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Satanic Abuse Rumbles On?

JamesWhitehead

JamesWhitehead

Piffle Prospector
Joined
Aug 2, 2001
Messages
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Satanic Abuse? Thought this one was long dead and put down to
overheated social workers fuelled on US horror tales.

The following however appeared in the Middleton Guardian
in July of this year. [**Actually it appeared on 27th July, 2000 - the
site has a somewhat confusing layout and this appeared in the
column headed July 2001. So it may not be strictly news, but
may still be found curious.**]

http://www.middleton-online.co.uk/LocalNews/BackIssuesMonths/July.htm


‘SATANIC ABUSE’ VICTIM REFUSED CHILD ACCESS
by DAVE EDWARDS
A DECADE on, the misery created by the notorious Langley “satanic abuse” case seems set to continue, affecting another generation.
One of the 17 children “snatched” by police and social services has been told he can’t have overnight access to his seven-month old son because of allegations made when he himself was made a ward of court in 1990.
The 23 year-old is concerned about repercussions which might affect his children, so the Guardian has agreed to use just his first name – David - in our report.
David was 13 when the police and welfare workers swooped on his Langley home and took him into care.  He was returned home almost three months later when the allegations were shown to be untrue.
But he’s now been told by his solicitor that the ex-girlfriend is refusing to allow him overnight contact with the child.
The letter from the ex-partner’s solicitor says that she recently found out he had been in care because of “allegations made against your family’s involvement in the ritual abuse case in Langley some years ago”.
David added that in the last three weeks, he had seen his son for just half an hour – and that was standing on a doorstep in Rochdale.
He says he’s even more determined to fight on for the access he believes he and his child deserve. “The injustice of ten years ago now seems to be responsible for another injustice against me and my child. It can’t be allowed to happen.”
 
By no means is satanic abuse deads, nor is it over-hyped by the media... just open any news paper, and you'll get all the evidence to suppost this that anyone could ever want.
 
Goddess! That's really depressing reading. So the real 'multi-generational' abusers are Social Services!

I suppose its a reminder that after we Forteans have had our fun with the phenomena of the day and moved on, the people who actually experienced it still live with the repurcussions.
 
So what really happened with this supposed "Satanic Abuse"?

A bunch of American "evangelical" social workers came over to the UK about ten years ago & gave a spiel, with the result that a lot of kids were grabbed off of one of the Scotish Islands & were later returned after there were claims that the local priest dressed as a turtle & he & others abused them!!! (This was at the time when Ninja Turtles were popular). None of these claims were ever proved & most of the children involved retractet their statements.

About the same time, in Pembrokeshire, a further bunch of people were charged with supposed "Satanic Abuse" & later convicted, their conviction defies belief!!! They were accused of holding satanic rituals in council garages!!! Ever seen the size of a council garage? You can hardly get a decent car in one, let alone hold a satanic ritual!!!!

This is the only supposededly "proven" case of "satanic abuse" in the UK, but still this rubbish goes on!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
Linked to the above topic, dooes anybody remember a channel 4 documentary shown possibly in the early 90's that 'uncovered'
evidence of SRA. The one thing that sticks in my mind is a reporter breaking into some kind of garage owned by an abuser and breathlessly opening drawers where she found child porn and a dildo....It was all very dangerous looking and it made me take SRA allegations seriously. I have since heard that the whole thing was faked.....is this true...due to the topic matter if it was faked it was a pretty sick thing to do.....
 
I have vague recollections of a tv documentary by the feminist
writer Bea. Campbell. I doubt if she would like it repeated.

Can't recollect her dildo or even the lines of her argument.

But it was something along the lines of how we must listen to
the children. Yup, like Salem just needed to listen to its kids more!

I do recall a graveyard location where she was pointing
to some pentangles scrawled on the wall. Signs of serious
Goth infestation? Evidence of turtle-headed abusing high priests
was somewhat thinner.

Idea: they were not turtles but Ickean lizards ahead of their time?

Incidentally a site called religioustolerance or something similar
has a page where it describes the phenomenon as a panic that
gripped a number of countries at the period. It was traced in all
cases to the immature social worker types who were attending
seminars on this new cause for concern. International Conferences were
spreading the word like a virus. :cross eye
 
Satanic Bogeyman Still Alive!

