Satanic ritual abuse
From RationalWiki
A major moral panic in the 1980s, the Satanic ritual abuse scare posited that there was a large underground of Satan-worshippers organized into multigenerational cults who habitually sexually abused and murdered children (and sometimes animals) in Satanic rites. "Satanic ritual abuse" was part of the Satanic Panic scare over widespread alleged Satanism. It included claims that do not stand up to the test of reason much less any actual statistics to back them up, such as the claim that Satanists conduct over 1 million human sacrifices per year, often of children born into these supposed families.
The panic was promoted heavily by Christian fundamentalists, particularly author Mike Warnke and his fraudulent "autobiography" The Satan Seller, Rebecca Brown and her equally fraudulent He Came To Set the Captives Free, Lauren Stratford and her gory (and fraudulent) book Satan's Underground, radio talk show host Bob Larson, book writer Hal Lindsey, and comic writer Jack Chick. An early book that gave impetus to the spread of this myth was Michelle Remembers by Michelle Smith in 1980. This book was proven to be a hoax but the widespread belief continued in multigenerational Satanic cults ritually abusing children. John Todd and Lauren Stratford also claimed to have been born into such multigenerational Satanist families, with Stratford claiming particulary horrific abuse, but both their testimonies were also found to be complete fabrications. The spread of the hoax continued into the 1990s with two Bob Larson novels, Dead Air and Abaddon, which were at least published as fiction but nonetheless tapped into the popularity of this belief among evangelical Christians.
The ritual abuse movement was intimately linked to recovered memory and multiple personality, two borderline theories within psychology. Significantly, almost no alleged SRA survivors remembered they had been abused until the intervention of therapists, concerned parents, or police interrogators. This eventually led psychologists to understand that the memories of abuse were being created, not recovered, by therapists.
Although the popular panic over Satanic abuse has largely faded from view, a minority of researchers and practitioners continues to plug away at it. Aiming for greater respectability, many now theorize that the fanciful, Satanic aspects of the alleged abuse were a cover devised by ingenious paedophiles to confuse their victims and make them less believable, or a confabulation caused incidentally while recovering memories of actual abuse. Some therapists go as far as arguing that the accuracy of supposedly recovered memories is totally irrelevant to their treatment — akin to claiming that anti-retroviral drugs are an appropriate treatment for the delusion that one has AIDS (as opposed to actually having AIDS). In practice, these sophisticated rationalizations tend to blend back into belief in a mass Satanic conspiracy.
