Dec. 26, 2012<\/p>\n
By 1993 the moral panic was at last retreating from therapists\u2019 offices, courtrooms and the media. That timing gives \u201cRitual Abuse<\/a>: What It Is, Why It Happens, and How to Help\u201d a peculiar place in its genre.<\/p>\n Although the pseudonymous \u201cMargaret Smith\u201d is a supposed \u201csurvivor and researcher of ritual abuse,\u201d her advocacy lacks the blind certitude of a \u201cNursery Crimes<\/a>: Sexual Abuse in Day Care\u201d (1988) or a \u201cDon\u2019t Make Me Go Back, Mommy<\/a>: A Child\u2019s Book about Satanic Ritual Abuse\u201d\u00a0(1990).<\/p>\n \u201cIf there is even a small chance that one ritual abuse claim is true,\u201d Smith begins, \u201cwe owe it to all potential victims to explore the problem of ritual abuse in greater depth.\u201d Such unexpected tentativeness!\u00a0 Is she doubting even her own claim of victimhood? Or did an editor at HarperSanFrancisco awaken just in time to insist on at least a fa\u00e7ade of rationality?<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the rest of the book alternates Smith\u2019s first-person accounts of her ritual-abuse-caused \u201cmultiple personality disorder\u201d with a predictable rollout of junk statistics. Could anyone be surprised, for instance, that among \u201cadult survivors of ritual abuse,\u201d fully 84 percent reported having witnessed \u201cmutilation or killing of animals\/humans\u201d?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dec. 26, 2012 By 1993 the moral panic was at last retreating from therapists\u2019 offices, courtrooms and the media. That timing gives \u201cRitual Abuse: What It Is, Why It Happens, and How to Help\u201d a peculiar place in its genre. Although the pseudonymous \u201cMargaret Smith\u201d is a supposed \u201csurvivor and researcher of ritual abuse,\u201d her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=766"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":767,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766\/revisions\/767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}