AskHistorians

Not really, at least nothing that made waves. I also haven't ever run across anything while actively looking when it comes up online, so afaik, if there was anything, it was local and minor.

At the time, while the evidence turned out to be dubious at best, the prosecution was acting in good faith based on the information they had. Overzealous? Absolutely. Outside of professional ethics or procedure? No.

You ran into a good bit of school board bullshit though. Policy, rather than law. And there were some changes in how childcare centers were overseen, but again, that's policy rather than law (with the same caveat that such laws wouldn't necessarily have made the news nationally).

Now, one place changes did occur across the nation was in handling of child witnesses and victims. With the usual caveat that this is anecdotal, second hand, and poor historiography; there was a boom in funding for research into the effects of sexual predation on children, specifically very young children. About the only good thing to come out of the whole fiasco, really. Children got better protection from law enforcement and the courts, as well as improvements in how they were treated as witnesses. That had the secondary benefit of making spurious accusations harder, which meant that resources could be focused on actual crimes rather than outrage and fear (at least hypothetically, ppl still be trippin when a kid is involved).

Going full anecdote, I had a cousin that was maybe 5 or 6 when it first started hitting the news here in my area. He was the first of us to get the "stranger danger" line actually used on him, though all of my generation down to his in the extended family got some degree of extra conversation and instructions on sexual assault awareness. I was in my teens, so I didn't get as much, but I still got some. Though I had been given a basic talk by my mom and dad once I was old enough to go play in the neighborhood, which actually ended up keeping me from getting molested once. Well, molested severely. Dude tried to cop a feel, but I noped out before he could do more than a quick touch to the balls. But now we're waaay on a tangent.

Point being that the difference in focus on what parents in my area were giving to kids changed, and specifically because of the public nature of the McMartin trials. It went from being really generic and vague to proper information that included trusted adults rather than just randos