Satanic panic
Testimonials, symptom lists, rumors, and techniques to investigate or uncover memories of SRA were disseminated through professional, popular, and religious conferences as well as through talk shows, sustaining and further spreading the moral panic throughout the United States and beyond.
[5] Scholarly interest in the topic slowly built, eventually resulting in the conclusion that the phenomenon was a moral panic, which, as one researcher put it in 2017, "involved hundreds of accusations that devil-worshipping paedophiles were operating America's white middle-class suburban daycare centers.
[13][16][17] The underpinnings for the contemporary moral panic were found in a rise of five factors in the years leading up to the 1980s: the establishment of fundamentalist Christianity and the founding and political activism of the religious organization which was named the Moral Majority; the rise of the anti-cult movement which accused abusive cults of kidnapping and brainwashing children and teens; the appearance of the Church of Satan and other explicitly Satanist groups which added a kernel of truth to the existence of Satanic cults; the development of the social work or child protection field, and its struggle to have child sexual abuse recognized as a social problem and a serious crime; and the popularization of post-traumatic stress disorder, repressed memory, and the corresponding survivor movement.
[30][31] In 1983, charges were laid in the McMartin preschool trial, a major case in California, which received attention throughout the United States and contained allegations of satanic ritual abuse.
[43] Among the conspiracy theories alleged by the panic were that thousands of people a year were being killed by a network of Satanists, what one psychiatrist writing in a psychiatric journal called “a hidden holocaust”.
[8] By the late 1980s, therapists or patients who believed someone had suffered from SRA could suggest solutions that included Christian psychotherapy, exorcism, and support groups whose members self-identified as "anti-Satanic warriors".
[50] In the 1990s, psychologist D. Corydon Hammond publicized a detailed theory of ritual abuse drawn from hypnotherapy sessions with his patients, alleging they were victims of a worldwide conspiracy of organized, secretive clandestine cells who used torture, mind control and ritual abuse to create alternate personalities that could be "activated" with code words; the victims were allegedly trained as assassins, prostitutes, drug traffickers, and child sex workers (to create child pornography).
Hammond claimed his patients had revealed the conspiracy was masterminded by a Jewish doctor in Nazi Germany, but who now worked for the Central Intelligence Agency with a goal of worldwide domination by a Satanic cult.
[52] Initial accusations were made in the context of the rising political power of the conservative Christian right within the United States,[20] and religious fundamentalists enthusiastically promoted rumors of SRA.
[40] Psychotherapists who were actively Christian advocated for the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID); soon after, accounts similar to Michelle Remembers began to appear, with some therapists believing the alter egos of some patients were the result of demonic possession.
[21] Protestantism was instrumental in starting, spreading, and maintaining rumors through sermons about the dangers of SRA, lectures by purported experts, and prayer sessions, including showings of the 1987 Geraldo Rivera television special.
[20] As the explanations for SRA were distanced from evangelical Christianity and associated with "survivor" groups, the motivations ascribed to purported Satanists shifted from combating a religious nemesis, to mind control and abuse as an end to itself.
[58][59][60] In 1987, a list of "indicators" was published by Catherine Gould,[61] featuring a broad array of vague symptoms that were ultimately common, non-specific and subjective, purported to be capable of diagnosing SRA in most young children.
Belief in SRA spread rapidly through the ranks of mental health professionals (despite an absence of evidence) through a variety of continuing education seminars, during which attendees were urged to believe in the reality of Satanic cults, their victims, and not to question the extreme and bizarre memories uncovered.
During the seminars, patients provided testimonials of their experiences and presenters stressed that recovering memories was important for healing:[62] Media coverage of SRA began to turn negative by 1987, and the "panic" ended between 1992 and 1995.
Reasons for the collapse of the phenomenon include the failure of criminal prosecutions against alleged abusers, a growing number of scholars, officials and reporters questioning the reality of the accusations, and a variety of successful lawsuits against mental health professionals.
[20] Some feminist critics of the SRA diagnoses maintained that, in the course of attempting to purge society of evil, the panic of the 1980s and 1990s obscured actual child-abuse issues, a concern echoed by author Gary Clapton.
[107] During the initial period of interest starting in the early 1980s the term was used to describe a network of Satan-worshipping, secretive intergenerational cults that were supposedly part of a highly organized conspiracy engaged in criminal behaviors such as forced prostitution, drug distribution and pornography.
"[7] One such case Goodman studied involved "grandparents [who] had black robes, candles, and Christ on an inverted crucifix—and the children had chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease, in their throats," according to the report by a district attorney.
[100] Mary de Young has pointed out that the report's definition of "substantiated" was overly liberal as it required only that one agency had decided that abuse had occurred, even if no action was taken, no arrests made, no operating licenses suspended.
[20] Analysis of the techniques used in two key cases (the McMartin Preschool and Wee Care Nursery School trials) concluded that the children were questioned in a highly suggestive manner.
[161] After skeptical inquiry, explanations for allegations of SRA have included an attempt by radical feminists to undermine the nuclear family,[162] a backlash against working women,[46] homophobic attacks on gay childcare workers,[163] a universal need to believe in evil,[164] fear of alternative spiritualities,[110] "end of the millennium" anxieties,[165] or a transient form of temporal lobe epilepsy.
[170][171][91] Members of local police forces organized into loose networks focused on cult crimes, some of whom billed themselves as "experts" and were paid to speak at conferences throughout the United States.
[174][175] Jeffrey Victor reviewed 67 rumors about SRA in the United States and Canada reported in newspapers or television and found no evidence supporting the existence of murderous satanic cults.
Kenneth Lanning, an FBI expert in the investigation of child sexual abuse,[178] has stated that pseudo-Satanism may exist but there is "little or no evidence for ... large-scale baby breeding, human sacrifice, and organized satanic conspiracies.
Lanning also suggests several reasons why adult victims may make allegations of SRA, including "pathological distortion, traumatic memory, normal childhood fears and fantasies, misperception, and confusion.
Screens or CCTV technology are a common feature of child sexual assault trials today; children in the early 1980s were typically forced into direct visual contact with the accused abuser while in court.
[52] However at an ISSTD conference in November 1990, psychiatrist and researcher Frank Putnam, then chief of the Dissociative Disorders Unit of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, led a plenary session panel that proved to be the first public presentation of psychiatric, historical and law enforcement skepticism concerning SRA claims.
"[185] Commenting on the study, Philip Coons stated that patients were held together in a ward dedicated to dissociative disorders with ample opportunity to socialize, and that the memories were recovered through the use of hypnosis (which he considered questionable).
According to McHugh, there is no coherent scientific basis for the core belief of one side of the struggle, that sexual abuse can cause massive systemic repression of memories that can only be accessed through hypnosis, coercive interviews and other dubious techniques.
