Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain

by Philip Jenkins

Intimate Enemies describes the creation of a journalistically induced panic in Great Britain during the the 1980s - a decade of intense concern about a closely related set of perceived sexual abuse of children, child pornography, satanic rituals, and serial murder. It was widely alleged that such practices became more common during the decade, and the notoriety attracted major attention from the mass media, as well as from agencies in law enforcement, social welfare, and mental health.Jenkins' book traces how such problems were reformulated in the course of the decade, and how they came to be seen as major menaces to society. It discusses the motivations of those who knowingly or otherwise disseminated misleading and exaggerated claims, and seeks to explain why these claims gained such widespread credence. Jenkins suggests that these newly defined "problems" aroused concern because they focussed upon broadly-held fears about changes in British society and national identity. In addition, the alleged threats to children provided a weapon for various political groups in their for conservatives opposed to perceived moral "permissiveness," and also for radical feminists seeking to promote an ideological agenda of their own.

274 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 1992

About the author

John Philip Jenkins was born in Wales in 1952. He was educated at Clare College, in the University of Cambridge, where he took a prestigious “Double First” degree—that is, Double First Class Honors. In 1978, he obtained his doctorate in history, also from Cambridge. Since 1980, he has taught at Penn State University, and currently holds the rank of Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of the Humanities. He is also a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion.

Though his original training was in early modern British history, he has since moved to studying a wide range of contemporary topics and issues, especially in the realm of religion.

Jenkins is a well-known commentator on religion, past and present. He has published 24 books, including The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South and God's Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe's Religious Crisis (Oxford University Press). His latest books, published by HarperOne, are The Lost History of Christianity and Jesus Wars (2010).

His book The Next Christendom in particular won a number of honors. USA Today named it one of the top religion books of 2002; and Christianity Today described The Next Christendom as a “contemporary classic.” An essay based on this book appeared as a cover story in the Atlantic Monthly in October 2002, and this article was much reprinted in North America and around the world, appearing in German, Swiss, and Italian magazines.

His other books have also been consistently well received. Writing in Foreign Affairs in 2003, Sir Lawrence Freedman said Jenkins's Images of Terror was “a brilliant, uncomfortable book, its impact heightened by clear, restrained writing and a stunning range of examples.”

Jenkins has spoken frequently on these diverse themes. Since 2002, he has delivered approximately eighty public lectures just on the theme of global Christianity, and has given numerous presentations on other topics. He has published articles and op-ed pieces in many media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, New Republic, Foreign Policy, First Things, and Christian Century. In the European media, his work has appeared in the Guardian, Rheinischer Merkur, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Welt am Sonntag, and the Kommersant (Moscow). He is often quoted in news stories on religious issues, including global Christianity, as well as on the subject of conflicts within the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, and controversies concerning cults and new religious movements. The Economist has called him “one of America's best scholars of religion.”

Over the last decade, Jenkins has participated in several hundred interviews with the mass media, newspapers, radio, and television. He has been interviewed on Fox's The Beltway Boys, and has appeared on a number of CNN documentaries and news specials covering a variety of topics, including the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, as well as serial murder and aspects of violent crime. The 2003 television documentary Battle for Souls (Discovery Times Channel) was largely inspired by his work on global Christianity. He also appeared on the History Channel special, Time Machine: 70s Fever (2009).

Jenkins is much heard on talk radio, including multiple appearances on NPR's All Things Considered, and on various BBC and RTE programs. In North America, he has been a guest on the widely syndicated radio programs of Diane Rehm, Michael Medved, and James Kennedy; he has appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air, as well as the nationally broadcast Canadian shows Tapestry and Ideas. His media appearances include newspapers and radio stations in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Brazil, as well as in many different regions of the United States.

Because of its relevance to policy issues, Jenkins's work has attracted the attention of gove

Reviews

[Richard Bartholomew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The phrase "moral panic" needs to be used with caution, and the author acknowledges that the label can be deployed in a "polemical and ideologically selective way". A "moral panic" over a perceived social problem does not mean that the problem does not in fact exist (although the panic over Satanic Ritual Abuse was completely concocted); rather, it is a label that may be appropriate when we consider critically "the rhetoric employed to promote ideas, and the use and abuse of statistics and examples to support claims" and "the means by which claims comes to be expressed through the media, and the wider relationship between the media and the making of policy".

Jenkins surveys how a number of social problems were constructed in Britain during the 1980s and the start of the 1990s: serial killers, child murderers, paedophiles, and allegations of Satanic Ritual Abuse. He highlights the role of "moral entrepreneurs" and "claims-makers", and he is particularly interested in how panics relate to "interest group theories". On the one hand, he shows how a rhetoric that amounts to "moral panic" can be discerned on both sides of a controversy: in Cleveland, a "moral panic" about child abuse led to excessive social service interventions, and this in turn produced a "moral panic" about fanatical social workers. On the other, though, he also shows how there can be an unexpected affinity of interests, particularly between radical feminists and religious conservatives. He also draws attention to the influence of American ideas and activists.

Jenkins tackles broad themes in chapter-length studies, and as such he at times comes close to spreading himself too thinly. His analysis is insightful, albeit in places arguable, but it is based exclusively on information in the public domain, assembled from journalism, cultural productions, and the works of particular claims-makers; despite some tabulated information, his studies are narratives built on anecdotes rather than the rigorous aggregation of data.

