguyen, the head of Vietnam Labor Watch, called Young's office two or three times to set up the meeting. At the time of the calls, Khanh was actually in the U.S. for several weeks, meeting with federal officials in Washington, D.C., and was anxious to visit Young; Khanh even offered to visit Atlanta if it was more convenient, Nguyen says. But Nguyen was told that GoodWorks wasn't interested.
And the photographs of would-be union officials aren't the only ones to raise questions about Young's examination of the factories. On page thirty-four appears a picture--also taken by Young--of several female workers, many with their arms crossed, sitting at a table. The caption says that these are the women who were "forced to run around Vietnamese factory." The reference is to a well-publicized event in which factory supervisors forced fifty-six Vietnamese factory workers to run laps around the factory because they had not worn proper shoes to work or had not met production quotas. The run was so strenuous that twelve of the women had to be hospitalized. After a wire story reported the incident, Vietnamese police arrested the supervisor.
At the time, the event was widely condemned in the media. But, in an interview with The Atlanta Journal and Constitution earlier this summer, Young said the women were "laughing and joking about it" and were "pretty easy with the experience." Young added that he felt most sorry for the supervisor, who did not speak Vietnamese and who was facing court charges.
Young's decision not to consider questions about whether Nike pays its workers minimum wage also seems baffling--after all, that is the labor activists' primary complaint. While the human rights groups have filed scattered reports of worker abuse, activists say nearly all of their complaints are that Nike is not paying the local minimum wage. Nike denies that it is breaking the law.
In the report, Young writes, "I was not asked by Nike to address compensation and `cost of living' issues which some in the human rights and NGO community had hoped would be part of this report." But was he really not asked? According to a January 15 letter from Phil Knight to Young, which was made public in the report, GoodWorks agreed to undertake an independent study of Nike's Code of Conduct, which outlines the basics of Nike's labor practices for its contractors, including prohibitions on child or forced labor and mandatory overtime. The code explicitly discusses wages: "Employers [meaning the subcontractors that run the factories Nike uses] shall pay employees, as a floor, at least the minimum wage required by local law or the prevailing industry wage, whichever is higher, and shall provide legally mandated benefits." Which means that looking at wages was in the code and was therefore well within the scope of Young's assignment. As if that were not enough, the January 15 letter gave Young plenty of room for expansive interpretation: it said he could look into anything he thought was important.
Young has a second explanation for his decision not to consider the wage issue. Determining what is a "`fair wage' in a foreign country is a very complicated process," he writes. "Such an exercise was well beyond the technical capacity of our small firm." Yet, as Nike's critics rightly point out, salary compensation is the one area of foreign labor on which so much has been written that even a novice could quickly get a basic handle on what fair wage estimates are. Provided with a copy of the report, a pro-business economist from the University of Pennsylvania said, "That's idiotic. When I read that, I knew the author was doing a p.r. job, not a serious look. If he really believes it, then he can only be a truly stupid man."
Or a smart one. If Young had excoriated Nike, GoodWorks's first major client, GoodWorks might have had a tough time attracting the next client looking to cleanse its shaky reputation. Young's whitewash perfectly positions GoodWorks International as the public relations agent for future multinationals. But GoodWorks is better than a p.r. firm. The media naturally discount anything they hear from paid spokespeople. But praise from a civil rights leader--now that's something worth paying for.
Speaking of which, Nike and GoodWorks won't say how much the company received for the study. Young wrote in the report: "The total compensation I have personally received for this report is less than I am usually paid for one speech." Note the careful phrasing: Young says nothing about how much Nike paid to GoodWorks (as opposed to Young personally), through which Young, as co-chairman, would presumably profit. Manager, Nike's spokesman, referred all questions on compensation to GoodWorks; he declined to say whether Nike had paid GoodWorks as well as Young. Ide, GoodWorks's spokesman, also declined to comment on pay, referring tnr to what Young wrote in the report.
Sadly, Young appears to be aware that the truth about Nike's operations is more complex than his report indicated. After returning from Asia on May 14, Young held a meeting in Washington with some of the experts whom he actually did consult. By all accounts, Young was unusually candid throughout the meeting. Notes taken by three separate individuals indicate that Young was much more critical at the meeting than he would be one month later in his report. Each set of notes, for instance, quotes Young as saying he knew he had been "snowed" at Nike's Chinese factories. William Conklin of the Asian American Free Labor Institute wrote in an interoffice memo the next day: "On China, AY said he went in expecting the worst but saw relatively good working conditions in the factories. In fact he felt `snowed' in China because the conditions were the best of all the factories." The notes said that Young thought Nike had difficulty recognizing problems in foreign countries.
Young's report makes no mention of these qualms. "I was surprised when I saw how fluffy the report was," said one of the people in the meeting. "That's not how Young was talking in May." Nike's spokesman Manager says the company can't comment on the meeting since its representatives did not attend; Manager stresses that Nike did not pressure Young to come to any specific findings.
Whatever the motivation, the document's physical character has the distinct feel of a public relations ploy--not a serious analysis. While the report weighs in at a hefty seventy-five pages, that's mostly due to the very large typeface and frequent use of boldface throughout. It's actually less than 7,000 words. Reduced to a more standard size of twelve-point text (which is actually 14 percent larger than the type you are now reading), and single- spaced, that comes to just thirteen pages of text. To pad the report even more, GoodWorks inserted photographs on every other page. That's "highly unorthodox," "bizarre" and "totally unprofessional" for a factory analysis, according to three individuals who have done similar analyses for other companies. They say the photographs of smiling, happy workers were inappropriate. (Young, if he had wanted to be critical of Nike, could have just as easily replaced his photos with news pictures of factory workers protesting low wages, which are widely available.)
Nike, meanwhile, remains as pleased as punch with the report. The company promises to "exceed his recommendations"--meaning it will do better than giving the workers business cards. Adds Manager, "Are you questioning the integrity of Andrew Young?"
Slavery Chic
by Stephen Glass
Mount Vernon Postcard
In think tanks, on Capitol Hill, even at political magazines, summer interns complain they get treated like slaves. At a summer program on the grounds of Mount Vernon, that's the point. Or at least it's supposed to be. As part of a program called "George Washington: Pioneer Farmer," seven college students are spending the summer on what's left of the first president's Virginia plantation, supposedly living their lives much as his slaves did 200 years ago. Using Washington's own notes as a guide, they work the same fields, tend the same kinds of livestock, even don reproductions of the same knickerbockers and waistcoats Washington's hands once wore.
For the Mount Vernon tourists, these interns are part of the attraction--a living exhibit of plantation life. For the students, all of whom are white, the idea is not merely to learn about agriculture but also to experience, firsthand, slavery--the kind of culturally defining ordeal that, according to the practitioners of identity politics, whites might not otherwise grasp.
But a really authentic slave experience is hard to find. I recently spent a day working alongside the intern-slaves at Mount Vernon, and one thing was clear: the Founding Father's hands never had it this good. These slaves work no more than eight hours a day, and they get weekends and evenings off. They have private rooms, with indoor plumbing. They enjoy television and the Internet, and, when they wish for music, they switch on their boom boxes instead of strumming on their old banjos. And, oh yes, they are paid $200 per week--the same princely sum as a tnr intern.
Actually, the slaves at Mount Vernon aren't even called "slaves." One intern told me that label was "classist"; another said it was "imposed" and Eurocentric, arguing that slaves should have the right to choose their own labels. And still another said it "really keeps you down." The preferred term is "field worker." Apparently that denotes the nature of the work, not the level of social standing. Progressive labor laws make another essential aspect of slavery illegal--corporal punishment. In fact, there's no hostility between the taskmasters and the slaves. And since Mount Vernon doesn't offer overtime, the only incentive is that they get to take back to college a set of authentic garb, stitched by an Indiana company that specializes in early American clothing.
In fairness, the work isn't easy. Over the course of a day, each slave works at about five different tasks. I was horrible at all of them. My day started near the barn, where a fellow slave asked me to watch a lamb that within a few seconds had bolted for the wheat fields. I thought about letting the lamb go free, out of solidarity. But the animal stopped after a few yards and wandered back. It was no better a runaway than I was a slave.
I didn't fare much better as a tour guide-slave. As Jimmy Guckman, a junior tourist from Los Angeles, petted the lamb's soft pelt, I imparted a bit of knowledge. "That's where cotton comes from," I said. The 5-year-old, a surprisingly well-informed young fellow, rolled his eyes at me. "Ya mean wool,” he said. Right. Wool. My lack of farm knowledge wasn't the only betrayal of inauthenticity. Although the adults rarely mentioned it, kids quickly noticed the obvious fact that not one of us was black. When I asked John Riley, Mount Vernon's assistant to the director, about the discrepancy, he became a little defensive. Mount Vernon, he insisted, is an equal opportunity employer. It just seems Washington's farm has a hard time attracting black slaves. Mount Vernon seems uneasily aware of its vulnerability to charges of institutional racism in its color-blind slave program. In conversations with several program officials, I got the clear impression that Mount Vernon would greet any black applicant with great eagerness, possibly even preferential treatment. "We'd like to have minorities here," said one official. "I'm sure if we knew the applicant was black, we'd help them along. It would be great for us, and for them." It's come to this: affirmative action on the plantation.
Here, however, Mount Vernon runs into another problem. The most efficient way to meet affirmative action goals is to set lower standards for minority hires. But Mount Vernon maintains standards that are quite exclusionary. Not just anybody gets to be a slave; the plantation only considers applicants who have agricultural experience. Such restrictions may unfairly discriminate against black applicants. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only 18,816 of America's 1,925,300 farms, or 1 percent, are operated by blacks. Although there are certainly blacks who work on farms but don't own them, the pool of black applicants who can meet Mount Vernon's agricultural requirement is obviously far smaller than that of whites.
Even for those applicants who make it past this hurdle, the competition is fierce: in recent years, as many as 400 students have applied for the handful of slots. Each applicant wrote an essay and submitted at least two letters of recommendation. The program accepts about 5 percent of the applicants, making it more selective than the Ivy League.
Alas, such competition yields a crop of slaves who seem more concerned with cultivating their resumes than their wheat. "I don't think anyone here wants to go into this field full time," explained Kara David, an intern from Texas. Most hope to attend graduate school, or land high-paying jobs in agribusiness. "I think it will really show that I am dedicated to my job," says another intern. "I mean it will demonstrate that I will break my back working hard for them."
Well, not really break. More like slightly strain. When it began raining later in the day, the slaves ditched their posts and searched for cover, abandoning a family of tourists near the fields. That left program developer Sandy Newton to make sure the tourists found shelter. After that, she had to run through the soaked fields--petticoat, bonnet and all--in order to save the fragile and expensive scarecrows from the strong winds.
After the rain subsided, the slaves eventually wandered back. A few confessed that they had lingered away from work simply because slavery can be "boring." "I guess I can relate to them," one said. "For slaves, every day was the same routine. Each day was just another day, another dollar." Only without the dollar.
Mount Vernon Postcard
In think tanks, on Capitol Hill, even at political magazines, summer interns complain they get treated like slaves. At a summer program on the grounds of Mount Vernon, that's the point. Or at least it's supposed to be. As part of a program called "George Washington: Pioneer Farmer," seven college students are spending the summer on what's left of the first president's Virginia plantation, supposedly living their lives much as his slaves did 200 years ago. Using Washington's own notes as a guide, they work the same fields, tend the same kinds of livestock, even don reproductions of the same knickerbockers and waistcoats Washington's hands once wore.
For the Mount Vernon tourists, these interns are part of the attraction--a living exhibit of plantation life. For the students, all of whom are white, the idea is not merely to learn about agriculture but also to experience, firsthand, slavery--the kind of culturally defining ordeal that, according to the practitioners of identity politics, whites might not otherwise grasp.
But a really authentic slave experience is hard to find. I recently spent a day working alongside the intern-slaves at Mount Vernon, and one thing was clear: the Founding Father's hands never had it this good. These slaves work no more than eight hours a day, and they get weekends and evenings off. They have private rooms, with indoor plumbing. They enjoy television and the Internet, and, when they wish for music, they switch on their boom boxes instead of strumming on their old banjos. And, oh yes, they are paid $200 per week--the same princely sum as a tnr intern.
Actually, the slaves at Mount Vernon aren't even called "slaves." One intern told me that label was "classist"; another said it was "imposed" and Eurocentric, arguing that slaves should have the right to choose their own labels. And still another said it "really keeps you down." The preferred term is "field worker." Apparently that denotes the nature of the work, not the level of social standing. Progressive labor laws make another essential aspect of slavery illegal--corporal punishment. In fact, there's no hostility between the taskmasters and the slaves. And since Mount Vernon doesn't offer overtime, the only incentive is that they get to take back to college a set of authentic garb, stitched by an Indiana company that specializes in early American clothing.
In fairness, the work isn't easy. Over the course of a day, each slave works at about five different tasks. I was horrible at all of them. My day started near the barn, where a fellow slave asked me to watch a lamb that within a few seconds had bolted for the wheat fields. I thought about letting the lamb go free, out of solidarity. But the animal stopped after a few yards and wandered back. It was no better a runaway than I was a slave.
I didn't fare much better as a tour guide-slave. As Jimmy Guckman, a junior tourist from Los Angeles, petted the lamb's soft pelt, I imparted a bit of knowledge. "That's where cotton comes from," I said. The 5-year-old, a surprisingly well-informed young fellow, rolled his eyes at me. "Ya mean wool,” he said. Right. Wool. My lack of farm knowledge wasn't the only betrayal of inauthenticity. Although the adults rarely mentioned it, kids quickly noticed the obvious fact that not one of us was black. When I asked John Riley, Mount Vernon's assistant to the director, about the discrepancy, he became a little defensive. Mount Vernon, he insisted, is an equal opportunity employer. It just seems Washington's farm has a hard time attracting black slaves. Mount Vernon seems uneasily aware of its vulnerability to charges of institutional racism in its color-blind slave program. In conversations with several program officials, I got the clear impression that Mount Vernon would greet any black applicant with great eagerness, possibly even preferential treatment. "We'd like to have minorities here," said one official. "I'm sure if we knew the applicant was black, we'd help them along. It would be great for us, and for them." It's come to this: affirmative action on the plantation.
Here, however, Mount Vernon runs into another problem. The most efficient way to meet affirmative action goals is to set lower standards for minority hires. But Mount Vernon maintains standards that are quite exclusionary. Not just anybody gets to be a slave; the plantation only considers applicants who have agricultural experience. Such restrictions may unfairly discriminate against black applicants. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only 18,816 of America's 1,925,300 farms, or 1 percent, are operated by blacks. Although there are certainly blacks who work on farms but don't own them, the pool of black applicants who can meet Mount Vernon's agricultural requirement is obviously far smaller than that of whites.
Even for those applicants who make it past this hurdle, the competition is fierce: in recent years, as many as 400 students have applied for the handful of slots. Each applicant wrote an essay and submitted at least two letters of recommendation. The program accepts about 5 percent of the applicants, making it more selective than the Ivy League.
