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Satanic Panic article from Philly City Paper
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Satanic Panic article from Philly City Paper

Brian Siano
4404 Walnut Street 3F
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Internet Email: [e-mail]

Bad Satan Psycho-Juju:
False Memories, Broken Families, Child Sacrifice and the New Satanic Panic

by Brian Siano (copyrighted)

    "To what end or purpose is this sacrilegious offering of children, and how
does it benefit the devils?. . . The first reason arises from their pride, which always
increases; as it is said: 'They that hate Thee have lifted up the head.' For they try as
far as possible to conform with divine rites and ceremonies. Secondly, they can
more easily deceive men under the mask of an outwardly seeming pious action. . .
And the third reason is, that the perfidy of witches may grow, to the devils' own
gain, when they have witches dedicated to them from their very cradles."

        From the "Malleus Maleficarum", the Inquisition's
        official reference on witchcraft (circa 1484)

     "20/20" and Geraldo Rivera notwithstanding, the incidence of exorcisms and
witch-burnings has dropped off appreciably since the days of Torquemada. To most
of us, this represents progress;  if we're accused of bewitching the cattle, we won't
have to choose between Repent While Suffering or Die Horribly. We don't start
mustering up infidels for an "auto da fe" when the crops go bad anymore. We
"hope" that five hundred years of progress has taught us to approach our problems
with a degree of sophistication.

    But the temptation to see Satan lurking in the woodpile has stayed with us,
and over the past ten years or so, talk shows, law- enforcement training programs,
and parents' seminars have been organized to discuss a so-called epidemic of occult-
related crime. As a result, some therapists are treating Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) as
a distinct psychiatric disorder -- caused by "real" Satanic Rituals.

    However, a growing number of experts have raised strong objections to these
theories, describing them as a modern-day version of the Salem witch hunts.
Researchers argue that claims of Satanic Ritual Abuse have created a climate of
suspicion over minority religious faiths, mainly for evangelical and political
purposes. Therapists and psychology researchers question the methods used to elicit
what they term "false memories" of childhood cult abuse, incest, rape, murder,
infanticide, and even abduction by UFOs. The courts are now dealing with these
accusations of abuse, brought by adults against their parents.

    It's a tricky field to navigate, and it could be littered with broken families and
confused victims in the near future.

All the Babies You Can Eat

     So why should accounts of violent, bloodthirsty Satanists be so credible? After
all, the popular conception of devil worship was more like "The Devil's Rain", a B-
movie that climaxed with Ernest Borgnine and John Travolta melting into
steaming goop. But Satanism has suddenly reasserted itself as the Ultimate Evil,
requiring legions of purported occult experts on "Geraldo" to talk about a range of
influence spanning from Charles Manson to heavy metal music. Aren't there
"worse" things to worry about?

    "In the 1880s," says Gerry O'Sullivan, "there was a Parisian publisher named
Leo Taxil who was famous for his scurrilous anti- Catholic tracts. Then one
morning he proclaimed his conversion to Catholicism. Shortly thereafter, he
declared that he had unearthed the doings of the Satanic Masonic sect called the
Paladins. He began publishing the memoirs of a woman named Sophia Walden,
who claimed to have left the order. For two years this fed into an anti-Masonic
hysteria in Europe, and there was even a Papal Benediction given to Sophia
Walden, whom no one had even met. After a few years, Taxil broke down and
confessed that he'd made it all up. It's interesting that one hundred years ago, you
also saw nativist stories in the United States about Masons, Catholics and Mormons
who were allegedly kidnapping children and holding them as slaves. And a
hundred years later, we seem to be experiencing more of the same."

    If anyone should be able to summarize the history of Satan rumor- panics, it's
O'Sullivan. He is a co-author of "Satanism in America", the first critical
examination of the various claims of Devil-worship circulated in the mid 1980s. He
is also co-author (with Edward S. Herman) of "The Terrorism Industry", another
jaundiced look at how a set of claims are circulated by a small culture of mutually-
reinforcing experts. (Currently, O'Sullivan is an instructor in the humanities at the
Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science -- and in the spring, he'll be teaching
a course on, surprise, surprise, New Religions.)

