Anatomy of a Moral Panic

Abstract

Satanism was not restricted to South Africa. The scare began in the USA in the early 1980s, spread to the UK and appeared as far afield as Scandinavia, Turkey and even Egypt by the 1990s.¹¹ A number of lurid, confessional US publications appeared in which female authors ‘recalled’ memories of appalling mistreatment by satanic groups: first Michelle Remembers (M. Smith and Pazder 1981) and then The Courage to Heal (Bass and Davis 1988), Satan’s Underground (Stratford 1988) and Out of the Darkness (Sackheim and Devine 1992).¹² This narrative was soon translated into satanic ritual abuse (SRA) and given its own acronym, specialists, survivors’ networks, talk-show episodes, books and psychiatric experts. SRA caught the attention of the media and a series of scandalous cases ensued, featuring ‘sensational investigations by well-meaning but overzealous police, doctors and social workers, who performed rectal and genital examinations on the children, invited them to demonstrate what happened with anatomically correct dolls, and asked leading questions’ (Showalter 1997, 172).