Satanic ritual abuse

Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) is a phrase coined in the 1980s to refer to well-publicized accounts of extreme child abuse allegedly organized by a satanic cult in the USA. Most of these claims about SRA assert that there are secret, criminal organizations motivated by worship of Satan, which commit ritual torture and sexual abuse of children to "program" them into the ideology of Satan worship. Some claims assert the existence of an international conspiratorial network. Less extreme versions assert that the secret networks consist of intergenerational family clans. Most mainstream authorities doubt the credibility of these claims.

Some writers consider the terms ritual abuse, sadistic ritual abuse, and organized sadistic abuse to be virtually interchangeable but others do not; see Changing terminology below. This article addresses abuse that has a specific association with Satanic belief or symbols, and refers readers to articles on other forms of abuse that do not involve Satanic belief or symbols.

Michelle Remembers and the origins of a "moral panic"

There is no dispute that some psychotic murderers have called themselves Satanists, or that there have been some people who sexually abuse children, using rituals and perhaps references to the Devil to manipulate them. There are also some "pseudo-satanic" juvenile delinquents. However, in the late 1980s, widespread media accounts portrayed Satanism as a worldwide conspiracy behind such crimes as child sexual abuse, ritual murder, and cattle mutilation , precipitating what has been called a "moral panic".

These claims started to appear rather suddenly; the first "survivor" account was published in 1980 in the best selling book, Michelle Remembers, after which accusations and rumors spread rapidly in the USA during the early 1980s and then declined again during the early 1990s. Michelle Remembers was originally published as a factual account of her life; the book stated that "the source material was scrutinized" and that "Satanism has apparently existed there for many years" Several subsequent investigations by journalists concluded that her accounts were fictional, although apparently they are still believed by some recovered memory therapists

Soon after its publication, there were two highly publicized cases in California, one about a "sex ring" in Kern County, and then the Martin Preschool case.

Therapists in the 1980s reported a flood of accounts of cases of multiple personality disorder in which the person had memories of involvement in a destructive Satanic cult but objective validation of these memories was seldom forthcoming, and in several cases collateral history proved that the claims of ritual abuse were false. Some have blamed irresponsible journalistic coverage of issues relating to child abuse for spreading unfounded fears

No law enforcement agency or research study has found the kind of physical evidence needed to support accounts of SRA. In 1994, the National Criminal Justice Reference Service of the UK estimated that 242 cases of organized abuse occur each year in the UK, of which about 21 involve allegations of ritual or satanic abuse. Thus, organized abuse accounts for only a small minority of all cases handled by child protection teams. However, no evidence was found that the sexual and physical abuse of children was part of rites directed to a magical or religious objective. In the three substantiated cases of ritual, not satanic, abuse, the ritual was secondary to the sexual abuse.

In 1990 the state of Utah set up a task force to report on ritual abuse. The report, published in 1992, noted that an opinion poll had found that 90 percent of Utah citizens believed that ritualistic sex abuse was occurring and that 68 percent supported more money being spent on investigating it. The report conceded that hard evidence was scarce, explaining that survivors reported that such groups were extremely careful and highly skilled at destroying evidence of their crimes. What we do have, said the report, is the evidence reported by the victims. That purported evidence also included the book Michelle Remembers, which was cited in the bibliography as fact .

The report also stated that there had been "successful prosecution of child abuse which contain indisputable elements of ritual abuse." This was contradicted by a 1992 report by Kenneth V. Lanning, Supervisory Special Agent, Behavioral Science Unit, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, Federal Bureau of Investigation describes the consistent lack of evidence supporting these allegations in the USA. Lanning has been criticized, in the book Cult and Ritual Abuse: Its History, Anthropology, and Recent Discovery in Contemporary America, for not investigating the majority of the cases he has consulted on, some of which had convictions.

False accusations in the midst of panic

Throughout the 1980s in the UK, some social workers came to believe child sex abuse was common, and that it could explain children's behavioural disorders. Several high profile cases of alleged ritual abuse were brought to courts, but the cases collapsed accompanied by trenchant criticism of police and social workers' willingness to believe allegations unsupported by solid evidence The last high profile case was in 1991, when five boys and four girls, aged between eight and 15, were taken from their homes on South Ronaldsay, one of the Orkney Islands off the North West coast of Scotland. The children were taken by police and social workers in a dawn raid on February 1991, and taken to foster parents. The raid was organised after social workers questioned members of another family, whose father had been jailed for sexual abuse; this questioning led them to suspect there was a child sex ring and ritual abuse taking place. The children denied that any abuse had occurred (and were continuing to deny it fifteen years later), but their denials were not believed by the social workers. The local community organised a public meeting to demand the return of the children to their homes; after two months, Sheriff David Kelbie ordered the children be returned, as there was no evidence against their parents. He said that the handling of the case by social workers had been fundamentally flawed and that the children had been subjected to cross-examinations designed to make them admit to being abused.

Reviewing the rise and fall of the Satanic ritual abuse panic, University of New Hampshire historian David Frankfurter in his award-winning book Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History, argued that demonic conspiracies and satanic ritual abuse are simply myths of evil conspiracies that provide societies an excuse for bullying those who are already considered suspect; he also argued that those seeking to purge demonic conspiracies have done more violence than the devotees of those so-called evil groups. However, Kent has stated that he believes that intergenerational satanic accounts are plausible and rituals may come from a deviant interpretation of religious texts.

