Social Work and the Satanic Panic, Then and Now 

What is the Satanic Panic and why am I writing about in a blog post on my psychotherapy website?

As defined in Wikipedia, “The Satanic Panic is a moral panic of over 12,000 unsubstantiated cases of Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA, also known as ritual abuse, ritualistic abuse, organized abuse or sadistic ritual abuse) starting in the 1980s in the United States, spreading through many parts of the world by the late 1990s, and persisting today.”

It’s the “persisting today” part that makes me want to share the history and information about this troubling phenomenon. I’m old enough to remember the beginning of the Satanic Panic but many are not, and its important history. I find that even people my age don’t know much about it, even though it was sensationalized mainstream news at the time. Even Oprah and Geraldo got in on the fun with lurid exposes on alleged “satanic” goings on. Geraldo has since apologized and admitted it was a bunch of nonsense, but as far as I am aware, Oprah has not. I don’t think she has ever apologized for popularizing Dr. Phil or Dr. Oz, either, but I digress. Folks may recall the hysteria over Dungeons and Dragons and heavy metal music being actual gateways to satanic possession, which perhaps seem quaint today but were deadly serious at the time.

The other factor of the SRA phenomenon that makes it of profound importance to me is the role that social work and psychotherapy has played, and still does, in promoting and spreading this idea. This seems to be a kind of “dirty little secret” in my profession, where people seem reluctant to discuss it.

It’s worth briefly defining a moral panic as a “widespread feeling of fear that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of community or society.” Other examples are the original medieval European witch hunts, the Salem witch trials, the Red Scare of the 1950’s, and of course the Holocaust. Currently, moral panic about queer and trans people is driving a disturbing narrative that queer and especially trans people are dangerous, particularly to children. Powers that be can use moral panics to justify discrimination and violence towards people seen as “others”. This is as old as human history itself, it seems. Here is a link to a story from the 80s about the association even back then between queerness and child abuse.

Many people point to the publishing of a book in 1980 called Michelle Remembers as a starting point of the Satanic Panic. This mega best-seller was written by the late Canadian psychiatrist Laurence Pazder, purporting to recount the torture and abuse of his client Michelle Smith as a small child by a cabal of Satanists. For anybody interested in learning more about this utter travesty of a book, there’s a 2023 documentary Satan Wants You that is available in several places, including free on Tubi, and I promise it’s a jaw-dropper.

To sum up briefly, Michelle came to him as a patient for treatment of depression after a miscarriage and ended up “recalling”, through “recovered memory therapy”, that she was abused and forced to endure “satanic rituals” that included human sacrifice, cannibalism and rape. It’s important to note that Pazder, a devout Catholic who had traveled in Africa and developed an interest in demonic possession seen in religious ceremonies there, essentially stopped his practice to focus full-time on Michelle’s treatment. This included many long hours of laying together in an embrace as she “remembered” and recounted horrifying sexual abuse in rituals that sometimes went on for months at a time, including literally having a tail sewn to her body. Appearances were made by Satan himself, and she was eventually saved by the Virgin Mary, who conveniently healed Michelle of all scars and signs of the abuse and made her forget all of it until she was “ready” to remember. Pazder and Smith later divorced their spouses and married each other, became celebrities, and made an enormous amount of money on the book. Also, Michelle converted to Catholicism. Clearly, this was extremely unethical and exploitive behavior by a licensed mental health provider, for which Padzer was richly rewarded.

This is a theme in the Satanic Panic—licensed mental health providers and social workers spreading dangerous and demonstrably false narratives of SRA, to the great harm of innocent people. Another doozy of an example is Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, of “Sybil” fame. Dr Wilbur treated a client who was later memorialized in the huge best-selling book and later movie as having what was then called Multiple Personality Disorder, brought on by severe abuse in childhood. While there was not a Satanic component to this story, it did involve fantastical claims of abuse, gross miscarriage of the therapeutic relationship, boundary violations and exploitation of a vulnerable person for fame and fortune. (Anyone interested in this story can check out Debbie Nathan’s book “Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case”.) Sybil helped to popularize the idea of Multiple Personality Disorder and recovered memory therapy. A young teacher suffering from what is reported as blackouts and emotional distress, Shirley Mason sought psychoanalytic treatment with Dr. Wilbur, not knowing that Wilbur had a pre-existing fascination with the extremely rare (at that time) diagnosis of MPD. Wilbur was also a lobotomist, but I digress again.

In addition to hypnosis, Dr. Wilbur also injected her client with sodium pentathol, the “truth serum” anesthetic that was popular among psychoanalysts at the time. Correspondence between Wilbur and the journalist Flora Reta Schreiber who wrote Sybil reveals that efforts were made to pump up the lurid details of the extreme abuse detailed in the book, which ended up being a massive financial and professional success for both the writer and the doctor. At one point before the publishing of the book, the Shirley Mason recanted to Wilbur, admitting that she had made it all up and did not have alternate personalities.