Alas, such competition yields a crop of slaves who seem more concerned with cultivating their resumes than their wheat. "I don't think anyone here wants to go into this field full time," explained Kara David, an intern from Texas. Most hope to attend graduate school, or land high-paying jobs in agribusiness. "I think it will really show that I am dedicated to my job," says another intern. "I mean it will demonstrate that I will break my back working hard for them."
Well, not really break. More like slightly strain. When it began raining later in the day, the slaves ditched their posts and searched for cover, abandoning a family of tourists near the fields. That left program developer Sandy Newton to make sure the tourists found shelter. After that, she had to run through the soaked fields--petticoat, bonnet and all--in order to save the fragile and expensive scarecrows from the strong winds.
After the rain subsided, the slaves eventually wandered back. A few confessed that they had lingered away from work simply because slavery can be "boring." "I guess I can relate to them," one said. "For slaves, every day was the same routine. Each day was just another day, another dollar." Only without the dollar.
Writing on the Wall
by Stephen Glass
When Stanley Galloway, environmental engineer, steps into his small office near Dale City, Virginia, he inhales deeply through his nose, holds his breath and then exhales. His eyelids drop halfway, almost as if he is in prayer. Galloway has the appearance of a man who spends a lot of time sweating the details. The pocket of his very starched, short-sleeved, button-down shirt is overstuffed with a small ruler, five pens, two mechanical pencils and a half-consumed Pink Pearl eraser. But, in the sanctity of his office, his gangly limbs hang calmly near his body, his raced speech slows. He breathes deeply two more times. Then he reaches into a small glass fishbowl on his desk and draws a green card. "The mind, like a parachute," he reads aloud while the edges of his lips curl into a slight, beatific smile, "functions only when open." He pauses, and, behind his thick glasses, his pupils roll upwards, deep in thought. "That's a nice one, yes, a really nice one," he says. "Yes, I do feel much better."
It is only natural that Galloway's office should bring balm to his soul. It is a chapel of sorts, a shrine to worker productivity. Five framed posters line the wood-paneled walls. One is of a jogger at dusk, running on an endless road. The large orange type underneath says "Quality: The race for quality has no finish line." Another, titled "Teamwork," features rowers at dawn. On Galloway's desk is a mug emblazoned with the words: "Make it Happen." On his sport jacket, he wears a brass lapel pin engraved with the words: "Expect to Win."
Over the past eighteen months, Galloway says he has spent more than $1,500 on motivational tools such as these, and he is not satiated yet. "I really wish I could buy some more," Galloway says, wistfully. He is saving money to buy the $120, three-foot-tall "Optimism" lithograph for his mailman. "My wife's friends are sort of sick of me telling them about the virtues of workplace motivation, so I've moved on to other people," he says. "I really need to tell as many people as possible. These successories are points of light during the murky times."
"Successories." That is the term of art, or rather commerce, for self-propaganda of the sort Galloway has fallen in love with, and it is a term that has become increasingly familiar in corporate America. Successories, Inc.--the industry giant that offers more than 6,000 products--has increased sales fourteen-fold in seven years to $55 million. In addition to catalog sales, the suburban Chicago company is one of the country's fastest-growing chain-stores; it already has 100 shops covering nearly every state. The company projects that this number will triple in the next three years. Big corporations swear by successories. Southwest Airlines recently ordered $38,000 in posters for its corporate offices. Coca-Cola, Xerox, Ford, 3M and AT&T are also regular clients.
But, unlike the dozens of management trends--from teams to Total Quality Management--that come and go each year, successories have ignited a firestorm in the otherwise dreary field of human resources. In one camp is a group of academics and irritated employees called "The Hards," in light of their endless demands for hard data to prove that successories work. In the other camp are corporate executives and a few business school professors called "The Sensors," who maintain that not all information can be quantified and that people like Galloway prove successories work.
Eighty miles south of Dale City, just west of Richmond, five women sit at Barbara Fenn's dining room table licking envelopes. Fenn, a nervous woman with frizzy brown hair and bright red glasses, is the leader of a group called Successories Hurt Employees, often called SHURE. The group believes that successories, at best, irritate workers and, at worst, boost employee cynicism, actually reducing productivity. She cites herself as a case study. For more than twenty years, Fenn has worked as a paralegal at a local law firm. She says she loved going to work each morning until last year, when the firm hung a large "Teamwork" poster over her desk. "I couldn't take it. It was so insulting. It's like saying, 'You haven't been part of a team so get on board already,'" Fenn says. "But the pens, the pens angered me more." The pens came three months after the poster. One day, Fenn arrived at work to find that the firm had replaced all the paralegals' pens with new, successorized writing utensils, pens imprinted with messages like "Make it Happen" and "Whatever it Takes" inscribed on the barrel. The tipping point for Fenn came on Christmas, when the firm installed a new screen saver on her computer. "Every time I paused a motivational message popped up and filled my screen," Fenn says. "That was the last straw. It's just like a religion. Could you imagine if a Jew for Jesus or a born-again Christian was putting their messages over your desk and on your computer? I don't need to be proselytized all day long. I do my job."
On January 2, Fenn and a handful of paralegals formed SHURE and threatened to walk out if the law firm didn't remove the successories. The partners laughed. So, the paralegal team came to work twenty minutes late the next Monday. On Tuesday, they arrived forty minutes late. By Wednesday, the successories were gone. In place of the "Teamwork" poster was a framed Monet print.
"It is a quiet, brutal war," says a Hard at the University of Pennsylvania who asked that his name not be used since many of his colleagues are Sensors. "For [Sensors, successories] is a church, and these posters are the idols. They have to convert you to it."
It has been a long time since American businesses tried to motivate their workers with moralistic slogans. In the 1920s and '30s, popular signs lectured: "Let's Make Good for Mother." But the posters petered out in the 1950s and '60s when the father of quality-control, W. Edwards Deming, urged managers to eliminate slogans. Mac Anderson, the founder of Successories, Inc., is credited by many with resurrecting motivational sayings in 1985, when he sold 1.7 million copies of an inspirational quote book. Soon after, Anderson started putting the quotes on plaques, posters and paperweights.
The natural insecurity of businessmen perpetuated the rise of successories. When one company started successorizing, the other companies in that field got nervous: What if it worked? It's safer to err on the side of imitation. Successories for one became successories for all. "Every guy who came in here told us we had to have more pictures of forests with inspirational poems under them, more slogans and more quips," says a human resources manager of a Midwestern Fortune 500 company who quietly sides with the Hards. "They were everywhere. Even elevators and bathroom stalls; you couldn't escape. You're sitting on the toilet and you need to see a sign that tells you to work harder? I don't think so."
Up until last October, the Hards were a marginal and unorganized crew. But, that month, the Conference Board, a New York research group that tracks consumer confidence for the government, published a scathing article about successories in its monthly newsletter. Under the headline "Simple--or Simple-Minded?" the Conference Board ridiculed the posters as more self-help than motivation.
The article galvanized the Hards. One of them, Warren Bennis, a professor of business administration at the University of Southern California, dismisses successories as worthless. "The only people they help are the people who make them," he says. "That's not good management, that's money wasted." Rick Roessler, a University of Arkansas professor who co-authored a book on modifying work behavior, says research indicates that successories are only effective if they are specific and linked to training. Otherwise, he jokes, they "just become a part of the wallpaper."
Bennis and many other Hards say their experience demonstrates that employees are so cynical about successories that the products actually reduce efficiency. "When I go to a corporation to consult," Bennis says. "I often see the employees have scribbled comments on the posters, or are throwing darts at them. Let's be honest: that's not working, and that's taking up time."
Anderson dismisses successories' critics and points to his company's roster of happy customers. "We get so many letters praising our products and telling us how they helped them get inspired through rough times," he says. "That's why we think they work." He pauses, then adds: "Look, you're going to decorate your walls anyway. Why not use something that's good for the team?"
At the moment, the battle between the Hards and the Sensors seems to be going pretty much the Sensors' way, the successories way. Financial analysts expect Successories, Inc. and its competitors to post record sales this year. And company executives say they plan to expand their market by introducing a home line and a children's line. But Fenn and the other members of SHURE say they're "in it for the long haul," and have just begun publishing a newsletter called The Hards' Way. They also sell a parody version of Successories, Inc.'s computer screen saver. It shows the boat in the "Teamwork" poster capsized and a rower drowning. They hope to eventually use the profits to buy back successories from companies that agree to destroy them.
The Hards might take heart, though, if they knew the dirty little secret at Successories, Inc. Calling the company's headquarters is certainly an inspiring experience. The sound-wallpaper a caller gets on hold is not the traditional Muzak, but quips from philosophers, politicians and sports heroes reminding the caller never to "shy away from challenges." Between quotes, the recording repeats Successories' slogan: "Our only goal is simple: to help you reach yours." Unfortunately, the company hasn't even done that well meeting its own goal. Despite record sales, creative advertising and multiplying franchises, Successories, Inc. lost millions of dollars over the past few years. In 1995, the once-profitable company posted a $7.7 million loss despite an all-time sales high. The main reason, by many accounts: low worker morale. One former employee says he "goofed off more there than any of the other four jobs [I] had before." Another says: "We spent a lot of time playing jokes on each other and wandering around."
In fact, productivity hit such a low in 1995 that the company hired James Beltrame, who had earned a reputation as a corporate turnaround expert. Beltrame cut 30 percent of the company's workforce, replacing them with new people, including an entirely new management team. He also condensed the company's eight facilities into one new building. Successories posted a $25,000 profit as of November. "Sure, there are still posters on the walls," says a longtime employee. "There have to be because that's what we sell. But no one pays any attention to it anymore."
When Stanley Galloway, environmental engineer, steps into his small office near Dale City, Virginia, he inhales deeply through his nose, holds his breath and then exhales. His eyelids drop halfway, almost as if he is in prayer. Galloway has the appearance of a man who spends a lot of time sweating the details. The pocket of his very starched, short-sleeved, button-down shirt is overstuffed with a small ruler, five pens, two mechanical pencils and a half-consumed Pink Pearl eraser. But, in the sanctity of his office, his gangly limbs hang calmly near his body, his raced speech slows. He breathes deeply two more times. Then he reaches into a small glass fishbowl on his desk and draws a green card. "The mind, like a parachute," he reads aloud while the edges of his lips curl into a slight, beatific smile, "functions only when open." He pauses, and, behind his thick glasses, his pupils roll upwards, deep in thought. "That's a nice one, yes, a really nice one," he says. "Yes, I do feel much better."
It is only natural that Galloway's office should bring balm to his soul. It is a chapel of sorts, a shrine to worker productivity. Five framed posters line the wood-paneled walls. One is of a jogger at dusk, running on an endless road. The large orange type underneath says "Quality: The race for quality has no finish line." Another, titled "Teamwork," features rowers at dawn. On Galloway's desk is a mug emblazoned with the words: "Make it Happen." On his sport jacket, he wears a brass lapel pin engraved with the words: "Expect to Win."
Over the past eighteen months, Galloway says he has spent more than $1,500 on motivational tools such as these, and he is not satiated yet. "I really wish I could buy some more," Galloway says, wistfully. He is saving money to buy the $120, three-foot-tall "Optimism" lithograph for his mailman. "My wife's friends are sort of sick of me telling them about the virtues of workplace motivation, so I've moved on to other people," he says. "I really need to tell as many people as possible. These successories are points of light during the murky times."
"Successories." That is the term of art, or rather commerce, for self-propaganda of the sort Galloway has fallen in love with, and it is a term that has become increasingly familiar in corporate America. Successories, Inc.--the industry giant that offers more than 6,000 products--has increased sales fourteen-fold in seven years to $55 million. In addition to catalog sales, the suburban Chicago company is one of the country's fastest-growing chain-stores; it already has 100 shops covering nearly every state. The company projects that this number will triple in the next three years. Big corporations swear by successories. Southwest Airlines recently ordered $38,000 in posters for its corporate offices. Coca-Cola, Xerox, Ford, 3M and AT&T are also regular clients.
But, unlike the dozens of management trends--from teams to Total Quality Management--that come and go each year, successories have ignited a firestorm in the otherwise dreary field of human resources. In one camp is a group of academics and irritated employees called "The Hards," in light of their endless demands for hard data to prove that successories work. In the other camp are corporate executives and a few business school professors called "The Sensors," who maintain that not all information can be quantified and that people like Galloway prove successories work.
Eighty miles south of Dale City, just west of Richmond, five women sit at Barbara Fenn's dining room table licking envelopes. Fenn, a nervous woman with frizzy brown hair and bright red glasses, is the leader of a group called Successories Hurt Employees, often called SHURE. The group believes that successories, at best, irritate workers and, at worst, boost employee cynicism, actually reducing productivity. She cites herself as a case study. For more than twenty years, Fenn has worked as a paralegal at a local law firm. She says she loved going to work each morning until last year, when the firm hung a large "Teamwork" poster over her desk. "I couldn't take it. It was so insulting. It's like saying, 'You haven't been part of a team so get on board already,'" Fenn says. "But the pens, the pens angered me more." The pens came three months after the poster. One day, Fenn arrived at work to find that the firm had replaced all the paralegals' pens with new, successorized writing utensils, pens imprinted with messages like "Make it Happen" and "Whatever it Takes" inscribed on the barrel. The tipping point for Fenn came on Christmas, when the firm installed a new screen saver on her computer. "Every time I paused a motivational message popped up and filled my screen," Fenn says. "That was the last straw. It's just like a religion. Could you imagine if a Jew for Jesus or a born-again Christian was putting their messages over your desk and on your computer? I don't need to be proselytized all day long. I do my job."
On January 2, Fenn and a handful of paralegals formed SHURE and threatened to walk out if the law firm didn't remove the successories. The partners laughed. So, the paralegal team came to work twenty minutes late the next Monday. On Tuesday, they arrived forty minutes late. By Wednesday, the successories were gone. In place of the "Teamwork" poster was a framed Monet print.
"It is a quiet, brutal war," says a Hard at the University of Pennsylvania who asked that his name not be used since many of his colleagues are Sensors. "For [Sensors, successories] is a church, and these posters are the idols. They have to convert you to it."
It has been a long time since American businesses tried to motivate their workers with moralistic slogans. In the 1920s and '30s, popular signs lectured: "Let's Make Good for Mother." But the posters petered out in the 1950s and '60s when the father of quality-control, W. Edwards Deming, urged managers to eliminate slogans. Mac Anderson, the founder of Successories, Inc., is credited by many with resurrecting motivational sayings in 1985, when he sold 1.7 million copies of an inspirational quote book. Soon after, Anderson started putting the quotes on plaques, posters and paperweights.
The natural insecurity of businessmen perpetuated the rise of successories. When one company started successorizing, the other companies in that field got nervous: What if it worked? It's safer to err on the side of imitation. Successories for one became successories for all. "Every guy who came in here told us we had to have more pictures of forests with inspirational poems under them, more slogans and more quips," says a human resources manager of a Midwestern Fortune 500 company who quietly sides with the Hards. "They were everywhere. Even elevators and bathroom stalls; you couldn't escape. You're sitting on the toilet and you need to see a sign that tells you to work harder? I don't think so."
