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vassilissa ([info]vassilissa) wrote in [info]otf_wank,
@ 2009-12-15 18:54:00


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Satanic ritual abuse wank
I dithered about whether to put this in unfunnybusiness or here, but in the end Satanic Ritual Abuse is not real, and what the person who said it was said was so funny it belonged here.

People who blatantly deny the existence of ritual abuse after being offered solid resources to the contrary demonstrate that they don’t need evidence about its existence. Instead, when they continue to deny its existence in a seemingly obsessive manner, they are more likely trolling for new victims in hopes that responding survivors will – while more emotional – slip-up and provide vulnerable, personal information.

There you go. If you deny the existance of ritual abuse, it's because you're looking for new victims to ritually abuse.


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[info]snarp
2009-12-15 10:19 pm UTC (link)
I'm sorry, but I don't think you don't understand why you're upsetting people here. No one in this thread is claiming that child abuse doesn't happen, and no one is claiming that abusers don't occasionally claim religious motives. The issue is that the phrase "ritual abuse" has a very specific meaning and history - it refers to non-Christians, in particular pagans and Satanists, abusing children for religious reasons in an organized fashion. This claim is used by religious extremists to demonize non-Christians, and tends to get linked up with larger conspiracy theories, particularly the "international Jewish conspiracy" subset.

A useful thing to remember about these claims is that the people making are frequently making money off of them - Michelle Smith, the most famous alleged abuse survivor, sold a best-selling book about her (fictional) experiences, and her husband and therapist was hired as a consultant in other cases; Mike Warnke had both a book and lucrative speaking career.

As melannen points out upstream in the thread, ritual abuse accusations are, in essence, a form of the blood libel, the claim that a given group eats children. The ideas of cannibalism and of deliberately hurting children are triggers of fear and disgust in pretty much every culture, so an accusation that a group of people do so frequently as part of their culture is a quick, simple way to dehumanize that group. It is a tactic that's been used by many different religious and ethnic groups throughout human history to paint other religious and ethnic groups as barbaric and subhuman.

The most famous example of the blood libel is probably the persistent accusations by medieval Christians that Jews kidnapped Christian children and use their blood to make matzos at Passover. This claim was often used in Germany in France as a rationale for the systematic killing of Jews and the seizure of Jewish property by the government. It was most common in unstable social times, when some city was concerned its citizens might aim their unrest at the government and wished to redirect it, or difficult economic times, which the city felt might be alleviated by the seizure of the Jews' property. Sociologists feel that similar factors come into play with ritual abuse accusations - the most famous case

The blood libel still persists today and there's an interesting feature of it that I think might help make it clear to you why you're offending people here: White supremacist groups in the United States frequently use exactly the same arguments you're using here in its defense. They defend their right to claim that Jews kill children, in spite of historical evidence against it, by saying that it only happened sometimes and it wasn't organized. If I understand you correctly, you're arguing that "ritual abuse" might happen, but not in an organized manner, not in large groups, and not only by non-Christians. The problem there is that the specific definition of the term "ritual abuse" is, in fact, the organized, large-scale abuse of children by non-Christians. If you say "ritual abuse," that's what people think of. What you're doing here, in essence, is not defending children, but defending the use of a term, and one with a very, very unpleasant history.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)


[info]snarp
2009-12-15 10:23 pm UTC (link)
I apologize profusely for the insane number of typos in this comment - I hit "post" instead of "preview."

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[info]ecchaniz0r
2009-12-16 12:43 am UTC (link)
You and your icon are my heroes today.

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[info]snarp
2009-12-16 03:23 am UTC (link)
(Sechs is a hero every day.)

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[info]lady_ganesh
2009-12-16 12:58 am UTC (link)

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[info]sneer
2009-12-16 01:30 am UTC (link)
Holy shit. Thank you for spelling this out, and I don't mean that facetiously. I honestly had no idea the term itself was so bad.

What should one call child abuse committed in a religious context, then--or should it just not be distinguished from other kinds of abuse? Again, I'm not trying to be a smartass, but people using their religion, any religion to justify hurting their children is just particularly vile and disgusting to me.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)


[info]snarp
2009-12-16 02:29 am UTC (link)
I'm not anything like an expert on the psychology of abuse, but my impression is that people who deal with abuse in social work or criminal justice contexts don't see any utility in distinguishing types of abuse that way. (Someone who works in those fields correct me if I'm totally off-base here.)

In the US, at least, there's no legal difference; as in, it all falls under the same charge, whatever the abuser claims their reasons to have been. It's not like, I don't know, the different degrees of murder or manslaughter charges, where motivation matters - if you hurt a child, that's a child abuse charge. And to the best of my knowledge, therapists tend to follow the same few treatment strategies with abuse victims no matter what sort of rationalizations their abusers may have given for their actions. Abusers always claim to have reasons - I'm not sure how much it's considered to matter what they are.

(This isn't to say that there aren't cultural traditions which normalize abuse - one could say a lot about, say, American prisons! - just that I don't think there's a lot of rationale for distinguishing between someone who hits a child and says he did it because he's a Satanist and someone who hits a child and says he did it because he's a Whig.)

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[info]eleutheria
2009-12-16 02:59 am UTC (link)
Thank you for this, you did a marvelous job explaining!

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[info]melannen
2009-12-16 03:12 am UTC (link)
Thank you for going into the necessary detail on this! I wouldn't have been able to do it nearly so well, and I am so glad it got said.

(Reply to this)(Parent)


[info]solle
2009-12-16 02:06 pm UTC (link)
I'm sorry, but I don't think you don't understand why you're upsetting people here.

What.

I mean, thanks for the explanation, I didn't know most of the history behind it, and I appreciate the effort. But why do you accuse me of lying about... well, about apparently not knowing why I was upsetting people? Which I apparently did before I even "upset" anyone?

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)


[info]snarp
2009-12-16 03:47 pm UTC (link)
I'm not sure what you mean about "accusing you of lying." The comment wasn't intended as a personal accusation - there are several people in these threads who weren't clear on what was being discussed. I posted in response to you specifically because you seemed to have been getting the most unhappy responses, and I wanted to make it clear to you why that was happening. I'm sorry if something in there sounded accusatory to you; that wasn't my intent.

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[info]cmdr_zoom
2009-12-16 06:05 pm UTC (link)
It's because an extra "don't" slipped in there by accident. Read it. You ended up saying "I don't believe that you aren't doing this deliberately."

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[info]snarp
2009-12-16 06:10 pm UTC (link)
Ohhhh, okay - I see what you mean. Yeah, clearly I can't type.

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[info]snarp
2009-12-16 06:11 pm UTC (link)
If you're upset about the extra "don't" in there, as cmdr_zoom says, then that was a typo - I apologize about that.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)


[info]solle
2009-12-16 06:41 pm UTC (link)
Ah, that makes more sense. :D

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[info]phosfate
2009-12-16 05:03 pm UTC (link)
You're kind of awesome.

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