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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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.

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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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