First, lurid accusations of bizarre child sexual abuse, of children forced to eat fried rats and cockroaches by their sadistic parents. Then the equally dramatic recantations of the children themselves, who now insist the abuse did not occur.
By now, one would think, reporters would look upon charges of extreme abuse with an almost instinctive skepticism. But no: in the first Tribune account of the allegations, dramatically announced with a banner headline on the front page, one could read in chilling detail about the horrific crimes said to have been committed by the south-side couple charged with 1,238 counts of “hellish” abuse against their children. “Four children were beaten,” the Tribune declared on February 6, summarizing the charges, “sexually assaulted, injected with drugs and fed rats and roaches, over and over again.” There was barely a hint of skepticism in the article.
In many cases, those jailed have been accused not simply of abuse but of something called satanic ritual abuse (SRA). In such cases, bizarre allegations became almost routine: children were said to have been abused by dozens of perpetrators, and to have been forced to engage in any number of improbable activities, including “baby barbecues,” cannibalism, and ritual murders on such a scale that were they all true even the census department would have noticed the dip in population.
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Many SRA proponents claim that up to 50,000 children are ritually murdered by cults every year–i.e., twice the number of people murdered in the more conventional manner, by criminals, relatives, enraged postal workers, and famous sports figures. And some estimates of the satanic holocaust are even higher. According to the Reverend Dr. Gary Lee, a self-proclaimed ritual abuse expert in Illinois, some five to eight million–yes, million–Americans are involved in satanic abuse, with each satanic group committing anywhere from 5 to 20 murders a year.
And while there is no evidence whatsoever of a vast satanist underground, there is ample evidence of unscrupulous (or simply overzealous) therapists and law-enforcement officials coaxing or coercing or otherwise extracting “memories” from bewildered children and adults alike of things that simply could not have happened.
In the child care cases, there is a slight variation on the theme: parents concerned about seemingly odd behaviors among their young children become convinced–in part because of the popularity of the abuse diagnosis and books like The Courage to Heal–that the children are suffering from “abuse.” Since parents know they aren’t abusers, suspicion falls on day care workers–and (once the “experts” arrive on the scene) charges of abuse can quickly balloon into stories of ritual abuse and massive satanic conspiracies. In these cases, children have been coaxed, if not coerced, into making accusations by therapists subjecting them to months of virtual interrogation; eventually the children “remember” not only abuse but, in some cases, robots and excursions into outer space.
But the cases have not vanished entirely. Last December, a jury in Wenatchee, Washington, acquitted pastor Robert Roberson and his wife on charges of leading ritual abuse orgies in their own church–accusations that arose, incidentally, after the two began questioning a police department that had put a number of their own parishioners in jail, some of them mentally handicapped indigents incriminated by “confessions” that they now say were coerced from them. The bulk of the Wenatchee defendants remain in jail today.
