“THE WITCH-HUNT NARRATIVE: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children,” by Ross E. Cheit. Oxford University Press. 508 pages. $49.95.

Ross E. Cheit’s book begins with the 1983 charges against staff at the McMartin Preschool. The case stretched over seven years, but produced no convictions — only a widespread consensus that it had been a “witch-hunt” and had unfairly targeted the accused. That narrative prevailed until now.

In 1992, Cheit recovered his own memory of sexual abuse in adolescence, more than two decades earlier, at a summer camp. By then, he held a law degree and a professor’s chair at Brown University. He eventually won civil suits against the individual and the institution that had betrayed him.

Cheit found that a single storyline clung tenaciously even when medical evidence showed children had been harmed. In academia, courts and the media, those who should have looked further failed to challenge the popular myth that considers children suggestible, unreliable witnesses to their own abuse.

Recognizing that his personal experience could bias him, Cheit closely examined the original evidence and court records in three large childcare sex-abuse cases and dozens of smaller ones — identifying some instances of people falsely accused and many where guilt went unpunished. He recounts evidence with scholarly precision that is emotionally engaging and eminently readable.

His book is a masterpiece of educational method, for he names more than 80 undergraduate students as colleagues in the massive effort to find original documents. They returned from hometowns across the country with court transcripts, medical records and old interviews of children. Students compiled casts of characters and forensic timelines. One student continued the work in graduate school and devised methods to graphically display enormous quantities of evidence.

Cheit refutes the claims of psychiatrist Richard A. Gardner, who promoted the witch-hunt narrative in his self-published 1991 book, “Sex Abuse Hysteria: Salem Witch Trials Revisited.” Ironically, Gardner had acknowledged in the final paragraph of his book that the vast majority (“probably over 95%,” Gardner wrote) of children’s sex-abuse allegations are valid, and that his own book, “Sex Abuse Hysteria,” only addressed “the small minority” that he considered false accusations — daycare and custody cases, where Gardner made his living as an expert witness for the defense.

Though not in Cheit’s book, a 1994 transcript from Rhode Island Family Court shows a mother complaining to the chief judge that the court’s leading psychologist did not properly evaluate her daughter for sexual abuse that was identified by other clinicians. Instead, she says, the psychologist propounded Gardner’s “witch-hunt” analysis and blamed the mother for alienating the girl against her father. The chief judge replies that he, too, is reading Gardner’s book.

One-tenth of Family Court’s 2004 training manual for guardians ad litem entertains Gardner’s theory of “alienation,” that adapts the witch-hunt narrative to custody cases. As recently as 2012, the Rhode Island Bar Journal published a credulous article on alienation despite the fact that scientific and judicial councils rejected it years before.

Cheit’s book is a tour de force against the witch-hunt fabulists and those suggestible enough to believe them.

Anne Grant (ParentingProject@verizon.net) began to document troubling custody rulings when she was executive director of the Women’s Center of Rhode Island and wrote the column “Overcoming Abuse” for The Providence Journal in the 1990s.