The Satanic panic is a moral panic consisting of over 12,000 unsubstantiated cases of Satanic ritual abuse starting in the United States in the 1980s, spreading throughout many parts of the world by the late 1990s, and persisting today. The panic originated in 1980 with the publication of Michelle Remembers, a book co-written by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient, Michelle Smith, which used the controversial and now discredited practice of recovered-memory therapy to make claims about satanic ritual abuse involving Smith. The allegations, which arose afterward throughout much of the United States, involved reports of physical and sexual abuse of people in the context of occult or Satanic rituals. Some allegations involve a conspiracy of a global Satanic cult that includes the wealthy and elite in which children are abducted or bred for human sacrifice, pornography, and prostitution.
In psychology, false memory syndrome (FMS) was a proposed "pattern of beliefs and behaviors" in which a person's identity and relationships are affected by false memories of psychological trauma, recollections which are strongly believed by the individual, but contested by the accused. False memory syndrome was proposed to be the result of recovered memory therapy, a scientifically discredited form of therapy intended to recover memories. Originally conceptualized by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, the organization sought to understand what they understood as a general pattern of behaviors that followed after a patient underwent recovered memory therapy and to come up with a term to explain the pattern. The principle that individuals can hold false memories and the role that outside influence can play in their formation is widely accepted by scientists, but there is debate over whether this effect can lead to the kinds of detailed memories of repeated sexual abuse and significant personality changes typical of cases that FMS has historically been applied to. FMS is not listed as a psychiatric illness in any medical manuals including the ICD-11, or the DSM-5. The most influential figure in the genesis of the theory is psychologist Elizabeth Loftus.
The McMartin preschool trial was a day care sexual abuse case in the 1980s, prosecuted by the Los Angeles District Attorney, Ira Reiner. Members of the McMartin family, who operated a preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, were charged with hundreds of acts of sexual abuse of children in their care. Accusations were made in 1983, with arrests and the pretrial investigation taking place from 1984 to 1987 and trials running from 1987 to 1990. The case lasted seven years but resulted in no convictions, and all charges were dropped in 1990. By the case's end, it had become the longest and most expensive series of criminal trials in American history. The case was part of day-care sex-abuse hysteria, a moral panic over alleged Satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Laurel Rose Willson was an American con artist and author. She authored books as Lauren Stratford alleging Satanic ritual abuse (SRA), and later assumed the guise of a Holocaust survivor as Laura Grabowski. The general theme of her writing, from adolescence, was horror fiction, often violent and sexual, in which she was the victim.
Michelle Remembers is a discredited 1980 book co-written by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his psychiatric patient Michelle Smith. A best-seller, Michelle Remembers relied on the discredited practice of recovered-memory therapy to make sweeping, lurid claims about Satanic ritual abuse involving Smith, which contributed to the rise of the Satanic panic in the 1980s. While the book presents its claims as fact, and was extensively marketed on that basis at the time, no evidence was provided; all investigations into the book failed to corroborate any of its claims, with investigators describing its content as being primarily based on elements of popular culture and fiction that were popular at the time when it was written.
The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse is a self-help book by poet Ellen Bass and Laura Davis that focuses on recovery from child sexual abuse and has been called "controversial and polarizing".
Day-care sex-abuse hysteria was a moral panic that occurred primarily during the 1980s and early 1990s, and featured charges against day-care providers accused of committing several forms of child abuse, including Satanic ritual abuse. The collective cases are often considered a part of the Satanic panic. A 1982 case in Kern County, California, United States, first publicized the issue of day-care sexual abuse, and the issue figured prominently in news coverage for almost a decade. The Kern County case was followed by cases elsewhere in the United States, as well as Canada, New Zealand, Brazil, and various European countries.
Recovered-memory therapy (RMT) is a catch-all term for a controversial and scientifically discredited form of psychotherapy that critics say utilizes one or more unproven therapeutic techniques to purportedly help patients recall previously forgotten memories. Proponents of recovered memory therapy claim, contrary to evidence, that traumatic memories can be buried in the subconscious and thereby affect current behavior, and that these memories can be recovered through the use of RMT techniques. RMT is not recommended by professional mental health associations. RMT can result in patients developing false memories of sexual abuse from their childhood and events such as alien abduction which had not actually occurred.