    The Leo Taxil story is typical of our conversation, which runs over a
landscape of arcane and obscure subjects that have little to do with car bombs, right-
wing think tanks and lit crit. There's the theology of Anton LaVey's Church of
Satan ("Basically, it's ritualized Social Darwinism; very law and order, socially
conservative, with a carefully cultivated image of outrage"), the first Satanist in
America ("Herbert Sloan. He operated his church out of his barbershop, and he used
to serve apple juice and cookies during his services"), and the role of "liminal
spaces" like abandoned houses and graveyards in folklore.

    "The Satanic panic," as O'Sullivan terms it, "has evolved out of a subgenre of
evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian literature -- namely, the conversion
narratives of allegedly former occultists and Satanists. Over time, these conversion
narratives gained an incredible amount of popularity in evangelical and
fundamentalist circuits." There were, in fact, three seminal documents that shaped
the modern Christian folklore on Satanism -- Mike Warnke's "The Satan Seller",
Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith's "Michelle Remembers", and Lauren
Stratford's "Satan's Underground". Most of this material has been substantially
discredited, even within the Christian community.

    "The Satan Seller", first published in 1973, purported to tell of Warnke's
college days as a high-ranking Satanist in the mid-1960's. Warnke, a proteg of
evangelist Morris Cerullo, also claimed to have been a member of that
ultraconspiracy, the Illuminati during this time. (But it wasn't until he found Jesus
that he began making real money; his ministry currently grosses two million dollars
a year. The IRS recently revoked his tax-exempt status.) The Christian magazine
"Cornerstone", in a fine display of a movement policing its own, reports that college
friends of Warnke's remember him as a likeable, not-very- offensive storyteller.
Beyond a little Ouija board play, Warnke's circle of friends had never gotten
anywhere near the Satan worship, gang rape, and major-league drug dealing that
Warnke describes. When told of Warnke's current claims of those days, most of his
friends from the period responded with laughter or questions like "Is this a joke?"

    During the 1970s, Jack Chick Publications -- the people behind those wallet-
sized comic book tracts we've all been handed on street corners -- was one of the
main sources of lurid, no-middle-ground accounts of how Satanists Are Lurking
Everywhere. One of their major authorities was John Todd who, like Warnke,
claimed membership in the Illuminati. Between a spat with Warnke over who-
claimed-what-first, and his increasingly terrifying and grandiose conspiracy theories,
Todd's star fell as Warnke's soared.

    The Satanists in Chick's comic books not only have magic powers that" really
work", but they control the news media, the local police, and even the Catholic
Church. Satanists, like most Chick unbelievers, are drawn with wattled and
depraved faces, and they have subtle, pop- culture names like "Sabrina," "Endora,"
and "Mrs. Damien" so readers get the point. In "Spellbound", Sabrina and her pals
are called into recording studios to fuse a netherworld demon into the master tapes
of rock albums. "Dark Dungeons" tells how fantasy-gamer Debbie is initiated into
using the "real" spells, until she finds Jesus and heroically burns her Dungeons and
Dragons equipment. Little Mandy learns to levitate tables at a slumber party in "The
Poor Little Witch", and before long, she's knocking back infant's-blood cocktails
with the rest of the gang. In other Chick tracts, occultists are depicted putting razor
blades in Halloween apples, eating human fingers, and abducting unwary hippie
chicks for sacrifice. Even Old Scratch himself holds up a board meeting in Hell to
gloat over the TV show "Bewitched".

    "Keep in mind that this is a very Manichean world view," says O'Sullivan,
"and for them, Satanism is simply reverse Christianity. Now, the literature suggests
that most child sexual abuse occurs within the home, and there's an increasing
number of incidents of pastors and priests who are accused of abusing children. But
in this central mythology of the family besieged and fortified, the people who
threaten your children are "outside" the family, and "outside" of Christianity.
There's a certain win-win logic involved where some Fundamentalists have
decided that no Christian could abuse children to this extent -- ergo, they're really
Satanists.

    "The Satanist has taken the place of the mythical stranger in a raincoat -- and
scapegoating day-care centers is part of the whole Christian right crusade. It's a war
to get women back into a purified, insulated home."

