Salem’s Lot

Letters

Vol. 17 No. 8 · 20 April 1995

From Joan Coleman

To judge by her article on ‘Satanic Child Abuse’ (LRB, 23 March), Leslie Wilson seems genuinely to believe satanic abuse is a myth and that the many people working in this field are fanatical extremists engaged on a modern witch-hunt. The truth is that this abuse happens and most of us are more involved with helping the victims than with catching the perpetrators. But unless it is exposed, there is little hope of doing either effectively.

Ten years ago, I was as sceptical as she appears to be. I regarded the subjects of witchcraft and black magic as boring mumbo-jumbo. However, I was forced to accept the reality of satanist abuse from hearing my own patients’ accounts and those from other members of Rains (Ritual Abuse Information Network and Support). These survivors have no contact, yet their descriptions of abuse are remarkably similar to each other and to those given by children. My account of cult practices was a compilation of this information and was confirmed by many sources.

Both my written pieces from which she quoted were strictly limited in length. Hence not everything is explained. Had Leslie Wilson interviewed me before writing her article, answers and some evidence would have been provided. For instance, the clinical outcome after disclosure was improvement in all cases with a steady reduction of symptoms. Were she a clinician, she would know that both retraction and an initial increase in disturbance, when first disclosing, are common features of abuse survivors and do not imply that the allegations are false. As she has mentioned the so-called ‘False Memory Syndrome’, whose proponents dispute the validity of any recovered memories, I must point out that none of my patients had forgotten their involvement in satanism, although some traumatic memories had been repressed. These were not recovered through hypnosis.

Why is it so hard to believe that professional people could be members of satanic cults? Religious and political extremists have been members of most professions from time immemorial. All the criminal activities, such as child abuse and pornography, child murder and drug-dealing, allegedly performed by satanists, are committed by others who are not satanists. Other cult leaders such as Jim Jones and David Koresh have brought about mass slaughter. Personally, I, too, have difficulty with the concept of satanic worship and I am no nearer to believing in black or any other sort of magic than I ever was, but it is almost equally hard to understand how grown men, mostly from the professional classes, can go along with the extraordinary initiation rites involved in Freemasonry.

Joan Coleman
Guildford

From Roger Sandell

I was impressed by Leslie Wilson’s article. In the course of reading the British and American literature on the subject I have been astonished and appalled by the willingness of writers and specialists with impressive qualifications to repeat manifest falsehoods and absurdities, and their failure to recognise grotesque, transparent and wicked miscarriages of justice. However, there are some points in her article that are worth going into in more detail.

Leslie Wilson briefly mentions the 1980 book Michelle Remembers as providing the main impetus for the anti-satanism panic. This book is so totally fantastic that it is hard to understand how anybody, let alone responsible professionals, could have taken it seriously. Its claims of involvement in a satanic cult closely parallel Rosemary’s Baby and Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out. It is written from the standpoint of ultra-traditional Catholicism and includes claims of supernatural events such as the appearance to the satanic cultists of the Devil himself (who prophesies that Armageddon will come in the Eighties as a result of a Soviet-Iranian alliance, an idea that was then popular with US right-wing Christians). Like the two other best known US ‘satanist survivor’ books, Lauren Stratford’s Satan Underground and Mike Warnke’s The Satan Seller, it includes autobiographical information that is demonstrably false. There are two similar British works by Doreen Irvine and Audrey Harper, chiefly sold in evangelical bookshops. Neither is checkable at any point and neither of the authors states that she has contacted the police although they both claim to have witnessed serious criminal offences.

Wilson mentions the US day-care centre satanism cases as being parallel to the British ones. The recent Ayrshire case, where a group of children in care were returned to their parents, gives clear indication of cultural contagion of British investigations by these earlier US cases. One allegation in Ayrshire was of sexual abuse in a hot air balloon, a detail that occurred in the 1988 Edenton North Carolina day-care satanism trial. This latter case, incidentally, was remarkable – even by the standards of such cases – for the highly bizarre nature of the allegations. Robert Kelley, a day-care centre proprietor, was imprisoned after children told tales of his shooting babies, taking children in his car as he robbed banks, throwing them to sharks and taking them for rides in a spaceship.

The parallels between Britain and the US should not be pressed too far, however. There is a major difference in that, while most of the British accused have been members of what it is now fashionable to call the underclass, the US cases have mostly taken place in middle-class settings and have originated not in interventions by the authorities but in acts of moral vigilantism by parents against alleged abusers. This difference is probably due to the fact that while the British satanism panic is largely confined to professionals in social and psychiatric work, and is spread by books and seminars aimed at a limited audience, the US panic is more general and popular, being spread by other means including rumours, sermons and TV talk shows.

