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IPT Journal -
Volume 10 1998 "The satanism scare," which began in North America in
the early 1980s, arrived in I preface this paper with a quote from a seventeenth century
skeptic who was responsible for bringing an end to a witchhunt: I have observed
that there were neither witches nor bewitched in a village until they were
talked and written about (Alonso de Salazar, quoted in Geis & Bunn, 1991,
pp. 41-42). In the latter part of the 1980s, first in What I hope to do in this paper is to show how these claims
originated and how they were disseminated in this part of the world. To do
this I need to examine the role played by a key network of American
claims-makers who brought the Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) scenario to I will preface this account with two important qualifiers.
First, there is no intention in what follows to question the existence of child
abuse, which has been increasingly recognized as a problem of considerable
proportions since the recognition of a "battered child syndrome" in
1962 (Best, 1990). Quite the contrary, my concern over alleged SRA is partly
motivated by concern that the pursuit of a mythical form of child abuse
diverts resources from the genuine cases. Second, there is no disputing the existence of people who label
themselves satanists-there were just over 900 of them in the 1996 New Zealand
census. But as Jean La Fontaine points out in her study of the British
allegations, "the existence of satanists does not prove that they abuse
children in these rituals; it merely means that care must constantly be taken
to emphasize that the actual practices of occultists, witches and satanists
are different from what is being recounted as satanic abuse" (La
Fontaine, 1998, p. 41). Her own work (La Fontaine, 1994, 1998), the firm
conclusions of an FBI specialist in sexual abuse (Lanning, 1992), and the
results of a very large study in the United States (Goodman, Qin, Bottoms,
& Shaver, 1994) all amount to the same result: "no bodies, no bones,
no bloodstains, nothing" (Waterhouse 1990). Satan's Arrival
in Though there are a variety of historical antecedents to the satanism
scare, the year of its origin can be established fairly precisely as 1980.
The publication of two very different books in that year laid the basis for
an escalation of claims about satanic ritual abuse throughout the 1980s. The
first was a book called Michelle Remembers, by a claimed "survivor"
of SRA, Michelle Smith, and her therapist-later husband-Lawrence Pazder
(Smith & Pazder, 1980). In it Michelle recalls as a five-year-old
"being tortured in houses, mausoleums, and cemeteries, being raped and sodomized
with candles, being forced to defecate on a Bible and crucifix, witnessing
babies and adults butchered, spending hours naked in a snake-filled cage, and
having a devil's tail and horns surgically attached to her" (Nathan
& Snedeker, 1995, p. 45). At one point in the account there is a personal
appearance of the Devil, complete with tail, and when Jesus and Mary emerge
to give support to the victim, there is an epic battle with sound effects
between the forces of good and evil. Michelle's Christian faith finally
defeats the satanists, who release her, whereupon she completely forgets her
experiences until 20 years later when she is in therapy with Dr. Pazder. However, there has been no verification of these events, and it
has been discovered that the alleged victim was attending school regularly,
and was even photographed for the school yearbook, at a time when she was
supposedly locked in a basement for months. Pazder had an interest in
exorcism and had studied West African witchcraft rituals, some of which
involved being buried in a pit - it is worth noting that burial or entombment
was to become one of the frequently reported components of the SRA scenario.
The book was a bestseller and it was not long before other women began to
recover "memories" of similar satanic events. Incidentally, it was
Pazder in 1981 who coined the term "ritual abuse" (Nathan &
Snedeker, 1995, p. 50). The other publication in 1980 that contributed to the satanism
scare was the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the
American Psychiatric Association (DSM-III), which for the first time included
the categories of "Multiple Personality Disorder" - later to be
relabeled "Dissociative Identity Disorder" - and
"Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder." These were to become the most
common diagnoses applied to those thought to have been the victims of satanic
abuse, and very soon a group of prominent American psychiatrists who
specialized in hypnotism had established an organization to advance the
treatment of Multiple Personality and Dissociation. Its spread has been
described to me as much like a process of pyramid selling (Sherrill Mulhern,
personal communication). In this way a phenomenon which had initially been
the preserve of fundamentalist Christians began to be validated by a group of
secular professionals. Pazder's influence was soon to be exercised in raising the
satanism scenario in one of the most notorious investigations and trials in Two central figures in the group were social worker and
interviewer Kee MacFarlane and psychiatrist Roland Summit. MacFarlane was
working at the Children's Institute International, a nonprofit child abuse
facility. Aware of the problems of interviewing small children, she
introduced novel procedures, such as using hand puppets in the interviews,
wearing colorful clothes, and making use of anatomically detailed dolls.
