Aug. 20, 2012

Endlessly fascinating – and baffling – is how some experts fell headlong for “satanic ritual abuse,” while others managed to keep their wits. This is from an April 25, 1989, Associated Press story:

“David G. Bromley, a sociologist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va., sees not an increase in satanic crime, but a ‘cult scare’ that has more to do with urban legends and modern psychology than with criminology.

“‘I think it’s all a hoax,’ says Bromley, who investigated allegations of cult ‘brainwashing’ in the 1970s that were never proven.

“Bromley says rumors about rings of adults who start day care centers to find children to abuse in satanic rituals are ‘sheer fantasy’ – but fantasy fed by reports of real child abuse and by today’s parents’ guilt and fears of entrusting their children to strangers.

“‘It is not coincidental that allegations of satanic conspiracies are centered on day care centers,’ he says.”

April 25, 1989! Bob Kelly was attending his probable cause hearing. The first McMartin trial was still ongoing. Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck were six years from publishing their landmark “Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children’s Testimony.” So how was David Bromley able to see through the fog?

“This kind of ‘subversion episode’ is not new,” he told me recently. “There has been one every few decades in American history. The focus has changed but not the phenomenon. Indian captivity tales, Salem witch trials, drug scares, communist scares, immigrant scares, UFO scares.

“There has always been some group or coalition that has found social insecurities a way of advancing its own status. In this case police and therapists made careers out of the episode.

“The story was only plausible for a limited period, and these kinds of events tend to implode eventually. But there are a lot of casualties in the meantime.

“It will happen again, I am sorry to say.”

And when it does…?

Sept. 1, 2015

 “(As witnesses) children are even less likely to be believed when their stories involve extremes of sadism, collusion among families and communities (sometimes extending over several generations) and so-called ritual or cult abuse – including the torture and killing of animals to frighten children into silence – that are so terrible that authorities decide these things just can’t be true.

“Yet many instances of such ‘incredible’ crimes are documented, sometimes by adults after years of suppressed memory, sometimes by authorities who are now beginning to believe children enough to investigate their stories…..”…

– From “Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem” by Gloria Steinem (1993)

Steinem’s semi-autobiography was a best-seller, both profiting from and contributing to the nation’s heightened concern with self-esteem.

In addition to using Ms. magazine to tout the existence of “ritual abuse,” she also helped finance the search for the imaginary McMartin tunnels.

Aug. 4, 2015

“Some have drawn parallels between the Salem witch trials of 1692 and the false accusations of sexual abuse that sweptc America in the 1980s. The difference is this:

“Those falsely accused in Salem got public apologies from their accusers and reparations. No such luck for the dozens of day-care workers and others who were falsely accused and imprisoned in modern-day America.

“We should be ashamed.”

– From “How the daycare child abuse hysteria of the 1980s became a witch hunt,” a review of “We Believe the Children,” by Maura Casey in the Washington Post (July 31)

I’ll have more soon on Richard Beck’s important new addition to the “satanic ritual abuse” bookshelf.

April 5, 2014

“Outside of science, progress is simply a myth.… In science the growth of knowledge is cumulative. But human life as a whole is not a cumulative activity; what is gained in one generation may be lost in the next.”

– From “Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals” (2002) by John Gray, British political philosopher

An arguable proposition, certainly – but how else to explain the widespread acceptance of day-care ritual-abuse claims 300 years after the Salem Witch Trials? As noted by sociologist David G. Bromley, this chronic failure to learn-and-remember makes inevitable yet more moral panics – whatever their specifics.

And how else to explain this just-published revisionist history?