I was fairly convinced that the "pedophile outside the school gates" had replaced the evil Satanist as the bogeyman for the milennium until I ran across this story in The Times:

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-2001296340,00.html

Despite being allegedly liberal The Times has always been a sensationalist paper - I remember when they ran an expose on the evils of rock music that resulted in my mother throwing out my brother's Guns and Roses albums for fear of him comitting suicide or being snared by 'dark forces'! The article in the link is similar, focusing on the teenage flirtation with the occult that films like the Craft and Buffy have brought about, but it makes some bizarre claims such as:

"Experts believe that there are now more than 1,000 cults operating in Britain and that their popularity has spread through the Internet. They are becoming adept at snaring young professionals through so-called self-help websites — for stopping smoking, losing weight, meeting a partner or playing the stock market."

DSSh
 
James Whitehead said:
I have vague recollections of a tv documentary by the feminist
writer Bea. Campbell. I doubt if she would like it repeated.
Click to expand...
Yes, I remember that program very well. Most of it was Bea Campbell poking around in a Nottingham graveyard where there were caves and tunnels. They had obviously been used by winos etc. and had all sorts or stuff scrawled on the walls. She also got into a locked storeroom room in the cemetary where she went poking through some drawers and found some bits of rubbish that the cematery keepers had found and stored away - a dildo (horrified gasp) was included, plus (even more horrified gasping) a council leaflet on fostering :eek!!!!: !
In another part of the program we were shown parts of a diary kept by a child who had supposedly be satanically abused - it included drawings of witches :eek!!!!: and a very good drawing of the MUFC demon mascot; these were held to be proof positive that the child had indeed be ther victim of satanists!
One particular part of the show which I found rather sinister was a very lengthy scene in which they had a small girl going around these places with a camera following her. The camera was placed close to ground level and constantly behind her, looking right up at her buttocks - and she was dressed in a pair of very tight little shorts. This was a totally unnessesary camera position - they could have just shown her feet or something - but it must have delighted any watching paedophiles.:mad:
I doubt very much if Campbell wants to be reminded of it - she's said very little on the subject of Satanic ASbuse in the last two or three years.
 
I too noticed the strange factoid in the Times about "over 1000 cults in the UK". It doesn't add that most of these cults are Christian based.
 
Thanks so much for helping me track down that documentary, there have been times when I could have sworn I dreamt the whole thing.......don't you just love these messageboards??????:)
 
Lest We Forget

Musician/artist/cultural innovator Genesis P. Orage, of 'Throbbing Gristle' & 'Psychic TV' fame, was forced into exile from the UK when a TV 'documentary' showed clips from some of his experimental/avante garde videos and claimed that they were evidence of SRA. Police raids, fear that his kids would be taken into care, etc., etc..........

And did the b*st*rds concerned ever apologise - was he compensated? What do you think?
 
As a psychiatric nurse I have never encountered a case of SRA, although I can assure you (as if you needed to be told) that CSA is an awful reality for many many people.

Given that it is not (despite opinions which seemingly dispute this) physically impossible for a person to engage in an abusive 'satanic' ritual, one wonders if the media hype about the topic has put the idea into any nasty little minds :eek!!!!:

And as for bleeding heart, woolly minded social workers... just don't get me started!:hmph:
 
Another point that's occured to me on the subject of SRA:
This (alleged) practice involves lots of sexual activity with large numbers of people, injections, cutting, blood-letting, blood-drinking and much ingestion of other bodily fluids. So, when social workers kidnapped - sorry, took into care, children they sincerely believed to be involved in these activities, did they have these kids tested for STDs, hepatitis and HIV?
If they did, what were the results? If they didn't, why???
 