Given the growing interest in multiple personality and ritual abuse, children
were told that if they did not remember incidents at the preschool this was
because they were dissociating, and that the job of the interviewers was to
help them remember. This led to a form of insistent interviewing, in which denials
of abuse by children were discounted in the search for "truths"
which the interviewers believed were being suppressed. The original mother's
complaints became increasingly bizarre and improbable, but they were taken
literally by police and therapists, who failed to notice their delusional
nature: in fact, the mother was eventually diagnosed as paranoid
schizophrenic and died shortly afterwards from alcohol poisoning. The
significance of this will be considered later. Roland Summit's ideas provided a pseudoscientific rationale
which underpinned the approach taken by the investigators. He had written a
1978 paper outlining what he termed "The Child Sexual Abuse
Accommodation Syndrome" (CSAAS). This paper was widely distributed prior
to its eventual publication in 1983. In that paper he argued that children
never fabricated accounts of sexual abuse and thus were to be believed when
they disclosed them, regardless of how incredible their accounts were.
However, children who had been victims of incest would often retract in
order-as he claimed-to maintain family equilibrium. Here were two components which were to be reiterated by many of
those involved in subsequent investigations, and they became enshrined as
dogma in the phrase "Believe the Children" - and in the maxim that
children never lie about sexual abuse unless they are recanting. Because of
this, it is extremely important to note that As a major protagonist in the satanism scare, it is also worth
examining Eccentric,
alienated, unsocialized and paranoid personality types are needed to ferret
out allegations of child sex abuse in the face of lack of evidence and
conventional, well-socialized parents and professionals (who reinforce denial
for their own mutual belief) It takes
somebody paranoid to continue to express suspicion and to take the child from
doctor to doctor until somebody confirms that maybe there is abuse (Summit,
quoted in Earl, 1995, pp. 90-91). In a further piece of innuendo, Two other figures who were involved in the McMartin case, one of
whom has considerable importance in The book's introduction begins with a discussion of the McMartin
case, and skeptical reviewers immediately sensed its potential to fuel the
satanic panic. In the opinion of one of these: This is a truly
remarkable book, primarily because of the monumental irresponsibility of the
authors, who have taken public monies . . . and used it [sic] to compile
statistics based on nothing more than opinions of a few beleaguered
investigators. The wasted money will be the least of it, however, for this
book promises to do much harm (Coleman, 1989, p. 46). Though his previous research into child abuse might have made
him skeptical of the large percentage of women among those accused in this
new form of child abuse, Finkelhor disposed of this problem by arguing that a
new type of woman had emerged from the sexual revolution of the 1960s - one
that was so obsessed with power and control that dominating men was no longer
adequate: the "mortification" of innocent children was now the goal
(Nathan & Snedeker, 1995, p. 133). It is more than a little curious that
Finkelhor became a champion of the SRA scenario which was to be taken up so
enthusiastically by some radical feminists. Dr. Astrid Heger was the fourth McMartin investigator to
popularize a diagnostic technique which became influential in other parts of
the world. In particular, under the tutelage of her colleague Bruce Woodling
(Nathan & Snedeker, 1995, p. 78), her investigation of children's
genitals, and especially her belief that sexual abuse could be detected by
the size and shape of young girls' hymens, became an abuse indicator in the
Christchurch, New Zealand child abuse investigation at the Glenelg Health
Camp, while the related anal wink, or dilation test which was supposed to
indicate molestation, triggered a major sexual abuse investigation in
Cleveland, Britain, in 1987 (Pendergrast, 1998, pp. 413-414). Evidence
gradually accumulated to show that these alleged stigmata of child sexual
abuse were meaningless, and, although Heger was aware of these studies, she
still persisted in maintaining her original diagnoses when the McMartin case
came to trial in 1987 (Nathan & Snedeker, 1995, pp. 197-198) . By the time the case came to trial, charges had been dropped
against five women defendants, and, after a 28-month trial (the longest
criminal proceeding in American history), there was an acquittal of the
remaining woman defendant and not guilty and hung verdicts for the remaining
male defendant. There was also a hung jury at the second trial and the
charges were finally dismissed, allowing the male defendant to be released
from jail after a year-year imprisonment (Nathan & Snedeker, 1995, p. 92).
