Encyc

Encyc houses over 100 concepts relevant to the history of eugenics and its continued implications in contemporary life. These entries represent in-depth explorations of key concepts for understanding eugenics.

Aboriginal and Indigenous Peoples
Michael Billinger
Alcoholism and drug use
Paula Larsson
Archives and institutions
Mary Horodyski
Assimilation
Karen Stote
Bioethical appeals to eugenics
Tiffany Campbell
Bioethics
Gregor Wolbring
Birth control
Molly Ladd-Taylor
Childhood innocence
Joanne Faulkner
Colonialism
Karen Stote
Conservationism
Michael Kohlman
Criminality
Amy Samson
Degeneracy
Michael Billinger
Dehumanization: psychological aspects
David Livingstone Smith
Deinstitutionalization
Erika Dyck
Developmental disability
Dick Sobsey
Disability rights
Joshua St. Pierre
Disability, models of
Gregor Wolbring
Down Syndrome
Michael Berube
Education
Erna Kurbegovic
Education as redress
Jonathan Chernoguz
Educational testing
Michelle Hawks
Environmentalism
Douglas Wahlsten
Epilepsy
Frank W. Stahnisch
Ethnicity and race
Michael Billinger
Eugenic family studies
Robert A. Wilson
Eugenic traits
Robert A. Wilson
Eugenics
Robert A. Wilson
Eugenics as wrongful
Robert A. Wilson
Eugenics: positive vs negative
Robert A. Wilson
Family planning
Caroline Lyster
Farming and animal breeding
Sheila Rae Gibbons
Feeble-mindedness
Wendy Kline
Feminism
Esther Rosario
Fitter family contests
Molly Ladd-Taylor
Gender
Caroline Lyster
Genealogy
Leslie Baker
Genetic counseling
Gregor Wolbring
Genetics
James Tabery
Genocide
Karen Stote
Guidance clinics
Amy Samson
Hereditary disease
Sarah Malanowski
Heredity
Michael Billinger
Human enhancement
Gregor Wolbring
Human experimentation
Frank W. Stahnisch
Human nature
Chris Haufe
Huntington's disease
Alice Wexler
Immigration
Jacalyn Ambler
Indian--race-based definition
Karen Stote
Informed consent
Erika Dyck
Institutionalization
Erika Dyck
Intellectual disability
Licia Carlson
Intelligence and IQ testing
Aida Roige
KEY CONCEPTS
Robert A. Wilson
Kant on eugenics and human nature
Alan McLuckie
Marriage
Alexandra Minna Stern
Masturbation
Paula Larsson
Medicalization
Gregor Wolbring
Mental deficiency: idiot, imbecile, and moron
Wendy Kline
Miscegenation
Michael Billinger
Motherhood
Molly Ladd-Taylor
Natural and artificial selection
Douglas Wahlsten
Natural kinds
Matthew H. Slater
Nature vs nurture
James Tabery
Nazi euthanasia
Paul Weindling
Nazi sterilization
Paul Weindling
Newgenics
Caroline Lyster
Nordicism
Michael Kohlman
Normalcy and subnormalcy
Gregor Wolbring
Parenting and newgenics
Caroline Lyster
Parenting of children with disabilities
Dick Sobsey
Parenting with intellectual disabilities
David McConnell
Pauperism
Caroline Lyster
Person
Gregor Wolbring
Physician assisted suicide
Caroline Lyster
Political science and race
Dexter Fergie
Popular culture
Colette Leung
Population control
Alexandra Stern
Prenatal testing
Douglas Wahlsten
Project Prevention
Samantha Balzer
Propaganda
Colette Leung
Psychiatric classification
Steeves Demazeux
Psychiatry and mental health
Frank W. Stahnisch
Psychology
Robert A. Wilson
Public health
Lindsey Grubbs
Race and racialism
Michael Billinger
Race betterment
Erna Kurbegovic
Race suicide
Adam Hochman
Racial hygiene
Frank W. Stahnisch
Racial hygiene and Nazism
Frank Stahnisch
Racial segregation
Paula Larsson
Racism
Michael Billinger
Reproductive rights
Erika Dyck
Reproductive technologies
Caroline Lyster
Residential schools
Faun Rice
Roles of science in eugenics
Robert A. Wilson
Schools for the Deaf and Deaf Identity
Bartlomiej Lenart
Science and values
Matthew J. Barker
Selecting for disability
Clarissa Becerra
Sexual segregation
Leslie Baker
Sexuality
Alexandra Minna Stern
Social Darwinism
Erna Kurbegovic
Sociobiology
Robert A. Wilson
Sorts of people
Robert A. Wilson
Special education
Jason Ellis
Speech-language pathology
Joshua St. Pierre
Standpoint theory
Joshua St. Pierre
Sterilization
Wendy Kline
Sterilization compensation
Paul Weindling
Stolen generations
Joanne Faulkner
Subhumanization
Licia Carlson
Today and Tomorrow: To-day and To-morrow book series
Michael Kohlman
Training schools for the feeble-minded
Katrina Jirik
Trans
Aleta Gruenewald
Transhumanism and radical enhancement
Mark Walker
Tuberculosis
Maureen Lux
Twin Studies
Douglas Wahlsten & Frank W. Stahnisch
Ugly Laws
Susan M. Schweik and Robert A. Wilson
Unfit, the
Cameron A.J. Ellis
Violence and disability
Dick Sobsey
War
Frank W. Stahnisch
Women's suffrage
Sheila Rae Gibbons

