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.
There have been many cases of sexual abuse of children by priests, nuns, and other members of religious life in the Catholic Church. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the cases have involved many allegations, investigations, trials, convictions, acknowledgement and apologies by Church authorities, and revelations about decades of instances of abuse and attempts by Church officials to cover them up. The abused include mostly boys but also girls, some as young as three years old, with the majority between the ages of 11 and 14. Criminal cases for the most part do not cover sexual harassment of adults. The accusations of abuse and cover-ups began to receive public attention during the late 1980s. Many of these cases allege decades of abuse, frequently made by adults or older youths years after the abuse occurred. Cases have also been brought against members of the Catholic hierarchy who covered up sex abuse allegations and moved abusive priests to other parishes, where abuse continued.
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.
Martensville is a city located in Saskatchewan, Canada, just 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) north of Saskatoon, 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) west of the city of Warman and 14 kilometres (8.7 mi) southwest of Clarkboro Ferry which crosses the South Saskatchewan River. It is a bedroom community of Saskatoon. It is surrounded by the Rural Municipality of Corman Park No. 344. The community is served by the Saskatoon/Richter Field Aerodrome located immediately west of the city across Highway 12, as well as by Saskatoon's John G. Diefenbaker International Airport, only a few miles to the south.
The Little Rascals Day Care Center was a day care in Edenton, North Carolina, where, from 1989 to 1995, there were arrests, charges and trials of seven people associated with the day care center, including the owner-operators, Bob and Betsy Kelly. In retrospect, the case reflected day care sex abuse hysteria, including allegations of satanic ritual abuse. The testimony of the children was coached.
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.
The Cleveland child abuse scandal is a wave of suspected child sexual abuse cases in 1987 in Cleveland, England, many of which were later discredited.
Peter Hugh McGregor Ellis was a New Zealand childcare worker who was wrongfully convicted of child sexual abuse. He was at the centre of one of the country's most enduring judicial controversies, after being found guilty in June 1993 in the High Court on 16 counts of sexual offences involving children in his care at the Christchurch Civic Creche and sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment. He maintained his innocence until his death 26 years later and was supported by many New Zealanders in his attempts to overturn his convictions, although others believed he was guilty. Concerns about the reliability of the convictions centred on far-fetched stories told by many of the children and the interview techniques used to obtain their testimony.
The Orkney child abuse scandal began on 27 February 1991, when social workers and police removed children—five boys and four girls, aged eight to fifteen and all from the families of English "incomers"—from their homes on the island of South Ronaldsay in Orkney, Scotland, because of allegations of child abuse. The children denied that any abuse had occurred, and medical examinations did not reveal any evidence of abuse.
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.
As distinct from abuse by some parish priests, who are subject to diocesan control, there has also been abuse by members of Roman Catholic orders, which often care for the sick or teach at school. Just as diocesan clergy have arranged parish transfers of abusive priests, abusive brothers in Catholic orders are sometimes transferred.
The sexual abuse scandal in the Congregation of Christian Brothers is a major chapter in the series of Catholic sex abuse cases in various Western jurisdictions.
The Martensville satanic sex scandal, also known as the Martensville Nightmare occurred in Martensville, Saskatchewan, Canada. There were two similar events around the same time where an allegation of child sex abuse escalated into claims of satanic ritual abuse. The more widely known of the two is the Martensville Daycare Scandal, and the second but earlier story is of the Foster Parent Scandal in nearby Saskatoon.
From the late 1980s, allegations of sexual abuse of children associated with Catholic institutions and clerics in several countries started to be the subject of sporadic, isolated reports. In Ireland, beginning in the 1990s, a series of criminal cases and Irish government enquiries established that hundreds of priests had abused thousands of children over decades. Six reports by the former National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church established that six Irish priests had been convicted between 1975 and 2011. This has contributed to the secularisation of Ireland and to the decline in influence of the Catholic Church. Ireland held referendums to legalise same-sex marriage in 2015 and abortion in 2018.
The media coverage of Catholic sex abuse cases is a major aspect of the academic literature surrounding the pederastic priest scandal.
Miazga v Kvello Estate, 2009 SCC 51 is a leading decision of the Supreme Court of Canada on how the tort of malicious prosecution applies to Crown attorneys and other public prosecutors. Specifically, the court held that there is no requirement for a public prosecutor to have a subjective belief that an accused person is actually guilty. Nor can there be a presumption of malice from a lack of reasonable and probable grounds.
The Murphy Report is the brief name of the report of a Commission of investigation conducted by the Irish government into the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin. It was released in 2009 by Judge Yvonne Murphy, only a few months after the publication of the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse chaired by Sean Ryan, a similar inquiry which dealt with abuses in industrial schools controlled by Roman Catholic religious institutes.
The Franklin child prostitution ring allegations began in June 1988 in Omaha, Nebraska, when multiple prominent Nebraska political and business figures were accused of involvement in a child sex trafficking ring. The allegations attracted significant public and political interest until late 1990, when separate state and federal grand juries concluded that the allegations were unfounded and the ring was a "carefully crafted hoax."
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.