Up until last October, the Hards were a marginal and unorganized crew. But, that month, the Conference Board, a New York research group that tracks consumer confidence for the government, published a scathing article about successories in its monthly newsletter. Under the headline "Simple--or Simple-Minded?" the Conference Board ridiculed the posters as more self-help than motivation.
The article galvanized the Hards. One of them, Warren Bennis, a professor of business administration at the University of Southern California, dismisses successories as worthless. "The only people they help are the people who make them," he says. "That's not good management, that's money wasted." Rick Roessler, a University of Arkansas professor who co-authored a book on modifying work behavior, says research indicates that successories are only effective if they are specific and linked to training. Otherwise, he jokes, they "just become a part of the wallpaper."
Bennis and many other Hards say their experience demonstrates that employees are so cynical about successories that the products actually reduce efficiency. "When I go to a corporation to consult," Bennis says. "I often see the employees have scribbled comments on the posters, or are throwing darts at them. Let's be honest: that's not working, and that's taking up time."
Anderson dismisses successories' critics and points to his company's roster of happy customers. "We get so many letters praising our products and telling us how they helped them get inspired through rough times," he says. "That's why we think they work." He pauses, then adds: "Look, you're going to decorate your walls anyway. Why not use something that's good for the team?"
At the moment, the battle between the Hards and the Sensors seems to be going pretty much the Sensors' way, the successories way. Financial analysts expect Successories, Inc. and its competitors to post record sales this year. And company executives say they plan to expand their market by introducing a home line and a children's line. But Fenn and the other members of SHURE say they're "in it for the long haul," and have just begun publishing a newsletter called The Hards' Way. They also sell a parody version of Successories, Inc.'s computer screen saver. It shows the boat in the "Teamwork" poster capsized and a rower drowning. They hope to eventually use the profits to buy back successories from companies that agree to destroy them.
The Hards might take heart, though, if they knew the dirty little secret at Successories, Inc. Calling the company's headquarters is certainly an inspiring experience. The sound-wallpaper a caller gets on hold is not the traditional Muzak, but quips from philosophers, politicians and sports heroes reminding the caller never to "shy away from challenges." Between quotes, the recording repeats Successories' slogan: "Our only goal is simple: to help you reach yours." Unfortunately, the company hasn't even done that well meeting its own goal. Despite record sales, creative advertising and multiplying franchises, Successories, Inc. lost millions of dollars over the past few years. In 1995, the once-profitable company posted a $7.7 million loss despite an all-time sales high. The main reason, by many accounts: low worker morale. One former employee says he "goofed off more there than any of the other four jobs [I] had before." Another says: "We spent a lot of time playing jokes on each other and wandering around."
In fact, productivity hit such a low in 1995 that the company hired James Beltrame, who had earned a reputation as a corporate turnaround expert. Beltrame cut 30 percent of the company's workforce, replacing them with new people, including an entirely new management team. He also condensed the company's eight facilities into one new building. Successories posted a $25,000 profit as of November. "Sure, there are still posters on the walls," says a longtime employee. "There have to be because that's what we sell. But no one pays any attention to it anymore."
Don't You D.A.R.E.
The anti-drug program called D.A.R.E. is popular, well-funded, and widespread. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work - and saying so can get you in big trouble.
by Stephen Glass
On January 28, 1991, at 4 p.m., 10-year-old Darrin Davis, of Douglasville, Georgia, returned from school to his suburban home. Both of Darrin's parents were at work, and he let himself in. He immediately went to his parents' bedroom to call his mother, who wouldn't be home for another two hours. After talking to her on the phone, Darrin began searching the bedroom for candy; his parents often hid sweets there. He found none. Instead, after climbing on top of a chair, Darrin saw a white powder on a small makeup mirror. At that point, Darrin would later say, he thought of something he had recently been taught in school. Darrin's fourth-grade class had been visited by a police officer under the auspices of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, or DARE, as it is known. One of the things the DARE officer had told Darrin and his classmates was that they should inform the police if they ever saw anyone - including their parents - use drugs. The kids were shown a video that reinforced the point.
Although Darrin had never seen either of his parents use drugs, he decided, based on what he had learned in DARE, that the substance on the mirror was powdered cocaine. So he did what the DARE officer had told him to do: he called 911 and turned in his parents. Two hours later, when the Davises returned home, they were handcuffed and arrested while Darrin watched. A police officer put his hand on Darrin's shoulder, and told the boy he had done "the right thing." Darrin's father spent the next three months in jail, much to Darrin's surprise and dismay. "I thought the police would come get the drugs and tell them that drugs are wrong," the boy told a local reporter. "They never said they would arrest them. It didn't say that in the video." When the sheriff's office told the boy he was too young to visit his dad in jail, Darrin set the neighbors' house on fire, causing $14,000 in damages. "I asked him why he did it," Darrin's mother said. "He said he wanted to be put in jail with his daddy."
As it turned out, the substance on the mirror was not cocaine. The Davises' lawyer says it was a small amount of speed. Both the Davises were charged with simple possession. Ultimately, the Georgia Supreme Court ordered the charges dropped, primarily on the grounds that the police had improperly searched the Davis home. The damage, though, was done. Darrin's telephone call destroyed his family. Heavy media coverage of the 10-year-old who had turned in his own parents ruined the Davises' reputation. Legal fees nearly bankrupted them, and they came close to losing their home. They filed for divorce shortly after the criminal charges were dropped.
In January 1994, James Bovard, a freelance writer, wrote an account of the Davis case for The Washington Post's prestigious Sunday Outlook section. Bovard used the case to criticize DARE for "turning children into informants" in the war on drugs. Although Bovard had called DARE to get the organization's comment, DARE officials had declined to talk more than briefly. Jefferson Morley, an assistant editor at Outlook who handled Bovard's column, edited the piece and faxed the edited copy to Bovard. The piece remained extremely critical of DARE. On the fax, Morley scribbled a note: "Jim: ok?" Bovard called Morley and approved the piece as edited.
On Sunday morning, January 30, Bovard picked up the Post and read his story. He was astonished to read, inserted into the piece and under his byline, six paragraphs that he had not written - that, indeed, he had never seen. The paragraphs ran counter to the thrust of the column, calling the case against DARE "murky." Far worse, the new paragraphs said "there was evidence" Darrin's parents were not only drug users, but "were also involved in drug trafficking, thus putting their child at risk." Not only had the possession charges been dropped against the Davises, but there had never been any evidence presented to show that the Davises were drug dealers. They had never been charged with trafficking, only with possession.
"I was stunned. I didn't know what to say," Bovard explains. "Nothing like this had ever happened before." Bovard investigated, and what he found out stunned him even more: the incorrect information in the added paragraphs had been directly supplied by DARE.
How did this happen? J.W. Bouldin, the Davises' lawyer, says the Post's lawyers told him that DARE had lobbied the newspaper to add the paragraphs. The Post's lawyers told Bouldin that DARE supplied Morley with the information for the six paragraphs and Morley typed it in. Bovard also says that DARE put pressure on the Post. "When they learned more about my story, DARE put on the full-court press," Bovard says. "They wanted to kill this story. It makes sense why."
Morley says it happened slightly differently. He says that after he edited the column he became concerned that DARE's point of view was not represented. He consulted with the Post's lawyers, who agreed with him that he should call DARE and get their side of the story. He telephoned DARE's Los Angeles headquarters and talked to a spokeswoman for the organization. Morley says that he wrote the six paragraphs based on his conversation with the spokeswoman. He admits that the information came directly from DARE and that he never told Bovard he had added it to the column. But he says neither he nor anyone at the Post "kowtowed" to DARE. "This was my f *-up. It was not the Post caving in to DARE," Morley says. "The whole story doesn't make me look very good. I regret, I really regret, any role in spreading the false information.... This was my least finest hour."
Bouldin knew as soon as he read the column that he had a dandy libel case. He called the Post's lawyers and informed them that he was going to sue on behalf of the Davises. "They soon saw they had one very, very big problem on their hands," Bouldin says. Shortly before the Davises' libel suit was to be filed, the Post settled. The settlement included a large cash payment to the Davises. The paper also printed a correction, which cleared the Davises of the drug trafficking accusation and admitted that no evidence connecting them with drug trafficking had ever existed. Bouldin says that the terms of the settlement prohibit him from disclosing just how much the misinformation provided by DARE cost the Post, but he makes it clear that the price was high. "Let's just say this was a very expensive mistake for The Washington Post," he says, the tone of satisfaction clear in his Southern drawl.
DARE spokesman Ralph Lochridge doesn't deny his organization gave the Post false information, and he doesn't apologize, either. "Just because [the Davises] weren't convicted in court doesn't mean they're not guilty of it," Lochridge told me.
The anti-drug and anti-alcohol program called DARE is popular, well-financed and widespread. Started in 1983 by the Los Angeles Police Department and the L.A. School District, DARE has quickly become the nation's standard anti-drug curriculum. The DARE logo is everywhere: on bumper stickers, duffel bags, Frisbees, even fast-food containers. DARE is the only drug education program specifically sanctioned for funding under the federal Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act. This year, the program will receive $750 million, of which some $600 million, according to outside analysts, comes from federal, state and local governments. At the core of the DARE curriculum are seventeen weekly lessons taught in the fifth or sixth grade. The teachers are all uniformed cops trained by DARE. The officers lecture and assign homework on the dangers of drugs, alcohol and gangs. Many schools, like Darrin Davis's, offer a shorter curriculum in every grade before the fifth. Some school districts also participate in supplementary junior high school and high school programs. The Los Angeles-based DARE America, the nonprofit company that develops and sells the DARE curriculum, boasts that cops working with DARE now lecture in 70 percent of the nation's school districts. In 1996, two of the last holdouts, the New York City and Washington, D.C., school districts, signed up for the program.
Most parents know about DARE, and most of them approve of it. So do most politicians, most police officers, most teachers and most journalists. President Clinton has been a fan ever since Chelsea graduated from the Arkansas DARE. "We ought to continue to expand the ... program so that in every grade school in this country there's a DARE officer," he said to cheers at an Orange County campaign rally last October. How many people, after all, are opposed to warning children about the dangers of drugs?
But what most people don't know is that, in the past five years, study after study has shown that DARE does not seem to work. The studies have found that students who go through the program are just as likely to use drugs as those who don't. In fact, the results in one study even show the dreaded boomerang effect: DARE graduates are more likely to use marijuana. Behavioral scientists have begun to question, with increasing vigor, whether DARE is little more than a feel-good scheme of enormous proportions. As one researcher put it: "DARE is the world's biggest pet rock. If it makes us feel good to spend the money on nothing, that's okay, but everyone should know DARE does nothing." None of this is a secret among drug policy experts and reporters who cover drug policy; some of the studies have been available for years. Reason, Kansas City Magazine and USA Today have published substantial stories criticizing the program's effectiveness. But these stories have done nothing to impede DARE's progress, and most parents and educators still believe it works. Why isn't the case against DARE better known? Why, at a time when federal funds are scarce, is it not a public issue that a program which costs the government more than half a billion dollars a year may be a waste of the taxpayers' money?
What happened to James Bovard and to The Washington Post is an illustration of the answer. For the past five years, DARE has used tactics ranging from bullying journalists to manipulating the facts to mounting campaigns in order to intimidate government officials and stop news organizations, researchers and parents from criticizing the program. DARE supporters have been accused of slashing tires, jamming television transmissions and spray-painting reporters' homes to quiet critics. "What you have to understand is that DARE is almost a billion-dollar industry. If you found out that a food company's foods were rotten, they'd be out of business," says Mount Holyoke sociology and criminology professor Richard Moran. "What's now been found out is that DARE is running the biggest fraud in America. That's why they've gone nuts." DARE has become so well-known for the hardball tactics it employs to shut down its critics that drug researchers and journalists have a word for those hushed - they say they've been "Dared."
Glenn Levant, the executive director of DARE, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview about DARE's effectiveness and its tactics in squelching bad publicity. Provided, at his request, with written questions, Levant did not reply. DARE spokesman Ralph Lochridge says his organization does not silence researchers. "We don't go after anyone, and DARE doesn't stop critical stories," he says. "It does try to help journalists write balanced pieces." Lochridge says his organization tries to "work" with journalists. "We don't mind criticism, but we want balance. Is your story going to be balanced?"
The story of DARE and its critics starts in Kokomo, Indiana. Fifty-three miles north of Indianapolis, Kokomo is an auto factory town of 45,000 people in the heart of the state's rural and Republican midsection. The city hall operator boasts that Kokomo was the birthplace of stainless steel. In 1987, it also became the first Indiana city to sign up for the DARE program. That year, school officials invited two sociology professors at the local branch of Indiana University to run an experiment to see how well the program worked. Everyone expected glowing results, and hoped the positive study would accelerate DARE's implementation elsewhere. The research team studied 1987's fifth-grade class in Kokomo through 1994, its last year in high school. They also studied the high school class of 1991, which had made its way through the school system prior to DARE's implementation, and had never been exposed to the program. Sociology professors Earl Wysong and Richard Aniskiewicz measured drug use among the students in both the 1994 graduating class and the 1991 class. They also measured DARE's secondary objectives: boosting self-esteem and reducing susceptibility to peer pressure. Wysong and Aniskiewicz were careful to measure the students' drug use with a multi-part questionnaire, which included DARE's own test as well as tests commonly used by psychologists. They found that the level of drug use among kids who had gone through DARE was virtually identical to the level among kids who had not. This means that in every category of drug use tested - lifetime usage, how recently the students had used drugs, how often they had used drugs and the grade in which they started using drugs - the results were "very similar" for both the DARE alumni and the non-DARE students. So similar, in fact, that the differences were within the margin of error. Moreover, students in both groups rated the availability of drugs nearly identically. In fact, the only statistical difference between the groups was that more DARE graduates said they had used marijuana in the past thirty days and the past year than non-DARE alumni. Wysong and Aniskiewicz concluded that "DARE exposure does not produce any long-term prevention efforts on adolescent drug use rates."
What about the more touchy-feely results? Again, the sociologists found no statistical differences. Using questionnaires to examine self-esteem and "locus of control," a common psychology test that measures susceptibility to peer pressure, they found numbers so similar for the two groups that any differences were again within the margin of error. They wrote that self-esteem and peer pressure are "two more areas where we can see no long-term effects resulting from DARE exposure." "That's all, that's it," says Wysong. "It's simple. There was no difference."
But Wysong and Aniskiewicz also found out what other critics of DARE would discover: no one - not parents, not educators and certainly not DARE officials - wanted to hear the bad news. Kokomo's parents, teachers and school board latched on to the study, but Wysong says they missed the point. "I told them the study shows DARE doesn't work," he says, but no one listened. "So what they did was implement drug testing." Since last April, the high school has required every student who leaves the building at lunch, participates in extracurricular activities or drives to school to sign a waiver. The waiver allows the school to pull them out of class at any time and force them to take a drug test. On average, forty-five students are tested each week. "That wasn't what our study recommended," Wysong says. "After our study it became very clear they kept DARE for public relations reasons." The school board has not renewed any studies on the local DARE program.