However, his narratives are compelling, and in 2016 they remain highly pertinent in the wake of recent botched police investigations into alleged "VIP paedophiles" (see my review of Harvey Proctor's autobiography here). Pages 77 to 80 deal with the stories of "elite criminality" in relation to paedophilia, and what he calls "the work of Geoffrey Dickens", an MP "active in promoting concern about sex rings and scandals, and the extravagant claims that often emerged." Alas, the word "buffoon" has not yet entered academic vocabulary as an analytical category, although it is clearly the most appropriate label to apply to Dickens. In recent years, Dickens’s claims have been revived by a Labour MP, John Mann. A few pages later, Jenkins relates how the National Association for Young People in Care (NAYPIC) promoted claims made by "Andrew", a supposed victim of child-sex trafficking, of a mysterious "elite twelve" who would supposedly pay "thousands" for paedophilic snuff films. Figures associated with NAYPIC have recently appeared in the media once again in relation to 1980s "VIP abuse" claims, particularly concerning the former Elm Guest House in west London.

One suggestion made by Jenkins that is arguable here is that claims of "elite criminality" were useful for Thatcherites, who had "little sympathy for the traditional upper-class leaders of conservatism", and who "benefited from the recurrent association of their predecessors with degeneracy". That may be true to an extent, but recent comments by Mann, who claims to have acquired one Dickens's notorious "dossiers", would seem to indicate that the old guard were just as willing to use these allegations against the libertarian Tory right, where there was greater acceptance of homosexuality.

Given Jenkins's perspective here, it is something of a non sequitur that he then goes on to discuss Leon Brittan, a confirmed Thatcherite who was smeared as a paedophile by anti-Jewish "rightist circles within MI5". Noting this and the Kincora Boys' Home affair, Jenkins suggests that "the intelligence services emerge as important clandestine claims-makers, generating rumor for the explicit purpose of spreading political disinformation." Perhaps Jenkins was working within the limitations of what was available, but this is quite a dramatic element to drop into the story almost in passing.

Jenkins's chapter on the Cleveland abuse fiasco – in which a medical procedure was used to misdiagnose children as abuse victims – reminds us of how radical feminist commentary on the subject promoted credulity as a moral imperative, with one feminist author (Emily Driver) going so far as to claim that supposed sceptics were in truth themselves paedophile infiltrators. Jenkins's observations on radical feminism's critique of the patriarchal family as a motivating factor in highlighting intra-family incest are particularly ironic given the shared interest with religious conservatives – in particular, I here recall a review of The Satanism Scare (an edited volume published in the same series as Intimate Enemies) that pointed out that the Satanic panic in relation to day-care in the USA may have been an attempt by conservatives to "re-domesticate" mothers, and to frame the problem of child-sex abuse as "stranger danger" rather than family dysfunction.

Two chapters are devoted to Satanic Ritual Abuse, the most baseless and extreme of all the “moral panics” of the period. Jenkins overviews how vaguely jocular or titillating media references to "Dennis Wheatley types" and occultists in the 1970s and 1980s were suddenly transformed into fears about a "menace" by the end of the 1980s. American "experts" produced lists of "indicators" of children who had been sexually abused, the most absurd of which was authored by Catherine Gould, a Californian therapist whose list included "wild laughter when the child or someone else passes gas" and "fear of ghosts and monsters". Ritual abuse indicators were also promoted by Pamela Klein of Chicago, and brought to Britain by Ray Wyre, an expert on sexual crime, and Tim Tate, a journalist.

Jenkins discusses the role of religious fundamentalists in formulating and promoting claims, in particular activists such as Reverend Russ Parker of the Manchester Deliverance Advisory Group and Reverend Kevin Logan, and supposed "survivors" such as Doreen Irvine, Audrey Harper (whose awful disclosures were published by Kingsway, with a foreword by Geoffrey Dickens), and, from America, Lauren Stratford (who was championed by Gould, and who later re-invented herself as a Holocaust survivor after her Satanic survivor claim was comprehensively debunked). A section on allegations of "elite Satanism" rakes over the 1986 fraud trial of Derry Mainwaring Knight, who had persuaded evangelicals in Sussex to donate large sums of money for the purchase and destruction of Satanic regalia– Knight is someone else whose claims were recently revived by an amnesiac British media looking for more evidence of “VIP abuse” (Knight was also the subject of a recent book by Marc Heal, reviewed by me here).

This is not just a story of credulous evangelicals, though, and Jenkins reviews articles by social workers and “radical support” from feminists such as Beatrix Campbell, writing in journals such as Marxism Today: "The appropriation of left and feminist rhetoric in such a cause is striking, but it was not untypical", writes Jenkins, as he charts how sex abuse within an extended family in Nottingham was misrepresented as a Satanic cult, and how the panic led to harmful interventions in Rochdale and Orkney, among other locations. Jenkins ends by describing ritual abuse as the only panic "that can be said to have effectively ceased to have been almost wholly discredited among media and policy-makers." However, he warns that some of the claims-makers remain active, and that their claims may "survive in the public consciousness until they re-emerge in some form as components of a future problem."

In 2016, we’re not quite there yet: "VIP paedophilia" remains the focus of the current panic, and extravagant claims about a baby-eating Satanic cult in Hampstead have remained on the fringes. However, we live in an age of conspiracy theories, mistrust, and disillusion – post-9/11, post-banking crisis, and post-Jimmy Savile – and some of the "VIP" claims include ritualistic elements. Recent police stupidity and credulity in relation to Operation Midland has been both revelationary and alarming; and Jenkins's words may yet prove prophetic.