    But it wasn't until the 1980 publication of "Michelle Remembers", by
Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith, that hypnotically-enhanced accounts of
torture and ritual murder began circulating. "The kind of religious folklore
involving Satanism and spiritual warfare, that had long been believed and listened
to in church basements, was eventually picked up as truth by the news media, police
officers, psychological paraprofessionals and social workers," says O'Sullivan.

    "Michelle Remembers" is based on Michelle Smith's narratives of SRA,
gathered when she underwent hypnotic therapy under Pazder's direction. Efforts by
both the Committee for the Scientific Evaluation of Religion and "MacLean's"
magazine to verify Smith's stories turned up nothing -- even though Smith's
Satanists cut off the middle finger of their left hands as an offering to the Devil,
which should make them pretty conspicuous. Psychiatric anthropologist Sherril
Mulhern, after reviewing Pazder's transcripts, noted that the Satanic themes were
introduced by Pazder himself during the therapy while Michelle was under
hypnosis.

    "Satan's Underground" by Lauren Stratford (real name: Laurel Wilson),
published in 1988, continued the trend toward more lurid stories. According to
"Cornerstone", Stratford was a woman with severe and tragic psychological
problems -- one friend recalls her compulsively cutting her own arms with a paring
knife to gain sympathy, and another reports that Stratford was retelling stories from
the book "Sybil" as though they'd happened to her. Eventually, Stratford was
claiming she'd been present during the Satanic rituals allegedly conducted at the
McMartin Preschool, but her videotaped testimony -- with elaborate accounts of
having been a breeder of babies for ritual sacrifice -- was deemed Not Credible by the
McMartin parents. (On talk show appearances, Stratford also gave different
estimates as to how many babies she gave birth to for sacrifice.)

    These books were the beginning of a flood of "Satan seminars" and
educational materials for parents and police that constituted, in O'Sullivan's view,
"evangelism posing as criminology." Informational materials provided by these
sources frequently failed to make any distinction among Satanists, neo-Pagans, fans
of Aleister Crowley, punk rockers, headbangers and modern Druids; even Islam,
Buddhism and Hinduism were characterized as "Satanic" at one point or another.
Telltale signs of devil-worship to look for in teenagers included falling grades,
hateful stares, the word REDRUM, and the flaunting of hierarchy. Symbols such as
the anarchists' circle-A, the peace sign, the Blue Oyster Cult's inverted-question-
mark, and even Mr. Spock's Live-Long-and-Prosper" handsign were interpreted as
ancient Devil- worship glyphs at one time or another.

    Tax monies were used to send law-enforcement officials to these seminars
and subscribe to their materials -- O'Sullivan mentions "File 18", a newsletter
published by Larry Jones's Cult Crime Impact Network, which operated out of the
basement of the Trinity Fellowship Church of Boise, Idaho. "When you're
concerned about the separation of church and state, these are important points to
ponder." Another perennial source of Satan-crime claims are the minions of
Lyndon LaRouche, whose magazine "Investigative Leads" is circulated to police
departments around the country.

    From a somewhat more secular source, a training video from AIMS media
"Ritual Crime: Guidelines for Identification" purports to discuss telltale signs of
ritual crime (inverted pentagrams, 666, the backwards "NATAS" and even the
"absence" of blood) as well as the rapidly growing category of "systematic child
abuse, often in pre- schools or other child care situations." "The officers note
behavioral changes in children which may be tip-offs to ritual abuse, and they
outline the proper procedures for investigations that will lead to successful
prosecutions." These delicate and subtle issues in forensics are discussed on a
videotape that runs all of "eighteen minutes". . . and costs your local police
department $345.00 per copy. Rentals are $75.00.

    And subtlety and caution are certainly needed, especially when it comes to
mystical symbology. "Back in Control," an Oregon program currently offering
Family Training Workshops, once issued a booklet that included the Star of David
as a diabolic symbol. Their reasoning? "If you know anything about the occult,
you'll know that it's the exact opposite of Christianity. That's what the occult is."

