June 10, 2016

It’s heartening to see that, 25 years later, “Innocence Lost” is still shining light on the wrongful prosecution of the Edenton Seven –  and for a younger audience!  This is a note from Judy Griffin, a teacher at Hamilton High School in Michigan, who recently rediscovered Ofra Bikel’s eight-hour masterpiece:

“I want you to know how helpful it is (to have “Innocence Lost” available online). I teach in a resource room English class.  The kids have no cognitive issues, but reading is a tremendous struggle.  When they can receive the information through really good videos like this one, we can cover some great information.

“We start by reading Edward R. Murrow’s introduction to ‘This I Believe.’ Then the students create digital versions of their own.  After that, they view ‘Good Night, and Good Luck.’ They have just learned about McCarthyism at this point in U.S. History, so it is fresh in their minds.

“We move then into The Crucible.  The students are then asked to compare this to ‘Good Night, and Good Luck.’  They read ‘Why I wrote The Crucible’ by Arthur Miller.

“At the conclusion, we talk about how these hysterias are repeated and actually happened even prior to Salem.  I introduce the Day Care scandal, and was thrilled to find the original ‘Frontline’ episodes.  I had seen it when it aired!

“They are now researching various aspects of the hysteria.  Some are looking at ‘satanic ritual abuse,’ some are looking at how hysteria spreads, some are researching what happened to the various defendants, and some are looking at the causes.  We emphasize that this is not unique to any of these situations, and the point of this all is to show how vulnerable societies are to hysteria….”

July 9, 2012

What happens to a social scientist who builds her career on exposing illusory “sex rings” and “ritual abuse” at day cares? And, more specifically, whose seminar at Kill Devil Hills apparently seeded the hysteria behind the prosecution of the Edenton Seven?

If you’re Ann Wolbert Burgess, it’s no problem. You just plunge ahead – and don’t look back.

Here’s how Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker described Burgess in 2001 in “Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a  Modern American Witch Hunt”:

“promoter of the use of children’s drawings to diagnose sexual abuse, developer of the idea of the sex ring, participant in developing the case that imprisoned the Amirault family and currently a researcher into the traumatic aftereffects of ritual abuse.”

For some people, that would be a career’s worth of wrongheaded ideas. But Burgess, now professor of psychiatric mental health nursing at Boston College, continues to accumulate merit badges on new topics such as heart attack victims, AIDS, infant kidnapping, online predators, nursing home abuse, women in prison, mass murder and elder abuse. Here she is in Raleigh on May 29 testifying as “an expert in crime scene classification and offender typology.”

Whew.

I’ve asked Dr. Burgess to reflect on Little Rascals and other examples of ritual abuse prosecutions. Too bad the subject didn’t come up when she was on the witness stand in Raleigh.

Oct. 4, 2013

“The essence of counterknowledge is that it purports to be knowledge but is not knowledge. Its claims can be shown to be untrue, either because there are facts that contradict them or because there is no evidence to support them. It misrepresents reality (deliberately or otherwise) by presenting non-facts as facts….

“The media were pushing the circulation of counterknowledge long before the public hooked up to broadband. Consider, for example, the satanic ritual abuse scare….”

– From “Counterknowledge: How we surrendered to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history” by Damian Thompson (2008)

Nov. 15, 2015

“In 1977 the Canadian psychotherapist Lawrence Pazder published a memoir of one of his patients, ‘Michelle Remembers.’…

“Michelle’s memoir had been preceded by a number of other books by survivors of child abuse, such as ‘The Three Faces of Eve’ (1952) and ‘Sybil’ (1973)…. What Michelle remembered, though, set her book apart. The narrative included lurid details of years of sexual abuse, satanic ritual, animal sacrifice, serial rape, baby killing and a climactic final battle between the devil (complete with horns and tail) and the Virgin Mary…

“Michelle had apparently repressed the memory of these events for something like 20 years. Only after sessions with her therapist (whom she later married) did the memories reemerge, from the couch to the printed page.

“‘Michelle Remembers’ was the first to really discover satan, and many of its narrative moments would recur, endlessly, in the following decade in a series of expanding claims of a secret satanic conspiracy for world domination. As one law enforcement official put it, ‘Before “Michelle Remembers,” there were no Satanic child prosecutions. Now the myth is everywhere.’ ”

– From “From History to Theory” by Kerwin Lee Klein (2011)