Question for Bernie and anyone else who might be interested. One of the most bizarre features of the original Satanic Panic of the '80s was that it was assiduously promoted by Eurocommunist Beatrice Campbell, and in the pages of Communist Party theoretical mag Marxism Today, no less.
What's your take on that part of the puzzle? It seems a rather odd for even that bunch of political renegades to take. . . or was it just a case of once people stop believing in something (in this case Lenin's Beard and all that went with it) they will fall for anything?
Anti-porn feminists and the religious right had already made (often uncomfortable) common cause prior to the SRA panic. For example, when Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin were trying to get anti-porn legislation passed in the early 80's in the US and found allies in the Reagan-era 'Moral Majority'. The socially conservative Meese Commission even co-opted some feminist language to support its recommendations. See e.g. feminist pornographer Pat Califia's
essay on the subject.
In the same time frame, the
McMartin allegations emerged, sowing the seed for the whole SRA panic of the late 80's. A key text on the central roles played by fundies and (some) feminists in promoting this horseshit in the US (along with conservative politicians and sensationalist press) is
Debbie Nathan's "Satan's Silence" which I can't find substantial quotes from online.
However,
here's Alexander Cockburn excoriating various elements of the radical feminist press for going along with this stuff uncritically and using detail derived from Nathan's book.
Here's Nathan along with a couple of other subject matter experts talking more generally about what lessons should be taken from the US ritual abuse cases.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/terror/meaning/
New research on medical evidence and child interviewing that appellate attorneys are bringing to court amply shows that it is quite possible for untrained or overzealous investigators to tease false allegations from children, and false confessions from accused adults. In the 1980s and early 1990s it was also possible for these investigators to go to the courts and the media, where they rationalized the most illogical and illusory claims with the gloss of their "expertise."
<snip>
If there is anything the justice system can learn from this illogic, it is that even as society investigates novel ways of dealing with old problems, we must maintain a deep regard for what the public calls "common sense," and what courts have always called findings of fact. Common sense has never posited a class of people who are incapable of lying and who can never be pressured or cajoled into telling falsehoods. Neither have the courts. Why, then, would anyone attribute ubiquitous truth-telling to children? And why would judges, juries and society believe that lack of evidence constitutes evidence?
Debbie Nathan, source above.
Now here's Bea Campbell in Marxism Today writing at time of the Nottingham SRA case.
http://www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/collections/mt/pdf/90_11_20.pdf
Key message here being 'believe the children' a message also insisted on by both the fundies and feminists in the US cases and an explicit call to reject 'common sense' concerns about SRA stories along with criticism of the police for trying to challenge test the validity of these allegations.
Here she is three years later, not explicitly talking about SRA, but writing about controversies associated with various horrible Nottinghamshire child abuse cases and within social services.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...-months-beatrix-campbell-reports-1468975.html
Judith Dawson aka Jones mentioned in the text is someone that Campbell has worked closely with, e.g.
they wrote a play about Myra Hindley together. Dawson/Jones was
heavily criticised for her key role in the the Nottingham SRA cases and was also subsequently
subject to severe criticism in the Nursery Nurses libel case in which, rather than accepting the verdict, she was instrumental, along with some colleagues and The Sun, in sending a mob of vigilantes after two people who had just been found
innocent in a court of law.
"HELP US FIND THESE FIENDS Do you know where perverts Lillie and Reed are now?
Phone us on 0161 935 5315 or 0171 782 4105. Don’t worry about the cost - we will call you straight back. "
Campbell seems pretty clearly keen to defend Dawson/Jones' decisions in the Indy piece and as the Marxism Today article (and the associated Dispatches documentary) shows, pretty obviously supported them at the time. My reading of Campbell's argument in the Indy piece is she's saying that a bunch of kids died because a more sceptical standard was applied to children's abuse testimony, implicitly, after the SRA fiasco precipitated a housecleaning and change of approach in Nottinghamshire.
For a contrasting point of view to Campbell's, here's Woffinden and Webster's extremely scathing piece on the Nursery Nurses case.
Eight years ago Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie were cleared in court of molesting children at the nursery where they worked. But the accusations continued - in newspapers and in a report commissioned by Newcastle city council - and they had to disappear, afraid for their lives. Journalist Bob Woffinden and writer Richard Webster tracked the pair down to where they were hiding and helped them to find barristers who would work on a no-win no-fee basis. Yesterday they won a historic libel victory. This is their story
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2002/jul/31/childrensservices.childprotection
I can provide more citations on all this stuff, but I'm now (as requested) going to hypothesise a bit based on what I've provided above. I think what happened both for conservative enemies of moral decay and feminist enemies of patriarchy, is that the SRA allegations pushed some really strong buttons. "Believe the children" became an article of faith for SRA proponents of both persuasions, despite mounting evidence that the children were being coached by adults into replaying pre-conceived ideas, either through dodgy fringe psychotherapeutic techniques (repressed memories, alters and all that stuff) or old-fashioned leading questions.
I can sort of feel something analogous happening over on the "High level paedophile ring" thread as more and at least somewhat credible testimony emerges (some really juicy stuff today) suggesting that half of Thatchers cabinet were child-raping sadists who were able to use the care home system as a child brothel because they were explicitly protected by special branch and the security services. Part of me really
wants all that stuff to be proven true, because I hate the fuckers and would love to see even the Daily Mail forced to piss on Thatcher's memory.
So I can sort of see how, especially if the SRA allegations were mixed up with some very real (but non-satanic) abuse as they apparently were in the Nottingham case, the "believe the children" principle combined with a bunch of pre-conceived ideas about SRA and highly suspect interview techniques, could lead to overzealousness about protecting children at all costs even if means innocents being jailed and hounded, endorsement of batshit SRA fantasies and retrospective self-justification.
Fundamentally, there's a question there about where society is going to choose to draw the line, between risk of injustice and risk of harm to children. Campbell and Dawson/Jones represent one side of that argument and people like Debbie Nathan in the US and Rosie Waterhouse, Richard Webster etc in the UK, represent the other.
