Satanic Panic: A Modern Myth

by Rosie Waterhouse

Jean La Fontaine, Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology, London School of Economics.“Rosie Waterhouse is an impressive journalist. Her method of work is finding out the facts behind any issue and her conclusions are demonstrably based on the evidence in an unusually scientific manner. She was, I think, the only journalist in Britain who, when she found out that allegations about the Satanic abuse of children that were sweeping the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s were not supported by evidence, had the courage to go against the majority of her colleagues and make this public. Her article ‘The Making of a Satanic Myth’ was original , factual, extremely well argued and preceded the publication of my more academic research which came to similar conclusions. Her work thus added considerably to the public’s understanding about moral panics and the mechanics of the construction of public fantasy.”Michael Hill, Emeritus Professor of Sociology , Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, formerly, lecturer London School of Economics.“The scholarly journalism of Rosie Waterhouse is of the highest standard and provides a robust and reliable examination of an area fraught with heated controversy. I can personally attest to the contribution which her work has made to my own research on the ‘Satanism scare’ as it migrated to Australia and New Zealand. Her first newspaper and magazine articles in the early 1990s presented an impressively argued and evidence-based response to many of the wild but widely accepted claims about the alleged Satanic abuse of children and in doing so injected a note of sanity into the debate.”

194 pages, Paperback

Published December 3, 2023

Reviews

[Mcsmartypants]

If you Google 'Satanic Panic' today you will get over seven million hits with all manner of nonsense spoken and written about the three decade long hysterical scare which has driven many crucial sociological changes to our world. It is responsible for the rise of the far right in the U.S. and around Europe. It is manipulated by the purveyors of Woke and lies behind our distrust of officialdom and authority today in the democracies. Yet Back in 1990 when the Satanic Panic first began the world-wide-web had not been invented and there were only a handful of people who knew the source of it all, and the main pushers of the conspiracy to foist Satanic Abuse Hysteria onto the British public. How did a hysteria that started so small, and was originally ridiculed by the Elite as a seven day wonder, end up driving woke politics and religious factions into power in such a way that our democracy has been irrepairably damaged?

Rosie Waterhouse is one of those key players in that handful of people who knew what was going on back in 1990 and whilst the rest of the British Media fell in line with the requirements of the Satan Hunters and dished out spine-freezing stories of little children killed and eaten in Satanic Ceremonies Ms Waterhouse calmly served up dozens upon dozens of national exposes in mainstream newspapers and TV showing that it could not possibly have happened. She recounts the failed trials from the press galleries of the courts. First-hand interviews with people indoctrinated to believe they had been abused, and then one day woke up to the fact that it was all fantasy and ended up suing their 'therapists'. A mediaeval myth gripped the minds of the police, politicians, social workers and academia. People whose job it was to look after us all, but didn't. Like the boy who saw the King had no clothes, Rosie Waterhouse risked her journalistic career by writing the Truth about it. Now you can follow her journey in this amazing book.

Over the years I have watched as Ms Waterhouse followed the money and found the quacks, traced the lies and checked-out the claims that most police forces missed. I've seen her ongoing series of articles for Private Eye which raised the ridiculous aspects of the Satan Scare. Like the 3 year old boy who told social workers he ate cats and they believed he had been doing so in Satanic sacrifice ceremonies, only to be disabused of that notion when his mother said she fed him animal pasta and he picked out the cats first because he liked their shape!

Rosie Waterhouse spotted the grifters, named the idiots, listed the bad actors and generally kept a lid on a witch-hunt which could have killed thousands. I was very pleased to see her book "Satanic Panic: A Modern Myth" in print at last. It is in fact the story of her own conversion from shocked hearer of heinous crimes through sceptical inquiry to the realisation that the politicians of this country were being manipulated by an alliance between the extremist religious right and the radical feminist extreme left, all powered by a new wave of self-generated mental illness created using quack therapies invented to make everyone a victim and create a dependent population through implanting false memories in vulnerable women who went to the NHS to seek help and eventually ended up worse because their 'therapy' was never meant to cure, but rather perpetuate their nightmares.

Today the truth of this historic situation has been drowned by the constant cacophony of 'you must believe' from the Radical Feminists on one hand and the Jesus brokers on the other, backed by an army of victim-impostors. You will ONLY find this reliable source information in Ms Waterhouse's book. Her research and analysis is absolutely unique.

Above all Rosie Waterhouse's work has been consistently accurate and 100% correct over the past three decades. Believers in SRA may not like what she has written but her facts are spot on, excellently referenced and cannot be decried. She hasn't had to change or apologise for anything she has written in three decades. If you REALLY want to know about the Satanic Panic and how it is still simmering today under the surface of Social Work ready to gush-force into another bout of witch-hunting or anti-semitism, then you need to read this unique book. I found it riveting. A detective story of the most surprising things. I challenge anyone to read it and not be shocked at what many of the general population, police, politicians and child-protection authorities have been fooled into believing.

[Andrew Garvey · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a summary of her long-time journalistic investigation into, and consistent debunking of, the persistent (Hoaxted Heath, anyone?) myth of Satanic Ritual Abuse and as a starting point for anyone wanting to understand more about the subject, this is a valuable book. But, written as it originally was as a PhD dissertation, it's hindered by a dry, stilted format and style that (understandably) prioritises academic achievement over readability. Waterhouse makes a very convincing argument and also writes at length about the part 'recovered' memories, dodgy therapists and a fad for diagnosing MPD/DID played in all this but what's missing is her actual writing. Her (excellent) journalism on SRA is referenced and summarised and she quotes plenty of snippets of other people's work but this book is rarely a paragraph or two away from a passage explaining methodology. Supposed cases of SRA are mentioned in passing and the details of them can probably be found by looking them up in the extensively detailed references but Waterhouse's work on them is, frustratingly, not really part of this book. Personally, I'd much rather just have a collection of her published work on SRA, with an author's note for each article, than this.