SRA
SRA
SRA Conspiracies and Evidence
When SRA stories initially surfaced in the early 1980s, first with Michelle Remembers, then followed by the McMartin preschool case in Southern California and the Bakersfield,
California and Jordan, Minnesota cases — many journalists, law enforcement personnel, and mental health professionals tended to believe that SRA might exist. We know that horrible people do terrible things to others, that people often conspire, that there really are Satanists, and that abuse sometimes happens within some sort of ritual context.
However, when dozens of stories multiplied into hundreds and then thousands of stories, none of which produced a single piece of corroborative evidence, some former believers became healthy skeptics.
Supervisory Special Agent Kenneth Lanning, of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, has investigated over 300 SRA reports and has yet to find corroborative evidence. While still affirming his willingness to look for and find such hypothetical evidence, Lanning points out the problems inherent in the standard SRA conspiracy theory
” True believers, as we already stated, usually offer four main arguments in defense of SRA:
(1) all conspiracies are by definition secret and unknown; (2) evidence against an SRA story actually constitutes proof for it, since Satanists plant false evidence as part of their conspiracy; (3) only a conspiracy such as that described by true believers has the capability of destroying all the evidence; and
(4) the very people who should be fighting the SRA conspiracy are actually part of it. To these can be added: (5) only therapists can determine whether victims are telling the truth; (6) children (whether physiological children or the fractured “child” personalities of an MPD client) don’t lie about such things, and no one would make up such horrific tales;
(7) the accused perpetrators’ refusal to confess shows the depths of depravity to which they have descended; (8) nondeterminative (i.e., inconclusive) evidence validates the conspiracy (e.g., what a true believer calls an abuse scar a skeptic calls an appendix operation scar);
(9) individual occult-related criminal acts validate the whole conspiracy scenario; and (10) the conspiracy explains the purported abduction of thousands of children each year.
Trying to Disprove a Negative. In addition to these ten lines of support for SRA conspiracy theories, true believers often demand that doubters disprove their theory. In other words, unless the investigator can deliver overwhelming, unequivocal evidence that the conspiracy can’t possibly exist, the true believer will consider his own view vindicated. This approach matches the absurdity of requiring a man, charged at random, to prove he didn’t kill a given murder victim last July 24.
(Fortunately, our justice system is based on the premise that one is innocent until proven guilty.) In the same manner, the more reasonable theory should be adopted unless there is overwhelming evidence in favor of the more bizarre. The “evidence” in favour of SRA conspiracies is negligible, not overwhelming.
SRA Stories
Another major problem with accurately discerning the veracity of SRA stories is that psychological models used to understand the dynamics of ordinary child abuse are superimposed on alleged SRA victims without demonstrating that such a transference is valid.
One such model proposed by Summit, the “child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome,” asserts that children who have been abused are characteristically reluctant to disclose, and often recant, their stories. Summit and other therapists even use the accommodation syndrome to determine whether or not a child has been abused.
This may have limited validity in an incest situation involving an intact family in which the revelation of child abuse may cause both the perpetrator’s removal from the family and recriminations from other relatives. However, as Lee Coleman notes, it is worse than useless “in cases in which the perpetrator is a non-supported outsider or a non-custodial parent accused by the custodial parent.”
No one wants to minimize the pain, trauma, and terror that child victims of any kind suffer. However, nonabused children become victims of misdirected intervention when they are treated as though they have been abused and so become convinced they were abused.
It is considered more incredible that someone would lie or invent stories about bizarre ritual abuse than it would be for such abuse to have actually occurred. Some true believer therapists have developed variations of this idea, such as psychiatrist Bennet Braun’s “rule of five”:
if he hears of the same abuse scenario from five different clients who have no known common association, he accepts that scenario as authentic. Such a fallacy of credulity, however, ignores the many possible sources of co-contamination among therapists, clients, the media, and so forth; the possible reasons one could believe and/or tell a story that is not true; and the fact that some SRA accounts have been proven to be false. Clients who unknowingly told vivid, yet false, stories have been reported. The causes for this are often broadly described as “directive therapy.”
Often, the controversial practice of hypnotism is used, sometimes with clearly false results.33 Several experts — including one of the nation’s leading MPD specialists, psychiatrist George Ganaway, and a leading hypnosis expert, psychologist Nicholas Spanos— have linked high suggestibility (which includes susceptibility to hypnosis) to claims of MPD and alleged adult survivor SRA stories.
True Believers
True believers sometimes cite ambiguous or nondeterminative evidence. For example, in a telephone interview,
Dr. James Friesen, a Christian therapist and author of the popular Uncovering the Mystery of MPD, told us he had corroborative evidence to support an SRA story. A woman claimed she had been impregnated through SRA and given birth to a child later used in a human sacrifice.
