An Analysis of Then and Now.

Recenty there have been several posts on the blog Daat Torah related to the issue of Satanic Ritual Abuse, among them the following:

1) Satanic Child Abuse - Is there a ring of such pedophiles operating in Sanhedria Murchevet?

2) Dorothy Rabinowitz - Why your friends, psychologists, and rabbis want to believe clearly impossible false accusations of child abuse - and why so few see that the Emperor has no clothes

3) Nachlaot: Panic in Jerusalem: Parents in a tight-knit neighborhood believe a pedophile ring is terorizing their children. What if it doesn't exist?

Clearly there are some real differences between the Satanic Ritual Abuse which was alleged to occur in daycare centers in the the US, and the accusations about ritual child abuse which have been made in Nachlaot, Sanhedria Murchevet, and various other neighborhoods of Jerusalem:



For one thing, most of the claims being made in the US were about events that were alleged to have been perpetrated at day care centers, nursery schools and the like, by child care givers and their associates. That is not the case at all, about the claims being made in Jerusalem.
Also, the claims of Satanic Ritual Abuse in the US included descriptions of children being forced to participate in bizarre rituals, presumably as part of a system of worshiping the Devil. This was particularly offensive to the majority of the US population -- who are mainstream Christians. In contrast, the claim being made in Jerusalem is that the children are being forced to participate in Christian rituals!
The claims about Satanic Ritual Abuse in the US were made back in the 1980s, in an era when the experts didn't understand the extent to which leading questions asked of children in an interrogation could lead to them giving false testimony, and therefore, people naively believed those claims. In contrast, the claims about the abuse in Jerusalem are occurring currently in 2015, at a time when all knowledgeable experts in the field of child abuse (therapists, lawyers, police, etc.) should already be acquainted with the mistakes made in the US in the 1980s, and therefore should not repeat such mistakes.
Does that therefore mean that although the claims of Satanic Ritual Abuse in the US were eventually debunked and no longer regarded as real by most experts, that the claims being made in Israel may be true -- since they are not identical?

In order to answer that question, one first needs to analyze the underlying causes of the false accusations. Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt by Debbie Nathan and MIchael Snedeker, is a book which does just that. Like Dorothy Rabinowitz' book No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times, this book deals with the Satanic Ritual Abuse moral panic which began in the US in the 1980s.

Satan's Silence discusses the anthropological concept of "subversion myths" as the basis for understanding the development of the Satanic Ritual Abuse moral panic (page 31):

"In the West, rumors of evils done to innocents date back to the ancient Greeks, and comprise part of what anthropologists call a subversion myth -- a story that attaches blame for complicated problems to scapegoats. Subversion myths apear in times of acute social stress, and typically contain several elements. Most basic is a conspiracy narrative, in which the plotters are usually racial and cultural outsiders. Or they may be members of the culture's powerful elites, such as aristocrates, politicians, priests, or the police. The crimes these culprits are charged with constitute the most evil, loathsome behavior imaginable, perpetrated against society's ultimate symbol of its own purity and self-renewal: its children."

Satan's Silence gives several examples of past "subversion myths" -- which interestingly enough include several accusations against the Jewish people, such as the "blood libels" in Europe during the Middle Ages. The book then turns its attention to the particular scapegoats in the Satanic Ritual Abuse cases (page 33):

"Why satanists? This latest scapegoat is explainable via the anthropological concept of the demonology: the narrative, specific to every culture, that identifies the ultimate evil threatening the group. During periods of social turmoil and moral crisis, societal preoccupation with its demonology intensifies. In Christian cultures, the demonology is based on the concept of a threat from Satan and his mortal agents."

Satan's Silence also details why parents were particularly uneasy about sending their children to day care in the United States during that era. Women in the United States had traditionally stayed at home to care for their children while their husbands went out to work, but for a variety of reasons --such as economic necessity and the influence of the women's movement -- more mothers were enterring the work force during the 1980s and as result were placing their young children in day care centers and preschools. But the society as a whole was not entirely comfortable with that change.

Thus, the anthropological concepts of "subversion myth" and "demonology", as applied in the United States during that period of time, were the underlying backdrop to the false accusations that day care workers were involved in Satanic Ritual Abuse.

What about the current accusations being made in Nachlaot, Sanhedria, and elsewhere about ritual child abuse? On the surface, as stated previously, these are quite different from the accusations which were made in the US during the 1980s about Satanic Ritual Abuse in day care centers. But if we examine the accusations from the perspective of anthropological concepts such as "subversion myth" and "demonology", it seems clear that Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel have quite a different concept of what the "ultimate evil threatening the group" would be.

We can discern some of the factors at play by examining Rabbi Yitzchok Berkowitz's speech. One of those factors appears to be a fear of "technology". He states "...this is what's most frightening, they use all sorts of technology, and systems, for compartmentalizing their brain, so that whatever they're experiencing remains subconscious, conscious on only a certain level, and the other part of their brain is totally unaffected by it, so that they won't talk." Whereas day care centers seemed to be the focus of fears in the US in the 1980s, "technology" is the focus of fears in Jerusalem in 2015. What technology is he talking about? Computers? The Internet? There is certainly a fear of technology on the part of many people, as well as an ignorance of technology. People have unclear ideas of what technology is and what it is actually capable of.

If we read between the lines of Rabbi Yitzchok Berkowitz's speech, we can also get an idea of what the underlying fear is really all about -- that there is a Christian missionary plot to convert the children to Christianity: "Whether or not they actually baptize them is hard to know. Kids have talked about pools. It's hard to know. And we have to be very clear: let's not jump to conclusions on our own. I know imaginations run wild. We don't know. There are things out on the street that this is all a plot, and it's the pope that's on top of it. Rabbosai, rabbosai, the more we use our imagination, the less credibility we're going to have. But we do know that they're attacking religion." While he doesn't want to come out and say that he knows for sure that there are Christian missionaries performing acts of child abuse in Sanhedria, he does acknowledge that many "on the street" are saying just that. Thus, whereas in the US in the 1980s, the suspected child abusers were accused of being Satanists who were attacking Christian values, in Jerusalem in 2015, the suspected child abusers are being accused of being Christian missionaries who are attacking Jewish values.

Rabbi Yitzchok Berkowitz seems to have a limited understanding of the extent to which leading questions can cause children to give contaminated, false testimony. He makes the following statement: "The kids are not talking, they don't talk at the police. What goes on at the therapists, doesn't matter to them, it's called eidut mezuhemet - for all you know, the therapist told them what to say. And there are people around Yerushalayim that claim that the therapists made this whole thing up. A therapist with a lot of imagination is getting the kids to say these things. I have one problem with accepting that theory - too many kids have told their parents the whole story before they got to a therapist." Rabbi Yitzchok Berkowitz doesn't realize that if parents and/or therapists question their children using leading questions, that can lead to the generation of eidut mezuhemet - contaminated, false testimony. That was what happened in the US in the 1980s, yet the same mistakes are being made again in 2015 in Jerusalem. If those who take responsibility for conducting an investigation are not knowledgeable about the potential pitfalls and the mistakes which others have made in the past, they are bound to make similar mistakes themselves.