As he drove from his home in North Carolina to Comet Ping Pong in the northwest neighborhood of Washington, D.C., Edgar Maddison Welch recorded a message for his two young daughters: “I can’t let you grow up in a world that’s so corrupt by evil, without at least standing up for you and for other children just like you” (Miller 2021). Later that day, Welch walked into the crowded pizzeria carrying an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle in search of a pedophilia ring that people on the internet had told him Hillary Clinton was operating in the building’s basement. As the diners ran from the restaurant, Welch walked around the building looking for an entrance to the child abuse operation. When he found a door he couldn’t open, he fired his gun at the lock. Eventually, he put down his weapons (he was also carrying a handgun) and submitted to being arrested.
People have always had extreme beliefs, but it takes emotion to put those beliefs into action, and children stir up emotions. Children are vulnerable and beloved, and we make enormous efforts to protect them from illness, injury, and exploitation. Unfortunately, there are people in the world who are capable of horrible acts, and children can rarely defend themselves when targeted. They are both precious and fragile. Unfortunately, we have come to a point where—by a shockingly wide margin—most accusations of child abuse are false. If you doubt this last claim, recall that an NPR/Ipsos poll conducted in December 2020 found that 17 percent of Americans agreed with the statement, “A group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.” Seventeen percent. Obviously, these are not specific accusations, but this obviously false statement is a core belief of the QAnon movement (Vyse 2021). It seems clear that the urge to protect children sent Welch on his misguided rescue mission, but this is just one cautionary tale in the long history of false claims of child injury.
A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of False Claims of Child Victimization
The Blood Libel Myth
On the day before Easter in 1144 CE in the town of Norwich, England, a twelve-year-old boy named William was found dead. His uncle, a priest named Godwin Sturt, accused Jews of murdering the boy. Thomas of Monmouth became the caretaker of William’s tomb, and although he was not in Norwich at the time of William’s death, he wrote an account of the boy’s life, The Life and Passion of St. William the Martyr of Norwich, which described the alleged murder of William by Jews as part of a Passover ritual. In an effort to advocate for William’s canonization, Thomas portrayed him as a martyr and reported a number of miracles attributed to him (McCulloh 1997).
Thomas of Norwich’s book was neither the first nor the last report of the blood ritual myth. Romans had accused early Christians of kidnapping non-Christian children for use in secret ritual sacrifices, and much later, during the French Revolution, popular rumor accused aristocrats of kidnapping children to use their blood in medicinal baths (Victor 1994). But the anti-Semitic version of the myth was widespread throughout the European Middle Ages. Geoffrey Chaucer recounted a version of the legend in The Prioress’s Tale, one of The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1387 CE), and this myth, as well as other anti-Semitic ideas, led to the scapegoating and murder of Jews during times of plague (Atlani-Duault et al. 2015).
The European Witch Craze
The book Malleus Maleficarum, commonly translated as “Hammer of Witches,” was written in 1487 by the Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer and the Dominican inquisitor James Sprenger. The Malleus became the manual for conducting witch trials, and it shaped popular ideas about the activities of witches. The women accused of witchcraft were often unmarried and frequently worked as midwives (Barstow 1994), and, among other horrors, they were accused of murdering infants. Section XI of the Malleus includes the following passage: “Certain witches, against the instinct of human nature, and indeed against the nature of all beasts, with the possible exception of wolves, are in the habit of devouring and eating infant children” (Kramer and Sprenger 1847, 55).
The number of people killed in the witch craze is estimated to be between 60,000 and 100,000—overwhelmingly women (Barstow 1994). The last person killed as a result of a sanctioned witch trial is thought to have been Anna Göldi of the Swiss Canton of Glarus in 1782 (Foulkes 2007).
Satanic Ritual Abuse Scare
The 1980 bestselling book Michelle Remembers introduced the idea of satanic ritual child abuse. The prior decade had seen the emergence of new religious movements, and people were worried about young people being attracted to cults. In late 1978, 900 followers of the Reverend Jim Jones killed themselves in a mass suicide poisoning in Guyana, an event that became known as the Jonestown massacre. In this atmosphere, the ideas promoted in Michelle Remembers took hold and found their greatest expression in the McMartin Preschool case in Manhattan Beach, California, in 1983. Seven staff members at the McMartin Preschool were accused of having ritually abused 360 children as part of a “Devil-worship” cult (Victor 1994). The McMartin case, which was not resolved until 1990, was the longest and most expensive trial in U.S. history, and in the end, neither of the main defendants, Peggy McMartin Buckey and her son Ray Buckey, were convicted of a crime.
Meanwhile, the fear of satanic ritual abuse had been adopted by many social workers, psychologists, law enforcement officials, and religious leaders. Therapists often used hypnosis or suggestive interview methods to “recover” memories of child abuse in their adult clients. During that period, I knew therapists who went to special in-service training programs to learn about satanic ritual abuse. But eventually, after the McMartins were found not guilty, skepticism about the phenomenon began to grow. Expert witnesses, including psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, testified about the unreliable nature of recovered memories and the effects of leading questions on the testimony of young children.
In 1994, the New York Times summarized the key finding of an investigation conducted by psychologist Gail Goodman of the University of California Davis of over 12,000 accusations satanic ritual abuse:
The survey found that there was not a single case where there was clear corroborating evidence for the most common accusation, that there was “a well-organized intergenerational satanic cult, who sexually molested and tortured children in their homes or schools for years and committed a series of murders,” Dr. Goodman said. (Goleman 1994).
Eventually, the satanic ritual abuse phenomenon was recognized as a moral panic based on unreliable evidence (Haberman 2014).