Richard Noll is an American clinical psychologist and historian of medicine. He has published on the history of psychiatry, including two critical volumes on the life and work of Carl Gustav Jung, books and articles on the history of dementia praecox and schizophrenia, and in anthropology on shamanism. His books and articles have been translated into fifteen foreign languages and he has delivered invited presentations in nineteen countries on six continents.
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) was a nonprofit organization founded in 1992 and dissolved in late 2019.
The Thurston County ritual abuse case was a 1988 case in which Paul Ingram, county Republican Party Chairman of Thurston County, Washington, and the Chief Civil Deputy of the Sheriff's department, was accused by his daughters of sexual abuse, by at least one daughter of satanic ritual abuse, and later accused by his son in 1996 of abusing him between the ages of 4 and 12.
The Satanic panic in Utah is part of a broader moral panic that began in the 1980s as children in the United States, subjected to coercive interviewing techniques at the hands of zealous social workers, made unsubstantiated allegations of bizarre Satanic rituals and horrific sexual and physical abuse at the hands of day care workers. As the decade unfolded, clients of believing therapists began to make similar allegations, which are now generally seen as confabulations caused by iatrogenic therapeutic techniques such as hypnosis and automatic writing rather than the discovery of repressed memories. Despite the similarities between the allegations of adults and children, investigations produced only circumstantial, and in many cases contradictory evidence of the patients' disclosures. The court cases surrounding satanic ritual abuse (SRA) allegations were among the most expensive and lengthy in history and produced no convictions or convictions based solely on the testimony of children that were frequently overturned or dismissed upon appeal.
The Oak Hill satanic ritual abuse trial occurred in Oak Hill, Austin, Texas, in 1991 when Fran Keller and her husband Dan, proprietors of a small day care, were accused of repeatedly and sadistically abusing several children.
Valerie Sinason is a British poet, writer, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist who is known for promoting the idea that people with a developmental disability can benefit from psychoanalysis and also that satanic ritual abuse is widely practiced in the UK. She ran the workshop dealing with intellectual disability at the Tavistock Clinic for twenty years and also worked for 16 years as a consultant research psychotherapist at St George's Hospital Medical School. She is a Trustee of the Institute for Psychotherapy and Disability.
The Country Walk case is a 1985 child sex abuse case which occurred in Florida and was described as a "Multi-Victim, Multi-Offender" case. Francisco Fuster-Escalona, known as Frank Fuster, was convicted on multiple charges and sentenced to a minimum of 165 years behind bars, while his wife Illiana served three years. Appeals courts at the state and federal level have consistently ruled against Frank Fuster.
Elizabeth Laura Mullinar is a London-born former film casting consultant. She is one of the founders of Advocates for Survivors of Child Abuse and is the Founder of the Heal For Life Foundation and created the TREE Model of Trauma Recovery. Mullinar is regarded as an expert in the field of trauma. In 2019, she presented the TREE model at the International Congress of Trauma and Attachment alongside other trauma experts including American Psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel, and British Psychoanalyst Peter Fonagy OBE.
The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) is a controversial nonprofit professional organization of health professionals and individuals who are interested in advancing the scientific and societal understandings of trauma-based disorders, including posttraumatic stress disorder, complex posttraumatic stress disorder, complex trauma, and the dissociative disorders.
Diana Louisa Napolis, also known by her online pseudonym Karen Curio Jones or more often simply Curio, is an American former social worker. Between the late 1990s and 2000, Napolis posted a series of pseudonymous accusations alleging that individuals skeptical of the satanic ritual abuse moral panic were involved in a conspiracy to cover up the sexual abuse and murder of children. The pseudonymous poster's real life identity was confirmed as Napolis in 2000.
Barbara W. Snow is a practicing therapist based out of Salt Lake City, Utah. She was a central figure in the Satanic ritual abuse moral panic in Utah in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