A psychiatrist covering Shirley Mason’s care when Wilbur was out of town for a few months was convinced and later went on record that he did not believe the MPD diagnosis but that Mason was playing the role to please her doctor. Wilbur, too deep in by then, brushed this off as her patient not wanting to go deeper into her therapy. As with Pazder and his patient/wife, Shirley Mason became dependent on her psychiatrist, with Wilbur spending many hours a week on Shirley’s therapy and even paying her rent. In later years, Mason moved to live near Wilbur and eventually ended up moving in with her to care for as she became ill and eventually passed away from Parkinson’s.

Whether or not Shirley Mason had dissociative identity disorder or not, or was horrifically abused as a child, the unprofessionalism, exploitation and boundary violations of the therapeutic relationship are clear and unsettling. Some blame Cornelia Wilbur for sparking an “industry” in recovered memory therapy and an explosion in the diagnosis of MDP that further drove the Satanic Panic. Astonishingly, even today the ISSTD (International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation) gives a “Cornelia Wilbur Award” to “recognize outstanding clinical contributions to the assessment and/or treatment of dissociative disorders”. I find it astounding and disturbing that she is being honored in this way.

Speaking of the ISSTD, anybody interested can google and learn about this organization and the “memory wars” in which the true believers in a worldwide conspiracy of abusers using ritual abuse and mind control techniques sparred with colleagues who were skeptical of such unsubstantiated reports. More on this organization in my next post.

Many folks are at least vaguely aware of the McMartin Preschool debacle, in which unsubstantiated claims of young children being ritually abused by their daycare providers resulted in the longest and most expensive trial in US history. After 7 years and 2 trials, all defendants were acquitted of all charges.

It began when a mother, Judy Johnson, whose child attended the well-regarded McMartin Preschool became concerned because her young son was having painful bowel movements and concluded that he was being sexually abused. She was later revealed to have a psychotic disorder and died of an alcoholism before the actual trial even started, but the mental illness was never revealed to the defense team. She had previously accused other individuals of sexually abusing the boy, but this complaint sparked a frenzied and disorganized search for other victims, with catastrophic results.

Hundreds of very young children were interviewed in leading and even coercive ways that led to bizarre and even impossible stories, including being flushed down toilets into secret rooms to be abused, flown in a hot air balloon to a different location, seeing people fly, orgies in public places, and the presence of actor Chuck Norris during the abuse. Hundreds of children were interviewed in this way and physically examined for signs of sexual abuse. It’s disturbing to think of several hundred young children being subjected to such examinations due to the report of one extremely mentally disturbed parent. Click here to read notes from an interview with Johnson.

Dr. and the now Mrs. Padzer got in on the action and became unofficial consultants to the case, but the real ignominy belongs to a social worker named Kee McFarlane. To make an extremely long, complicated story short, McFarlane interviewed hundreds of children, using techniques she developed that today are obviously leading. A true believer of an organized, nationwide conspiracy of “orthodox satanic groups” (whatever that means) using preschools as cover for abuse, she testified before congress that the reason that no evidence is ever found for such activities is that the satanic groups are too big and well-funded to get caught. Here you can read some of McFarlane’s testimony in the McMartin trial, and an article that quotes her on the topic as well.

While the McMartin Preschool trial is the best known, it is not remotely the only example of innocent people being accused. The presence of Satanic Ritual Abuse cults was taken as fact and taught to law enforcement agencies, even using Michelle Remembers as educational text. Other trainers claimed that “fear of creepy crawlies, blood and ketchup” or drawing squiggly lines or Christmas trees were indicative of SRA. Although the modern Satanic Panic began in North America, it was exported to Europe in the form of trainings provided to (you guessed it) social workers in how to spot and investigate SRA.

A notable tactic of the pro-SRA people is “If you don’t believe every report of child sexual abuse, no matter how bizarre or impossible, or through what techniques the memories were recovered, then you are “one of them” and covering for the vast global cabal of Satanic child abusers. At the very least you don’t think any child abuse exists at all!”

As a psychotherapist specializing in trauma, I am very aware that the abuse of children is an enormous and real problem. There are children who are being trafficked and abused all over the world. There is abundant evidence of this, which is sort of the point—there is evidence.

In many of the SRA accounts, there are reports of enormous numbers of people being murdered but extensive investigation has not turned up any evidence of such crimes. The lack of evidence, and the bizarreness of the reports, are seen as proof that the stories are real. Here is a report from an FBI investigation truly worth reading for anyone interested in this topic.

Part of the problem of the SRA idea of the organized global cabal of child abusers, the shadowy “elites”, is that is turns the focus away from the most likely perpetrators of child abuse, which is mostly male (but not always) members of the immediate family, followed by family friends, clergy, teachers, coaches etc. Anybody who has watched the news in the last few decades has learned about actual organized child abuse rings such as the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Church of Latter-Day Saints, some extremely conservative Jewish sects, and yes, some newer religious cults like NXIM or The Children of God.

By the mid 1990’s the furor around the Satanic Panic had subsided, due in part to new coverage getting skeptical of the reports. Below is a link to a Nightline Documentary from 1995 that is again a jaw-dropper worth a watch. It documents what I believe is appalling abuse and exploitation of clients. As mentioned in this documentary, clients also began suing the psychiatrists and therapists for implanting false memories of abuse. It seemed that the Satanic Panic was over, but in fact it just went underground for a bit.

The Search for Satan