In the first of a series presenting long-out-of-print articles from the FT archive we present a ground-breaking analysis by MIKE DASH of the Satanic ritual abuse scare that gripped the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s and saw children taken from their homes by social workers in the grip of an Evangelical-fuelled panic.
EXPLORING 50 YEARS OF FORTEAN TIMES
January 20, 1988: Carl, four, a Nottingham kid in care, confides in his foster mother. He describes being sexually abused by his uncles and aunts, and recalls his attackers wiping blood from him with a tissue. He also describes the circumstances of the attack. “You walk around bonfire saying witching, witching, witching, when they splash you with water, you stronger, can’t get burnt. Them witches, them have sheep, them kill sheep. Them put worms in our hair, them witches go magic, magic, magic.”
Similar accounts have been reported from other children taken into care in Nottingham, Rochdale, Kent, Manchester and the Orkney islands, of alleged abuse in the course of a magical ceremony labelled variously as Satanic ritual abuse or Satanic child abuse (SCA).
BACKGROUND TO A PANIC
The idea that organised groups of demonically-inspired child molesters are systematically abusing children and performing rituals either as an act of worship or simply to heighten their own sexual pleasure, seems outlandish. Yet – despite a total lack of evidence of ritual abuse – several factors helped convince social workers and sometimes police that the phenomenon was genuine.
The Cleveland scandal in 1987 involved 121 cases of sexual abuse of children diagnosed in a period of a few months. Although the enquiry by Lord Justice Butler-Sloss ended with the collapse of the prosecution case and the general discrediting of the pædiatricians involved, it brought the subject of widespread child abuse to public notice for the first time.
Cases of alleged ritual Satanic abuse from the United States – including the McMartin Pre-school trial and the story of Michelle, the ‘reformed Satanist’ saved by her psychiatrist – were publicised in the UK from 1988 thanks to contacts between social workers and the activities of at least three British fundamentalist Christian groups.
The threat of ritual abuse was raised in the House of Commons by ‘Rent-a-Quote’ Tory MP and child abuse campaigner Geoffrey Dickens in April and September 1988. After making unsubstantiated allegations about the prevalence of SCA, he said h