Eugenics as wrongful

In a landmark legal case in 1996, eugenics survivor Leilani Muir successfully sued the province of Alberta for wrongful confinement and sterilization. The legal finding implied that Ms. Muir should never have been institutionalized at the Provincial Training School of Alberta as a “moron” and sterilized under the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta. The trial itself revealed many unsettling features of the province’s practice of eugenics, raising questions about how a seemingly large number of people, like Ms. Muir, who were not mentally defective, could have been wrongfully confined at an institution for the feeble-minded, and subsequently sterilized on eugenic grounds. Employing a three-agent model of wrongful accusation and conceiving of eugenics as wrongful more generally may help in understanding the operation of eugenic practices, such as institutionalization and sterilization, both in Western Canada and elsewhere. Eugenic practice involves a form of wrongful accusation that marks a significant departure from eugenic ideology.

Wrongfulness
The concept of wrongfulness is drawn from legal contexts and applies in the first instance to criminal convictions. A wrongful conviction in a legal criminal case occurs when the decision to convict someone is mistaken. Initial accusations may be false, police investigative work may be misleading, defense counseling may fail to satisfy minimal standards, or there may be communal pressure to convict the person. The presumption is that the legal system is designed to ensure a fair process in a criminal trial, and that people are assumed innocent until proven guilty. Thus, to move from innocence to a verdict of guilty without the person having committed the crime in question, there must be at least one process leading to the conviction that “goes wrong” in some way.

The failures implied by a wrongful conviction are both procedural and systematic. Since the legal system has procedures aimed at preserving the presumption of innocence, in cases of wrongful conviction we say that the legal system failed to deliver justice. Likewise, to attribute wrongfulness to a particular eugenic practice, such as the decision to admit and retain someone in an institution for feeble-minded persons, points to procedural and systematic failures in a larger set of eugenic practices.

Wrongful Accusation
A passing comment by sterilization survivor Ken Nelson in the film The Sterilization of Leilani Muir suggests that the wrongfulness of eugenic practices extends beyond endpoint decisions, such as that to confine or to sterilize someone. Talking of his general experiences in the Provincial Training School in Red Deer, Alberta, Mr. Nelson says that “it was almost as if you had committed a crime”. That feeling of having been accused of a crime that one did not commit, of having been falsely accused, provides another way to think of the wrongfulness of eugenics: as laying in part in procedural and systematic failures to prevent or halt the effects of the equivalent of false accusations of mental defectiveness.

Although accusations of criminality are not usually thought to be wrongful in the same sense as are convictions, the concept of wrongful accusation parallels that of wrongful conviction. The very procedural and systematic failures that result in a mistaken outcome or decision can also operate so as to allow a false accusation to be made, to be heard, and to initiate legal proceedings.

Ritual Sexual Abuse and Wrongful Accusation
The accusations at the heart of the satanic or ritual sexual abuse cases prevalent in North America during the 1980s and 1990s provide a paradigm of wrongful accusation. Beginning with the McMartin preschool case in California in 1983, over the next 15 years more than 100 similar cases involving allegations of ritual sexual child abuse, often involving “satanic” elements, developed in the United States and Canada. These cases included extensive charges of multi-child sexual abuse involving many daycare workers (as in the McMartin case) or groups of largely working class parents (as in the Bakersfield case). Many of the cases involved truly bizarre allegations, such as that the accused flew around in the air unaided, and that putative victims had been pierced with sharp objects although they bore no visible signs of such piercing.