    "Back in Control" was endorsed by Parents' Music Resource Center founder
(and prospective Second Lady) Tipper Gore in her book "Raising PG Kids in an X-
Rated Society". The PMRC bills itself as an information resource for concerned
parents; for twenty dollars, they provide a thick stack of news reports and clippings
on Satanism and rock-related crimes. Included in this material are lyrics of heavy
metal songs, the suicide notes and pledges to Satan written by disturbed teenagers,
and news accounts of suspected Satanic crimes from around the nation. Many of the
materials are ads for guidebooks and seminars from such partisan sources as
Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD), the American Family Foundation,
and the International Cult Education Program. Only "one" article that expresses any
doubt on the matter is included -- a brief notice about the release of the "Satanism in
America" report. If the PMRC is an information resource, it's certainly a selective
one.

    This demonization of different subcultures, linking them to harmful mental
and physical effects, has become a popular tactic these days. It's not enough to just
"dislike" something; one has to show that it's as physically or psychologically
"harmful" as dioxin or PCP. In a notorious passage in "The Closing of the American
Mind", Allan Bloom described, in lurid Humbert Humbert detail, twelve-year-olds
forsaking Plato and Aristotle and throbbing sexually to rock music on their Sony
Walkmans. More recently, Michael Medved has portrayed the film industry as a
decadent, soul-sick coterie of dissolute leftists in "Hollywood Vs. America" -- an
image that isn't very different from Jack Chick's caricatures of gays, Satanists, and
secular humanists. If one is convinced that a rotten elite is polluting our society
with garbage culture, then it's a lot easier to believe in clandestine groups of baby-
killers and blood-drinkers. Or, as Gerry O'Sullivan puts it, "Boo Radley's always
living somewhere."

    In striking contrast to the Satan hysteria, Ed Maxwell, a Delaware police
officer, conducts workshops on occult beliefs and law enforcement that stress
understanding and restraint. "We're responsible to maintain people's ability to
worship, as long as they don't break local laws. In the past, if a police officer saw a
group of Pagans holding a ritual around a bonfire in the woods, they might
automatically think, 'Oh, this is Satanic, a baby's about to be killed.' In reality, it's
their First Amendment right to practice that, as long as no laws are broken."

    Maxwell's seminars are designed to avoid the kind of subculture-
demonization that many of the Satan-mongers encourage. "We do an awareness
type of thing, saying, 'This is what the occult is.' We try to break down the areas of
Paganism, Afro-Cuban Religions, give a little background, and say as long as they
don't cross that imaginary line, they're protected by the First Amendment. When
they cross that line, you're dealing with a crime. You don't go arrest a Satanist. You
arrest a criminal."

    O'Sullivan points out that accounts of Satanic rituals and child abuse became
progressively more baroque as time went by, almost trying to outdo each other in a
spiral of horrors. Warnke's 1973 account ("The Satan Seller") does not describe any
ritual killings; but twenty years later, and after the precedents of Stratford and
Smith, he suddenly managed to recall child murders and ritual torture for his 1991
book "Schemes of Satan".

    By 1985, "20/20" had done a program on the subject with Mike Warnke as a
consultant, and the "Geraldo" show had brought on Dr. Rebecca Brown, author of
"He Came to Set the Captives Free", and who could have stepped whole and
breathing from Ken Russell's film "The Devils". "Brown" was the pseudonym of
Ruth Bailey, a former physician who'd had her license revoked in Indiana for a
variety of professional transgressions. These included diagnosing brain tumors and
cancers as the work of demons, telling her patients that other physicians were
actually demons and devils, addicting her patients to Demerol, and medicating
herself on the stuff as well.

    Five hundred years after the Inquisition, the mainstream culture was back to
hunting witches again. . . and it was no longer unreasonable to believe in blood-
drinking devil cults lurking in every neighborhood.

"Getting in Touch" with Cotton Mather

     Gerry O'Sullivan believes that we're entering another resurgence of the
Satanic Panic. Claims of Satanic Ritual Abuse are being circulated among those he
diplomatically describes as "well- intentioned, but misinformed" therapists, who are
more impressed with the apparent sincerity, consistency, and narrative quality of
repressed memories than with forensic verification of the stories. Rather than
passing muster in peer-reviewed scientific journals, the standard documents on
Satanic cult claims -- rituals, robes, chants and prayers, shapes of daggers, kinds of
torture, etc. -- are circulated at conferences in a kind of "samizdat" of photocopied
papers, outlines and standard questionnaires.