From what I remember they used the incredibly scientific test of noting that a SRA childs buttocks clenched when an object was placed near said buttocks.( For christs sake, wouldn't yours?????). This test was supposed to be indicitive of unnatural practices......the whole affair still makes my blood boil........:mad:
 
Actually, that rectal test wasn't connected with SRA, but with the preceding Cleveland case, when hundreds of children were diagnosed as having been sexually abused solely by this test. The child was laid on its stomach, the buttocks were spread aprat - if the anus opened wide, it meant they had been sodomised.
Of course, it meant nothing of the sort - any more than having sweaty palms means you're telling a lie. It publicised the whole issue of child sexual abuse, but in the wrong way - it demonised men (who are equipped to sodomise) and its supporters claimed it proved that child sexual abuse was going on everywhere, hidden inside family homes. It began the moral panic that helped bring about the myth of SRA - the spectre of men sodomising children inside the privacy of the family easily became Satanists abusing children inside the secrecy of covens.
 
Cleveland

Isn't the scary thing about the Cleveleand case that it may well have been that some of the children had been abused, but because child abuse was not recognised as happening in middle class homes, the abusers got away with it?

I don't think we should let the SRA thing get in the way of understanding that child abuse is more common than we'd like to believe, and happens within the family more often than not.

The recent paedophile hysteria can be seen as a cultural denial of the fact that kids are abused (sexually and physically) by parents/carers far more often than by strangers.

Oh, and I don't know about 'demonising men', but the fact is that its men who make up the vast majority of sexual abusers of every stripe, from paedophiles to porn consumers.
 
Absolutely. It is a thousand pities that the Satanic Abuse
scare almost certainly distracted attention from the real
issues.

Someone has already posted the address of a site which
recounts even more cases of abusive clergy, besides which
Satanic cult abuse fades into statistical insignificance.

Yet there has been a historical association of cults with
child abuse. This goes back at least as far as Charles Leadbeatter,
the Theosophist, who found that leadership of a group was a
very good position from which to abuse trust.

On the whole, however, abusers have found it easier to escape
detection by existing within quite orthodox systems. The mask
of a turtle has not been half as useful as that of a doctor or teacher.
 
I picked up a related book this weekend - The dirty Squad by Michael Hames, it's reduced to half price in various branches of books etc, there's a chapter on RSA which is short but enlightening - the rest of the book is about the authors police career and his work in the obscene publications squad and there's obviously a few chapters about kiddie material and the purpertrators which again is an insight, if only into the pressure the police are under to respond to scares and public worries.

Jolly
 
One of the things I find most alarming about the Satanic Abuse scares in the UK is that although they come out of the new culture of openness about abuse, of listening to the children, no-one actually listened to the children.

These children did not come forward unpromted with tales of blood sacrifices and sexual abuse. Some of them were questioned repeatedly before they gave any indication of abuse at all and these indications were pricisely what the social workers had programmed them through their questioning to say.

Even if the children had been abused the questioning would have constitued abuse in it's own right. But to act like this when there is no evidence of abuse and the children have not acused anyone of abuse seems to me to be wholey undefendable.

Cujo
 
Child Abuse by either side

:rolleyes:

Actually, I have been on both sides of this coin.

When I was a little girl (no older than 11 yrs., no younger than 9) in fifth grade, before anyone had warned my nice, middle-class suburbanite friends and myself about getting into strangers' cars, a man picked me up on an especially rainy day. He said he'd lost his cat, Snow-something, and showed me a Polaroid of a bedraggled, but utterly heartwrenching, cat, whose age I would now estimate to be between six and nine months. He said he'd give me a ride home if I helped him look. He gave me a chocolate bar, told me it was "okay to" take off the shirt part of the new (but drenched) sweatsuit I was wearing. This left me in nothing but a drenched camisole-undershirt, which was more revealing than my scattered absentminded (I have attention deficit disorder) fifth-grade self could have realized. He was, he had explained earlier, a professional photographer. He had one of those important-looking manual, analog Nikons to back it up with. He took a few pictures of me, which I, being me, didn't really mind.

I thought he was wonderful, even thought he was my guardian angel back then, because I didn't have a friend in the world and he seemed to take me seriously, discussing everything from Renaissance art to light politics/history with me. I thought that he was my angel until very recently, when I wrote a humorous piece about the incident for my Writing Workshop I class and realized how awfully sad and desperate I must have been to accept his ride, and how oblivious and how much of a child I was not to have understood that when I said "I hope you don't mind... I'm a bit damp," that he probably took that, in his sick, pedophile's mind, as a deliberate double-entendre on my part. It makes me feel sick, cheap, and humiliated when I think of how I used to be split between thinking I'd been let off unscathed and thinking he was my guardian angel, when all the time he's probably been beating off to pictures of "the little idiot who got into my car and got undressed for me."

