EXPLORING 50 YEARS OF FORTEAN TIMES
Following on from Mike Dash’s account of the Satanic ritual abuse panic that gripped the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s (see FT438:50-55), BOB RICKARD provides some vital historical context for this modern witch hunt in a revised version of his original article from 1991.
The controversy caused by allegations of Satanic child abuse (SCA) provides a good example of how a powerful fantasy can disturb whole sections of society. To make sense of the most bizarre rationalisations, we must look at the imaginative processes and imagery involved.
The Evangelical Alliance and their sympathisers claimed that SCA – also termed SRA (Satanic Ritual Abuse) – indicates a conspiracy of child-slaughtering cultists under the control of supernatural evil. We must examine the evidence dispassionately for proof of that reality… proof which, if substantiated, would have far-reaching consequences.
A precise definition of SCA is difficult because it encompasses a number of allegations which go beyond the sexual abuse of children to murder and heresy. Its meaning varies according to the views of the user and the way in which it is used. From the statements made by evangelicals and others, we understand that the term included the following elements:
• organised groups of perverts, degenerates and subversive criminals who meet regularly
• tentacles of influence and corruption reaching every level of society, forming local, national and international networks (allied to ‘snuff’ movie and pædophile networks)
• the involvement of respectable professionals including “the highest in the land”
• the enrolling and corrupting of children
• children drugged, hypnotically conditioned, terrorised or brainwashed into committing, or submitting to, acts that violate serious psychological and sexual taboos, or inflicting them on fellow victims
• the domination of women and children as sexual slaves
• the kidnapping and enticement of suitable victims (especially vagrants and young runaways)
• the use of women as ‘brood mares’
• the sacrifice of selected victims and un-baptised babies (including foetuses induced before full term) and the consumption of blood and other body parts in a deliberate subversion of ‘good’ (i.e. Christian) values These component activities of SCA are