    The charge is corroborated in part by George Ganaway, Director of the
Ridgeview Center for Dissociative Disorders in Atlanta. "Many of the clinicians in
my field began to attend seminars held by authorities around the country, who were
reporting that their patients seemed to be telling similar stories about
transgenerational mega- cults involved in human sacrifices. The people who
attended these seminars would go back to their practices with lists of questions for
their patients in the trance state, and began to report stories from their own
patients."

    Rev. Kathleen Roney-Wilson, of the Somerset County Chaplaincy Council in
New Jersey, presents accounts of children being forced into animal sex and mind-
shattering rituals in her article "Healing Survivors of Satanic Sexual Abuse." She
warns that the article "is not intended as a horror story. . . nor is it intended to
conduct a witch hunt" before leaping right into accounts of child torture. Roney-
Wilson rhapsodizes about "pain corridors" and the Great Darkness before asserting
that "If there is any hope for those who have been abused by satanic groups, it lies at
the foot of the Cross of Jesus Christ."

    Multiple Personality Disorder crops up a lot in the Satan literature. An
extremely rare syndrome, MPD is related to childhood abuse, and is perhaps the
only psychological mechanism that could explain why survivors fail to remember
several "years'" worth of traumatic events. It also begs the question as to how
someone with multiple personalities can also be integrated enough to conduct
complex rituals, as well as conceal multiple murders. In many guides, it is suggested
that Satanists, through a process of ritual torture, murder, and mind games, actually
"instill" MPD in children to ensure cult control over their minds and to discredit
their testimonies later on!

     The Rev. Dr. Gary Lee of Heartways Counseling and Consultants (formerly
Heartways Ministries), who works with SRA survivors in Illinois, estimates that
perhaps two to three percent of the United States' population -- that's five to eight
"million" people -- are actively involved in Satanic ritual abuse. According to Lee, a
typical satanic group will kill between seven and twenty people a year. He also
claims that these sacrifices tend to be babies kidnapped from hospitals, and that
abortion clinics allow cults to use aborted fetuses in their rituals.

    Locally, Rosalind Dutton, a therapist and senior partner of the Wissahickon
Counselling Associates, has been holding monthly support group meetings for
Satanic Ritual Abuse survivors for three years. Unlike many of the sources of SRA
claims, she describes a non-hypnotic process where an adult first experiences some
kind of anxiety or fear, begins to remember traumatic incidents later on, and details
about sexual abuse and Satanic rituals emerge through later therapy.

    Supporting Gary Lee's 2-3% figures, Dutton says that "There are animals that
are sacrificed, and children are made to eat parts of the animal. Children have to kill
other children in order to live: they're told that if they don't do this, they will die.
They're put in cages and sold to other groups." Dutton also supports the claims of
infanticide, child murder, ritual torture, and breeders that others have circulated.

    In response to these horror stories, Gerry O'Sullivan says, "The great thing
about Satanists -- at least, as they're depicted by evangelicals and therapists -- is that
they don't exist. They're not going to come forward and say, 'We only killed two
children last year, not twenty. Get it right!'"

Grand Guignol Romper Room

     Apart from the say-so of former Satanists, is there any solid evidence that
these horrible events are going on? If a Satanic group averages twenty members,
Gary Lee's figures would give us, "at least", 250,000 separate Satanic groups in the
United States, responsible for, "at least", 1.75 million murders every year. This is a
death rate higher than that of the Vietnam War by several orders of magnitude.
(Using Lee's "higher" estimates, we'd have 7.5 million Satanists committing 7.5
million murders a year -- nearly three times the population of Philadelphia.) If we
charitably estimate an average Satanic group at a thousand members, this would
provide 5,000 groups committing a low-end yearly estimate of 35,000 murders -- a
number well in excess of the 20- 23,000 murders, solved and unsolved, that are
committed every year.

    "Where do we get rid of 35,000 bodies?" asks Ed Maxwell. "That's 700 bodies
per state. In a state like Delaware, in a bad year, you might have twenty murders.
Delaware's a small state -- we'd "notice" 700 fresh graves."