However, I don't believe in Satanic Sexual Abuse, because people like that rat-bastard have no sense of the sacred, neither in their souls nor in their aesthetic senses, so they could never successfully convince anyone, not even a child as gullible and naive as I was, that the ceremony to which she was conducted and in which she was forced to play a role was for anything but personal, depraved pleasure.

Also, except for maybe NAMBLA, child molesters aren't socially-adept enough to run these huge, well-organized, financially-secure and legally-untouchable sets of social gatherings. The only groups ever to stage anything of the sort have been the Medici Catholic Church, the Early Roman Empire, and the homosexuals in America, and they want grown men, not children, plus they'd be appalled at the tacky crap the "Satanists" allegedly wear and put on the walls and in "Liber"s.

Just my 2 cents, though....;)
 
return of satanic abuse scare?

This from the Telegraph today (I don't think it's been discussed on any other thread) ... is the urban myth of ritual satanic abuse making a comeback?

The people who believe that Satanists might eat your baby
By Damian Thompson
(Filed: 22/03/2002)


RITUAL satanic abuse is back. Yesterday, a private meeting at Westminster, chaired by Lord Alton, discussed assaults on children by hooded, chanting Satanists. "You may be aware," the organisers said, "that, for several years, there have been reports of the ritual abuse of children and in some cases ritual murder. The rituals reportedly often involve the Black Mass and the wearing of robes. Adult survivors of ritual abuse are divulging important evidence regarding the large scale of this problem in the UK."

One of the organisers, Wilfred Wong, an evangelical Christian, is campaigning for ritual abuse to be made a specific crime, so that the Satanists - responsible for "hundreds, if not thousands" of sexual assaults and murders - can be brought to justice. "But so far little has been done," he says plaintively.

That is a matter of opinion. In the early 1990s, far too much was done. In Rochdale, 20 children were removed from their homes after a six-year-old boy told teachers he had seen babies murdered; the claims were dismissed by the High Court. In the Orkney islands, village gossip about satanic practices led to the removal of nine children from their homes; after a £6 million inquiry, all charges were dismissed and social workers criticised for planting ideas in children's heads. In 1994, a three-year Department of Health inquiry by the anthropologist Prof Jean La Fontaine into 84 alleged cases of ritual abuse found no evidence of Satanism in any of them.

What the inquiry did expose, however, was the tangle of folklore and urban legend that produced the scare. The ingredients included: stories of baby sacrifice borrowed from 19th-century anti-Catholic propaganda (many Satan-hunters are anti-Catholic fundamentalists); the anti-Semitic blood libel; corny images of devil-worshippers owing more to The Wicker Man than to any real occult rubric; television cartoons (the Orkney allegations featured adults dressed as Ninja Turtles); and the scatological rambling of small children.

As Prof La Fontaine points out, paedophilia is the most potent representation of evil in modern society; it is not surprising that it should become conflated with older folk devils, or that groups with a distrust of the Establishment - fundamentalists, feminists, social workers - should prove receptive to such a myth. What is surprising is that they have been able to sustain their belief in the face of the empirical demolition of their claims.

They have done so by retreating into the time-honoured logic of the conspiracy theorist: the absence of evidence proves the effectiveness of the conspiracy. The resourceful Satanists dispose of bodies by feeding them into mincing machines, dissolving them in acid baths, burning them in furnaces or just eating them. How do they get away with it? Dr Joan Coleman, a psychiatrist who spoke at yesterday's meeting, says the abusers have "Masonic connections", though an American campaigner, Prof Cory Hammond, thinks they are part of a Nazi conspiracy led by a renegade Jew.

The anti-Satan lobby has also seized opportunistically on isolated crimes. Last September, the torso of a five-year-old black boy was found in the Thames. Valerie Sinason, a psychotherapist at St George's Hospital in London, told the press that the case bore all the hallmarks of a ritual murder. "Sadly, I do not think this is a one-off," she said.

