Group 14: Satanic Ritual Abuse

Abstract

The 1980s witnessed a growing concern that organized Satanic cults were committing atrocities across the United States. This fear was reinforced by several allegations of child abuse, of which the McMartin preschool trial was a particularly bizarre example. The California preschool was investigated and charged with several acts of child sexual abuse, supposedly related to a Satanist cult in which the McMartin family was active. The 1966 founding of the Church of Satan and other Satanist-identified groups gave some credence to reports of such “cults,” yet research reveals few if any links between public fears and actual Satanist practices. The growth of Satanic groups also coincided with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity, which saw the Moral Majority as a prominent force in American society. This project seeks to analyze the cultural factors that contributed to the “Satanic Panic,” with emphasis on how the combined efforts of the religious right, psychotherapists, law enforcement, and the media’s uncritical coverage of spurious stories all contributed to the credibility and promotion of cultural anxieties. The panic is also contextualized more broadly in the era’s newfound public awareness of child abuse and in the growth of New Religious Movements. We argue that the cultural anxieties plaguing American society’s vulnerabilities to evil forces are embodied in the moral panic surrounding Satanic ritual abuse; indeed, it appears people may have invented supernatural antagonists to rationalize a genuinely disturbing issue - child abuse - and in order to literally demonize non-Christian members of society.