This woman’s family had no knowledge of her ever giving birth, and her gynaecologist confirmed that she had delivered a child at some time in the past. This, however, proves only that she gave birth; it doesn’t prove the circumstances of the pregnancy, the birth, or the fate of her child.
Missing Statistics for Missing Children.
The tenth and final argument most true believers employ is some variation on the idea that the SRA conspiracy theory explains a number of widely held beliefs — for example, that thousands of children disappear each year.
The SRA conspiracy theory is said to account for this phenomenon: the children are sacrificed in satanic rituals! Dr. Al Carlise estimates that 40,000-60,000 people are killed in satanic rituals yearly. Other true believers cite smaller numbers, but still in the tens of thousands.
And yet, when statistical studies on missing children are examined, we find that the truth does not fit the SRA conspiracy model. In fact, the vast majority of children reported missing each year are accounted for within a twelve-month period,41 leaving fewer than 300 unaccounted for after one year
. The majority of missing children either are taken by noncustodial parents in custody disputes or are runaways.
Certainly to a parent whose child is missing, the size of the problem is immaterial, the grief real, and the suffering profound. But it is wrong to confuse compassion for an individual with a blind acceptance of false statistics in a futile effort to bolster an SRA conspiracy theory.
Equally damaging, if not more so, are the growing number of false accusations of child sexual abuse which are sometimes fueled and supported by inadequate test methods, overly zealous medical and mental health professionals, and excessively concerned parents. Drs. Ralph Underwager and Hollida Wakefield summarize the tragedy of false reports concerning children and SRA:
o treat a child as if satanic abuse were real….is to reify a child’s most terrifying fantasies and force a child to grow into an adult whose world remains at the level of a constant night terror. It is to run the risk of training a child to be psychotic, not able to distinguish between reality and unreality. It is to irrevocably and likely irretrievably damage a child and induce a lifelong experience of emotional distress
Fallacies of the SRA Conspiracy theory
Logical examination of these ten “proofs” quickly reveals their fatal flaws. First, while conspiracies are certainly secret, they cannot continue to exist and function in an open society without leaving a trail. For example, the FBI may not have known how extensive the Mafia’s network was until years of painstaking investigation, and the confessions of some members revealed the truth, but the Mafia left plenty of physical evidence in the form of homicides, gun battles, arson cases, beatings, and a host of other illegal activities. No one has found Teamster’s boss Jimmy Hoffa’s body, but the evidence that he existed is beyond dispute.
Statistically speaking, the invincible secrecy that would be necessary to conceal widespread SRA is impossible. Let’s suppose there are 100,000 adult survivors, who represent only a small subgroup of the conspiracy.
They are the ones who: were not killed; eventually escaped the cult’s control; got into therapy; “remembered” their abuse; and were then willing to tell others about it. If we conservatively peg the average number of abusive events per survivor at fifty, that would give us 5,000,000 criminal events over the last fifty years in America alone. And not a shred of corroborative evidence?
Contrary Evidence.
There are several problems with the second “proof.” Evidence against a story, if gathered professionally and examined objectively, is just that: evidence against a story, not evidence for it. To offer only one explanation for contrary evidence is to commit what is known as the either/or (disjunctive) fallacy. For example, if an alleged adult survivor’s story of being an only child is contradicted by proof that her older sister lived with her until she was a teenager, the true believer would have us believe that the contrary evidence can only be explained as evidence for victimisation.
Perhaps (the true believer reasons) the victim was so traumatised that she repressed the memory of her sister, or perhaps the Satanists deliberately manipulated her memory in some way. The true believer will totally ignore the much more likely alternative that the SRA conspiracy scenario is just as untrue as the “only child” memory. Without some objective proof for the story, suspicions of tampering with other parts of the evidence are groundless.
Missing Evidence.
The third argument, a variation on the second, falls into the same either/or fallacy. The true believer accepts only one possible reason that there is no evidence: obviously, only a conspiracy as big as the SRA stories depict could destroy everything.
However, in reality there are at least two possible reasons for a lack of evidence. Besides the one suggested by true believers, the other is that the theory is not true. The facts of the case do not change; one’s presupposition determines how one will interpret the lack of evidence. This, then, is not a proof, and certainly not evidence; it is a subjective belief.
Paranoia.
The fourth argument, which accuses those who disagree of being co-conspirators, stretches the true believers’ credibility and, without warrant for such charges, dwindles to paranoid name calling. Lanning described this vulnerability well, saying, “Another very important aspect of this paranoia is the belief that those who do not recognize the threat are evil and corrupt. In this extreme view, you are either with them or against them. You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.”28
Ph. Deities.