Of course she doesn't. Miss Sinason, the main speaker yesterday, is on the record as saying that Satanists are breeding babies for ritual murder, a practice she described to the Catholic Herald as "an Auschwitz in peacetime". Until now, not one body has surfaced to corroborate this theory, which explains why the ritual abuse lobby is so eager to claim the Thames torso for Satanism. But this, too, is nonsense. The little boy may have been ritually killed - but by an African witchdoctor harvesting body parts for the magical medicine known as muti. It has nothing to do with suburban devil-worship.

Prof La Fontaine's verdict on Valerie Sinason goes to the heart of the problem. "It's depressing to find someone who has a position at leading London hospitals who is so cut off from what research methodology is, and what rational evidence is," she says. When Miss Sinason announces that she has "clinical evidence" of infanticide and cannibalism, she means that her patients have told her stories about them. The implication is that, because the suffering of these people is real, their "memories" must be accurate.

Miss Sinason's claims are so implausible that they are unlikely to win much of an audience this time. The real cause for concern is the influence on our thinking about a range of social problems: chronic fatigue, cot death, post-battlefield stress, autism. In each case, it is more emotionally satisfying to identify a single cause - an undiscovered virus, chemical warfare, the MMR jab - than to accept that nasty things happen randomly, or are produced by a mixture of causes.

It is not just that we have lost faith in science: it is also that we have done so without bothering to understand the limits within which science must operate. Statistical probabilities are hard to grasp; we prefer to encounter our evidence in the form of human interest stories. Proper research, which is fundamentally about measurement, lacks entertainment value: Prof La Fontaine's report cannot compete with the Hammer Horror scenario of satanic abuse, just as the painstaking work of real archaeologists pales in comparison with the tales of "lost civilisations" that television companies, to their shame, still commission.

Fortunately, inconvenient facts have a way of fighting to the surface. Lord Alton - who says he is keeping an "open mind" on satanic abuse - might want to consider the following story. Last year, Jeremy Laurance, the health editor of the Independent, was alerted by a well known psychotherapist to the existence of pictures on the internet of a man eating a dismembered baby. The paper ran the story. A week later it apologised. "Let's not beat about the bush. I've been had," said Laurance. It turned out that the photographs were a hoax by a Chinese performance artist. And the gullible psychotherapist? Valerie Sinason, of course.
Click to expand...
 
Oh, no - not again!

How on earth can these people be persuaded to chase after the real bogey men?
 
Just as the painstaking work of real archaeologists pales in comparison with the tales of 'lost civilisations' that television companies, to their shame, still commission.

I say, that's a bit off. Never liked the telly myself, but I don't think they invented Atlantis...who is this chap? I wish to box his ear.

Did anyone else see the irony in his own nomenclature?
 
It's this Sinason woman who really worries me, I can't believe she's working in the psychiatric dept at St Georges. If I'd lived a few miles further north I might be seeing her myself. And they call us patients the loonies. :mad:
 
Klassen vindicated

Monetary compensation still to be determined

Shannon Boklaschuk
The StarPhoenix

Wednesday, December 31, 2003


Richard Klassen and 11 other plaintiffs wrongly accused of ritual abuse against three foster children in the early 1990s were victims of malicious prosecution, a Court of Queen's Bench judge has ruled.

"I've always said we were innocent, and I knew that coming into this," Klassen told reporters during a press conference on Tuesday, where his relatives and supporters cried and hugged nearby.

"I'm happy for this judgment, and my faith in the justice system in Saskatchewan has been renewed," he said.

In 1991, Klassen, his wife and others were accused of sexually abusing three Saskatoon-area foster children.

The bizarre allegations included detailed accounts of satanic ritual abuse, which included animal and human sacrifice, as well as claims the children had been forced to eat feces and drink urine.

Police arrested 16 people in 1991, but charges against 12 individuals were stayed in 1993, while Richard's father Peter Klassen pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual assault. The birth parents and a family friend were found guilty, but the decision was later overturned by the Supreme Court.

The children later recanted almost all of what they had alleged, and the oldest foster child, Michael Ross, was found to be abusing his younger twin sisters, Michelle and Kathy.