Even after Wysong and Aniskiewicz published their results, DARE continued to boast that an earlier California study - in fact, the first study ever done on DARE - showed that kids who went through the program accepted drugs less often than kids who had not gone through the program. The data also showed that DARE alumni reported using drugs less often. This study, however, did not ring true to many researchers because it had no pre-test. In other words, students were only surveyed after graduating from DARE. Without measuring drug use before DARE, it's difficult to know whether or not the students' behavior had changed. What is more, the study last examined its subjects as seventh-graders, meaning it never measured DARE's long-term impact. "If you don't know where your base is you really don't know anything," laughs an Ivy League biologist who examined the methodology of the California study. "My kid's science fair project with plants and swinging lights was more rigid than this."
Another drug policy expert who has questioned DARE is Dick Clayton, a widely respected drug abuse researcher at the University of Kentucky. In 1996, Clayton published, in the journal Preventive Medicine, the most rigorous long-term study ever performed on DARE. Starting in September 1987, Clayton surveyed schoolchildren in all of the thirty-one elementary schools in Lexington, Kentucky. The schools were randomly assigned to receive the DARE curriculum or to receive "no treatment." Students were tested before going through the DARE program, immediately afterward and again each year through the spring of 1992. Clayton's team found that any results from DARE were extremely short-lived. "Here it is in layman's terms: DARE is supposed to reduce drug use. In the long term, it does not," Clayton says. Just before and after Clayton's release of the two-year data, more studies quietly began popping up with similar results. In total, Clayton wrote in the 1996 book Intervening with Drug-Involved Youth, at least fifteen studies were conducted. "Although the results from various studies differ somewhat, all studies are consistent in finding that DARE does not have long-term effects on drug use," he wrote. Among those studies was a 1990 Canadian government report showing DARE was less effective than anyone imagined. The program, the Canadians reported, had no effect on cutting abuse of any drug from aspirin to heroin. (The Canadians were studying DARE because the program was becoming more popular abroad. Today, Lochridge says, DARE is used in forty-nine foreign countries.)
As the number of debunking studies grew, something else also grew: the number of researchers getting Dared. Take the case of Daniel, a young professor at an Illinois college. He asked that his last name not be used, since he is up for tenure within the next two years and nervous about adverse publicity. Daniel says he wants to study behavioral programs that have political impact. While he suspects that to improve his chances for tenure he should study the behavior of lab animals, he's fascinated by "real world" problems. "That's why Clayton's study appealed to me," he says. "I thought here was a chance where people like me can make a difference." Daniel designed and performed a study of college freshmen. All of the freshmen were in-state students, but only some had attended DARE. Once again, Daniel's study found no meaningful difference in drug use between students who had gone through DARE and students who hadn't. He did find, however, that DARE graduates were slightly more likely to drink alcohol regularly for the purpose of getting drunk. Over lunch one day, Daniel, proud of what he thought was an "important finding for the Illinois school system," showed the data to a colleague in a different department. "That was the biggest mistake of my career," Daniel says. "That's right - even bigger than sleeping through an oral exam in graduate school." Daniel says that, within a week, a local DARE official called him at home and asked to see the data. Daniel says he freely showed the information to him. That, he says, resulted in a "big argument with lots of yelling." Two weeks later Daniel says he received a call from his department chairman. The chairman told him that the local DARE official had complained that Daniel was offering kids marijuana as part of his study. Daniel says the allegations are false, but that he immediately stopped work on the DARE study, and returned to lab animals. "That could have been, and still might be, a career killer," Daniel says. "DARE has made it so I will never venture out of the lab again."
While it's not possible to say exactly how many researchers have been Dared, it is clear from talking to academics in the relevant fields that there are a number of them. It's common knowledge among researchers that doing DARE studies can ruin a promising career. Wysong and David W. Wright, a Wichita State University professor, wrote in Sociological Focus that the DARE researchers they had interviewed "asked to remain anonymous out of fear of political reprisals and to protect their careers." Interviews with drug researchers support this statement. An author of one prominent paper says he no longer studies DARE. "I needed my life back. I'm in research. My wife and I couldn't take endless personal attacks," he told me. "You want to know why I stopped researching DARE? Write your article and you'll see." Another researcher who was critical of DARE says he became so unpopular among fellow professors he went into the private sector. "If you fight DARE, they make you out to look like you want kids to smoke pot. I thought it was my duty to say the emperor is not wearing any clothes," he says. "It was stupid of me to think I could fight them. Everyone told me I couldn't, but I tried. Here [in the private sector] I can start over." The researcher says after he published his study, someone etched the words "kid killer" and "drug pusher" into the paint of his car.
The extent of DARE's ability to muzzle critical studies can be seen in the treatment of the most definitive test of the DARE program ever conducted. In 1991, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) - the research wing of the Justice Department - hired the prestigious Research Triangle Institute (RTI) to analyze the studies on DARE and determine the bottom line. Initially, DARE supported the "meta-analysis." In a 1992 letter, it urged state groups to work with RTI, saying it "will give us ammunition to respond to critics who charge that DARE has not proven its effectiveness."
"Everything was going along just fine," explains a researcher who worked on the RTI analysis and who asked that his name not be used so he wouldn't get "any more nasty, screeching phone calls" in the middle of the night. "That is, until we started finding DARE just simply didn't work. Then all hell broke loose."
In 1993, RTI presented its preliminary results at a San Diego drug education conference. According to Sociological Focus, a DARE supporter immediately responded by urging RTI to call off the research, saying: "If [DARE] fails, it will be making a statement about all prevention programs." After the conference, DARE launched an all-out war to sink the study. An internal memo from the July 5, 1993, meeting of DARE's advisory board offers evidence that Levant tried to squelch the study. The memo contains the minutes of Levant's speech. Levant criticized an advance copy of the RTI study. The minutes summarize Levant: "The results of this project are potentially damaging to DARE. DARE America has spent $41,000 in trying to prevent widespread distribution of what is considered to be faulty research." The minutes also noted that "DARE America has instituted legal action," aimed at squelching the RTI study. "The action has had some positive results," the minutes reported. "It has resulted in prevention of a second presentation by RTI. Legal action is intended to prevent further public comment until completion of academic review." Lochridge did not return a phone message asking for comment on the memo, and asking whether government funds had been used to stop the government from distributing a government-funded study questioning the efficacy of a government-funded program.
In the past, DARE had been unable to effectively refute its critics on scientific grounds, and its claims rang correspondingly weak. "They must not know how to measure things," maintained an Indiana DARE official about the Kokomo research at a local community agency. "If they could just see the kids' faces, they'd know how much good it's doing." Herbert Kleber, a Columbia University professor who heads DARE's scientific advisory board, says the RTI study was flawed. "It used the old DARE curriculum, which had already been substantially revised," Kleber says. "No, the new curriculum has never been examined."
So this time Levant turned to grass-roots pressure. According to one Justice Department official, Levant arranged for DARE supporters to flood the Justice Department with phone calls. Nationwide, many teachers, principals, DARE officers and parents believe in the program with almost religious devotion. In local debates, they have always been more than willing to make phone calls, write letters and hold forums to support DARE. This time, the callers stayed "on message," the official says, speaking almost as if from a script. "They'd call and tell us if we published the study, DARE would be sunk and millions of kids would get hooked," says the official. "Whenever we'd say the research looked mathematically good, they'd say, `there's more at stake here than good statistics. Can you live with that?'"
In September 1994, RTI finished the lengthy report. It concluded that, while DARE was loved by teachers and participants, it had no effect on drug use. It also went one step further, a step that DARE feared most of all. "What got [RTI] in the most hot water is that they said other programs work better," says Moran, the Mount Holyoke sociologist. In other words, RTI found that DARE is not merely a failure in itself, but crowds out money for programs that actually keep kids off drugs. RTI published a lengthy bibliography of some of the other programs. Kleber says the alternatives RTI looked at, which he calls "boutique programs," were only examined in highly controlled environments.
Levant upped the ante. Congressmen and mayors began calling the National Institute of Justice. The politicians stressed two messages: the curriculum had changed since the study, making it irrelevant; and the public did not want to hear criticism of an anti-drug program widely regarded as successful. The Justice Department official says the "phone rang off the hook."
One month later, for the first time in memory, the Justice Department refused to publish a study it had funded and successfully peer-reviewed. "We're not trying to hide the study," Ann Voit, an NIJ spokeswoman, told USA Today. "We just do not agree with one of the major findings." A puzzling statement, since NIJ hired RTI in the first place because it trusted them to evaluate DARE impartially. Still more puzzling is that even as late as six months after the San Diego conference, NIJ sent RTI memos praising the study. One note from Laurie Bright, NIJ's program manager, said the "methodology appears to be sound and DARE representatives did not offer any specific flaws ... [it] presented findings in a very fair and impartial light." Eventually, Jeremy Travis, who heads the NIJ, stepped in. He publicly reiterated that Justice had not caved under DARE's pressure, explaining that NIJ's independent reviewers unanimously recommended against publishing the report. Not so, according to one reviewer. William DeJong, a Harvard lecturer, told USA Today: "They must be misremembering what I said." Two of the independent reviewers who examined the report in March 1994 recommended that more analysis be done. But both urged the publication and wide dissemination of the executive summary of the report, and one praised the crucial section that analyzed DARE's efficacy as "well done." NIJ still has not approved the study, but will sell it upon request.
The same day Justice refused the study, The American Journal of Public Health - a highly respected academic journal - accepted it. It had conducted its own peer review and found the paper to be worthy. The Justice Department official says this infuriated Levant and that DARE tried to prevent the journal from publishing the study. While no one at Public Health would comment on Levant and DARE, two editors at the journal said that it stands by editor Sabine Beisler's comment of October 1994: "DARE has tried to interfere with the publication of this. They tried to intimidate us." When NIJ learned the journal was going to publish the study, it issued its own two-page summary. The summary oddly heralded DARE's popularity, but virtually ignored the thrust and bulk of the study, which showed DARE doesn't curtail drug use.
Today, the researchers who worked on parts of the RTI study remain thoroughly spooked by their experience. Two researchers at RTI, four at universities and two now in the private sector refused to talk more than briefly about the study. All but one said they were scared of losing their jobs. Three told me that their superiors had been contacted by politicians. "A state representative called my boss and asked if my research was really in the best interest of the community," said one state university professor. "Thank God my boss said `yes.' I don't know if even tenure would stand up to that."
Dare's hardball approach is as well-known among journalists who have attempted stories on the organization as it is among academic researchers. James, a television news producer who does not want his last name used for this story, says that ever since he was Dared he doesn't have any doubts about retaliation. Several months ago, James, who works for a small Missouri station, produced and aired a short editorial criticizing DARE. In more than a decade of local news, it is the only item he has ever regretted running. After that show aired, so many kids called James so often at home to read him lessons from the DARE workbook that he was forced to unlist his telephone number. "You bet I was Dared," James says. "The calls came and on and on. I had to hear about so-and-so is offered a joint, but she says `no.' I couldn't take it." Two callers told James that their DARE officer encouraged them to call his house at strange hours. After that, James's house was attacked with graffiti messages like "crack user inside" so many times, he moved to an apartment building. The local police, who run the local DARE program, spent no time looking for the vandals, James says. After a math teacher asked his son how "the pot-head dad" was doing, he transferred his kid to a boarding school. And, when the owner of a local diner asked him to stop coming to lunch, since other customers were leaving when he walked in, his wife took to calling him "Small-town Salman," after Satanic Verses author-in-hiding Salman Rushdie. James says he phoned Levant and asked him to "please call them off," but Levant never returned the message. "This may sound as if I'm being extreme, but I'm not. I went to Vietnam and that was less stressful," James says with a shaking voice. "There, the people I love weren't always being attacked. And this time, I know I'm on the right side."
In the past year, NBC's newsmagazine "Dateline" has become the most prominent news organization to be Dared. Starting in September 1995, "Dateline" producers began initial research on a hard-hitting story about how DARE doesn't work. They interviewed researchers who had concluded that DARE was a failure and students who couldn't remember the lessons. A "Dateline" camera crew also flew to Indianapolis, where an affluent, mostly Republican suburb was debating whether to keep DARE. For the past year, the school district had monitored a small pilot program. More than 100 parents showed up to the meeting and, according to those who were there, the majority vocally opposed DARE. According to a longtime NBC News employee, the show was scheduled to run on April 9, 1996 - the day before National DARE Day. The following account of what then transpired has been corroborated by two additional NBC sources; essential details of it have also been confirmed by a DARE source and a Justice Department source.
Last March, Levant heard about the planned "Dateline" show. According to the NBC News employee - who does not work on "Dateline" but has read a series of letters between Levant and NBC officials - Levant wrote an "attack letter" to Jack Welch. Welch is the chief executive officer of General Electric, NBC's parent company. The letter called the segment a "journalistic fraud." Levant accused "Dateline" of "staging" the Indiana meeting. Still under the shadow of an infamous episode in which "Dateline" was accused of rigging trucks to explode, the NBC employee says Levant's accusations sent "Dateline"'s staff into a "whirlwind of activity." But Levant's accusation was a "flat-out lie - no ifs, no buts about it, a lie as low as it goes," says Betsy Paul, then the Parent Teacher Organization president of the Indiana school district. "I don't know how to say this strongly enough. I will tell you on any witness stand with God as my judge.... We had scheduled the meeting for at least a week before `Dateline' said they were coming out here." Paul says David McCormick, NBC's senior producer for broadcast standards, called her. McCormick asked her if she had brought in "ringers" to stack the meeting against DARE. "And that was the biggest bunch of bologna I've ever heard," Paul says. "DARE just doesn't like that parents here figured out they didn't work." As further proof, Paul points out that this year DARE was eliminated in her school district and replaced with a locally developed program. "[Levant is] a big liar because if we stacked that meeting, if it didn't accurately reflect how this community thinks, then why did the school board eliminate DARE this year?" she says. "I'll say it again, he lied, and once more he lied."
Levant's letter to Welch contained other untruths, claims the NBC News employee. In the letter, Levant alleges "Dateline" producers would only interview him on the day his wife was receiving a bone marrow treatment for leukemia. Not true, according to the NBC News employee: "Dateline" offered Levant "several" date options. Levant also alleged "Dateline" staffers were interrogating kids in dark rooms like "old war movies." In truth, "Dateline" cameramen had turned off the overhead lights when they interviewed DARE participants because they were using their own lighting, which is standard practice. While the NBC employee says McCormick defended "Dateline" in a response to Levant, the story was put on hold. "DARE scared NBC's upper brass," the NBC employee says. "The story was, and is, solid. The people on it are some of the best in the business, but we did not want to look like we were going after a program that keeps kids off drugs. You can imagine that's a very unpopular position with G.E. So it was put on hold." David Corvo, the NBC vice president that clears "Dateline" episodes before they air, says, "There is no controversy about the program at NBC." He says all delays occurred because he felt the segment needed more reporting. "No way," the NBC News employee says. "That piece was solid in every way. Sure, you can always get another interview, and they did, but even before that it was better than much of what we air."
Then, in a September 1996 issue of TV Guide, NBC placed the following announcement: "`Dateline NBC': A Len Cannon report on the DARE program in schools. Its effects are `statistically insignificant,' says segment producer Debbie Schooley. `Research overwhelmingly shows no long-term effect on drug use.' The report visits schools in suburban Indianapolis."
