Ritual child abuse enquiry set up

SENIOR officials from several denominations are investigating tIte extent of ritual child abuse in Britain. The group, under the auspices of the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland (CCBI), has met three times so far and has set up a working party to write a factsheet on ritual child abuse gild how to deal with it.
...Mgr Michael Connelly, secretary of the Catholic Child Welfare Council and of the Social welfare committee of the bishops' conference of England and Wales, is one of the members.
He has conlacted more than 40 Catholic bishops to record any incidents from their diocesan exorcists of dealing • with ritual child abuse. "I only heard of one case in the whole
of Britain, he reports. A teenage girl had been subjected to "disgusting and degrading" ritual abuse, and was exorcised by a Catholic priest and has made a good recovery from the trauma.
"What we are finding is that there is abuse, but it is not clear whether there is ritual involved," he notes. "We do know that a child's imagination is vivid, and it is often hard to check facts."
Most mainstream churches in Britain have run exorcism ministries for centuries, but the group is anxious to discover whether the phenomenom of ritual child abuse has a genuine satanic element or is a nonreligious addition to paedophile activity.
The group convener, a Methodist minister David Gamble and a council member of Barnardo's, the Christian based child care organisation, believes that rituals are more than likely used to terrify a child into silence rather than to express an adult's alternative religious beliefs. He says he knew of no evidence of human sacrifice.