    Have any SRA survivors, flush with vivid memories of Satanic masses and
multiple infanticides, ever provided enough verifiable evidence to convict anyone
for these thousands of murders? In a word, "no". In over twenty years, Mike
Warnke has never provided police with any information about the Satanists and
drug dealers he claims to have known. Michelle Smith's and Lauren Stratford's
allegations haven't led to anyone being convicted for several hundred infant
murders. And not one Satanic Ritual Abuse survivor has provided any evidence
that would expose this nationwide conspiracy of Satanists, who ostensibly have a
track record of butchery that beats out Hitler's.

    To explain this, Rosalind Dutton says, "It's very complicated. . . No one has
been found guilty when it's been brought to the legal system because people don't
believe it. The people who are involved in this are at every level. There are doctors
who do not record the fact that babies are born because they're being killed. There
are doctors that do not record the hospital work that they do. There are judges who
are part of the Satanic cult who would never convict anybody. There is hardly
anywhere where we as people could really find a fair hearing."

    To George Ganaway, this is a familiar story. "In "Michelle Remembers",
sacrifices involved burning bodies in open fires. When forensic experts pointed out
that an open fire isn't hot enough to completely burn a body, the stories began to
change. It became that bodies were being burnt up in crematoriums, and
undertakers were part of this cult. Those stories were checked out and shown that
they couldn't be true. Then they came up with stories of portable crematoriums on
wheels that they'd keep out of sight. When someone presented information that
would contradict that belief [such a crematorium would need massive amounts of
fuel, and it'd be the size of a Mack truck], the individual would come up with a new
explanation." There are reports that some therapists wish to change the designation
of Satanic Ritual Abuse to "Sadistic" Ritual Abuse -- possibly because the stories of
baby-murders have met with so much disbelief and so little substantiation.

    "I understand that it boggles the mind," says Dutton. "It's not something our
brains can assimilate. It's something that's happened for centuries. It isn't a recent
phenomenon. Satanic Ritual Abuse has its origins in Europe, a long time ago.
Historians talk about it happening in the Middle Ages." Gerry O'Sullivan points out
that many of these accounts were blood libels against Jews and slanders against
heretics -- and supported by confessions obtained through torture by the Inquisition.
"It's very interesting, three hundred years after the Salem witch hunts, to see a
small group of rather credulous mental health professionals resurrecting old
myths," he says.

Those Weren't the Days

     Outside, it could be the last warm Saturday of the year. But Pamela Freyd is
sitting in a windowless room at the University City Science Center, assembling a
mass mailing for the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. During our interview,
she hands me Xeroxed reprints of articles and scientific papers discussing the
dynamics of hypnosis, group therapy, survivor stories and the impact of "Courage to
Heal", an influential book in the incest recovery movement. It's been Pam Freyd's
job since March, as the Foundation's Executive Director, to try to clarify some very
arcane issues of human memory and trauma.

    "Parents were calling therapists with stories that they'd been falsely accused,
by their adult children, of things the parents vehemently denied," she explains.
"About twenty percent of them were accused of Satanic ritual abuse, and as many as
a third of the parents we've surveyed had no idea "what" they'd been accused of.
Their adult children had gone into therapy of some sort and recovered repressed
memories.

    "The stories we're documenting are limited to those that come out of a
particular circumstance: when there are people who claim that they've never had
any awareness of something, who go into a therapeutic setting, and who recover
memories that other people say are not true. The first step as a group was to see if,
indeed, there was such a problem." And since March, the Foundation has been in
contact with 1,400 families that are facing accusations and/or lawsuits based on
recovered memories. (These families include Pamela Freyd's; her adult daughter
has made similar accusations against Freyd's husband.) "What's at issue are the
methods used to elicit those memories, and what happens as a consequence of the
memories."

    Some of the memory-recovery methods that the Foundation considers
warning flags include hypnosis, the use of sodium amytal, trance work, body
massages, group sessions and reading self-help books. Remember, two of the
seminal books on Satanic Ritual Abuse -- "Michelle Remembers" and "Satan's
Underground" -- were based on the hypnotically-recalled memories of cult
survivors.

