Ritual Sexual Abuse: The Anatomy of a Panic (Part 2)

Analysis

BBC

Government, Politics, News

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2015

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

David Aaronovitch of The Times traces the powerful intellectual influences behind what he sees as one of the most important cultural shifts of the past 40 years: from a society in which accusations of sexual abuse were wrongly ignored to one in which the falsely accused were crushed by a system where the mantra was "victims must be believed".

In the second of two programmes, Aaronovitch re-examines the role played by unproven psychoanalytic theories which, from the 1980s, spread from the world of therapists in Canada and the USA to social work, medicine and then to law enforcement in Britain.

The programme explores the parallels between the belief in ritual abuse with some of the claims being made today about VIP paedophile rings and group murder.

Some of the mistakes of the past - such as the false accusations made against parents in the Orkneys and Rochdale of satanic abuse - have been acknowledged. But, Aaronovitch argues, without a profound understanding of how and why such moral panics arise we are unlikely to avoid similar mistakes in the future. And when such mistakes recur we risk an over-reaction and a return to a culture of denial.

Producer: Hannah Barnes

Contributors: Rosie Waterhouse - Investigative Journalist; Head of MA in investigative journalism at City University

Debbie Nathan - Investigative Journalist and Author

Tim Tate - Television Producer and Director

Sue Hampson - Former counsellor, and now Director of Safe to Say Trauma Informed Training and Consultancy

Dr Sarah Nelson - Research Associate at the University of Edinburgh

Professor Richard McNally - Professor of Psychology at Harvard University

Anonymous case study.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this edition of analysis. This is the second of two programs in which David Aronovich
0:06.4	explores how a belief in widespread satanic abuse of children, spread from the United States to Britain, and continues to have an impact on vulnerable people to this day.
0:16.0	The first programme is still available via the BBC Analysis Podcast Stream.
0:21.0	In 1990, Christine Johnston, a social worker from Nottingham appeared on the BBC One programme, heart of the matter.
0:30.0	She was talking about a local case involving the sexual abuse of children that had achieved national notoriety.
0:37.0	We've looked at every explanation that they could be other than ritual abuse and at the end of the day we're left saying
0:45.0	it can only be rich and abuse and if the children here have experienced this and
0:51.0	are talking about this and children elsewhere and in America
0:54.6	and Europe are saying the same things there's got to be something happening.
0:58.9	But if this something is true what your evidence amounts to is a nationwide worldwide
1:07.2	network of appalling behavior. Torture of children, yes.
1:15.0	Unbelievable, isn't it?
1:17.0	Unbelievable, but it had to be believed.
1:20.0	The children had to be believed.
1:22.0	However much we might want to resist the idea of such
1:25.3	improbable evil, dozens of babies and animals being sacrificed in satanic rituals, it had to be
1:31.8	faced up to. As I said on last week's programme, available to listen online
1:37.0	and as a podcast if you missed it, I'm not disputing the idea that the society I grew up in was one that was often in denial about the existence of child sexual abuse.
1:47.0	Some of our most trusted institutions dismissed the complaints of victims and colluded in protecting their abusers.
1:55.4	But how did we go from a state of denial to one of credulity?
2:00.8	Of course in the thousands of cases of child sexual abuse over the years
2:04.5	there have been some where the abusers have sought to intimidate their victims
	...

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