According to the NBC employee, the TV Guide announcement killed the episode again. Dozens of DARE supporters, including Levant, called NBC. According to the employee, this time he made veiled threats of suing "Dateline." Despite the listing, the show didn't air. Corvo maintains that NBC "did not kill" the story and says if any lawsuit threats were made, they were not taken seriously. He maintains that NBC sent TV Guide the listing several weeks in advance, but when the date arrived, the piece still wasn't ready.
Next, the biggest gun in the drug wars tried to sink the segment once and for all. In mid-September, the White House's drug czar General Barry McCaffrey stepped in. "Dateline" had already interviewed McCaffrey for the segment. During the interview, McCaffrey ridiculed the research against DARE, but a Justice staffer says he did a "very poor" job refuting the mounds of evidence. Corvo won't comment on McCaffrey's interview, beyond saying the drug czar disputed the evidence against DARE.
On September 20, 1996, Donald Maple, a spokesperson for McCaffrey's office, wrote to "Dateline"'s executive producer. The letter asked "Dateline" not to use the taped interview with McCaffrey. Maple wrote that he feared the interview would serve "`Dateline''s purpose of painting DARE in a bad light." The NBC employee says pulling the McCaffrey interview might have dealt a "death blow" to the show. NBC's McCormick responded to Maple that the show's producer had written McCaffrey a letter before the interview telling him the purpose of the interview was to discuss research on DARE's effectiveness. While the network did not promise to cut McCaffrey's interview, the NBC employee explains, "at some point this story is much more trouble than it's worth." Maple says writing this kind of letter to a news organization is "uncommon," and he had never done it for McCaffrey before. But he says "Dateline" treated McCaffrey unfairly.
The show was rescheduled one more time, for Tuesday, February 4. That time slot - right after the president's State of the Union address - is commonly considered to be a "death slot." Clinton's speeches are renowned for running long, killing whatever television segment is planned to run next. And, that night, the segment did not run. As expected, Clinton's speech ran longer than scheduled and "Dateline" ran a show focusing on the O.J. Simpson verdict. "This system has worked. This show has not been killed. Whoever says that is out of the loop," Corvo says, adding that he has now cleared it to air. As of February 10, though, the segment had not been rescheduled. Corvo says it will be rescheduled when the executive producer of "Dateline"returns from vacation.
And researchers and reporters are not the only ones getting Dared. Some parents who question the program also say they've been strong-armed. In the San Juan Islands northwest of Seattle is a small town called Friday Harbor. There, dozens of parents have joined together in a group called San Juan Parents Against DARE. According to Andrew Seltser, the group's founder, nearly all of the members want drug education in the schools; they just don't believe the DARE program works. In August, Seltser's group collected more than 100 signatures on a petition asking the local school board to review the effectiveness of DARE. The debate about DARE overtook the small community, and became a matter of intense passion, with local DARE supporters raging against the parents who were challenging the program. In September, the local school board announced it would review concerns about DARE.
Then an odd thing happened. On October 7, 1996, the "CBS Evening News" aired a short segment that presented information critical of DARE. No one in Friday Harbor saw that segment, though. Thirty seconds into the story, Friday Harbor's screens went black. Randy Lindsey, the station manager for the local cable station, says when he watched a videotape of that night's news "it looks like someone pulled the plug." Lindsey can't explain the blackout. Friday Harbor, he says, often has problems receiving television signals due to sun spots. But sun spot interference, he says, normally distorts the screen differently. Seltser's group says they believe the program was jammed by DARE supporters since it came in the heat of the debate. And some Friday Harbor DARE supporters aren't denying it. One prominent local DARE supporter says it's "not important" whether or not the show was jammed. "Look, I'm not going to answer the question as to whether or not I know who jammed it. Hell, it might have been me," he says, asking that his name not be used. "What I am going to tell you is that TV program may have stopped DARE in Friday Harbor, which means more kids here would be on drugs."
Dare's public response to studies critical of the program has been to dismiss the studies as irrelevant. DARE says the studies are based on an old curriculum that may not have worked, but that the program now uses a redesigned curriculum that does work. The problem with the old curriculum, DARE officials say, was that DARE classes were not interactive enough; under the new curriculum, the classes are much more so. But this seems debatable, judging from a recent DARE class conducted by Detective Rick Myers at Barcroft Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia. Myers, a big man who looks very much like a cop, visits Barcroft's fifth-graders every Thursday to lead them in the DARE way. One week's lesson was about resisting peer pressure. Myers's lesson lasted about forty-five minutes. All but six minutes were spent on a lecture by Myers. To be sure, Myers used interactive role play during those six minutes, but researchers question the value of such role-playing as set out by the DARE curriculum.
For the first scene, Myers chose two kids: a brown-haired boy who was so nervous that he wobbled when he stood, and a tall girl who was so self-confident that she bowed when she got to the front of the room. Myers whispered the script to the two children and told them to face each other.
"There is a party on Saturday night at some person's house," the girl said matter-of-factly.
The boy said nothing.
"The people there, they will be drinking things that have [now louder and more slowly] al-co-hol."
The boy looked at the ground.
"I said, `The people will be drinking [very loudly and very slowly] al-co-hol.'"
"No," peeped the boy.
Kindly, but firmly, Myers lectured the boy. "Posture. Eye contact. Posture. Eye contact," Myers told him. "You need to be confident. You're doing the right thing."
Take two. The girl said her first line. The boy said: "Oh." Myers shouted: "Posture. Eye contact." The girl said her second line. The boy stood straighter, looked the girl briefly in the eye, and said very quickly: "No thank you, I don't take alcohol. I prefer juice and milk." Myers led everyone in a round of applause. At one of the back tables, a thuggish-looking kid sat regarding this little scene with frank scorn. "He's supposed to say that? That won't work. He'd get the shit beat out of him."
For another scene, Myers chose a small girl with wide eyes and scraggly brown hair. She seemed a little nervous, but excited to have been chosen. Myers whispered the instructions into her ear. They faced off, standing about ten feet from each other. Myers walked up to the girl. "Hey, do you want to buy a joint?" he said. She replied, almost inaudibly, "No." Myers put his face close to hers. "Come on, wanna buy it?"
"No, thank you," she whispered.
Now, waving his finger in her face, Myers shouted: "Why not? Come on, buy it!"
The little girl, backed against the windows, said, again, "No." Myers led the class in a round of applause.
Drug researchers interviewed about Myers's scenes are dismissive. "That role play is absurd. If the kids learn anything at all from it, they learn not to buy drugs from police officers," one researcher says. "Making it more interactive means making it more like real life. This is not useful. Fun, maybe. Useful? Nope."
And Myers's class is typical. When I asked him if other DARE instructors did it differently, he was adamant in response. "No. The great thing about this program is that everyone in the country is trained the same way," Myers told me. "We are told to go exactly by the book. There is no room for modifying the program. No way. It's the same everywhere."
The claim that DARE's curriculum is changing and maturing seems to be more a matter of tactics than anything else. A longtime California instructor who recently retired, and who told me that the curriculum has not in fact changed much at all, conceded that saying the curriculum was in constant flux did have an obvious strategic benefit. Experts agree. Wysong and Wright wrote in Sociological Focus that if DARE is portrayed as a constantly evolving program it can't ever be studied and therefore can't ever fail. "Thus DARE is protected from criticism and remains `forever young,'" they wrote. "In fact, in the view of DARE stakeholders, this is as it should be, because the program cannot be allowed to fail: the stakes are simply too high."
In fact, the most controversial part of the program - the DARE box - has remained unchanged despite years of criticism about this systematic attempt to encourage children to rat out the grown-ups around them, including their own parents. After the first class, the students, following DARE instructions, fashion a shoe box into a colorful mailbox, often decorated with DARE stickers. Each week from then on, for the entire seventeen weeks, students are encouraged to write anonymous notes asking any question they want. They are also allowed to accuse people of using or selling drugs or committing sexual abuse. These accusatory notes may also be anonymous. At the end of every DARE class, the officer reads the questions out loud. The officer does not read the accusatory notes to the class, but those notes are referred to the appropriate school and police investigative units for action. As James Bovard pointed out, Darrin Davis is not an isolated case. DARE students have fingered their parents in Maryland, Oklahoma and Wisconsin. In 1991, a 10-year-old told a Colorado 911 operator, "I'm a DARE kid," and urged the police to arrest his parents for marijuana possession. After his parents were arrested, the cop assigned to his school publicly praised him.
Parents and scientists in dozens of states have attacked the DARE box, saying that it reminds them of Stalinists rewarding kids for ratting on their parents. Lochridge, DARE's spokesman, dismisses their fears, saying it's mostly "urban myths." "Officers, as part of their training," he adds, "are taught not to elicit information about the [students'] personal lives." Lochridge says students are not encouraged to make accusations. But, according to one University of Illinois study, an accusation is made in 59 percent of all DARE classes. And while that number may be high, three Washington, D.C., area DARE cops interviewed said a DARE box note accused someone of using or selling drugs in at least one-third of their classes. All three cops said they "didn't discourage" their students from making accusations. Lochridge maintains the cops are just doing their job. "I don't know of any state which doesn't have laws requiring us to investigate any accusations of sexual abuse or drugs," he says.
In the end, DARE has an answer that trumps all. Even if there is some truth to charges that DARE doesn't work, what this means is that we need ... more DARE. "Well, if you teach people fractions or a foreign language, it's going to erode unless you reinforce it," Lochridge explains. "So the answer is more DARE. Kids need to get it more." And doubtless they will, whether it does them any good or not. (Copyright 1997, The New Republic)
by Stephen Glass
On January 28, 1991, at 4 p.m., 10-year-old Darrin Davis, of Douglasville, Georgia, returned from school to his suburban home. Both of Darrin's parents were at work, and he let himself in. He immediately went to his parents' bedroom to call his mother, who wouldn't be home for another two hours. After talking to her on the phone, Darrin began searching the bedroom for candy; his parents often hid sweets there. He found none. Instead, after climbing on top of a chair, Darrin saw a white powder on a small makeup mirror. At that point, Darrin would later say, he thought of something he had recently been taught in school. Darrin's fourth-grade class had been visited by a police officer under the auspices of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, or DARE, as it is known. One of the things the DARE officer had told Darrin and his classmates was that they should inform the police if they ever saw anyone - including their parents - use drugs. The kids were shown a video that reinforced the point.
Although Darrin had never seen either of his parents use drugs, he decided, based on what he had learned in DARE, that the substance on the mirror was powdered cocaine. So he did what the DARE officer had told him to do: he called 911 and turned in his parents. Two hours later, when the Davises returned home, they were handcuffed and arrested while Darrin watched. A police officer put his hand on Darrin's shoulder, and told the boy he had done "the right thing." Darrin's father spent the next three months in jail, much to Darrin's surprise and dismay. "I thought the police would come get the drugs and tell them that drugs are wrong," the boy told a local reporter. "They never said they would arrest them. It didn't say that in the video." When the sheriff's office told the boy he was too young to visit his dad in jail, Darrin set the neighbors' house on fire, causing $14,000 in damages. "I asked him why he did it," Darrin's mother said. "He said he wanted to be put in jail with his daddy."
As it turned out, the substance on the mirror was not cocaine. The Davises' lawyer says it was a small amount of speed. Both the Davises were charged with simple possession. Ultimately, the Georgia Supreme Court ordered the charges dropped, primarily on the grounds that the police had improperly searched the Davis home. The damage, though, was done. Darrin's telephone call destroyed his family. Heavy media coverage of the 10-year-old who had turned in his own parents ruined the Davises' reputation. Legal fees nearly bankrupted them, and they came close to losing their home. They filed for divorce shortly after the criminal charges were dropped.
In January 1994, James Bovard, a freelance writer, wrote an account of the Davis case for The Washington Post's prestigious Sunday Outlook section. Bovard used the case to criticize DARE for "turning children into informants" in the war on drugs. Although Bovard had called DARE to get the organization's comment, DARE officials had declined to talk more than briefly. Jefferson Morley, an assistant editor at Outlook who handled Bovard's column, edited the piece and faxed the edited copy to Bovard. The piece remained extremely critical of DARE. On the fax, Morley scribbled a note: "Jim: ok?" Bovard called Morley and approved the piece as edited.
On Sunday morning, January 30, Bovard picked up the Post and read his story. He was astonished to read, inserted into the piece and under his byline, six paragraphs that he had not written - that, indeed, he had never seen. The paragraphs ran counter to the thrust of the column, calling the case against DARE "murky." Far worse, the new paragraphs said "there was evidence" Darrin's parents were not only drug users, but "were also involved in drug trafficking, thus putting their child at risk." Not only had the possession charges been dropped against the Davises, but there had never been any evidence presented to show that the Davises were drug dealers. They had never been charged with trafficking, only with possession.
"I was stunned. I didn't know what to say," Bovard explains. "Nothing like this had ever happened before." Bovard investigated, and what he found out stunned him even more: the incorrect information in the added paragraphs had been directly supplied by DARE.
How did this happen? J.W. Bouldin, the Davises' lawyer, says the Post's lawyers told him that DARE had lobbied the newspaper to add the paragraphs. The Post's lawyers told Bouldin that DARE supplied Morley with the information for the six paragraphs and Morley typed it in. Bovard also says that DARE put pressure on the Post. "When they learned more about my story, DARE put on the full-court press," Bovard says. "They wanted to kill this story. It makes sense why."
Morley says it happened slightly differently. He says that after he edited the column he became concerned that DARE's point of view was not represented. He consulted with the Post's lawyers, who agreed with him that he should call DARE and get their side of the story. He telephoned DARE's Los Angeles headquarters and talked to a spokeswoman for the organization. Morley says that he wrote the six paragraphs based on his conversation with the spokeswoman. He admits that the information came directly from DARE and that he never told Bovard he had added it to the column. But he says neither he nor anyone at the Post "kowtowed" to DARE. "This was my f *-up. It was not the Post caving in to DARE," Morley says. "The whole story doesn't make me look very good. I regret, I really regret, any role in spreading the false information.... This was my least finest hour."
Bouldin knew as soon as he read the column that he had a dandy libel case. He called the Post's lawyers and informed them that he was going to sue on behalf of the Davises. "They soon saw they had one very, very big problem on their hands," Bouldin says. Shortly before the Davises' libel suit was to be filed, the Post settled. The settlement included a large cash payment to the Davises. The paper also printed a correction, which cleared the Davises of the drug trafficking accusation and admitted that no evidence connecting them with drug trafficking had ever existed. Bouldin says that the terms of the settlement prohibit him from disclosing just how much the misinformation provided by DARE cost the Post, but he makes it clear that the price was high. "Let's just say this was a very expensive mistake for The Washington Post," he says, the tone of satisfaction clear in his Southern drawl.
DARE spokesman Ralph Lochridge doesn't deny his organization gave the Post false information, and he doesn't apologize, either. "Just because [the Davises] weren't convicted in court doesn't mean they're not guilty of it," Lochridge told me.
