Ralph Charles Underwager (28 July 1929 – 29 November 2003) was an American minister and psychologist who rose to prominence as a defense witness for adults accused of child sexual abuse in the 1980s and 1990s.
Underwager first appeared in court as a defense witness for two of the accused in the 1984 Jordan, Minnesota case, one of the earliest attempts to prosecute alleged organized child sexual abuse in the United States.
On the stand, Underwager argued that the children's testimony of abuse was the result of brainwashing by social workers using Communist thought-reform techniques.
[3] VOCAL members picketed hospitals, courts and social service departments who they characterized as staffed by "Gestapo-like" "fanatics", "quacks and zealots" who remove children solely based on "rumours.
[6] VOCAL criticized child abuse prevention programs, claiming that they create sexually aware children who might misinterpret an innocent touch from an adult.
By the late 1980s, he had appeared in court on behalf of defendants in child sexual abuse cases more than 200 times in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Britain.
[15] Guy Stockwell portrayed Underwager's role as a defense witness in the Country Walk case in the TV-movie Unspeakable Acts.
[16] Underwager was forced to resign from the advisory board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and end his career as an expert witness because of an article that appeared in "Moving Forward: A Newsjournal for Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse and Their Supporters", a series of excerpts from an interview he and Hollida Wakefield—his wife and also an FMFS advisory board member—had given to a non-refereed, pro-pedophilia pseudo-academic publication,[17] Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia.
[18][19]Underwager and his wife claimed that their comments were in the context of their view that the best prevention programs for sex-abuse of children were those that focused on stopping the actions of abusers.
Underwager later claimed that "radical feminists who have self-styled themselves as sex-abuse experts" had taken the interview out of context and misrepresented his answers, reiterating previous statements that he believed "sexual contact between an adult and a child is [n]ever acceptable nor can it ever be positive.