Klassen and the others then sued, alleging malicious prosecution. Those suing included Richard Klassen and his wife Kari, Klassen's sister Pamela Shetterly, the estate of his deceased mother Marie Klassen, his brother John Klassen and John's wife Myrna, his brother Peter Dale Klassen and his wife Anita, who were the Ross children's foster parents, and four plaintiffs that cannot be named.

They claimed justice officials knew they had no case, but proceeded anyway.

In their defence, lawyers for police, prosecutors and a therapist stated the officials were simply doing their jobs.

On Tuesday, Justice George Baynton of the Court of Queen's Bench released his decision on the malicious prosecution lawsuit.

Baynton found that child therapist Carol Bunko-Ruys, Crown prosecutor Matthew Miazga and Saskatoon police officer Supt. Brian Dueck -- who was a corporal when the case broke -- had maliciously prosecuted the plaintiffs.

Meanwhile, the malicious prosecution suit against Sonja Hansen, the second Crown prosecutor, was dismissed, as was Hansen and Miazga's counterclaim against Klassen for defamation.

"The case was labelled by the media as the 'Scandal of the Century'," Baynton said in his 189-page decision.

"The real scandal, however, is the travesty of justice that was visited upon 12 of those individuals, the plaintiffs in this civil action, by branding them as pedophiles even though each of them was innocent of the horrendous allegations and criminal offences charged against them."

While the plaintiffs sought in excess of -million in damages, monetary compensation wasn't addressed in Baynton's ruling.

Lawyer Robert Borden, who represented all of the plaintiffs except Richard Klassen, said every plaintiff will have to establish damages relative to his or her own situation.

Borden said he and Klassen hope to meet with representatives from the Department of Justice and the Saskatoon Police Service and "settle this this week.

"It's just a matter now of allowing these people their good compensation and allowing them to get on with their lives. Let's not drag this out any further," he said.

For Richard Klassen, who has struggled for years to clear his name, Tuesday's judgment came as a shock, since he had "honestly" expected to lose the civil trial.

Because he represented himself, he was afraid "judges would be reluctant to give a self-represented litigant their day in court."

However, "this judge carefully listened to me, and allowed me to lay forward the evidence, like someone who had legal experience," Klassen told the media.

Although Klassen now feels "vindicated," he plans to continue to lobby for change in the justice system. For example, he believes malicious prosecution should be included in the Criminal Code, he said.

Klassen also plans to fight for a "fair settlement" and said that "apologies should come immediately.

"The government owes a lot of apologies to this province, and they need to start bringing these apologies forward," he said.

"They fought us, they took us to court and here we are. They owe me an apology."

Don Morgan, the Saskatchewan Party's justice critic, agrees.

When the children recanted their stories, the government's focus should have shifted, he said.

"They should have said, 'We were wrong. We're sorry. We made a mistake.' "

Lawyer Don McKillop, who represented Miazga, Bunko-Ruys and Hansen, said it is premature to make a decision about an apology.

As for an appeal, McKillop said "it's very clearly something we will be looking at.

"But no more so than you always do when get a trial decision that goes against you," he added.

Saskatchewan's justice minister, Frank Quennell, was not available for comment Tuesday.

The Saskatoon police service, meanwhile, did not issue a formal statement.

In an interview, spokesperson acting Insp. Al Stickney said police want to take the time to carefully read through Baynton's lengthy ruling.

"This is a large document of 189 pages that neither I nor anybody else at the police service has had time to go over and assess what implications, if any, it has for the police service," he said.

But after years of hardship, several emotional members of the Klassen family were ready to express their feelings and talk about the pain they endured.

According to Richard Klassen, some individuals have suffered mental breakdowns, while two of the plaintiffs have died, "certainly from a lot of stress."

For one plaintiff, whose two children and now-deceased husband were also accused, "the pain will never go away.

"I can't give my heart to anybody anymore, because I hurt so deeply. I don't even trust neighbours," said the woman, who could not be identified.

"I had promised my husband on his death bed that I would do anything I could to clear our names, and for our children's sake, to let them have a proper life and go on.