The anti-drug and anti-alcohol program called DARE is popular, well-financed and widespread. Started in 1983 by the Los Angeles Police Department and the L.A. School District, DARE has quickly become the nation's standard anti-drug curriculum. The DARE logo is everywhere: on bumper stickers, duffel bags, Frisbees, even fast-food containers. DARE is the only drug education program specifically sanctioned for funding under the federal Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act. This year, the program will receive $750 million, of which some $600 million, according to outside analysts, comes from federal, state and local governments. At the core of the DARE curriculum are seventeen weekly lessons taught in the fifth or sixth grade. The teachers are all uniformed cops trained by DARE. The officers lecture and assign homework on the dangers of drugs, alcohol and gangs. Many schools, like Darrin Davis's, offer a shorter curriculum in every grade before the fifth. Some school districts also participate in supplementary junior high school and high school programs. The Los Angeles-based DARE America, the nonprofit company that develops and sells the DARE curriculum, boasts that cops working with DARE now lecture in 70 percent of the nation's school districts. In 1996, two of the last holdouts, the New York City and Washington, D.C., school districts, signed up for the program.
Most parents know about DARE, and most of them approve of it. So do most politicians, most police officers, most teachers and most journalists. President Clinton has been a fan ever since Chelsea graduated from the Arkansas DARE. "We ought to continue to expand the ... program so that in every grade school in this country there's a DARE officer," he said to cheers at an Orange County campaign rally last October. How many people, after all, are opposed to warning children about the dangers of drugs?
But what most people don't know is that, in the past five years, study after study has shown that DARE does not seem to work. The studies have found that students who go through the program are just as likely to use drugs as those who don't. In fact, the results in one study even show the dreaded boomerang effect: DARE graduates are more likely to use marijuana. Behavioral scientists have begun to question, with increasing vigor, whether DARE is little more than a feel-good scheme of enormous proportions. As one researcher put it: "DARE is the world's biggest pet rock. If it makes us feel good to spend the money on nothing, that's okay, but everyone should know DARE does nothing." None of this is a secret among drug policy experts and reporters who cover drug policy; some of the studies have been available for years. Reason, Kansas City Magazine and USA Today have published substantial stories criticizing the program's effectiveness. But these stories have done nothing to impede DARE's progress, and most parents and educators still believe it works. Why isn't the case against DARE better known? Why, at a time when federal funds are scarce, is it not a public issue that a program which costs the government more than half a billion dollars a year may be a waste of the taxpayers' money?
What happened to James Bovard and to The Washington Post is an illustration of the answer. For the past five years, DARE has used tactics ranging from bullying journalists to manipulating the facts to mounting campaigns in order to intimidate government officials and stop news organizations, researchers and parents from criticizing the program. DARE supporters have been accused of slashing tires, jamming television transmissions and spray-painting reporters' homes to quiet critics. "What you have to understand is that DARE is almost a billion-dollar industry. If you found out that a food company's foods were rotten, they'd be out of business," says Mount Holyoke sociology and criminology professor Richard Moran. "What's now been found out is that DARE is running the biggest fraud in America. That's why they've gone nuts." DARE has become so well-known for the hardball tactics it employs to shut down its critics that drug researchers and journalists have a word for those hushed - they say they've been "Dared."
Glenn Levant, the executive director of DARE, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview about DARE's effectiveness and its tactics in squelching bad publicity. Provided, at his request, with written questions, Levant did not reply. DARE spokesman Ralph Lochridge says his organization does not silence researchers. "We don't go after anyone, and DARE doesn't stop critical stories," he says. "It does try to help journalists write balanced pieces." Lochridge says his organization tries to "work" with journalists. "We don't mind criticism, but we want balance. Is your story going to be balanced?"
The story of DARE and its critics starts in Kokomo, Indiana. Fifty-three miles north of Indianapolis, Kokomo is an auto factory town of 45,000 people in the heart of the state's rural and Republican midsection. The city hall operator boasts that Kokomo was the birthplace of stainless steel. In 1987, it also became the first Indiana city to sign up for the DARE program. That year, school officials invited two sociology professors at the local branch of Indiana University to run an experiment to see how well the program worked. Everyone expected glowing results, and hoped the positive study would accelerate DARE's implementation elsewhere. The research team studied 1987's fifth-grade class in Kokomo through 1994, its last year in high school. They also studied the high school class of 1991, which had made its way through the school system prior to DARE's implementation, and had never been exposed to the program. Sociology professors Earl Wysong and Richard Aniskiewicz measured drug use among the students in both the 1994 graduating class and the 1991 class. They also measured DARE's secondary objectives: boosting self-esteem and reducing susceptibility to peer pressure. Wysong and Aniskiewicz were careful to measure the students' drug use with a multi-part questionnaire, which included DARE's own test as well as tests commonly used by psychologists. They found that the level of drug use among kids who had gone through DARE was virtually identical to the level among kids who had not. This means that in every category of drug use tested - lifetime usage, how recently the students had used drugs, how often they had used drugs and the grade in which they started using drugs - the results were "very similar" for both the DARE alumni and the non-DARE students. So similar, in fact, that the differences were within the margin of error. Moreover, students in both groups rated the availability of drugs nearly identically. In fact, the only statistical difference between the groups was that more DARE graduates said they had used marijuana in the past thirty days and the past year than non-DARE alumni. Wysong and Aniskiewicz concluded that "DARE exposure does not produce any long-term prevention efforts on adolescent drug use rates."
What about the more touchy-feely results? Again, the sociologists found no statistical differences. Using questionnaires to examine self-esteem and "locus of control," a common psychology test that measures susceptibility to peer pressure, they found numbers so similar for the two groups that any differences were again within the margin of error. They wrote that self-esteem and peer pressure are "two more areas where we can see no long-term effects resulting from DARE exposure." "That's all, that's it," says Wysong. "It's simple. There was no difference."
But Wysong and Aniskiewicz also found out what other critics of DARE would discover: no one - not parents, not educators and certainly not DARE officials - wanted to hear the bad news. Kokomo's parents, teachers and school board latched on to the study, but Wysong says they missed the point. "I told them the study shows DARE doesn't work," he says, but no one listened. "So what they did was implement drug testing." Since last April, the high school has required every student who leaves the building at lunch, participates in extracurricular activities or drives to school to sign a waiver. The waiver allows the school to pull them out of class at any time and force them to take a drug test. On average, forty-five students are tested each week. "That wasn't what our study recommended," Wysong says. "After our study it became very clear they kept DARE for public relations reasons." The school board has not renewed any studies on the local DARE program.
Even after Wysong and Aniskiewicz published their results, DARE continued to boast that an earlier California study - in fact, the first study ever done on DARE - showed that kids who went through the program accepted drugs less often than kids who had not gone through the program. The data also showed that DARE alumni reported using drugs less often. This study, however, did not ring true to many researchers because it had no pre-test. In other words, students were only surveyed after graduating from DARE. Without measuring drug use before DARE, it's difficult to know whether or not the students' behavior had changed. What is more, the study last examined its subjects as seventh-graders, meaning it never measured DARE's long-term impact. "If you don't know where your base is you really don't know anything," laughs an Ivy League biologist who examined the methodology of the California study. "My kid's science fair project with plants and swinging lights was more rigid than this."
Another drug policy expert who has questioned DARE is Dick Clayton, a widely respected drug abuse researcher at the University of Kentucky. In 1996, Clayton published, in the journal Preventive Medicine, the most rigorous long-term study ever performed on DARE. Starting in September 1987, Clayton surveyed schoolchildren in all of the thirty-one elementary schools in Lexington, Kentucky. The schools were randomly assigned to receive the DARE curriculum or to receive "no treatment." Students were tested before going through the DARE program, immediately afterward and again each year through the spring of 1992. Clayton's team found that any results from DARE were extremely short-lived. "Here it is in layman's terms: DARE is supposed to reduce drug use. In the long term, it does not," Clayton says. Just before and after Clayton's release of the two-year data, more studies quietly began popping up with similar results. In total, Clayton wrote in the 1996 book Intervening with Drug-Involved Youth, at least fifteen studies were conducted. "Although the results from various studies differ somewhat, all studies are consistent in finding that DARE does not have long-term effects on drug use," he wrote. Among those studies was a 1990 Canadian government report showing DARE was less effective than anyone imagined. The program, the Canadians reported, had no effect on cutting abuse of any drug from aspirin to heroin. (The Canadians were studying DARE because the program was becoming more popular abroad. Today, Lochridge says, DARE is used in forty-nine foreign countries.)
As the number of debunking studies grew, something else also grew: the number of researchers getting Dared. Take the case of Daniel, a young professor at an Illinois college. He asked that his last name not be used, since he is up for tenure within the next two years and nervous about adverse publicity. Daniel says he wants to study behavioral programs that have political impact. While he suspects that to improve his chances for tenure he should study the behavior of lab animals, he's fascinated by "real world" problems. "That's why Clayton's study appealed to me," he says. "I thought here was a chance where people like me can make a difference." Daniel designed and performed a study of college freshmen. All of the freshmen were in-state students, but only some had attended DARE. Once again, Daniel's study found no meaningful difference in drug use between students who had gone through DARE and students who hadn't. He did find, however, that DARE graduates were slightly more likely to drink alcohol regularly for the purpose of getting drunk. Over lunch one day, Daniel, proud of what he thought was an "important finding for the Illinois school system," showed the data to a colleague in a different department. "That was the biggest mistake of my career," Daniel says. "That's right - even bigger than sleeping through an oral exam in graduate school." Daniel says that, within a week, a local DARE official called him at home and asked to see the data. Daniel says he freely showed the information to him. That, he says, resulted in a "big argument with lots of yelling." Two weeks later Daniel says he received a call from his department chairman. The chairman told him that the local DARE official had complained that Daniel was offering kids marijuana as part of his study. Daniel says the allegations are false, but that he immediately stopped work on the DARE study, and returned to lab animals. "That could have been, and still might be, a career killer," Daniel says. "DARE has made it so I will never venture out of the lab again."
While it's not possible to say exactly how many researchers have been Dared, it is clear from talking to academics in the relevant fields that there are a number of them. It's common knowledge among researchers that doing DARE studies can ruin a promising career. Wysong and David W. Wright, a Wichita State University professor, wrote in Sociological Focus that the DARE researchers they had interviewed "asked to remain anonymous out of fear of political reprisals and to protect their careers." Interviews with drug researchers support this statement. An author of one prominent paper says he no longer studies DARE. "I needed my life back. I'm in research. My wife and I couldn't take endless personal attacks," he told me. "You want to know why I stopped researching DARE? Write your article and you'll see." Another researcher who was critical of DARE says he became so unpopular among fellow professors he went into the private sector. "If you fight DARE, they make you out to look like you want kids to smoke pot. I thought it was my duty to say the emperor is not wearing any clothes," he says. "It was stupid of me to think I could fight them. Everyone told me I couldn't, but I tried. Here [in the private sector] I can start over." The researcher says after he published his study, someone etched the words "kid killer" and "drug pusher" into the paint of his car.
The extent of DARE's ability to muzzle critical studies can be seen in the treatment of the most definitive test of the DARE program ever conducted. In 1991, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) - the research wing of the Justice Department - hired the prestigious Research Triangle Institute (RTI) to analyze the studies on DARE and determine the bottom line. Initially, DARE supported the "meta-analysis." In a 1992 letter, it urged state groups to work with RTI, saying it "will give us ammunition to respond to critics who charge that DARE has not proven its effectiveness."
"Everything was going along just fine," explains a researcher who worked on the RTI analysis and who asked that his name not be used so he wouldn't get "any more nasty, screeching phone calls" in the middle of the night. "That is, until we started finding DARE just simply didn't work. Then all hell broke loose."
In 1993, RTI presented its preliminary results at a San Diego drug education conference. According to Sociological Focus, a DARE supporter immediately responded by urging RTI to call off the research, saying: "If [DARE] fails, it will be making a statement about all prevention programs." After the conference, DARE launched an all-out war to sink the study. An internal memo from the July 5, 1993, meeting of DARE's advisory board offers evidence that Levant tried to squelch the study. The memo contains the minutes of Levant's speech. Levant criticized an advance copy of the RTI study. The minutes summarize Levant: "The results of this project are potentially damaging to DARE. DARE America has spent $41,000 in trying to prevent widespread distribution of what is considered to be faulty research." The minutes also noted that "DARE America has instituted legal action," aimed at squelching the RTI study. "The action has had some positive results," the minutes reported. "It has resulted in prevention of a second presentation by RTI. Legal action is intended to prevent further public comment until completion of academic review." Lochridge did not return a phone message asking for comment on the memo, and asking whether government funds had been used to stop the government from distributing a government-funded study questioning the efficacy of a government-funded program.
In the past, DARE had been unable to effectively refute its critics on scientific grounds, and its claims rang correspondingly weak. "They must not know how to measure things," maintained an Indiana DARE official about the Kokomo research at a local community agency. "If they could just see the kids' faces, they'd know how much good it's doing." Herbert Kleber, a Columbia University professor who heads DARE's scientific advisory board, says the RTI study was flawed. "It used the old DARE curriculum, which had already been substantially revised," Kleber says. "No, the new curriculum has never been examined."
So this time Levant turned to grass-roots pressure. According to one Justice Department official, Levant arranged for DARE supporters to flood the Justice Department with phone calls. Nationwide, many teachers, principals, DARE officers and parents believe in the program with almost religious devotion. In local debates, they have always been more than willing to make phone calls, write letters and hold forums to support DARE. This time, the callers stayed "on message," the official says, speaking almost as if from a script. "They'd call and tell us if we published the study, DARE would be sunk and millions of kids would get hooked," says the official. "Whenever we'd say the research looked mathematically good, they'd say, `there's more at stake here than good statistics. Can you live with that?'"
In September 1994, RTI finished the lengthy report. It concluded that, while DARE was loved by teachers and participants, it had no effect on drug use. It also went one step further, a step that DARE feared most of all. "What got [RTI] in the most hot water is that they said other programs work better," says Moran, the Mount Holyoke sociologist. In other words, RTI found that DARE is not merely a failure in itself, but crowds out money for programs that actually keep kids off drugs. RTI published a lengthy bibliography of some of the other programs. Kleber says the alternatives RTI looked at, which he calls "boutique programs," were only examined in highly controlled environments.
Levant upped the ante. Congressmen and mayors began calling the National Institute of Justice. The politicians stressed two messages: the curriculum had changed since the study, making it irrelevant; and the public did not want to hear criticism of an anti-drug program widely regarded as successful. The Justice Department official says the "phone rang off the hook."
One month later, for the first time in memory, the Justice Department refused to publish a study it had funded and successfully peer-reviewed. "We're not trying to hide the study," Ann Voit, an NIJ spokeswoman, told USA Today. "We just do not agree with one of the major findings." A puzzling statement, since NIJ hired RTI in the first place because it trusted them to evaluate DARE impartially. Still more puzzling is that even as late as six months after the San Diego conference, NIJ sent RTI memos praising the study. One note from Laurie Bright, NIJ's program manager, said the "methodology appears to be sound and DARE representatives did not offer any specific flaws ... [it] presented findings in a very fair and impartial light." Eventually, Jeremy Travis, who heads the NIJ, stepped in. He publicly reiterated that Justice had not caved under DARE's pressure, explaining that NIJ's independent reviewers unanimously recommended against publishing the report. Not so, according to one reviewer. William DeJong, a Harvard lecturer, told USA Today: "They must be misremembering what I said." Two of the independent reviewers who examined the report in March 1994 recommended that more analysis be done. But both urged the publication and wide dissemination of the executive summary of the report, and one praised the crucial section that analyzed DARE's efficacy as "well done." NIJ still has not approved the study, but will sell it upon request.
