Saw the McMartin preschool trial mentioned on a website earlier today and it got me to thinking. That was big, of course, but I've heard of lots of smaller Satanism-fears/accusations of the era (He-Man and She-Ra as having Satanic symbols or promoting Satanism springs to mind - probably because I watched those shows).
While I am interested in "whys" - why did it happen, why did people believe it, what sociological factors led to it, I realized I've actually never seen any numbers on how wide-spread those beliefs were.
Is anyone aware of these metrics existing? Were there any even slightly rigorous polls published at the time? How many people believed there was one cult of Satantic child-abusers? How many believed in a nation-wide ring/movement/organization? How many believed there was an infiltration into children's tv programming? That sort of thing.
I would interpret poll data with a degree of caution, as they can, sometimes, create as much as find their object of study and in none of the studies below have I actually seen the polls themselves; they’ve been reported in secondary sources. Further, although the polls reported on below are all from the US, the Satanism panic of the 1980s and 1990s was not limited to the US.
Nonetheless, a 1989 telephone poll of the Texas population found that 80 per cent of respondents “believed that Satanism is an increasing problem in American Society” (Victor, 1998a: 545). The same or another poll in Texas (provenance unclear) reported that when asked the question ‘How serious a problem do you think Satanism is to our society, if at all?’ 63 per cent of respondents said ‘very serious’ and a further 23 per cent ‘somewhat serious’ (Richardson et al., 1991: 3). A 1992 poll in the State of Utah reported, “90% of the Utah citizenry do believe that ‘ritualistic child sexual abuse is occurring’” and wanted the Attorney General’s budget to increase in response (Utah Commission, 1992: 10). In 1994 Redbook magazine conducted a national poll in the US which found that 70 per cent of the population believed “that at least some people who claim that they were abused by satanic cults as children, but repressed memories for years, are telling the truth” (Victor, 1998a: 545). Multiple surveys in the early 1990s also revealed that significant proportions of US psychotherapists, counsellors and social workers found accounts of satanic ritual abuse and recovered memories plausible (Victor, 1998b: 196).
Richardson JT, Best J and Bromley DG (1991) Satanism as a Social Problem. In Richardson JT, Best J and Bromley DG (eds) The Satanism Scare. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, pp. 3–20.
Utah Governor’s Commission for Women and Families (1992) Report of Utah State Task Force on Ritual Abuse
Victor JS (1998a) Moral Panics and the Social Construction of Deviant Behaviour: A Theory and Application to the Case of Ritual Child Abuse. Sociological Perspectives 41(3): 541–565.
Victor JS (1998b) Social Construction of Satanic Ritual Abuse and the Creation of False Memories. In De Rivera J and Sarbin B (eds) Believed-in Imaginings: The Narrative Construction of Reality. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, pp. 191-216