Despite this outcome, the satanic claims-makers have continued to insist on
the reality of the McMartin abuse, and subsequent allegations have closely
paralleled the McMartin pattern. Two other American figures, both social workers, were to have a
significant impact on the dissemination of the satanism scenario. First,
Pamela Klein, a rape crisis worker from Pamela Hudson is the other key figure. She, too, produced a list
of satanic symptoms and forms of abuse which had wide distribution among
abuse workers. Of particular importance was her list of 16 reported forms of
physical and psychological abuse. These included being locked in a cage,
being buried in the ground in a coffin or box, being tied upside down or hung
from a pole or hook, participating in a mock marriage, seeing children or
babies killed, having blood poured over them, and being taken to churches and
graveyards for ritual abuse. Hudson had a particular interest in the robes
and masks which perpetrators were alleged to wear, and the cover of her book,
which received wide circulation, shows just such an image which a child had
supposedly drawn (Hudson, 1991). As Jean La Fontaine has pointed out,
"it looks more like a cross between a ghost and a Ku Klux Klan
figure" (La Fontaine, 1998, p. 54). Satan Migrates
to the In August 1986 In October 1988 a woman in The link between this investigation and the earlier McMartin one
is provided by a note in police files containing the McMartin address, and the
parallels are striking. It later became apparent that the mother who
initially complained to the police was psychotic, in both cases a children's
game was investigated as a possible case of ritualized sex, and the medical
examination of the children included a search for anal and genital stigmata
of the type Heger had relied on. Another feature, which would appear
elsewhere, was that some of the parents began to present those investigating
the case with publications on ritual abuse. When the case did come to court
in August 1989, it was dismissed by the magistrate on the grounds that the
children's testimony "had been contaminated by excessive and leading
questioning by police and parents" (Guilliatt, 1996, p. 35). Also involved in interviewing some of the children in the Mr.
Bubbles case was a Satanists all
around the world are reported to have declared the eighties "The Decade
of the Destruction of Innocence" . . . an horrendous reversal after the
goodwill and progress of the International Year of the Child in 1979 (quoted
in Guilliatt, 1996, p. 90). Her speech was titled "Nursery Crimes-A Perfect Little
Holocaust in the Suburbs," showing the affinity of her claims with the
work of Finkelhor. Schlebaum has continued to investigate alleged cases and
give seminars on SRA, and her most recent involvement will be discussed
shortly. The Mr. Bubbles case generated a great deal of media attention
and, within a short period of time, police in Western Australia, Victoria,
the ACT, Queensland and New South Wales were investigating allegations of
bizarre satanic cult crimes involving sexual abuse of children, the sacrifice
of humans and animals, rituals in which blood was consumed, and black mass
rituals. Among specific allegations were those that could be found on the
lists of satanic "indicators," which had been devised by American
"experts," - children being locked in coffins became one of the
common claims in a number of investigations. One of the most substantial satanic cases to emerge in One of the several therapists involved, John Manners, worked for
a psychotherapy practice called Christian Psychological Services (Guilliatt,
1996, p. 58) and held views on memory recovery which may help to explain his
role in the Bunbury case. In one interview he is quoted as saying, "In
reality the details of the trauma are more accurate if they've been repressed
and brought back" (Who Weekly, 1994, p. 69). Thus, it is not difficult
to understand why Manners should state that he had no intention of following
the Australian Psychological Society's new guidelines on repressed memory,
which stipulate the need for outside corroboration of such memories. The
Bunbury case ended in December 1994 with a mixture of not guilty and
undecided verdicts on the 42 charges faced by the accused (Guilliatt, 1996,
p. 216). What is of considerable interest in the Australian dissemination
of the satanic scenario, and something which will also be found in Finally, in examining the penetration of the SRA scenario into
the highest levels of decision making in In response, in October 1997, an inquiry was set up (the Nader
Inquiry) to investigate her claims. Despite the appearance before the inquiry
of an alleged adult "survivor" of satanic abuse, the inquiry
concluded that Arena had no evidence of such a cover-up and had essentially
used parliamentary privilege to launch a malicious campaign. Indeed, it was
precisely the evidence of the satanic survivor, claiming incidents which were
alleged to have happened between the ages of 3 and 11 and recalled when she
was aged 24 in 1992-which had been given to Arena by the psychiatrist who was
treating this person, which undermined the MP's credibility. In a Privilege Committee hearing in March 1998, Arena was
questioned at great length on the credibility of the satanic survivor and on
the reliability of the therapist. In her evidence to the Committee, she
asserted that she relied a great deal on the advice of the therapist to
validate the so-called survivor's claims. In view of this, it is important to
examine just what it was that was being alleged. Here are two extracts from
the statement of the survivor: Judge B then
dragged me downstairs to the basement. There were bodies strung up around the
walls. He took me around to all the dead men and made me suck all the blood
off their penises. I was later taken to the furnace room where they had a big
incinerator and a stainless steel table where they were burning all the
bodies. They quite often burned bodies there. There was a pipe which went to
the outside of the building and up past the roof level. It made me sick
whenever I saw smoke pouring out of it because I knew they were burning some
bodies (NSW, 1998, p. 88). and again: My mother
grabbed me by the hair and shoved a penis in my mouth that she cut off one of
the bodies. It had blood all over it. I gagged and nearly threw up. I shook
my head to try to get it out. Judge B was holding down my arms and body. He
yelled, "You little bitch," and took the penis off my mother and
turned me on to my stomach and pushed the penis into my anus. He said,
"See how you like that." He left it there and dragged me outside
the room. He then took me into the bathroom and I just stared at the bath.