The same day Justice refused the study, The American Journal of Public Health - a highly respected academic journal - accepted it. It had conducted its own peer review and found the paper to be worthy. The Justice Department official says this infuriated Levant and that DARE tried to prevent the journal from publishing the study. While no one at Public Health would comment on Levant and DARE, two editors at the journal said that it stands by editor Sabine Beisler's comment of October 1994: "DARE has tried to interfere with the publication of this. They tried to intimidate us." When NIJ learned the journal was going to publish the study, it issued its own two-page summary. The summary oddly heralded DARE's popularity, but virtually ignored the thrust and bulk of the study, which showed DARE doesn't curtail drug use.
Today, the researchers who worked on parts of the RTI study remain thoroughly spooked by their experience. Two researchers at RTI, four at universities and two now in the private sector refused to talk more than briefly about the study. All but one said they were scared of losing their jobs. Three told me that their superiors had been contacted by politicians. "A state representative called my boss and asked if my research was really in the best interest of the community," said one state university professor. "Thank God my boss said `yes.' I don't know if even tenure would stand up to that."
Dare's hardball approach is as well-known among journalists who have attempted stories on the organization as it is among academic researchers. James, a television news producer who does not want his last name used for this story, says that ever since he was Dared he doesn't have any doubts about retaliation. Several months ago, James, who works for a small Missouri station, produced and aired a short editorial criticizing DARE. In more than a decade of local news, it is the only item he has ever regretted running. After that show aired, so many kids called James so often at home to read him lessons from the DARE workbook that he was forced to unlist his telephone number. "You bet I was Dared," James says. "The calls came and on and on. I had to hear about so-and-so is offered a joint, but she says `no.' I couldn't take it." Two callers told James that their DARE officer encouraged them to call his house at strange hours. After that, James's house was attacked with graffiti messages like "crack user inside" so many times, he moved to an apartment building. The local police, who run the local DARE program, spent no time looking for the vandals, James says. After a math teacher asked his son how "the pot-head dad" was doing, he transferred his kid to a boarding school. And, when the owner of a local diner asked him to stop coming to lunch, since other customers were leaving when he walked in, his wife took to calling him "Small-town Salman," after Satanic Verses author-in-hiding Salman Rushdie. James says he phoned Levant and asked him to "please call them off," but Levant never returned the message. "This may sound as if I'm being extreme, but I'm not. I went to Vietnam and that was less stressful," James says with a shaking voice. "There, the people I love weren't always being attacked. And this time, I know I'm on the right side."
In the past year, NBC's newsmagazine "Dateline" has become the most prominent news organization to be Dared. Starting in September 1995, "Dateline" producers began initial research on a hard-hitting story about how DARE doesn't work. They interviewed researchers who had concluded that DARE was a failure and students who couldn't remember the lessons. A "Dateline" camera crew also flew to Indianapolis, where an affluent, mostly Republican suburb was debating whether to keep DARE. For the past year, the school district had monitored a small pilot program. More than 100 parents showed up to the meeting and, according to those who were there, the majority vocally opposed DARE. According to a longtime NBC News employee, the show was scheduled to run on April 9, 1996 - the day before National DARE Day. The following account of what then transpired has been corroborated by two additional NBC sources; essential details of it have also been confirmed by a DARE source and a Justice Department source.
Last March, Levant heard about the planned "Dateline" show. According to the NBC News employee - who does not work on "Dateline" but has read a series of letters between Levant and NBC officials - Levant wrote an "attack letter" to Jack Welch. Welch is the chief executive officer of General Electric, NBC's parent company. The letter called the segment a "journalistic fraud." Levant accused "Dateline" of "staging" the Indiana meeting. Still under the shadow of an infamous episode in which "Dateline" was accused of rigging trucks to explode, the NBC employee says Levant's accusations sent "Dateline"'s staff into a "whirlwind of activity." But Levant's accusation was a "flat-out lie - no ifs, no buts about it, a lie as low as it goes," says Betsy Paul, then the Parent Teacher Organization president of the Indiana school district. "I don't know how to say this strongly enough. I will tell you on any witness stand with God as my judge.... We had scheduled the meeting for at least a week before `Dateline' said they were coming out here." Paul says David McCormick, NBC's senior producer for broadcast standards, called her. McCormick asked her if she had brought in "ringers" to stack the meeting against DARE. "And that was the biggest bunch of bologna I've ever heard," Paul says. "DARE just doesn't like that parents here figured out they didn't work." As further proof, Paul points out that this year DARE was eliminated in her school district and replaced with a locally developed program. "[Levant is] a big liar because if we stacked that meeting, if it didn't accurately reflect how this community thinks, then why did the school board eliminate DARE this year?" she says. "I'll say it again, he lied, and once more he lied."
Levant's letter to Welch contained other untruths, claims the NBC News employee. In the letter, Levant alleges "Dateline" producers would only interview him on the day his wife was receiving a bone marrow treatment for leukemia. Not true, according to the NBC News employee: "Dateline" offered Levant "several" date options. Levant also alleged "Dateline" staffers were interrogating kids in dark rooms like "old war movies." In truth, "Dateline" cameramen had turned off the overhead lights when they interviewed DARE participants because they were using their own lighting, which is standard practice. While the NBC employee says McCormick defended "Dateline" in a response to Levant, the story was put on hold. "DARE scared NBC's upper brass," the NBC employee says. "The story was, and is, solid. The people on it are some of the best in the business, but we did not want to look like we were going after a program that keeps kids off drugs. You can imagine that's a very unpopular position with G.E. So it was put on hold." David Corvo, the NBC vice president that clears "Dateline" episodes before they air, says, "There is no controversy about the program at NBC." He says all delays occurred because he felt the segment needed more reporting. "No way," the NBC News employee says. "That piece was solid in every way. Sure, you can always get another interview, and they did, but even before that it was better than much of what we air."
Then, in a September 1996 issue of TV Guide, NBC placed the following announcement: "`Dateline NBC': A Len Cannon report on the DARE program in schools. Its effects are `statistically insignificant,' says segment producer Debbie Schooley. `Research overwhelmingly shows no long-term effect on drug use.' The report visits schools in suburban Indianapolis."
According to the NBC employee, the TV Guide announcement killed the episode again. Dozens of DARE supporters, including Levant, called NBC. According to the employee, this time he made veiled threats of suing "Dateline." Despite the listing, the show didn't air. Corvo maintains that NBC "did not kill" the story and says if any lawsuit threats were made, they were not taken seriously. He maintains that NBC sent TV Guide the listing several weeks in advance, but when the date arrived, the piece still wasn't ready.
Next, the biggest gun in the drug wars tried to sink the segment once and for all. In mid-September, the White House's drug czar General Barry McCaffrey stepped in. "Dateline" had already interviewed McCaffrey for the segment. During the interview, McCaffrey ridiculed the research against DARE, but a Justice staffer says he did a "very poor" job refuting the mounds of evidence. Corvo won't comment on McCaffrey's interview, beyond saying the drug czar disputed the evidence against DARE.
On September 20, 1996, Donald Maple, a spokesperson for McCaffrey's office, wrote to "Dateline"'s executive producer. The letter asked "Dateline" not to use the taped interview with McCaffrey. Maple wrote that he feared the interview would serve "`Dateline''s purpose of painting DARE in a bad light." The NBC employee says pulling the McCaffrey interview might have dealt a "death blow" to the show. NBC's McCormick responded to Maple that the show's producer had written McCaffrey a letter before the interview telling him the purpose of the interview was to discuss research on DARE's effectiveness. While the network did not promise to cut McCaffrey's interview, the NBC employee explains, "at some point this story is much more trouble than it's worth." Maple says writing this kind of letter to a news organization is "uncommon," and he had never done it for McCaffrey before. But he says "Dateline" treated McCaffrey unfairly.
The show was rescheduled one more time, for Tuesday, February 4. That time slot - right after the president's State of the Union address - is commonly considered to be a "death slot." Clinton's speeches are renowned for running long, killing whatever television segment is planned to run next. And, that night, the segment did not run. As expected, Clinton's speech ran longer than scheduled and "Dateline" ran a show focusing on the O.J. Simpson verdict. "This system has worked. This show has not been killed. Whoever says that is out of the loop," Corvo says, adding that he has now cleared it to air. As of February 10, though, the segment had not been rescheduled. Corvo says it will be rescheduled when the executive producer of "Dateline"returns from vacation.
And researchers and reporters are not the only ones getting Dared. Some parents who question the program also say they've been strong-armed. In the San Juan Islands northwest of Seattle is a small town called Friday Harbor. There, dozens of parents have joined together in a group called San Juan Parents Against DARE. According to Andrew Seltser, the group's founder, nearly all of the members want drug education in the schools; they just don't believe the DARE program works. In August, Seltser's group collected more than 100 signatures on a petition asking the local school board to review the effectiveness of DARE. The debate about DARE overtook the small community, and became a matter of intense passion, with local DARE supporters raging against the parents who were challenging the program. In September, the local school board announced it would review concerns about DARE.
Then an odd thing happened. On October 7, 1996, the "CBS Evening News" aired a short segment that presented information critical of DARE. No one in Friday Harbor saw that segment, though. Thirty seconds into the story, Friday Harbor's screens went black. Randy Lindsey, the station manager for the local cable station, says when he watched a videotape of that night's news "it looks like someone pulled the plug." Lindsey can't explain the blackout. Friday Harbor, he says, often has problems receiving television signals due to sun spots. But sun spot interference, he says, normally distorts the screen differently. Seltser's group says they believe the program was jammed by DARE supporters since it came in the heat of the debate. And some Friday Harbor DARE supporters aren't denying it. One prominent local DARE supporter says it's "not important" whether or not the show was jammed. "Look, I'm not going to answer the question as to whether or not I know who jammed it. Hell, it might have been me," he says, asking that his name not be used. "What I am going to tell you is that TV program may have stopped DARE in Friday Harbor, which means more kids here would be on drugs."
Dare's public response to studies critical of the program has been to dismiss the studies as irrelevant. DARE says the studies are based on an old curriculum that may not have worked, but that the program now uses a redesigned curriculum that does work. The problem with the old curriculum, DARE officials say, was that DARE classes were not interactive enough; under the new curriculum, the classes are much more so. But this seems debatable, judging from a recent DARE class conducted by Detective Rick Myers at Barcroft Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia. Myers, a big man who looks very much like a cop, visits Barcroft's fifth-graders every Thursday to lead them in the DARE way. One week's lesson was about resisting peer pressure. Myers's lesson lasted about forty-five minutes. All but six minutes were spent on a lecture by Myers. To be sure, Myers used interactive role play during those six minutes, but researchers question the value of such role-playing as set out by the DARE curriculum.
For the first scene, Myers chose two kids: a brown-haired boy who was so nervous that he wobbled when he stood, and a tall girl who was so self-confident that she bowed when she got to the front of the room. Myers whispered the script to the two children and told them to face each other.
"There is a party on Saturday night at some person's house," the girl said matter-of-factly.
The boy said nothing.
"The people there, they will be drinking things that have [now louder and more slowly] al-co-hol."
The boy looked at the ground.
"I said, `The people will be drinking [very loudly and very slowly] al-co-hol.'"
"No," peeped the boy.
Kindly, but firmly, Myers lectured the boy. "Posture. Eye contact. Posture. Eye contact," Myers told him. "You need to be confident. You're doing the right thing."
Take two. The girl said her first line. The boy said: "Oh." Myers shouted: "Posture. Eye contact." The girl said her second line. The boy stood straighter, looked the girl briefly in the eye, and said very quickly: "No thank you, I don't take alcohol. I prefer juice and milk." Myers led everyone in a round of applause. At one of the back tables, a thuggish-looking kid sat regarding this little scene with frank scorn. "He's supposed to say that? That won't work. He'd get the shit beat out of him."
For another scene, Myers chose a small girl with wide eyes and scraggly brown hair. She seemed a little nervous, but excited to have been chosen. Myers whispered the instructions into her ear. They faced off, standing about ten feet from each other. Myers walked up to the girl. "Hey, do you want to buy a joint?" he said. She replied, almost inaudibly, "No." Myers put his face close to hers. "Come on, wanna buy it?"
"No, thank you," she whispered.
Now, waving his finger in her face, Myers shouted: "Why not? Come on, buy it!"
The little girl, backed against the windows, said, again, "No." Myers led the class in a round of applause.
Drug researchers interviewed about Myers's scenes are dismissive. "That role play is absurd. If the kids learn anything at all from it, they learn not to buy drugs from police officers," one researcher says. "Making it more interactive means making it more like real life. This is not useful. Fun, maybe. Useful? Nope."
And Myers's class is typical. When I asked him if other DARE instructors did it differently, he was adamant in response. "No. The great thing about this program is that everyone in the country is trained the same way," Myers told me. "We are told to go exactly by the book. There is no room for modifying the program. No way. It's the same everywhere."
The claim that DARE's curriculum is changing and maturing seems to be more a matter of tactics than anything else. A longtime California instructor who recently retired, and who told me that the curriculum has not in fact changed much at all, conceded that saying the curriculum was in constant flux did have an obvious strategic benefit. Experts agree. Wysong and Wright wrote in Sociological Focus that if DARE is portrayed as a constantly evolving program it can't ever be studied and therefore can't ever fail. "Thus DARE is protected from criticism and remains `forever young,'" they wrote. "In fact, in the view of DARE stakeholders, this is as it should be, because the program cannot be allowed to fail: the stakes are simply too high."
In fact, the most controversial part of the program - the DARE box - has remained unchanged despite years of criticism about this systematic attempt to encourage children to rat out the grown-ups around them, including their own parents. After the first class, the students, following DARE instructions, fashion a shoe box into a colorful mailbox, often decorated with DARE stickers. Each week from then on, for the entire seventeen weeks, students are encouraged to write anonymous notes asking any question they want. They are also allowed to accuse people of using or selling drugs or committing sexual abuse. These accusatory notes may also be anonymous. At the end of every DARE class, the officer reads the questions out loud. The officer does not read the accusatory notes to the class, but those notes are referred to the appropriate school and police investigative units for action. As James Bovard pointed out, Darrin Davis is not an isolated case. DARE students have fingered their parents in Maryland, Oklahoma and Wisconsin. In 1991, a 10-year-old told a Colorado 911 operator, "I'm a DARE kid," and urged the police to arrest his parents for marijuana possession. After his parents were arrested, the cop assigned to his school publicly praised him.