Rather than such accusations being dismissed in virtue of their bizarre nature, the lack of credibility of witnesses, the absence of physical evidence, and the large-scale inconsistencies in the charges, ritual sexual abuse cases often involved a multiplication of charges and extensive legal proceedings. For example, in Wenatchee, Washington, ultimately over 30 000 charges were laid against more than 40 people in legal proceedings that endured more than three years. No ritual sexual abuse took place there.

Eugenics and Wrongful Accusation
Striking about such wrongful accusation is that despite there being legal and social systems to detect false accusations and prevent them from cascading through to wrongful convictions, those systems themselves fostered that cascade. Here the parallel to eugenic practices is perhaps most suggestive. For cases such as that of Leilani Muir, as well as many of the more than 700 related cases that were settled by the government of Alberta in its wake, precisely the same is true. What should have been detected as false diagnoses of mental deficiency, or as mistaken admissions to training schools for the feeble-minded, cascaded through instead to long-term confinement and eugenic sterilization. Moreover, this happened not only despite, but in virtue of the very system of protections and checks put in place to prevent misapplication of eugenic ideology. This conceptualization of eugenics as involving wrongful accusation thus invites new ways of thinking about the mechanics of eugenics.

Appeals to the notions of “moral panic” or “group think” are common in explaining both ritual abuse cases and that of eugenics. Potentially more insightful, however, is a dynamic model focused on interactions between three kinds of agents—victims, perpetrators, and bystanders.

A Three-Agent Model of Eugenics as Wrongful
In standard cases of sexual abuse, the perpetrator is an adult (often a male), the victim is a child, and bystanders include other adults, some of whom occupy special positions of authority in virtue of their familial or social position. Familiar from classic feminist work on sexual abuse, bystanders have been viewed as playing, and indeed have been called on to play, an active witnessing role in intervening to end such abuse (e.g., Herman 1997).

This interventionist role, however, had devastating consequences in ritual sexual abuse cases, with zealous actions of would-be bystanders, such as social workers, police officers, parents, and other concerned citizens, in effect creating new victims—innocent adults who had committed no relevant crime at all. One way to think of this is in terms of there having been a shift in the occupants of the three roles in standard cases of child sexual abuse. In ritual sexual abuse cases, adults in special positions of authority—would-be bystanders in standard cases—become perpetrators; falsely accused, innocent adults become victims (along with children who tragically come to falsely believe that they have been subject to ritual sexual abuse); and other adults and children become bystanders called in to “witness” crimes that in fact did not occur.

Likewise, in the case of eugenics we can distinguish two cases, the standard or idealized case—that comporting with eugenics ideology—from eugenic practice. In eugenic ideology, the feeble-minded and others of inferior stock are perpetrators, the innocent public and future generations are victims, and those in positions of social authority—politicians, scientists, social advocates, community leaders—are bystanders. In eugenic practice, however, enthusiastic intervention by such authorities, in effect, shifts the occupants of these three roles. In eugenics as practiced, those wrongfully accused of mental deficiency and as being of inferior stock become victims; those in positions of social authority become perpetrators; and the innocent public become bystanders called on to “witness” and intervene in a putative intergenerational process—degeneracy, race suicide—that in fact does not exist.

-Robert A. Wilson

  • Bowal, P., & Pecson, K. (2011). Eugenics and Leilani Muir. Law Now, 49-52.

  • Davis, J.E. (2005). Accounts of innocence: Sexual abuse, trauma, and the self. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

  • Grekul, J., Krahn, H., & Odynak, D. (2004). Sterilizing the ‘feeble-minded’: Eugenics in Alberta, Canada, 1929-1972. Journal of Historical Sociology, 17, 358-384.

  • Herman, J. (1997). Trauma and recovery. New York: Basic Books, 2nd edition. (First edition published in 1992).

  • Muir, Leilani. (2014). A whisper past: Childless after eugenic sterilization in Alberta. Vancouver, BC: Friesen Press.

  • Nathan, D., & Snedeker, M. (1995). Satan’s silence: Ritual abuse and the making of a modern American witch hunt. Lincoln, NE: Author’s Choice Press.

  • Rabinowitz, D. (2003). No crueler tyrannies: Accusation, false witness, and other terrors of our times. New York: Wall Street Journal Books.

  • Satanic ritual abuse. Retrieved from: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse

  • Wahlsten, D. (1997). Leilani Muir versus the philosopher king: Eugenics on trial in Alberta.Genetica, 99, 185–198.

  • Hard-Nac Movie, LLC. (2009) Witch hunt. 91 minutes.