This book charts the sudden appearance and subsequent decline of so called 'satanic abuse' cases involving children in England the late 1980's and early 1990's. It deals with the subject critically, rather than as an article of faith, whether religious or psychotherapeutic. It compares the modern satanic abuse 'epidemic' with the witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also with similar phenomena in non-western societies in the twentieth century. In short, it finds that there was no coroborative evidence, no substance to the allegations. It explains how they came about through the needs of certain adults to find satanic abuse, and how the children involved and the words they spoke were manipulated to this end. None of the cases were proven in Court, and the modern day witch hunters have now turned their attention away from children.
Why do I call it a missed opportunity? The book could have been so much more effective had its style been less obscure; so many long sentences, a punctuation wilderness. I found it heavy going, and I'm not totally unused to reading academic stuff. There is no excuse for this; there is no reason why academic rigour and readability should be mutually exclusive. So the book will find an audience amongst academics and those like me, a social worker working in child protection, who have a professional interest in the subject. But the book, or perhaps its yet-to-be-written popular counterpart, needs to have a much wider audience. I know from personal experinece that many people still believe in the existence of satanic child abuse, so the danger of more witch hunts is still with us. The literature put out by the anti-satanist lobby, particularly those who approach it from a Christian fundamentalist standpoint, is racy and readable in the extreme. So why can't the facts and the rational arguments against it also be set forth in plain English for the general reader?
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