Parents and scientists in dozens of states have attacked the DARE box, saying that it reminds them of Stalinists rewarding kids for ratting on their parents. Lochridge, DARE's spokesman, dismisses their fears, saying it's mostly "urban myths." "Officers, as part of their training," he adds, "are taught not to elicit information about the [students'] personal lives." Lochridge says students are not encouraged to make accusations. But, according to one University of Illinois study, an accusation is made in 59 percent of all DARE classes. And while that number may be high, three Washington, D.C., area DARE cops interviewed said a DARE box note accused someone of using or selling drugs in at least one-third of their classes. All three cops said they "didn't discourage" their students from making accusations. Lochridge maintains the cops are just doing their job. "I don't know of any state which doesn't have laws requiring us to investigate any accusations of sexual abuse or drugs," he says.
In the end, DARE has an answer that trumps all. Even if there is some truth to charges that DARE doesn't work, what this means is that we need ... more DARE. "Well, if you teach people fractions or a foreign language, it's going to erode unless you reinforce it," Lochridge explains. "So the answer is more DARE. Kids need to get it more." And doubtless they will, whether it does them any good or not. (Copyright 1997, The New Republic)
Holy Trinity
By Stephen Glass
The New Republic
January 27, 1997
The gospel of Saints Paul, Warren and Pete.
Susan is an 80-year-old widow. She had hip surgery five years ago, and since then she has spent most of her time indoors. Until two years ago, she had never shown much interest in politics and government. She subscribed to The Chicago Tribune to read Ann Landers and the "Tempo" section. She had voted for president only once, in 1960; she can't remember if she picked Kennedy or Nixon. Each morning, she woke up early, spent most of her day watching soap operas and talking to her three cats--Larry, Moe and Curley. Each night, after cleaning the dishes, she read romance novels in bed until she fell asleep. But on March 1, 1994, all that changed. Intrigued that " Larry King Live" was promising to talk about the British royal family's new mail-order catalog, Susan decided to stay awake past 8 p.m. "But Larry took forever to get to Prince Michael," she recalls. "Beforehand, he had Paul Tsongas and Warren Rudman talking about their group, the Concord Coalition. All of a sudden I saw what was happening. Both parties working together. It must be on target. These men were going to save my children."
Susan became, at once, a convert, a deficit-hawk of unmatched zeal. She has written, by her own estimate, more than 900 letters to congressmen asking for Social Security and other entitlements to be curtailed. In her wallet next to photos of her grandchildren, she has a picture of Warren Rudman. She can tell you what the deficit will be at noon on all major holidays. She even renamed her cats: Paul, Warren and Pete (the last one named after Pete Peterson, the Concord Coalition's president). What does she do when she's bored? She tries to convert others. "I trick my friends into giving me the phone lists of their senior citizen homes and then I call everyone on the list," she says. (She adds a request that her last name not be used so she doesn't lose these friends.)
The New Republic
January 27, 1997
The gospel of Saints Paul, Warren and Pete.
Susan is an 80-year-old widow. She had hip surgery five years ago, and since then she has spent most of her time indoors. Until two years ago, she had never shown much interest in politics and government. She subscribed to The Chicago Tribune to read Ann Landers and the "Tempo" section. She had voted for president only once, in 1960; she can't remember if she picked Kennedy or Nixon. Each morning, she woke up early, spent most of her day watching soap operas and talking to her three cats--Larry, Moe and Curley. Each night, after cleaning the dishes, she read romance novels in bed until she fell asleep. But on March 1, 1994, all that changed. Intrigued that " Larry King Live" was promising to talk about the British royal family's new mail-order catalog, Susan decided to stay awake past 8 p.m. "But Larry took forever to get to Prince Michael," she recalls. "Beforehand, he had Paul Tsongas and Warren Rudman talking about their group, the Concord Coalition. All of a sudden I saw what was happening. Both parties working together. It must be on target. These men were going to save my children."
Susan became, at once, a convert, a deficit-hawk of unmatched zeal. She has written, by her own estimate, more than 900 letters to congressmen asking for Social Security and other entitlements to be curtailed. In her wallet next to photos of her grandchildren, she has a picture of Warren Rudman. She can tell you what the deficit will be at noon on all major holidays. She even renamed her cats: Paul, Warren and Pete (the last one named after Pete Peterson, the Concord Coalition's president). What does she do when she's bored? She tries to convert others. "I trick my friends into giving me the phone lists of their senior citizen homes and then I call everyone on the list," she says. (She adds a request that her last name not be used so she doesn't lose these friends.)
Probable Claus
Stephen Glass
Last year, two days before Christmas, Jerry Buttle was nearing the end of his best year yet as a shopping mall Santa. He was averaging more than 25 kids an hour, up from the previous year's record 21. The line of eager children equipped with voluminous lists snaked farther than he could see down the Wisconsin shopping center's hallway.
At about 7 p.m., a ruddy-faced fourth-grader hopped onto his lap and began listing the dozens of gifts he wanted for Christmas. Then, just after asking for a video game, he shouted: "Mommy, Santa has a boner!" He began singing over and over: "Santa has a boner, Santa has a boner!" A deep silence spread all the way to the back of the line. Then, just as suddenly, the chatter started up again as parents told their kids it was time to go home.
Jerry Buttle is 83 years old. "Trust me. I haven't had one in a long time," he says of the erection in question. "He must have felt my belt buckle." Mr. Buttle now uses rope to hold up his red pants.
An isolated episode of humiliation for one old man, a small change in tradition, rope instead of a belt. But incidents like this one are just the beginning for Santas across the country.
Once assumed to be kindly -- if perhaps slightly eccentric, boozy or otherwise not conventionally employable -- old men, commercial Santas are now widely assumed to be potential pedophiles. No longer celebrated only in secular hymns and saccharine movies, Santas are the subject of a forthcoming paper by a child advocacy group on how to guard against child molesters.
The climate of suspicion has spawned an entire industry of Santa advisers. One Chicago-area school for Santas featured a 144-page textbook that provided instruction on everything from going to the bathroom in a Santa suit to rules on how to touch children. The country's other major Santa school and company, Santa Plus, offers a shorter handbook that repeats this rule twice: "Always be aware of the placement of your hands while children are on your lap. Both hands should be clearly visible at all times."
And Santa's bosses are taking this sort of stuff very seriously. The witch-hunt that has devastated the day care industry in recent years has made a deep impression on others who work closely with children. Fearful of lawsuits, criminal charges and bad publicity, mall executives are erring on the side of skittishness.
Starting about four Christmases ago, though, shopping mall executives -- under pressure from insurance companies -- began demanding tighter control over jolly old Saint Nick's baser instincts. In many malls, this has meant relatively subtle changes, like requiring that Santa undergo drug testing, and that he wear white gloves so that his hands are more visible.
But, increasingly, Santa's overlords have begun to demand much more. In the Midwest, children's advocates have been successful in pressuring malls to adopt a whole new Santa tradition. Three Illinois malls instructed their Santas to be "more down-to-business" and refrain from smiling since St. Nick's traditionally jolly demeanor could be "misinterpreted."
Across the Atlantic, Santa fares little better. England, whose Victorian age gave rise to the notion of Saint Nick as an innocent dispenser of universal love for children, has, like the U.S., begun to regard the old boy more as a fur-clad groper than a pater familias. This November, for the first time, several of England's department stores declared Santa's lap or knee off-limits unless an adult supervised.
And children's advocates say they want even more restrictions. The executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence believes all Santas should be fingerprinted. The Child Welfare League of America says there should be a national registry of Santas. "What we need are some regulations," explains Mary Davidson, the dean of Rutgers University's School of Social Work and a prominent advocate for children. "The question we must ask ourselves is, who is screening the Santas?"
But if child-care alarmism had at least some roots in reality (there have been a few cases of child-care workers molesting children), the great Santa Scare is 99.9 percent hysteria. The National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect hasn't recorded a single case of a Santa molesting a child.
Some experts say Santas may actually be the safest population since they are constantly being photographed. "What (the demand for restrictions is) doing is drawing attention away from the real problem. It's making Santa the fall guy," says Richard Gelles, director of the University of Rhode Island's Family Violence Research Progam. "If you worry about Santa, you forget to worry about Uncle Harry." And an abusive Uncle Harry is far more common; only 6 percent of child abuse is committed by strangers.
Douglas Besharov, the first director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, fears that many men will avoid the Santa business altogether. "It's a great loss for the men and for the children. Children need to be touched. People need to be touched," he says. "It's a reality that men want to be careful, so they are progressively having less and less physical contact with children."
The Santa scare may not be saving children, but it is having one real effect: It is discouraging Santas and frightening them into treating children in a more distant, and even peculiar, fashion. While no one has historical data on how many Santas are quitting, one retired South Carolina Santa, Richard, began informally keeping track last year. Richard, a 78-year-old Santa who claims his last name is Claus (he also says his answering machine announces that he is unavailable because he is feeding the reindeer), is convinced the scare is encouraging more and more Santas to get out of the racket. "If this keeps up, the next generation will have no contact with Santa," he says. "Get your pictures now," he forecasts solemnly, "they'll be collector's items."
Some Santas have agreed to stay on board only if they can modify their costume to avoid any perceptions of child abuse. For many, this simply means streamlining the suit's cuffs, so Santa's hands are more visible. But a few Santas have gone further, and weirder. After an Illinois Santa noticed that his white-gloved hands appeared to blend into a child's white shirt in a picture, he began wearing rhinestone-studded aqua-blue mittens. Likewise, a Miami Santa has been wearing sunglasses ever since a parent accused him of giving his 3-year-old daughter "the eye."
Richard is horrified by the more creative solutions. In October, he founded the Union of Concerned Santas and Easter Bunnies. The group fights malls that tinker with tradition, but promotes sensitivity training for Santas. In its upcoming newsletter, the child is segmented into green (safe, like shoulders) and red (dangerous, like chests) touch zones. "If they could invent safe sex," Richard says, hopefully, "then, Ho! Ho! Ho!, we'll make safe Santa-sitting."
Last year, two days before Christmas, Jerry Buttle was nearing the end of his best year yet as a shopping mall Santa. He was averaging more than 25 kids an hour, up from the previous year's record 21. The line of eager children equipped with voluminous lists snaked farther than he could see down the Wisconsin shopping center's hallway.
At about 7 p.m., a ruddy-faced fourth-grader hopped onto his lap and began listing the dozens of gifts he wanted for Christmas. Then, just after asking for a video game, he shouted: "Mommy, Santa has a boner!" He began singing over and over: "Santa has a boner, Santa has a boner!" A deep silence spread all the way to the back of the line. Then, just as suddenly, the chatter started up again as parents told their kids it was time to go home.
Jerry Buttle is 83 years old. "Trust me. I haven't had one in a long time," he says of the erection in question. "He must have felt my belt buckle." Mr. Buttle now uses rope to hold up his red pants.
An isolated episode of humiliation for one old man, a small change in tradition, rope instead of a belt. But incidents like this one are just the beginning for Santas across the country.
Once assumed to be kindly -- if perhaps slightly eccentric, boozy or otherwise not conventionally employable -- old men, commercial Santas are now widely assumed to be potential pedophiles. No longer celebrated only in secular hymns and saccharine movies, Santas are the subject of a forthcoming paper by a child advocacy group on how to guard against child molesters.
The climate of suspicion has spawned an entire industry of Santa advisers. One Chicago-area school for Santas featured a 144-page textbook that provided instruction on everything from going to the bathroom in a Santa suit to rules on how to touch children. The country's other major Santa school and company, Santa Plus, offers a shorter handbook that repeats this rule twice: "Always be aware of the placement of your hands while children are on your lap. Both hands should be clearly visible at all times."
And Santa's bosses are taking this sort of stuff very seriously. The witch-hunt that has devastated the day care industry in recent years has made a deep impression on others who work closely with children. Fearful of lawsuits, criminal charges and bad publicity, mall executives are erring on the side of skittishness.
Starting about four Christmases ago, though, shopping mall executives -- under pressure from insurance companies -- began demanding tighter control over jolly old Saint Nick's baser instincts. In many malls, this has meant relatively subtle changes, like requiring that Santa undergo drug testing, and that he wear white gloves so that his hands are more visible.
But, increasingly, Santa's overlords have begun to demand much more. In the Midwest, children's advocates have been successful in pressuring malls to adopt a whole new Santa tradition. Three Illinois malls instructed their Santas to be "more down-to-business" and refrain from smiling since St. Nick's traditionally jolly demeanor could be "misinterpreted."
Across the Atlantic, Santa fares little better. England, whose Victorian age gave rise to the notion of Saint Nick as an innocent dispenser of universal love for children, has, like the U.S., begun to regard the old boy more as a fur-clad groper than a pater familias. This November, for the first time, several of England's department stores declared Santa's lap or knee off-limits unless an adult supervised.
And children's advocates say they want even more restrictions. The executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence believes all Santas should be fingerprinted. The Child Welfare League of America says there should be a national registry of Santas. "What we need are some regulations," explains Mary Davidson, the dean of Rutgers University's School of Social Work and a prominent advocate for children. "The question we must ask ourselves is, who is screening the Santas?"
But if child-care alarmism had at least some roots in reality (there have been a few cases of child-care workers molesting children), the great Santa Scare is 99.9 percent hysteria. The National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect hasn't recorded a single case of a Santa molesting a child.
Some experts say Santas may actually be the safest population since they are constantly being photographed. "What (the demand for restrictions is) doing is drawing attention away from the real problem. It's making Santa the fall guy," says Richard Gelles, director of the University of Rhode Island's Family Violence Research Progam. "If you worry about Santa, you forget to worry about Uncle Harry." And an abusive Uncle Harry is far more common; only 6 percent of child abuse is committed by strangers.
Douglas Besharov, the first director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, fears that many men will avoid the Santa business altogether. "It's a great loss for the men and for the children. Children need to be touched. People need to be touched," he says. "It's a reality that men want to be careful, so they are progressively having less and less physical contact with children."
The Santa scare may not be saving children, but it is having one real effect: It is discouraging Santas and frightening them into treating children in a more distant, and even peculiar, fashion. While no one has historical data on how many Santas are quitting, one retired South Carolina Santa, Richard, began informally keeping track last year. Richard, a 78-year-old Santa who claims his last name is Claus (he also says his answering machine announces that he is unavailable because he is feeding the reindeer), is convinced the scare is encouraging more and more Santas to get out of the racket. "If this keeps up, the next generation will have no contact with Santa," he says. "Get your pictures now," he forecasts solemnly, "they'll be collector's items."
Some Santas have agreed to stay on board only if they can modify their costume to avoid any perceptions of child abuse. For many, this simply means streamlining the suit's cuffs, so Santa's hands are more visible. But a few Santas have gone further, and weirder. After an Illinois Santa noticed that his white-gloved hands appeared to blend into a child's white shirt in a picture, he began wearing rhinestone-studded aqua-blue mittens. Likewise, a Miami Santa has been wearing sunglasses ever since a parent accused him of giving his 3-year-old daughter "the eye."
Richard is horrified by the more creative solutions. In October, he founded the Union of Concerned Santas and Easter Bunnies. The group fights malls that tinker with tradition, but promotes sensitivity training for Santas. In its upcoming newsletter, the child is segmented into green (safe, like shoulders) and red (dangerous, like chests) touch zones. "If they could invent safe sex," Richard says, hopefully, "then, Ho! Ho! Ho!, we'll make safe Santa-sitting."
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