All the babies you can eat - Ms. magazine's reporting of unsubstantiated satanic rituals - Column

Humanist, March-April, 1993 by Brian Siano

One of the more encouraging signs of a revitalized feminist movement was the rebirth of Ms. magazine. Shunning advertising and trying to draw upon a wider and more varied approach to feminism, Ms. promised to provide a good mix of solid reporting, artistic expression, and spiritual and moral support. By and large, it's kept that promise.

But when the cover of the January 1993 issue instructs me to "Believe It! - Child Ritual Abuse Exists!," I'm not just disappointed - I'm angry. (Imagine how you'd feel if Geraldo Rivera was voted Humanist of the Year. That's how I'm feeling about Ms. right now.)

"Surviving the Unbelievable" is the first-person account of one Elizabeth Rose, who describes herself as the survivor of satanic ritual abuse. Rose claims that, starting when she was four or five, her mother would drag her off to be a participant in horrifying occult rituals. She claims to have been physically and psychologically abused, raped repeatedly (both by adult men and by women using such objects as branches and crucifixes), and forced to consume flesh and blood from human sacrifices. She also claims that her infant sister was decapitated and eaten in one of these sacrifices, leaving behind not so much as a birth certificate, soiled diaper, or teething ring. Her father, on the other hand, was away in Vietnam during all of this and, like most doubters, has gone into "denial" when confronted with these facts.

Perhaps because she felt the article needed a feminist angle, Rose links ritual abuse with male domination and claims, "A woman's role in the cult was based solely on her sexuality.... The men in the cult dominated the women, physically and emotionally." But her own account describes a female-dominated cult, in which

My mother's otherwise ordinary

middle-class family participated.

...I can trace the family's involvement

back to my grandmother's

generation at the very

least, although it probably goes

back further.... My mother's

sister was the first person to perform

acts of ritual abuse on me.

My aunt told me I was being punished

because I was a wicked little

girl. In the months following, I

witnessed my aunt commit many

acts of ritual abuse.

(I'm sure this is a great comfort to those readers of Ms. who are exploring neo-paganism and other forms of feminist spirituality.)

Another interesting shift - perhaps in reaction to objections raised by the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set, or more likely to separate her article from Geraldo-style Satan-mongering - is that Rose goes to some pains to drop the usual references to satanism. But she nonetheless describes rituals that fit the classic "satanic" stereotypes - complete with robes, chanting, violation with crucifixes, and prayers to Satan and evil.

In keeping with most other such accounts, at no point does Rose present any evidence that these events actually occurred. She doesn't say whether she's filed charges against any of these satanists, many of whom are probably still alive today. She doesn't say whether she's provided the police with any information leading to their acquiring solid forensic evidence of ritual infanticide and child abuse - both felony crimes she claims to have seen first-hand. She claims to have witnessed the removal of a boy's testicle in a ceremony - couldn't this kid be located today? (It would be an interesting phone call to make, at the least.) And with all these babies being sacrificed, where are the bodies? Where are the bones? What physical evidence exists that would make her story some, what more believable than a Weekly World News headline? None. Even the name "Elizabeth Rose" is phony; the credit line on the article says that "Rose" is the pseudonym of a writer currently working on a novel about ritual abuse.

In little more than a decade, the "satanic panic" has followed the same course that UFOlogy took some 40 years to travel. The hard physical evidence for either flying saucers or a nationwide conspiracy of child-slaughtering satanists never really turned up. But the basic myth-model became known to everyone thanks to years of fringe-culture circulation and media sensationalism; after a while, hundreds of people were turning up with stories that "confirmed" these mythologies.

Lately, both claims have gained new life through the same method: the use of hypnosis and trance-induced states to elicit "hidden" or "repressed" memories of abduction, ritualized abuse, and personal violation. A recent "Prime Time Live" segment demonstrated how strong these memories can seem: regressed patients were shown in convulsions, strangling their teddy bears and screaming about how they hated their parents for being satanists. There has also been a confluence of satanic ritual abuse (SRA) claims with similar therapies designed to uncover hidden memories of childhood abuse - thereby giving SRA claims a legitimacy among many therapists that even the lack of actual forensic evidence can't shake.

The issues regarding hypnosis and memory are far more complex than the "uncovered repressed memory" model most people are told about. For example, most SRA therapists claim that the events described are so horrible that children have no choice but to blot out all conscious memory. The problem is, this requires believing that these particular events cause every child to react in an extreme and uniform manner.