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 unbaptised 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 believed to be organised and supervised by worshippers of Satan (here equated with ‘witches’) to pervert and mock Christian and other moral beliefs. Though the main issues are listed above, others have been drawn into the mix at its periphery, including beliefs about ‘snuff movies’, anti-Semitism, and even the dangers of role-playing fantasy games.
Inevitably, the ill-prepared case workers caught in the middle drifted away from common sense and the new guidelines, themselves inadvertently spreading that sense of panic. Violence against and sexual abuse of children is an unpleasant fact of life and has been with us as long as the human family itself. However, the link between child abuse and alleged Satanism has historical precedents which (as we shall see) have nothing to do with an objectively ‘real’ menacing cult and everything to do with