    Freyd points out that "None of those methods are known to provide
memories of a kind that are necessarily reliable. In fact, if a memory is enhanced by
hypnosis, it's not allowed as testimony in a criminal trial. Although these
memories are extremely vivid and compellingly real to the people who have them,
they're not necessarily based on events that actually happened."

    In the 1950s, a federal research mandate to understand hypnosis -- prompted
by dramatic stories of "brainwashed" wartime prisoners, a la "The Manchurian
Candidate" -- led to a quantification of what psychologist Herbert Speigel termed the
Grade Five Syndrome. Grade Fives were highly suggestible, extremely susceptible to
trance states, compliant with the directions of their therapists, and vulnerable to
introspective therapy techniques.

    As Pam Freyd points out, people enter a therapy situation "expecting to find
an answer, seeking help." Indeed, Grade Fives seem to thrive in therapy situations --
there's a marked tendency to confabulate, to create fantasies that the person believes
as being real. Even non-directed group therapy can encourage this; especially when
the people getting the healing attention are the ones with the most sensational
stories.

    "There is virtually no reliable way to differentiate accurate from inaccurate
memories without outside corroboration," says George Ganaway. "Experimental
hypnosis studies have shown that one can induce the individuals to confabulate
memories and experiences that never happened, and to make up details that are just
as vivid and accompanied by intense emotions."

    To illustrate this, Ganaway cites an experiment by the aforementioned
Speigel. "He hypnotized an otherwise healthy volunteer to believe that there was a
Communist conspiracy afoot to take over the country. When the subject was
interviewed by a local news broadcaster, in order to sound more convincing, he
began "making up" details of attending the hatching of the plot in a theater in
Sheridan Square, with details about the theater, the loft, the posters on the wall, the
beer they drank, and the people involved. None of those people ever existed. The
subject didn't know where this belief came from, so in order to explain it, he had to
invent more and more convincing details to support it."

    George Ganaway may have caught a glimpse of the future of the debates over
false memory syndrome. While attending a conference on UFO abductions at MIT,
he "described to them the Satanic ritual abuse experiences, and how closely they
parallel the UFO abduction experience -- including the entire baby-breeding
phenomenon and the idea of serial abductions. The people at the conference had
never heard anything about the Satanic Cult experiences. They thought that was so
bizarre.

    "They said that, obviously, the Satanic Ritual Abuse memories have to be
screen memories for actual alien abductions, and the aliens had planted their
memories of the cult experiences. Now, if you go to the Satanic Ritual Abuse
seminars, they'll tell you the opposite; they'll say that the UFO abduction
experiences are all screen memories for actual satanic cult experiences."

    The issue of child sexual abuse virtually guarantees the Foundation some
degree of controversy. Even the question of how often it happens is open to debate.
The most widely-circulated estimate is that it happens to one in four people. A study
from the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, estimates that two-tenths of
one percent of the population has been sexually abused as a child. Another study,
from the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse, states that
estimates have ranged between 6% and 62%; the Foundation's newsletter says this
variance "tells us we do not have reliable information on the problem." "If people
are genuinely concerned about addressing the issue of child sexual abuse," says
Freyd, "collecting accurate data should be a top priority."

    Add to this a certain ambiguity over what constitutes rediscovery of repressed
memories in adults. "Courage to Heal" states that "If you are unable to remember
any specific instances. . .  but still have a feeling that something abusive happened to
you, it probably did."

    In the wake of the McMartin Preschool scandal, the battle cry "Believe the
Children" has become the name of a national organization for parents who believe
their children's testimonies of sexual and Satanic abuse -- despite the lack of
corroborative evidence. And Believing the Children isn't easy when adults have
acted as mediators, as the case of Seattle's Bill and Kathleen Swan demonstrates. The
"San Jose Mercury News" reports that, on October 2 of 1985, Lisa Conradi was hired
as a substitute teacher at the pre-school of the Swans' three year old daughter,
Kimberly. Inside of her first half-hour on the job, Conradi had interrogated
Kimberly -- no notes were taken, so what really was said is unknown -- and pegged
her as a victim of child sexual abuse.