Facilitated Communication
As readers of Skeptical Inquirer may recall, facilitated communication (FC) is a thoroughly discredited form of communication used with autistic children and others who are unable to use speech to communicate (Vyse 2015). The theory behind FC suggests that autism is a physical condition, not a cognitive one, and that many children are intellectually capable of language but lack the physical ability to speak or write. To overcome this difficulty, another person, a facilitator, holds the autistic person’s hand, arm, or shoulder as they type on a keyboard. Unfortunately, all the controlled studies of this phenomenon have found that the communications are coming from the facilitator and not from the person with the language disability. In a phenomenon similar to a Ouija board, the facilitators are unaware of their influence over the typing (Boynton 2012). Despite the overwhelming evidence against FC, it remains popular with many parents and teachers of language disabled people.
Part of the reason we know that facilitated communication doesn’t work comes from the many accusations of child abuse that have been typed out using this technique. Beginning in the 1990s and continuing to the present day, families have been torn apart by these accusations, which law enforcement is forced to investigate. Although much damage has been done—and in some cases, parents have been jailed while the cases played out—all the accusations have eventually collapsed because it could not be established that the language-disabled individual was the author of the accusations. For a list of these false child abuse accusations see this page of the new facilitatedcommunication.org website established by a group of activists (including the author) fighting to eliminate the use of the technique.
Pizzagate/QAnon
Today, the most popular form of child abuse moral panic comes from QAnon believers who are convinced that Democrats Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Soros, as well as media figures Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, and Ellen DeGeneres, operate a global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles (Roose 2020). The future of QAnon is unclear now that the message boards used by Q, the anonymous leader of the group, have been taken down. But the persistence of the pedophilia myth from Pizzagate to QAnon, combined with the results of the recent NPR/Ipsos poll, suggest that many people have latched on to this false belief as part of a highly charged political movement—a movement capable of getting some of its believers to storm the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The Dangers of False Claims
Godwin’s Law, a well-known internet principle, states that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” Although not endorsed by Michael Godwin himself, some people have proposed a corollary to the original law suggesting that, when a comparison to Nazis or Hitler appears in an argument, the person making the reference automatically loses. Godwin’s original suggestion was not that Hitler comparisons were never appropriate. Instead, his goal was to preserve these terms for appropriate use. In a 2015 op-ed in the Washington Post, he wrote: “The best way to prevent future holocausts, I believe, is not to forbear from Holocaust comparisons; instead, it’s to make sure that those comparisons are meaningful and substantive” (Godwin 2015). In 2017, he supported comparing the white supremacist protesters at Charlottesville, Virginia, to Nazis (Olheiser 2017).
(Source: Wikipedia)
I would like to propose a variation on Godwin’s Law: “As a social movement becomes more emotionally charged, the probability that the opponents of that movement will be accused of child abuse approaches one.” My motivations for framing the law are very similar to Godwin’s. Child abuse in all its horrific forms is real; it happens. However, people who make false or unsubstantiated claims of child abuse weaken the force of the charge and make it less likely that justifiable claims of child abuse will be taken seriously. Paraphrasing Godwin, the best way to prevent the abuse of children is not to avoid all accusations; instead, it’s to make sure that the accusations we make are meaningful and substantive. If we care about the welfare of children, we should be sure of the facts and not use them as pawns in our adult conflicts.
References
Atlani-Duault, L., A. Mercier, C. Rousseau, et al. 2015. Blood libel rebooted: Traditional scapegoats, online media, and the H1N1 epidemic. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 39(1): 43–61. Available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-014-9410-y.
Barstow, Anne Llewellyn. 1994. Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts. San Francisco: Pandora.
Boynton, Janyce. 2012. Facilitated communication—what harm it can do: Confessions of a former facilitator. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention 6(1): 3–13. Available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17489539.2012.674680.
Foulkes, Imogen. 2007. Europe’s last witch-hunt. BBC News (September 20). Available online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7003128.stm.
Godwin, Mike. 2015. Sure, call Trump a Nazi. Just make sure you know what you’re talking about. The Washington Post. (December 14).
Goleman, Daniel. 1994. Proof lacking for ritual abuse by satanists. The New York Times (October 31). Available online at https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/31/us/proof-lacking-for-ritual-abuse-by-satanists.html.
Haberman, Clyde. 2014. The trial that unleashed hysteria over child abuse. The New York Times (March 10). Available online at https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/us/the-trial-that-unleashed-hysteria-over-child-abuse.html.
Kramer, Heinrich, and James Sprenger. 1487. Malleus Maleficarum: The Witch Hammer. Pantianos Classics (translation by Montague Summers).
Miller, Michael E. 2021. The Pizzagate gunman is out of prison. Conspiracy theories are out of control. The Washington Post (February 16). Available online at https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/02/16/pizzagate-qanon-capitol-attack/.
McCulloh, John M. 1997. Jewish ritual murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth, and the early dissemination of the myth. Speculum 72(3): 698–740. Available online a https://doi.org/10.2307/3040759.
Ohlheiser, Abby. 2017. The creator of Godwin’s Law explains why some Nazi comparisons don’t break his famous internet rule. The Washington Post (August 14). Available online at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/08/14/the-creator-of-godwins-law-explains-why-some-nazi-comparisons-dont-break-his-famous-internet-rule/.
Roose, Kevin. 2020. What is QAnon, the viral pro-Trump conspiracy theory? The New York Times (August 18). Available online at https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-qanon.html.
Victor, Jeffrey S. 1994. Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend. Chicago: Open Court.
Vyse, Stuart. 2015. Facilitated communication: The fad that will not die. Skeptical Inquirer Online (May 11). Available online at /exclusive/facilitated-communication-the-fad-that-will-not-die/.
Vyse, Stuart. 2021. When QAnon prophecy fails. Skeptical Inquirer Online (February 15). Available online at /exclusive/when-qanon-prophecy-fails/.