Children for the Devil

by Tim Tate

Genres: Conspiracy Theories, True Crime

320 pages, Hardcover

First published August 27, 1991

About the author

Tim Tate is a multiple award-winning British documentary film-maker and bestselling author.

His films - mostly investigative, always campaigning - have been honoured by Amnesty International, the Royal Television Society, UNESCO, The Association for International Broadcasting, The International Documentary Association, the New York Festivals and the US National Academy of Cable Programming. He often speaks at international conferences and university seminars.

He is also the author of fifteen published non-fiction books. These include the best-selling "Slave Girl" which told the true story of a young British woman sex-trafficked to Amsterdam; "Girls With Balls" which uncovered the secret history of women's football; "Hitler's Forgotten Children", which tells the extraordinary and harrowing story of a woman who was part of the Nazi Lebensborn programme to create an Aryan master race; and "Yorkshire Ripper - The Secret Murders" which reveals long-suppressed evidence showing that Peter Sutcliffe killed 23 more victims.

His 2017, "Pride", tells the extraordinary true story behind the hit movie of the same name. In 1984,in the depths of the bitterly-fought miners' strike, a group of very cosmopolitan London gay men and women made common cause with the very traditional communities of a remote south Wales valley - and helped keep its mining families alive at at a time when the British government was trying to starve them into submission.

His latest book - The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: Crime, Conspiracy and Cover-Up (Thistle Publishing) is the result of 25 years investigation by Tim and his co-author, former CNN journalist Brad Johnson. It presents detailed forensic, ballistic and eyewitness testimony showing that the convicted assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, could not have shot Kennedy. It reveals that Los Angeles Police disregarded and then suppressed clear evidence of a conspiracy behind the assassination and makes a compelling case for a new official inquiry.

Reviews

[ThoughtCriminal]

From the author's website, just to throw it out there:

https://timtate.co.uk/books/

This book brought me the dubious honour of being sued for libel. A police officer referred to in its pages alleged that readers could draw an inference from four paragraphs (in a book of almost 100,000 words) that he was corrupt.

I had not intended any such inference, for the very good reason that the officer was not corrupt. The book was certainly critical of his handling of a controversial case of alleged ritual sexual abuse of children, but neither I – nor the very experienced libel lawyer who checked the manuscript for problems before publication – believed that an inference of corruption could or should be drawn from the text.

But libel law – particularly where inference rather than an outright defamatory statement is alleged – is a very difficult business. In this case, the problems were exacerbated by the employer of key defence witnesses, whose criticisms of the detective were quoted in the book: this organisation refused my publisher’s lawyers access to the employees to take pre-trial statements.

The publishers were left with little choice. They settled the case before it went to trial. They – and I – issued a full public apology to the police officer and paid him a substantial sum in damages.

I do not blame the officer for bringing the libel action. He believed, quite genuinely, that the ordinary reader would draw a damaging and false inference about his honesty. I repeat: I intended no such slur.

But I do regret the outcome. No other book – before or since – has attempted thoroughly to investigate – with an honest, secular and open mind – the claims and counterclaims of those who argue that ritual abuse is a widespread phenomenon and those who insist that it does not exist at all.

The book answered the latter question definitively by detailing a series of successful prosecutions – here, in Britain – of adult men and women for the sexual abuse of children during what courts heard and accepted were satanic rituals. It also showed that many of the more dramatic claims made by those convinced of an international conspiracy of satanic abusers were often either driven by their own religious position or stemmed from amateurish and contaminated questioning.

The result has been that, ever since, ritual abuse has been “the third rail” for anyone tasked with investigating or therapeutically helping victims of sexual abuse: touch it, and – professionally, at least – you die.

The book is still findable on Amazon and in libraries. I urge anyone interested in the protection of children to read it and to make their own minds up about this most intractably difficult issue. But if you do, please bear in mind that you should draw no inference from it about the police officer – because none was, or is, intended.

[Zachy Mcsmacky · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the rare cases of a truly banned book. Fortunately my local library bought a copy back in 1992 before it was forced out of publication the following year. I have subsequently discovered that a PDF copy has very recently been published online - Google it.

Very important reading. This book is the authority on the subject. You'll find lots of people rubbishing this book without having ever read it. If you actually read it you will find it's well written, incredibly balanced and thoroughly researched with a ton of sources. Makes you wonder about the motives of those detractors - why would you go to such lengths to attempt to disprove the truths of such horrific acts against minors? In fact, the book covers many such cases, so once reading, you know exactly what their motivation is.

What this book details has been going on for millennia, and still goes on today. The scum responsible thrives on their secrecy. The more who read this book, the better.

[Ustolemyname]

A helpful review of SRA in the UK. One proof of this, is the other review, predictably disputing the existence of such; even using SRA denier, Rosie Waterhouse as a source to backup such claims. Any such claims in the face of the evidence can only raise suspicions about motives.
No need to take my word for it. There are at least 10 cases of prosecution where SRA was acknowledged. The MET police website also admits that it exists. So what do you think the motives of the deniers could be?

