Reddit reviews Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt

This is it and this is a snippet I kept as the parallels to today are so obvious: -

"While writers with doubts about defendants’ guilt were ignored or refused assignments, skeptical mental health professionals fared worse. Throughout the 1980s, psychologists and physicians who publicly opposed ritual-abuse prosecutions were subjected to harassment and attacks. In 1987, Ralph Underwager sent a questionnaire to thirty-three such experts “who had testified that not every accusation is fact and that there are significant problems with the way such accusations are handled.” Of the seventeen who responded, all but one reported a variety of repercussions. Dossiers with slander and ad hominem attacks on them were circulated among prosecutors. There were efforts by child-protection authorities to blacklist them, cut off their referrals, stop their research funding, and cancel their classes and workshops. Complaints were made against them to regulatory bodies. Some were threatened with physical violence. One had his office picketed"

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Satans-Silence-Ritual-Making-American/dp/0595189555/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=9780595189557&linkCode=qs&qid=1562574820&s=books&sr=1-1

The book is titled Satan's Silence (Ritual Abuse and the making of a modern American witch hunt) by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker. Here's the link to it.

> Beefsteak Bil brought up that morality involves empathy and reciprocity, which is kinda relevant but pretty intuitive, I mean maybe you could say the reciprocity isn't intuitive but I think the golden rule kinda conveys the same message and we all know what that is already.

Reciprocity is just a fancy word for the golden rule. If you read the wiki entry on the Golden Rule, right there at the top it says also known as "the ethic of reciprocity." If you're going to get fancy with the golden rule, I much prefer Kant's Categorical Imperative. It's like Golden Rule+, or the golden rule for math nerds.

>Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

I personally prefer Richard Rorty's view on morality. What we want to prevent (and this may be similar to what Dan was getting at) is cruelty. Whether that be cruelty to the poor, the innocent, the criminal or the insane. That includes pedophiles, because it includes everyone. One of the main ways we end up practicing cruelty is by having some metaphysical definition of "human nature." Stray from that, and one suddenly becomes something "less" than human, and it becomes increasingly easier to practice cruelty on them. See Laura's part of the conversation: they were literally comparing pedophiles to dogs who needed to be neutered.

But if you cast off a definition of "human nature," if you have a really big tent that covers the breadth of human thought and behavior, then it becomes more difficult to behave with cruelty. It's a matter of turning all "us vs them" talk to just "us" (seriously not going for a justice pun). Parents vs pedophiles becomes a community trying to deal with one if its members who has issues they need to cope with.

I realize this way of thinking is similar to Dan's in that I'm basically proposing nothing (but I'm not shouting "let's stop proposing things!" which was the thing I found truly annoying about that conversation). But I do agree with Dan that we need a better starting point. For him it's tearing down walls or not building more walls. I'm using a slightly different vocabulary. For me it's tear down the sign at the entrance that says "you have to be this human to come inside." Instead, we should let everyone in, and then figure out how we're going to deal with their problems.

Another possible recommended read (I only say that because I haven't read it yet) is Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt by journalist Debbie Nathan. Here's a pull quote that summarizes her starting point:
>[D]emonization of child sexual abuse as society's ultimate evil has rendered it so holy as to be virtually immune to reasoned analysis.

> I have heard stories of satanic ritual abuse, a significant factor in many paedophile rings, at the hands of household-name parliamentarians past and present.

Perhaps he's too young to remember the collapse of the 'Satanic child abuse' allegations on both sides of the Atlantic in the eighties. Innocent people were imprisoned, families destroyed as a result of these improbable claims, before they were exposed: https://www.amazon.com/Satans-Silence-Ritual-Making-American/dp/0595189555