Belief in widespread ritual abuse

Although campaign groups for victims of abuse claim that there is some objective evidence of satanic ritual abuse to support the extensive accounts of alleged survivors, most academic commentators have concluded that the evidence for a vast Satanist conspiracy or extensive networks of "ritual abuse" practitioners is at best flimsy. Indeed, while there are certainly cases where psychotic abusers have used Satanic symbols, there is dispute as to whether there have been any cases in which Satanic belief systems have contributed to any actual abuse. The issue is hard to resolve objectively because of major difficulties in diagnosis - behaviors that may be mistaken for ritual abuse include repetitive psychopathological abuse, sexual abuse by pedophiles, child pornography portraying ritual abuse, distorted memory, false memory, false report due to a severe mental disorder, pseudologia phantastica, adolescent behavior simulating ritual abuse, epidemic hysteria, deliberate lying, and hoaxes.Children who have experienced extreme abuse develop coping strategies that include anxiety, denial, self-hypnosis, dissociation, and self-mutilation, and nurses who care for such children recognize that some of their reports must be discounted as false memories because they emerge from fantasy, distortions, innocent deceptions, false beliefs, lies, or adult coaching.

Doubting the literal truth of the testimony of alleged victims of abuse does not imply any deliberate deception. When people claim to recall past-life experiences, or UFO alien contact and abduction, as a great many people have done, it is generally believed that these people have fantasized these entire complex scenarios and later defined them as memories of actual events rather than as imaginings. Such fantasy events can be elicited under hypnotic procedures and structured interviews which provide strong, repeated demands for the requisite experiences, and which then legitimate the experiences as "real memories." Skeptics of SRA allegations suspect that the evidence of alleged victims often involves similar false memories It has been suggested that false memories of SRA are particularly likely in disturbed patients who either are Christian fundamentalists or who have therapists who are, and who believe in a literal Satan, at a time when the popular media abound with such stories of satanic abuse.

In 1996, a survey of clinical members of the American Psychological Association showed that only a minority of clinical psychologists had encountered ritual cases. Of those that had encountered such cases, the majority believed their clients' claims, although the evidence for the allegations, especially in cases reported by adults claiming to have suffered the abuse during childhood, was questionable. Most experts have concluded that many, if not most, of the memories of child sexual abuse recovered in adulthood are not a true reflection of history Nevertheless, some psychotherapists believe that there must be at least tens of thousands of survivors of ritual abuse in the U.S.A. Valerie Sinason a psychotherapist and founder of the Clinic for Dissociative Studies in the UK is one who believes her clients: "the crimes I'm talking about are cannibalism, induced abortions for the purpose of murder and cannibalism, necrophilia, bestiality, anal, vaginal and oral abuse, and murder. Those crimes are in addition to the severe kinds of grievous bodily harm and everything else that people know about: eating shit, drinking blood, drinking urine, they make people feel sick, eating spiders, being put in coffins for long hours with spiders and snakes. They are all things that stir up archetypes, which is why they are used, of course. Those kind of crimes are pretty unbearable ones to hear about. You are hearing about those all the time."

Changing terminology

While the reports of the 1980s used the term "Satanic", some have suggested that it is inaccurate or overly dramatic and have preferred to use the terms "ritual abuse", "sadistic abuse", and "sexual abuse". Unquestionably, sadism, which is not specific to child abuse or even nonconsensuality, is a well-recognized term, deriving from the Marquis de Sade. The other terms, while not precisely defined, are commonly used in broader anthropological contexts.

The Report of the Ritual Abuse Task Force from the Los Angeles County Commission for Women, defined ritual abuse as "a brutal form of abuse of children, adolescents, and adults, consisting of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, and involving the use of rituals. Ritual does not necessarily mean satanic. However, most survivors state that they were ritually abused as part of satanic worship for the purpose of indoctrinating them into satanic beliefs and practices."

The term "cult" may also appear in this context. Not all cults are Satanic, and not all sadism is ritualistic or even a group activity. Whether or not a given ritual is abusive is also dependent on context: eating pork is commonplace to billions of people, while forcing a devout Muslim or Jew to eat pork would be abusive. Some cultures believe male circumcision or female genital mutilation are quite appropriate, and neither Christianity or Satanism may have anything to do with their beliefs.

Even some of the other terms pose particular difficulties for law enforcement. Ritual with a child is not necessarily abusive; rites of passage such as First Communions, Bar Mitzvahs, and other coming-of-age ceremonies are ritual by definition.

Some authors, notably Jean M. Goodwin, suggested the substitution of "sadistic" for "satanic" in the ongoing legal process. In the book Satan's Silence, Nathan and Snedeker state Goodwin said that the change would (their quote) "reinforce adults' and childens' claims for various reasons. For one, while talking about satanic ritual abuse posited behavior that criminologists and the public had never heard of, the term sadist recurred to real historical precedents: Caligula, the Spanish Inquisition, Jack the Ripper, John Gacey." They also wrote she began to include the criminology of serial killers, but pointed out several differences between the general patterns of serial killers and the cases under discussion:

• Serial killers usually murder their victims quickly [with notable exceptions]— they do not allow them to leave and return over prolonged periods
• "Unlike the gangs of perpetrators in ritual abuse stories, criminal sadists are usually loners. Occasionally, they recruit a partner, and sociopathic authoritarians such as Charles Manson sometimes direct several people"
• Criminal sexual sadists have been men, rather than the women frequently accused of satanic ritual abuse.

Gould, whose paper on ritual abuse said "The evidence is rapidly accumulating that the problem of ritual abuse is considerable in scope and extremely grave in its consequences," only addressed Satanism with the comment "While ritual abuse is certainly an integral part of some kinds of Satanism, it is most likely that the deeper reason for the prevalence of ritual abuse is that, simply put, it reliably creates a group of people who function as unpaid slaves to the perpetrator group."