    Within three days, Kimberly was taken into protective custody, and a month
later, the Swans were arrested. They were eventually convicted of child sexual
abuse, mainly because the jury and the courts of appeal decided that three year-old
children do not make up stories about sexual abuse. No physical evidence of sexual
abuse was ever found, but as of this writing, the Swans are serving a 50-month
sentence, and awaiting a circuit court ruling in the summer of 1993. (In July,
Kathleen was allowed to see her daughter -- the first time since 1986.)

    It has since turned out that Lisa Conradi, the substitute teacher who first
accused the Swans, had a history of finding allegedly abused children in several
other day-care centers where she'd worked. Claiming to be a survivor of child sexual
abuse, Conradi has also boasted, "I've turned in at least 20 kids," and of going from
door to door, accusing her neighbors of having abused her own children. There are
people, Conradi said, "who would say I'm on a witch hunt and am a fanatic because
I don't like to see kids abused, and when I see it, I turn it in."

    Laura Davis, one of the co-authors of "Courage to Heal", sees the Foundation
as part of a backlash, saying that "We have become effective enough to make an
impact on people who have an investment in abusing children, hiding abuse
they're committed, denying their spouse's abuse. . . Add the people who don't want
to believe that so many children are abused, and there's a sizable number to oppose
us. . ."

    Freyd takes the critics very seriously, although she admits that some of it is
"just off-target. There is not an issue whether there are such things as repressed
memories. It's known that there are." She acknowledges that "For many years,
people couldn't look at the issue, and incest is so horrendous that people shut it off.
But people who ordinarily would use their skills of critical analysis have suspended
them just because the topic is sexual abuse."

    But the prospect of well-meaning therapists discrediting the issue through
bad methodology raises Freyd's concern. "I have seen a tremendous change for
women in being able to come forth to say you've been abused or assaulted in some
way. The awareness of abuse has come to the fore. I would hate to see us lose that."

    In the meantime, a lot of families have been shattered, and at least one
person is currently in prison over the matter. Paul Ingram, the former Chief Civil
Deputy of Thurston County, Washington, is currently serving twenty years in
prison for rape -- on the basis of what could be false memories of Satanic Ritual
Abuse.

    In September of 1988, Ingram's 22-year-old daughter Ericka attended a
Christian retreat, where she claimed that Ingram had raped her when she was five
years old. Within a few weeks, Ericka was accusing Ingram of having raped her
nearly every night for the past seventeen years. Her younger sister Julie, also at the
retreat, began a similar series of accusations.

    When confronted, Ingram maintained his innocence at first. But, in keeping
with his church's doctines on "Satanic deception," Ingram acknowledged to the
interrogators that his memories of the events might have been blocked. According
to Dr. Richard Ofshe in "The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental
Hypnosis", Ingram was repeatedly told that sex offenders frequently repress their
memories, and the interrogators promised him that, if he admitted his guilt on the
matter, his memories would return.

    The records of subsequent interrogations (23 sessions, over a five-month
period) demonstrated how those memories eventually "did" come back. A
psychologist whom Ofshe calls "Dr. Smith" participated in the interrogations; Dr.
Smith led Ingram through a series of relaxation techniques that, in Ofshe's estimate,
"dramatically heightened suggestibility and trance logic." While Ingram was in this
dissociative state, the interrogators made helpful suggestions to visualize the events
that Ingram was accused of.

    During this time, Ericka Ingram -- prompted by a reading of "Satan's
Underground" -- was claiming that 25 babies had been murdered by Satanic cults,
and Julie was talking about having nails driven through her flesh and arms of dead
babies being inserted into her vagina. Both daughters claimed that they'd been
forced to attend hundreds of Satanic rituals where these horrible events took place.
No evidence was ever found to support these claims, but Paul Ingram had no
trouble 'visualizing' them under Dr. Smith's interrogation.

    In May of 1989, Ingram, at the
urging of the prosecutor, pleaded guilty to six counts of rape. The visits by the
interrogators and Dr. Smith stopped, and within a month Ingram's confidence in
his pseudo- memories had evaporated. He is, however, still in prison.

    Like we said, it's a good thing we don't burn people at the stake these days.