Satanic ritual abuse


 * Not to be confused with the Socialist Rifle Association, the NRA's good twin.

From my perspective, the U.S. appears to be witnessing its third great wave of hysteria. The first, the Salem Witch Trials, in 1692, lasted only a few months. Nineteen people were hanged before it became apparent that the accusations were suspect. In the 1950s, at the time of the McCarthy hearings, hysteria over the communist threat resulted in the destruction of many careers. Our current hysteria, which began in the early 1980s, is by far the worst with regard to the number of lives that have been destroyed and families that have disintegrated.

A major moral panic in the 1980s, the Satanic ritual abuse scare posited that there was a large underground of Satan-worshipers organized into multigenerational cults who habitually sexually abused and murdered children (and sometimes animals) in Satanic rites. "Satanic ritual abuse" was part of the Satanic Panic scare over widespread alleged Satanism. It included claims that do not stand up to the test of reason, much less any actual statistics to back them up, such as the claim that Satanists conduct over 1 million human sacrifices per year, often of children born into these supposed families.

Promotion and fraud
The panic was promoted heavily by Christian fundamentalists, particularly author Mike Warnke and his fraudulent "autobiography" The Satan Seller, Rebecca Brown and her equally fraudulent He Came To Set the Captives Free, Lauren Stratford and her gory (and fraudulent) book Satan's Underground, radio talk show host Bob Larson, book writer Hal Lindsey, and comic writer Jack Chick.

Many American feminists also pushed the panic, causing leftist Alexander Cockburn to rail against Katha Pollit, Gloria Steinem, and what Cockburn described as "countless psychotherapists, social workers, doctors, lawyers, and writers who call themselves feminists." Cockburn stated that "belief in ritual abuse has become so ensconced in this wing of feminism that the arrest, trial by ordeal, and lifelong incarceration of accused women have occasioned hardly a blink from its proponents." In Sweden, the panic was promoted by feminists such as sociologist and gender theorist Eva Lundgren.

An early book that gave impetus to the spread of this myth was Michelle Remembers by Michelle Smith in 1980. This book was proven to be a hoax (noticing a pattern?), but the widespread belief continued in multigenerational Satanic cults ritually abusing children. John Todd and Lauren Stratford also claimed to have been born into such multigenerational Satanist families, with Stratford claiming particularly horrific abuse, but both their testimonies were also found to be complete fabrications. The spread of the hoax continued into the 1990s with two Bob Larson novels, Dead Air and Abaddon, which were at least published as fiction but nonetheless tapped into the popularity of this belief among evangelical Christians.

False memories
The ritual abuse movement was intimately linked to recovered memory and multiple personality, two borderline theories within psychology. Significantly, almost no alleged SRA survivors remembered they had been abused until the intervention of therapists, concerned parents, or police interrogators. This eventually led psychologists to understand that the memories of abuse were being created, not recovered, by therapists. One woman remembered abuse happening to her before she was one year old, though memories from before the age of three are rare and memories from before the age of one are unknown.

Decline
Although the popular panic over Satanic abuse has largely faded from view, a minority of researchers and practitioners continues to plug away at it. Aiming for greater respectability, many now believe that the fanciful, Satanic aspects of the alleged abuse were a cover devised by ingenious pedophiles to confuse and terrify their victims while making it less likely for the victims' accounts to be believed, or a confabulation caused incidentally while recovering memories of actual abuse.

Contemporary cranks that promote these ideas whole-hog, such as Mark Dice and Vigilant Citizen, often mesh them with conspiracy theories about the Illuminati. In this new version, the Illuminati abuses children and turns them into sex slaves using a form of brainwashing called "Monarch programming", allegedly developed by the CIA. When these girls grow up, they supposedly become "sex kittens" in the entertainment industry (e.g., Katy Perry ), where they fill the airwaves with Satanic propaganda and rituals in order to lure impressionable youths into deviltry, all in service to the Illuminati and its master Satan.