A similar travesty of justice happened in Italy in the late 90s with a bunch of parents going to jail, their kids being taken away by the local child protection services, parents committing suicide from the trauma etc.
Two decades later, as part of an investigation, the kids (now adults) came out as saying that they were brainwashed, they were pressured into confessions of satanic rituals in the local cemetery, of blood sacrifices and live burials and so on.
The investigation concluded that it was ultimately a combination of a popular moral panic, a special spot-the-satanist training that the teachers received as part of their professional development, and a collusion between psychologists and orphanages trying to fill out their facilities with kids harvested from accused parents. An absolute horror show.
I'm curious, as there is no English page, do you have any more information I can pursue regarding the 'spot-the-satanist training'? Curious what exactly that entailed and the signs they looked for.
It's cited in the Audible series itself (that's where the investigation was originally published: https://www.audible.com/pd/Podcast/B08JJNYH2J), which is many hours of content, so I wouldn't be able to easily dig that up unfortunately. If I recall correctly, it was a wave of professional instruction that was making its way through either teacher ed or psychologist ed, I imagine of US/UK origin. Do a search for "satanic ritual abuse" and all of the studies around it, e.g. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3813055
Just to clarify, since I misspoke, the training was not about spotting satanists, it was about spotting symptoms of satanic ritual abuse in children victimized by them.
Those responsible rarely get their comeuppance. I mean the academics and psychiatrists who invent this baloney, and continue pushing it for years, sustaining the delusion. Some of them are still practicing today. They've casually moved onto other things.
Academics? At least in what I've seen of the US satanic panic, there were no academics that I know of. Journalists, police consultants, quack shrinks (I forgot which kind of psy.* they were), political and religious authorities, and generally people who had some power and/or money to gain from the panic.
GP posted an article by someone who was then (and appears to still be[1]) a professor of psychology at Pepperdine. If he's not an academic then we are fairly far into "no true Scottsman" at this point.
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I also forgot about the Bragas who were child psychologists at the University of Miami who have been accused by defendants (and their team) of inducing false allegations that put at least 3 people in jail.
Two decades later, as part of an investigation, the kids (now adults) came out as saying that they were brainwashed, they were pressured into confessions of satanic rituals in the local cemetery, of blood sacrifices and live burials and so on.
The investigation concluded that it was ultimately a combination of a popular moral panic, a special spot-the-satanist training that the teachers received as part of their professional development, and a collusion between psychologists and orphanages trying to fill out their facilities with kids harvested from accused parents. An absolute horror show.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diavoli_della_Bassa_modenese (unfortunately no En version of the page)