Satan's Silence by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker

Now, determined to unmask the cabal that was victimizing the South Bay's children, Currie quit working and devoted himself full-time to sleuthing.  He began combing woods and beaches for satanic artifacts.  Once he found a dead frog that was missing its intestines.  Convinced it was the remnant of a demonic rite, Currie brought it home and displayed it in his dining room, in full view of his frightened children.  Another father called a DA's investigator late one night and reported that someone from the "conspiracy" had placed a stake into his lawn.  When the sun rose the next morning, the stake turned out to be a newly bloomed gladiola bulb.

We use the phrase "witch hunt" all the time.  We use it to mean any unfounded accusation, typically with the insinuation that there are ulterior motives at hand, and a willful disregard for evidence or proof.  The president is certainly fond of using it to describe the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election, but he's not alone.  It's a dead phrase, shorn of the impact of the history it references, and I think we have mostly accepted that it's a dead phrase because we believe we are wiser than the generation that executed nineteen people in Salem, Massachusetts at the end of the 18th century.  But, as Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker show in their book Satan's Silence, history repeats, and the traits that made the Salem witch trials so uniquely horrifying--the mass hysteria, marked not by bad faith but utter sincerity; the targeting of women, people of color, and other marginalized people; the unexamined accusations of literally Satanic behavior; the fear of being perceived as siding with the accused rather than the accuser; the immense human cost--are all shared with the Satanic ritual abuse cases that rocked the United States in the late 1980's and early 1990's.

In 1983, a mentally ill mother in Manhattan Beach, California, became obsessed with the state of her preschool-aged son's genitals and anus.  After relentlessly questioning him, she got him to admit that a worker at the preschool, Ray Buckey, had "taken his temperature," and became convinced that the "thermometer" Buckey used was not a thermometer at all.  A year later, police and researchers would be claiming that 360 children had been sexually abused at the McMartin Day Care, not just by Buckey but his mother and grandmother.  The accusations included claims, made by the children, that they witnessed witches riding on broomsticks, that they were abused in hot air balloons, and that they were abused by Chuck Norris.  The entire school was leveled to search for the hidden tunnels where abuse purportedly took place, and of course, none were found.  The trial, which ended up lasting seven years, was the longest and most expensive in American history.  It ended in acquittal for all parties, but by then Ray Buckey had spent five years in jail, and this and similar California cases spawned a wave of ritual abuse prosecutions throughout the country, in which the accused were not so lucky.  Many accused went to jail for decades.

The narratives of these cases, according to Nathan and Snedeker, defied belief.  They required you to believe that Satanic rings, comprising hundreds of otherwise ordinary people, were abusing children in day care centers at rates so unbelievable that they could hardly escape detection from other adults.  The authors of Satan's Silence describe a perfect storm of cultural, political, and legal forces that perpetuated the moral panic: Feminists and child abuse advocates overcorrected for a widely held belief up through the 1960's that children could not be trusted as witnesses.  Child abuse "experts" and investigators insisted that children did not lie about being abused, and confirmed these beliefs by interviewing frightened kids with leading questions.  Child abuse was seen as a slam-dunk issue for ambitious prosecutors--the authors even suggest that Janet Reno, whose prosecution of Frank Fuster in Miami helped launch her to the office of Attorney General, was similarly preoccupied with child abuse by the Branch Davidians in Waco, and the same dynamics led to the firefight that killed 76 people.  Unscrupulous medical researchers claimed to be able to recognize signs of sexual abuse in children, bolstered by unscientific and frankly sexist understandings of what "normal" genitalia, especially young female genitalia, look like.

This book was hard to read.  The accounts of the accusations themselves, even though they recount abuse that never occurred, are grueling.  Faced with the prospect of such horrible things happening to your child, hysteria seems understandable.  But it was also hard to read because it shows how dozens of innocent people, most of whom dedicated their lives to the not-lucrative profession of child caretaking, had their lives ruined.  One element of the panic I hadn't known about was that the accusers often came from powerful or wealthy families, even families of police and prosecutors, while the accused were often poorer, women, immigrants.  The children, too, who were prodded and coerced into accusing their caretakers and sometimes even their own parents, were put through intense trauma.

I picked this book up because I've been thinking about write a novel about the Satanic Panic of the late 80's and early 90's.  I was hoping Satan's Silence could give me a better sense of the cultural theology involved, of what people believed about Satan and Satanists, but the book sheds less light on that aspect of the time period.  That makes sense: because the imagined Satanists were secretive, shadowy, the nature and structure of their rituals was sketchy.  Books like Michelle Remembers and the Wicca Letters apparently provide some sense of who these Satanists were supposed to be, but in the cases themselves, whatever a kid could be prodded to imagine was seized on.  But one thing I'd really like to hear more about is the way that these cases fit into larger patterns of Satanic fears, of records being played backwards, and of distinct travesties like the West Memphis Three, three high schoolers accused of killing three boys in 1993.

Satan's Silence is a reminder that we are not past the kind of social dynamics that produce a real witch hunt.  Though many of the accused in these cases have been released, most weren't until after this book was published, in the mid-2000's.  And you don't have to look far to see history repeating itself yet again: In 2016 Edgar Welch walked into Comet Ping Pong Pizza in Washington, D.C. with an AR-15, looking to take down Satanist child molesters.  Like the McMartin Day Care, Comet Ping Pong has a phantom basement where abuse goes on.  Edgar Welch couldn't find it, but there are thousands of online warriors convinced he just wasn't looking hard enough.