Someone had filled it with blood and body parts. There were arms and legs and
a head. I pulled the penis out of my bottom. He said, "What are you
doing?" He picked me up and threw me in the bath. I was horrified. He
then took off his clothes quickly and got into the bath with me (NSW, 1998,
p. 89). When asked by a member of the Privileges Committee, "Do you
believe that nonsense?," Arena's reply was "I do not know,"
but she went on to quote the opinion of the psychiatrist, who wrote: I have been
seeing "A" [the "survivor"] once a week, at times more
often, for two and one-half years. During that time I have become very
familiar with her character and personality. During that time her behaviour
has been consistently that of a highly ethical and scrupulously truthful
person in all areas of her life. She has a very strong religious faith and
tries to live by those principles. She has at times been severely depressed
but never been delusional (NSW, 1998, p. 90). Eighteen years since the first publication of Michelle
Remembers, the same kinds of Gothic atrocities are being elicited by
therapists and presented as valid accounts. They form the basis for
widespread folk myths about satanic activity which can be tapped by the media
when they are in search of a grabbing headline. In the Australian press in
June and July 1998, for instance, there was an alleged "satanic
beheading" (Sydney Sun-Herald, June 14, 1998), in which the
investigating detective refused to comment on "reliable reports that the
word Satan was smeared on the wall in blood." And the teenagers involved
in the attack on a Satan's The satanic cult scenario was introduced to Early in the following year, 1991, the Ritual Action Network -
later to be called Ritual Action Group (RAG) - was established in The group received public funding from the Department of Social
Welfare through the Family Violence Prevention Coordinating Committee.
Indeed, it seems that the funding of the group was lavish because in 1994 an
internal audit spoke of "grandiose" overspending, "including
'well catered' breakfasts, lunches and dinners, uncontrolled use of taxi-chit
books and wrong accounting practices" (Dominion, April 7, 1994). And
Jocelyn Frances was convicted in 1993 of benefit fraud, having defrauded the
Social Welfare Department of $30,000. In 1991, however, the group attracted
considerable credibility and was able to propagate its views among social
welfare staff, police, and staff from other government departments (Dominion,
November 28, 1993). But the main focus of satanic allegations was to be [I]t had been
found in the One of the claims reported by the speaker was that a child had
been made to eat feces during a particular ritual. The Commissioner for
Children was quoted in the same news item as saying that the phenomenon of
satanic worship was worldwide, but "whether it related abuse of children or just mass hysteria,
was another matter" Christchurch Press, August 27, 1991). The issue was made more concrete six days later at a Ritual
Abuse Workshop presentation in The paper continues: Not much is
known at this time in Aotearoa/New The sources quoted in this section of the paper are the same Ritual
Abuse Task Force Report as that cited in A child who has
been ritually abused will have been subjected to a systematic process of
dehumanisation - their bodies invaded through their eyes, ears, nose, mouth,
vagina/penis and rectum. They will likely have been forced to have sex with
animals, had their bodies smeared with excrement, drink blood and urine,
forced to watch and participate in the sacrifice of animals, eaten the flesh
and organs of animals, often their own pets, and seen photographs of
themselves doing all of this (FVPCC, 1991, vol. 2, p. 9). The paper further comments on types of cults, including
fundamentalist Christian churches, Freemasons and cults of a satanic kind.
