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Satanic Ritual Abuse 243
assigned to the case thoroughly took apart several
sites; for example,
they brought one of their big pieces of
equipment out there with a blade and they
indicated an area that had been indicated to
them by the witnesses against Paul Ingram as
an area in which burials had taken place,
burials specifically of the remnants of victims
of ritual sacrifice, and animals that had been
sacrificed and of course the recurrent theme
of babies that had been sacrificed. And they
buried them out back they said, out back of
the house and in the field near by. So I
proceeded under the assumption that the only
way to do it was to clear a sizable area....So
we took the pasture out back and literally took
the top off of it. (Papworth 1996, website)
Nothing beyond a single cow bone was ever
recovered. The only evidence was in the recovered
memories of numerous survivors. Retrospectively,
however, it is now clear that these were false
memories resulting from improper interview
techniques, which, in effect, implanted memories
of imagined events by suggestion and leading
questions.
Another factor at the time was the increasing
concern over abused children as an important
public issue. Many SRA cases were pursued on the
basis of the testimony of children. Therapists had
been influenced by the then-prevalent line of
thinking that children’s claims of sexual abuse
must be believed at face value, and that the same
children were to be disbelieved if they later took
back their claims. This particular approach would
later be abandoned after researchers demonstrated
that children could be prompted to recount imagined
incidents as if they were true in the face of
constant questioning. But at the time of the SRA
scare, such methods were still regarded as not only
acceptable, but as state of the art. Thus counselors
and child protection officials pumped children full
of leading questions reflecting ritual abuse ideology,
and, not coincidentally, ended up finding
evidence for the existence of ritual abuse in children’s
responses.
Another player in the Satanic panic was the
anticult movement (ACM). The SRA movement
adopted both the stereotype of sinister cults and
the mind-control notion from the ACM.
Although understood as a kind of cult mind
control, Satanic mind control was originally
invoked for a completely different reason: Cult
mind control explained why someone’s adult child
could join a self-evidently crazy religious group.
Satanic programming, on the other hand, explained
how a hypothetical network of secretive
underground Satanic cult groups could manage to
control both their victims and their members so
that no one would ever reveal the truth about their
existence. It also provided a theoretical background
for understanding how recovered memory
therapy (hypnotizing alleged victims to uncover
repressed memories of abuse) worked, and why
recovered memory therapy was necessary.
The ACM, for its part, climbed on board the
ritual abuse bandwagon to expand its own scope
of activities. As public concern over Satanism
grew, ACM groups received so many inquiries
about Satanism and clandestine Satanic cults that
they developed information packets to sell to
callers. Composed largely of Xeroxed newspaper
and popular magazine articles, such packets
simply repeated popular stereotypes. Entering
into the arena of public concern about Satanism
also gave the ACM a new forum within which to
promote its perspective on cults and mind
control.
Another important player in the Satanic panic
was the mass media. Because of its sensationalist
appeal, Satanism and SRA have been the topic of
numerous talk shows, including episodes of
Oprah Winfrey, Sally Jesse Raphael, Phil Donahue,
and Geraldo Rivera. Out of these programs, Rivera
has likely been the most influential on the Ritual
Abuse topic. Rivera’s most influential program
was the television special “Devil Worship:
Exposing Satan’s Underground,” broadcast by
NBC on October 25, 1988. Aired for two hours
during prime time, this special was obviously
designed to fit in with the Halloween season
programming. It has been said that this special
was watched by more people than any other previous
television documentary.
In her 1987 book Prepare for War, one of