Wilson is certainly correct to point to historical parallels such as the witch mania and allegations made against heretics. But she misses the most relevant of all historical parallels: that of Jewish ritual murder of Christian children.

These stories, common in the Middle Ages, were revived in the 1905 Russian pogroms and by the Nazis. In the latter cases they were combined with tales of a Jewish plot to overthrow society. Some modern anti-satanists make similar allegations. Dr Joan Coleman, who is quoted in the article, believes that Satanists are involved in drugs, arms smuggling and ‘snuff movies’ (another contemporary myth). Even more disturbing than Dr Coleman’s ideas are the fantasies of Dr Corydon Hammond, a US abuse specialist who claimed at a conference endorsed by the American Medical Association that satanism had been brought to the US by one Dr Greenbaum, allegedly a Hasidic Jew who had shared Kabbalistic secrets with the Nazis and had been brought to the US by the CIA in 1945.

When nonsense like this can be taken seriously it is not surprising that attempts are being made to use the satanism myth to revive other images of child sacrifice. Apparently British neo-Nazis have recently been circularising nurseries with leaflets about ‘Jewish ritual murder’. Those who, like Valerie Sinason, compare satanism sceptics to Holocaust deniers might care to reflect on those parallels. One can only hope some of the believers will read Leslie Wilson’s historical summary, since the ignorance their own writings show about the witch mania seems as total as the confidence with which they proclaim that ritual abuse dates back hundreds of years. Children for the Devil, a book by the British journalist Tim Tate which is taken seriously by many professionals, attempts to prove this claim in a section that cites as evidence confessions made during the witch mania as well as blatant historical forgeries.

There is another historical parallel worth pursuing. Although the Malleus Maleficarum was written by two Dominicans, Protestant witch-hunters used it as a manual and their works were in turn quoted by Catholics. The modern satanism panic is kept alive by a similarly bizarre set of allies. On one hand there are evangelical Christian groups such as the Outreach Trust; on the other liberal professionals. Nor does this exhaust the list of strange bedfellows. The group Accuracy About Abuse, which champions the accuracy of recovered memories, is taken seriously in the media in spite of being run by Marjorie Orr, whose main credentials as a therapist consist of being the astrologer to the Daily Express.

Particularly disturbing is the role played in maintaining the panic by some feminists such as Beatrix Campbell. It is hard to imagine the reason for this since in many of the cases women have been accused (unlike cases concerning genuine child sex rings, which rarely involve women); at least one US case, that of Kelly Michaels, was clearly influenced by anti-lesbian prejudice.

The satanism panic in the last decade has been so clearly irrational that one cannot help speculating on the motivation behind it. While many of its proponents may be well-meaning, it is hard to escape the conclusion that some of them are people harbouring sadistic fantasies which they project onto others. Certainly, Wilson’s quote from one professional who justifies oppressive questioning of children by saying that some children really want to continue even when they say no is disturbingly similar to the rationalisations of real-life child abusers.

Roger Sandell
Richmond, Surrey

Vol. 17 No. 11 · 8 June 1995

From Leslie Wilson

Joan Coleman (Letters, 20 April) is quite wrong to suggest that I might regard the subjects of witchcraft and black magic as boring mumbo-jumbo, as she apparently once did. I find them fascinating. Nor did I set out to prove that the extreme satanic cult she describes doesn’t exist: I went into the area with an open mind. I have no problem believing that people belong to dubious cults, and I am unsurprised by any cruelty that human beings carry out on each other. But this is meant to be a cult of mass murder, and there is no evidence that its members exist or ever have existed, or that they have ever killed anyone. There is ample evidence that during the Great Witch-Hunt the authorities, convinced of the cult’s reality, killed thousands of people.

‘Why is it so hard,’ she asks, ‘to believe that professional people could be members of satanic cults?’ She has misread me. Of course professional people can belong to all sorts of strange organisations. However, as she well knows, people who believe in satanic ritual abuse explain the lack of evidence by the hypothesis that well-placed satanists are actively involved in a conspiracy to suppress it. If she were to reread my piece, she would see that conspiracy theory is part of belief in the satanic sabbat. I don’t think she and her colleagues are necessarily fanatical witchhunters, but the evidence of history is that ordinary decent people can commit the most appalling injustices: all it needs is an ideology powerful enough to wreck their sense of proportion.

Leslie Wilson
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