Satanic ritual abuse: fact or fiction?

From Mrs Valerie Sinason Sir, Further to Professor La Fontaine's letter (Mar. 29) the problem was not your correspondent Simon Caldwell paying "too much attention" to my "extravagant claims", but not actually checking what I actually said and relying on distorted reports.
I absolutely agree with Prof La Fontaine that the torso in the Thames was not part of Satanism. Indeed, shaving worked with Colonel Kobus Jonker yearly in South Africa (in my University of Cape Town post) I have worked with those dealing with Muti murders.
Indeed my work has covered victims of trauma (with or without a learning disability) from Rwanda and Bosnia, together with the consequences of abuse within families of all religious belief systems.
Colleagues in the UK from all professions are in agreement that within the awful topic of child abuse, sadistic abuse is one of the smallest categories. Within that small category we consider ritual abuse is an even smaller subsection. Indeed, within the House of Commons meeting (and Simon Caldwell fails to mention all the distinguished colleagues and organisations present) a college provided a UK guestimate of 2,000.
As readers of the book I edited in 1994 will know, I consider the existence of child torture with the family as an emotion equivalent of a hidden Auschwitz in peace-time England. Not a numerical Auschwitz.
The current inquiry by Sir Keith Povey has found that the rateof successful prosecutions in rape trials has dropped from one in three to one in 13. The odds of a rapist being brought to court are only one in 100. Those of us working with vulnerable victims (those with learning disability, or dissociative disorders or mental health problems) see an even smaller group succeeding in gaining access to justice. The broken lives of those harmed by all kind of ritual abuse is unbearable enough without disturbing distortions.
At a time when the Catholic Church is bravely trying to deal with years of silence over abuse concerning priests and nuns your paper has done a grave disservice in trying to distort this area of human pain and frailty.
Yours faithfully, VALERIE SINASON London W1 From Miss Margaret Jervis Sir, The protestations of the promoters of satanic abuse claims (Letters, Mar. 29) fail to mention the key fact the oral evidence of the "satanic survivors" is not a product of normal recall but an artefact of the discredited "recovered memory" process of manufactured narratives. That is why the movement is clustered around mental health professionals, such as psychotherapist Valerie Sinason and psychiatrist Dr Joan Coleman.
These "experts" lend a patina of respectability to a patently bogus form of conjuration. But despite the drawing in of fellow "recovered memory" adherents among secular welfare professionals and feminist rape crisis counsellors, the satanic abuse bandwagon remains essentially an evangelical crusade with a number of key speakers at the last Ritual Abuse and Information Network and Support (RAINS) conference having a Protestant evangelical agenda behind their secular banner.
In keeping with the spirit of the age, sectarian prejudice has from the outset been masked by avowedly humanitarian concerns gaining maximum publicity and credulity while reinforcing fear and superstition. Satanic abuse has been found to be a sham by all reputable researchers (and this includes some outstanding evangelical and fundamentalist investigators, such as the Passantinos in the US, who exposed Lauren Stratford, the 20th century equivalent of Maria Monk, as a fake "satanic survivor").
Consequently the continued battle against phantom enemies in the name of child protection, allied with a fervent pornographic imagination, will inevitably alight on innocent people and groups who become the focus of suspicion.
American anti-Catholicism in the 19th century was the product of just such a mind-set and it is one that Dr Coleman and her associates would do well to study and reflect on, rather than continuing with their blinkered posturing of moral indignation and bad practice in mental health.
Yours faithfully, MARGARET JERVIS Legal Affairs Adviser, British False Memory Society Bradford on Avon, Wilts