"We were accused of doing things were never did, with kids I never saw in my life. And our lives have been taken away because of it," said the woman, her voice breaking with emotion.

In separate interviews, Richard Klassen's wife and sister also talked about how proud they were of the job he has done.

"I'm so filled with pride for my brother. He's a fantastic person. He's worked hard," said Shetterly, who was also a plaintiff.

Klassen's wife, Kari, said she had confidence her husband "could present the case that he did.

"I am so extremely proud of him. If it hadn't been for him, there wouldn't be a lawsuit," she said.

"I was telling him 'You're going to win this.' And he did. He won," added Klassen's smiling daughter, 14-year-old Kayla.

For some, such as Shetterly, Baynton's judgment presents an opportunity to begin healing.

On Tuesday morning, her thoughts turned to her family.

"I thought of my brothers and my sisters and all that we've lost, and I thought of all the things that have happened, and the smoke has cleared," the Outlook resident said.

"We are still standing. And that's tremendous."
Click to expand...

http://www.canada.com/saskatoon/starphoenix/story.asp?id=CC4B02A1-327E-431D-92D2-65A065E56797
 
As far as I'm aware, there are still several people serving life sentences in America on charges of SRA.

There are several books on the subject. The Lure of the Sinister, by Gareth Medway, is very good although a little hard going in places. Victims of Memory by Mark Pendegrast is a very thick book, but fascinating stuff. Making Monsters by Richard Ofshe and Ethan Waters. No Crueller Tyrannies by Dorothy Rabinowitz. The Myth of Repressed Memories by Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham. Eyewitness Testimony by Elizabeth Loftus. Jeopardy in the Courtroom by Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck.

They make for terrifying reading. The effects of so called 'physical memories' such as flinching, or unexplained pains in legs, back, breasts etc, all of which are explained away as some kind of body memory of abuse. The questioning of children and they way they have been bullied into certain statements. The whole thing is a horror story. And people believe it. Juries convict; Judges sentence, all based on things that simply cannot be believed. I went into Waterstones in Exeter the other week, and saw The Courage to Heal for sale. This is a self help guide for victims of abuse, which carries the advice that, even if you cannot remember being abused, you probably were and should think and act accordingly. This is nothing to do with genuine cases of abuse; this is all about persuading people they were abused.

For example - are you scared of going to the dentist? Because this is clear 'proof' of abuse, and you were probably forced to perform oral sex on an adult when a child, you've just repressed the memory.

'Repression' isn't the idea that something happened, and you just don't think about it; it's the notion that you have fabricated a completely new reality around the 'fact' of the abuse. You haven't simply forgotten it and a quick reminder will bring it all back, you have erased it completely from your mind and replaced it with something else. When you read the arguments from the proponents of repressed memories, it is a totally circuitous argument, filled with its own language. You're in denial; you've repressed.

It scares the hell out of me, anyway. And there are people who's lives have been ruined by it all. People who have been falsely persuaded into believing they had an horrendous childhood, and people who have been persuaded that just because they can't remember abusing their kids doesn't mean they didn't. People who are serving life sentences; people who have died of the stress. And given the present paedophilia witch-hunt, how can you ever get your life back when you've been wrongly accused?
 
The real crooks are the social workers.

Two things that have happened to people I knew...

A Guy was trying to get custody of his two daughters, 11 and 8 (I think) he had a house, a good job and all and they got on really well. (her nibs meanwhile had gone off with a loser) he was talking with the social worker, and she asked some seeming innocent questions about his past. He told her he had studied art at college, and so she asked to see his portfolio, and all innocent he showed her...and what did she see?

(life models, anyone?)

Unsuprisingly he did not win his case....

The next case involved a couple, happily married, middle class, (of course) who took their son to the doctor for some irrelevant reason, he noted blisters upon the boys feet, and immediatley had him taken into case as a suspected abuse case.

(I suspect that this case was targeted at middle class people. since they could afford the lawyer to get the owner of stiff new shoes back. try it on the poor and they might be landed with the kid for good.)

I think I have told you elsewhere of the mischief I have seen go on in families with drug addicts, antics whic the authorites were all too aware of....but of course that would not be allowed to go on in a decent home, now, would it?
 
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