[Tony Rhodes]

Readers should know that the author of this book was sued in 1992, shortly after the book was published, for defamatory accusations against a police officer Det Sgnt Coles. Tate could not substantiate the accusations against Cole and agreed a settlement. Children for the Devil was pulled by its publishers and pulped. Readers recommending this book might also be breaking the law by repeating the libels, so watch out. SAFF research since has shown that the majority of conclusions and statements in Tate's book, were either without foundation or factually incorrect. This book was a follow-on from that disastrous 1989 Cook Report 'The Devil's Work' which just about trashed Roger Cook's reputation for truthful investigative journalism.
You can see the controversy about Cole's suing of Tim Tate here:

http://saff.nfshost.com/coles.htm

There was a scathing and incisive review of Children for the Devil published in the New Stateman in 1991 upon the book's first publication which I have reproduced hereunder.
The book is now rarely obtainable second hand due to the lawsuit against it and only of use to collectors because of it's infamy. Of the 21 cases of claimed Satanic Abuse used in the book, zero came true. Not one was real. As a serious overview of the 1990 Satanic Panic it is therefore absolute dross.

New Statesman Review follows:

Witch Hunt: Children for the Devil: Ritual Abuse and Satanic Crime: Tim Tate (Methuen, £16.99)

By Rosie Waterhouse

In September 1987, Tim Tate, a journalist researching a book on child pornography, was first introduced to the notion that a worldwide network of Satanists was sexually abusing children, breeding babies ` for sacrifice and sometimes eating them during depraved black-magic rituals. He ` was sent literature from the US, where stories were beginning to circulate that a phenomenon called Satanic or ritual abuse ; was rife. Tate, then a researcher for Central Television’s Cook Report, began working on a film and his next book. Since then, the Satanic abuse scare has l come to Britain. Tate’s role in spreading it is not insignificant. He was active behind the scenes, helping social workers in Nottingham, where one of the earliest full] scale panics began. 'There have been other sensational investigations, most notably in | Rochdale and the Orkney Islands. But, so I far, police have found no evidence. Spelling it out on radio in March this year, Sir John Woodcock, chief inspector of constabulary, said: "Police have no evidence of rituals or Satanic abuse inflicted on children anywhere in England and Wales. A lot of well-intentioned hype has got out of control.”

Tate’s latest book, Children for the Devil, is positively dangerous hype, which he is about to peddle on the conference circuit to unsuspecting social workers and other child-care professionals, frightened of remaining ignorant of a supposed new form of child abuse. Tate claims to have succeeded, where police forces in the US, Canada, the Netherlands and Britain have failed, in finding evidence of Satanic abuse. He claims it is “abundant and convincing" and that it is revealed in his book. There is not one shred of the physical, concrete, corroborative sort of evidence that stands up in court. Apart from its historical research, the book contains nothing new. It is largely a rehash of The Devils Work, the Cook Report of two years ago that was criticised by the Broadcasting Complaints Commission and panned by critics as “tabloid television". Tate has been promising me for months that the book would reveal six proven court cases of Satanic or ritual abuse in Britain. I thought it would be worth reading for these cases alone. But I was astonished to find that just eight pages ` were devoted to these potentially import- I ant revelations. It soon became obvious . why In each case, the police, prosecuting lawyers or judge decided that the Satanism or rituals were a pretence, "a mere trick", as Tate puts it, used by sex offenders to frighten their victims into silence or submission. I'm amazed that the publishers fell for it: eight pages that destroy his own thesis. Tate devotes much more space to the Nottingham affair: an indisputably vile case of incest, in which ten adults were jailed for sexually abusing 23 children from one extended family. He quotes from ` the diaries written by their foster mothers, based on things the children said. They were clearly describing unspeakable acts; but these acts also appeared to have an occult context. But, as a confidential report on the Nottingham case reveals, the children began talking of witches, snakes, babies and blood only after they were given such toys as witches' costumes, snakes, dolls and syringes to play with during therapy with social workers from the NSPCC. Tate states that the children’s stories were corroborated by three older members of the family Again, the Nottingham report said that two of them retracted their stories, and that all three “have been found to be lying in every respect that could actually be checked”. According to the report, social workers had inadvertently led the children into making disclosures with leading questions. Tate is very knowledgeable about historic witch hunts. At Erst sight, the re search is impressive, but he has been cunningly selective, especially in his use of witness “evidence" gained through torture during the witch trials of the 15th and 16th centuries. For instance, he quotes from records showing that a rich Frenchman, Gilles de Rais, admitted murdering 800 children in devil-worshipping ceremonies. He does not mention that two servants were tortured into making allegations against him; nor that his inquisitors offered him the choice of death by being burned alive at the stake or, if he confessed, the "mercy” of being strangled first. 'The book quotes from the autobiography of Magdalein Bavent, a “Satanist nun" who confessed to all manner of atrocities, including eating children. Tate omits the fact that she also claimed to have had sac with a ghost, that she was raped by the Devil in the form of a black cat, saw blood trickling from a holy wafer and consorted with half human demons. It would take a tome twice as long as Tate's to give the full story behind his historic “evidence”. Tate attacks police officers for their incompetence, judges for their blindness, lawyers for twisting evidence, and journalists for ignoring it. The accusations and snide innuendo he reserves for me, because of my sceptical articles in the Independent an Sunday, are defamatory, misleading and false. For the record: I left the Sunday Times on a point of principle that would be lost on a journalist such as Tim Tate; for most of the time I worked on the Insight team, not under a by-line, so he could not possibly know what I produced there; and I have never appeared on a television chat show. l wonder how many he will be appearing on to sell his book?

pp36: 6th September 1991

[Luna Dante]

There may be a pdf version available online.
There are two excellent reviews by the booktube channel Interesting Books Reviewed; here is the second one: https://youtu.be/P-BbwXSjsMI

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yet another instance where reaction to the book tells us as much as the book itself, even though it is only a mild introduction to the reality. Thank you Tim Tate for risking so much to defend the victims of this widespread horror.

[BlehhGubby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well written, and a huge if not the best piece of the puzzle to anyone researching SRA.