The satanic ritual abuse panic

That an organised network of satanic cults — in the fuller versions reaching into wealthy and powerful families — was abducting, breeding, abusing and sacrificing children, operating through daycare centres and preschools, and that memories of this abuse could be recovered from adult and child witnesses through therapeutic technique.

The panic has a datable start: Michelle Remembers, published in 1980 by the Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient Michelle Smith, whom he later married. The book presented recovered memories of satanic abuse as fact and was promoted to police and social workers as a case study. The McMartin preschool investigation, beginning in 1983, gave the claims a criminal-justice engine and seven years of television coverage. Conference circuits, symptom checklists and interview techniques spread through therapy, social work and law enforcement; talk shows carried it to everyone else. Earlier evangelical material, notably Mike Warnke's fabricated 1972 memoir The Satan Seller, had prepared the ground.

The convictions are the part that does not wash out. The McMartin defendants were acquitted or had charges dropped after seven years and the longest criminal trial in American history. Others were not so lucky: people in Kern County, in Wenatchee, in Edenton, in Martensville were imprisoned for years on evidence of this kind before appellate courts unpicked it, and some served full sentences. Families were separated. The panic also caused a second harm, less visible: it consumed investigative attention and public credibility that ordinary, non-ritual child abuse desperately needed at exactly the moment the institutional cases documented elsewhere in this archive were being buried. The narrative structure — elite networks, trafficked children, hidden symbols — did not die. It was rebuilt almost intact for QAnon.