Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt

Skeptical books? I mean books like this one that question our culture's holiest beliefs - in the continuing and ever-worsening oppression of victimized classes, the coming environmental doom etc. Most of the reviews tend to be positive; after all, interested persons have purchased the book or are shopping for the book. Their point of view is already formed. Then there are the other reviews - usually giving no stars, usually short and scabrous: "This book is part of a conspiracy to trivialize a very real problem. This book has been discredited. It has shoddy research etc." "Discredited" is a great word - applied not to shoddy research but to research that challenges our sacred beliefs. To get more specific, negative reviewers of this book and its many cousins miss the point. Nathan and her co-authors are not excusing abuse or dismissing it as a possible occurrence. Nor are they denying that memories can be repressed. They are simply arguing two points: 1. People are innocent until proven guilty. (Right?) and 2. Memories recovered through hypnosis or by other means are not strong enough evidence to convict an accused "perp." As evidence, they are simply unreliable. Lots of libertarians are on the internet and obviously are disposed to like books of this kind. Then there are others... the true believers, steeped in ideology and unconcerned about the facts in any specific case. Their only concern is with broader principles - "victims must be protected!"; "abuse is a terrible, growing problem!" These principles are fine, but they should not be brought to bear upon the process of determining guilt or innocence. This process should retain its clear focus on evidence and facts. That is the essence of Nathan's argument, as well as those of Ofshe, Terence Campbell, Willard Gaylin and Dorothy Rabinowitz.

Co-author Snedeker has been a psychologist, a writer and an appellant's attorney since the mid-70s, so is remarkably well qualified to write on the subject. The book's dissection of the nonsense that prevailed in mid-80s "satanic, ritualistic, child abuse" witch hunts should be required reading for persons in the child protection field. Were it so, the fevered investigators' imaginations which created these travesties might have been cooled, and innocent people spared from allegations of perpetration. I am retired from that field, so am terribly familiar with the pervasive incompetence it harbors.

This book was a real eye opener for me. It documents the trumped up charges against daycare workers,"sex rings" of parents and grandparents -- accused of the most elaborate and unlikely--even impossible-- crimes against children. None of the charges came spontaneously from children, who in fact insisted nothing had happened. Rather, children were subjected to highly coercive and manipulative interviews by true-believer therapists, repeated over weeks and weeks. the therapists fed the kids the stories they wanted to hear -- and eventually got what they wanted. What was presented as physical evidence of abuse --microscopic bumps and skin tags on genitals --have turned out to be as common in nonabused kids and abused ones. Over a hundred people went to jail, and around a dozen are still there --even though the justice system has tacitly admitted the flaws in the original prosecutions. After all, no one has brought a daycare ritual-abuse case in a decade. What I particularly like about this book is that--unlike some of the other books debunking ritual abuse, repressed memory and the like-- it's written from a feminist perspective. Nathan argues that what women and children need to be safe from abuse is more equality within the family, and more equality for women socially and economically. For her the tragic turn in feminism was the turn toward psychologizing incest and sex abuse and presenting therapy as the remedy, instead of social change. This perspective sets her apart from the dominant strain in the movement against intrusive child advocacy, the "parents' rights" movement, which tends to see children as family propoerty with no rights of their own, and tends to be extremely conservative politically. A wonderful book.

This book is must reading for anyone concerned with justice in America. This book details cases of child abuse accusations that put people behind bars for outlandish crimes that could never have been committed, crimes that were so fantastical and so unreal as to be utterly unbelievable. This is not a one-sided account, but a true and courageous investigative expose of the child-abuse and satanic ritual cases like the McMartin Pre-school case that were nothing but a house of cards that came crashing down when the facts were examined with a critical eye. Read it and you will wonder in amazement and disbelief how prosecutors and judges -- elected public officials -- could have allowed these cases to happen and why some of the accused are still behind bars despite their innocence and the fact that the crimes never could have occurred.