April 16, 2012
“At the beginning of each ritual-abuse case, the children had been eminently reliable, but what they communicated was that they had not been molested by satanists. Indeed, it was only after an investigation started, after intense and relentless insistence by adults, that youngsters produced criminal charges.
“By then, their utterances had nothing to do with their own feelings or experiences. Rather, what came from the mouths of babes were juvenile renderings of grownups’ anxieties.”
– From “Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American
Witch Hunt” by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker (1995)