Ritual dabbling in particular is presented as a source of recruitment to
satanic cults, and the following scheme is offered as a means of identifying
individuals who are progressing to "higher rituals": · bitter hatred towards
family and religion · drop in grades · cuts to the body · increased use of
illegal drugs · use of satanic
nicknames · use of various
alphabets (FVPCC, 1991, vol. 2, p. 16). Parents, it is suggested, should be looking for the following
items: · a black covered book
or computer counterpart that has types and
locations of rituals and contracts for suicide or
homicide · ceremonial knives · candles · chalice · robes · photos and/or videos · books about belief
systems, eg. satanic · animal bones and human
bones, especially skull, right upper leg, rib
and upper portion of right arm. (FVPCC, 1991,
vol. 2, p. 17). The social workers' presentation had already been featured in
Sunday newspapers before it was presented in With the credentials the RAG network claimed for itself, their
reports gained credibility with a wider audience. In turn, this wider
audience may also have become predisposed to accept even more bizarre claims.
Claims about child pornography, and about the existence of organized sex
rings and cults which practiced ritual abuse, had featured prominently in
media reports prior to the September conference and were to reappear
subsequently. The linkage between child pornography and ritual abuse had been
an important feature of the satanism scare in the The extent to which a SRA scenario was involved in the
Christchurch creche case has been somewhat masked by the Crown prosecutor's
successful suppression of the more bizarre allegations which emerged in the
children's later interviews, but it was undeniably part of the beliefs of
some parents and formed a significant element in the police investigation.
Indeed, according to David McLoughlin (1996), whose excellent article on the
case makes it unnecessary to review it in detail, comments: "Anyone
familiar with the American day-care cases would immediately recognize the
Civic scenario as a carbon copy of numerous scandals in The mother of one child, whose reported abuse managed to list
all 16 of Pamela Hudson's satanic indicators, demanded at the depositions
hearing that Hudson be brought to New Zealand as an "expert"
witness. Her son, for example, had told of how he had been "forced to
kill a boy and animals" (Christchurch Press, November 13, 1992). Further
elements of On one occasion, children had been taken to an address in The same mother later ran a newsletter called "End Ritual
Abuse," with funding from the Lotteries Commission, and in it she
reprinted claims which originated in an American publication, "Believe
the Children," a movement that arose out of the McMartin case. In her book
on the creche affair, the mother discourses on the nature of SRA, once again
citing Hudson was indeed invited to Christchurch in 1993 by the
Campbell Centre (Presbyterian Support Services), whose Director in 1992 -
Rosemary Smart -had written a damning report on the Civic Creche which
assumed that Ellis was guilty: this was a year before his trial (Smart,
1992). This report was very influential and led to police investigation of
the women creche workers (McLoughlin, 1996, p. 65). A further indication of the American influence on the case is
the fact that New Zealand's Commissioner for Children's Ian - Ian Hassall was
then Commissioner - had sent Smart the Executive Summary of David Finkelhor's
book, Nursery Crimes (Office of the Commissioner for Children, letter March
8, 1994), and in the report she cites him as an authority on child sexual
abuse in child-care settings. Clearly, Finkelhor is regarded as a substantial
expert in The influence of Klein, Hudson, and Finkelhor has been noted,
but it is interesting to note that other participants in the original
McMartin debacle have had a continuing influence on the It is not
uncommon for child complainants in sexual abuse cases to withdraw their
allegations or claim they were lying . . . We are by no means satisfied [the
girl] did lie at the interviews, although she may now genuinely believe she
did (Court of Appeal, 1994, p. 33). One should remember the pseudoscientific status of the so-called
Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome when opinions such as that are
stated as established principle. Another McMartin protagonist, Astrid Heger,
was invited by DoSAC no fewer than five times between 1989 and 1996. DoSAC
has also invited the SRA believers Arnon and Marianne Bentovim to As long as such lack of balance persists in the sexual abuse
industry, there remains a possibility that the SRA scenario will persist.
Satan's excellent adventure is currently a lively feature in References
Author Info Michael Hill is Professor of Sociology, Copyright (c) 1989-2001 by the Institute for Psychological
Therapies. http://www.ipt-forensics.com/journal/volume10/j10_9.htm |