The fifth way true believers attempt to support the SRA conspiracy theory betrays a naivete and misplaced trust in authority, if not self-aggrandizement on the part of true-believer therapists. Therapists do not have some sort of omniscient capacity to determine who is recounting reality and who is ascribing reality to fantasy. As one forensic psychologist joked, “They sound more like Ph.Deities than therapists!”
Children Do Not Always Tell the Truth.
The sixth claim, that children (or childlike MPD manifestations) don’t lie about abuse, gained popularity during the early 1980s as part of the child protection movement. This belief is heavily promoted by many of the most vocal child protection advocates, even though some, such as UCLA psychiatrist Roland Summit, admit that there are no controlled studies to validate
Self Hypnosis
Sometimes inadvertent hypnosis or self-hypnosis can have tragic consequences, as in the nightmarish case of Paul Ingram. Ingram, who was accused of SRA by his adult daughter, succumbed to intensive interrogation, pastoral pressure, and subtle hypnotic cues. Eventually, through self-induced hypnosis, he “remembered” his participation in satanic crimes so he could confess and plead guilty in criminal court!36 Memory idiosyncrasies can also play a crucial part in false stories, as noted by leading memory expert and psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and others.37
Some false stories are produced with the cooperation of the client, including cases of factitious (fabricated), simulated (imitative), or malingering (avoiding responsibility for one’s eventual recovery) dissociative disorders.38 One of the most interesting examples of factitious disorder is chronicled by Philip M. Coons in his “Factitious Disorder (Munchausen Type) Involving Allegations of Ritual Satanic Abuse.”39 In this case, the client made a minicareer of traveling cross-country, being assisted by different SRA support groups and gaining admittance to inpatient facilities, where she would remain until her ruse was discovered and then move on.
Denial Does Not Prove Guilt.
The seventh argument true believers use is a variation of the fourth. Accused perpetrators are given a nonlethal form of the same kind of guilt-or-innocence test that was administered to suspected witches during medieval times. If the witch didn’t confess when charged, that proved he or she was unrepentant and should die. If one did confess, the punishment was the same. Today’s true believers don’t kill those they accuse, but they leave them with no way to establish their innocence. Indeed, a protestation of innocence becomes a tautological “proof” of guilt.
Nondeterminative Evidence.
In connection with the eighth argument, true believers sometimes attempt to find corroborative evidence. Some refer to amorphous “files full of evidence,” yet are unable to cite even one example thereof. They may even refer to unidentified “officials” who have seen their evidence and advised the victims to keep quiet lest they risk death from the avenging cult.
Individual Occult-Related Crime.
In the ninth argument, true believers almost invariably point to sensational crimes with occultic overtones as though they prove the SRA conspiracy theory. Loner and self-styled Satanist murderer Richard Ramirez does not fit the SRA profile at all
But true believers frequently mention him along with Sean Sellers, a self-styled teen Satanist who killed his parents, and Ricky Kasso, a teen drug dealer and self-styled Satanist who killed a friend and then committed suicide.
They also cite the Matamoros, Mexico drug ring murders, which were committed in rituals derived from Palo Mayombe, an Afro-Cuban form of occultism. None of these, however, fits the SRA pattern in any way. During our telephone interview with James Friesen, he said he would send us news clippings citing evidence in support of his SRA theories. The clippings, none of which substantiated SRA claims, included crimes like those above.
SRA Stories VS. Biblical Standards
There is still no substantial, compelling evidence that SRA stories and conspiracy theories are true. Alternate hypotheses more reasonably explain the social, professional, and personal dynamics reflected in this contemporary satanic panic. The tragedy of broken families, traumatized children, and emotionally incapacitated adults provoked by SRA charges is needless and destructive. Careful investigation of the stories, the alleged victims, and the proponents has given us every reason to reject the satanic conspiracy model in favor of an interpretation consistent with reason and truth.
The Bible tells us that we serve the God of truth (Isa. 65:16). Paul exhorts us to test everything, clinging only to what is good (2 Thess. 5:21-22), and commends the Bereans for testing what he taught by God’s Word; that is, by what was known to be true (Acts 17:11). Peter warns us by example not to be seduced by cunningly devised myths (2 Pet. 1:16). God commands us not to bear false witness against another (Deut. 5:20). In Matthew 18:15-19, Jesus warns us not to bring any accusation of sin against a fellow Christian without evidence and witnesses.
God’s judgment against those who do evil is according to truth (Rom. 2:2). Should our judgment be based on fallacies, nonevidence, subjectivism, and worldly wisdom? Let us be committed to compassion for victims and biblical judgment for victimizers, but let us not become victimizers by faulty judgment and false accusations. With sound wisdom and biblically based discernment, we need have no fear of a monolithic satanic conspiracy (Prov. 3:23-26).
