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“We saw a pale echo of what is now possible in 1990-1991, when Saddam Hussein, the autocrat of Iraq, made a sudden transition in the American consciousness from an obscure near-ally - granted commodities, high technology, weaponry, and even satellite intelligence data - to a slavering monster menacing the world. I am not myself an admirer of Mr. Hussein, but it was striking how quickly he could be brought from someone almost no American had heard of into the incarnation of evil. These days the apparatus for generating indignation is busy elsewhere. How confident are we that the power to drive and determine public opinion will always reside in responsible hands?”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“The history of Europe before the Conquest is sufficient proof that the Europeans did not have to cross the oceans to find the will to exterminate those standing in their way.”
― Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

“We stand hand-clasped, our faces quite blank, as if this were not a nightmare that tells me, as clearly as if it were written in letters of fire, what ending a girl may expect if she defies the rules of men and thinks she can make her own destiny. I am here not only to witness what happens to a heretic. I am here to witness what happens to a woman who thinks she knows more than men.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Lady of the Rivers

“Talk of "witch-hunts" conceals an inconvenient fact: men charged with rape stand a better chance of walking free than other defendants. The conviction rate in rape trials â€� 63 per cent in 2012/13 â€� is quite a lot lower. Prosecutors are taking a bigger risk when they bring rape cases to court, especially when the alleged offences happened decades ago, leaving no forensic evidence.
The Independent, 9 February 2014”
― Joan Smith

“The witch-hunt narrative is a really popular story that goes like this: Lots of people were falsely convicted of child sexual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s. And they were all victims of a witch-hunt. It just doesn’t happen to line up with the facts when you actually look at the cases themselves in detail. But it’s a really popular narrative â€� I think it’s absolutely fair to say that’s the conventional wisdom. It’s what most people now think is the uncontested truth, and those cases had no basis in fact. And what 15 years of painstaking trial court research (says) is that that’s not a very fair description of those cases, and in fact many of those cases had substantial evidence of abuse. The witch-hunt narrative is that these were all gross injustices to the defendant. In fact, what it looks like in retrospect is the injustices were much more often to children.”
― Ross Cheit

“interview from Ross E. Cheit about The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children (Oxford University Press, February 2014).
In the foreword to your book you mention a book titled Satan’s Silence was the catalyst for your research. Tell us about that.

Cheit: Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker solidified the witch-hunt narrative in their 1995 book, Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, which included some of these cases. I was initially skeptical of the book’s argument for personal reasons. It seemed implausible to me that we had overreacted to child abuse because everything in my own personal history said we hadn’t. When I read the book closely, my skepticism increased. Satan’s Silence has been widely reviewed as meticulously researched. As someone with legal training, I looked for how many citations referred to the trial transcripts. The answer was almost none. Readers were also persuaded by long list of [presumably innocent] convicted sex offenders to whom they dedicated the book. If I’m dedicating a book to fifty-four people, all of whom I think have been falsely convicted, I’m going to mention every one of these cases somewhere in the book. Most weren’t mentioned at all beyond that dedication. The witch-hunt narrative is so sparsely documented that it’s shocking.”
― Ross Cheit

“The witch-hunt narrative is now the conventional wisdom about these cases. That view is so widely endorsed and firmly entrenched that so widely endorsed and firmly entrenched that there would seem to be nothing left to say about these cases. But a close examination of the witch hunt canon leads to some unsettling questions: Why is there so little in the way of academic scholarship about these cases? Almost all of the major witch-hunt writings have been in magazines, often without any footnotes to verify or assess the claims made. Why hasn't anyone writing about these cases said anything about how difficult they are to research? There are so many roadblocks and limitations to researching these cases that it would seem incumbent on any serious writer to address the limitations of data sources. Many of these cases seem to have been researched in a manner of days or weeks. Nevertheless, the cases are described in a definitive way that belies their length and complexity, along with the inherent difficulty in researching original trial court documents. This book is based on the first systematic examination of court records in these cases.”
― Ross Cheit, The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children

“The book argues that even though many cases have been held up as classic examples of modern American “witch hunts,â€� none of them fits that description. McMartin certainly comes close. But a careful examination of the evidence presented at trial demonstrates why, in my view, a reasonable juror could vote for conviction, as many did in this case. Other cases that have been painted as witch-hunts turn out to involve significant, even overwhelming, evidence of guilt. There are a few cases to the contrary, but even those are more complicated than the witch-hunt narrative allows. In short, there was not, by any reasonable measure, an epidemic of “witch huntsâ€� in the 1980s. There were big mistakes made in how some cases were handled, particularly in the earliest years. But even in those years there were cases such as those of Frank Fuster and Kelly Michaels that, I believe, were based on substantial evidence but later unfairly maligned as having no evidentiary support.”
― Ross Cheit, The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children

“J'attends avec impatience le jour où les chercheurs se rendront compte que, dans les mythes, ils ont affaire aux mêmes thèmes que dans la chasse aux sorcières, structurés de la même façon et faussement perçus comme indéchiffrables.”
― René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

“An undergraduate researching the "witch hunt" cases asked for evidence that there had been more than one hundred cases, noting that the major lists of such cases added up to about fifty. There was no reply that provided documentation to support the claim.[34] The members of the list were generally strong proponents of the witch-hunt narrative. They knew the answer to the question “Is there a child sex abuse witch hunt?â€� These “witch hunters,â€� as those on this list soon came to describe themselves, were increasingly activists who used the internet to exchange information and ideas. Jonathan Harris may have done more than anyone else to disseminate the witch-hunt narrative in the mid 1990s and beyond.[35]”
― Ross Cheit, The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children

“Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General (1645 â€� 1647) by Stewart Stafford

‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live� � Exodus,
Nor allow legalised killing too cheaply,
Twenty shillings of blood money per witch,
A charlatan’s extortion for ‘cleansing.�

Witchcraft, the capital crime of the age,
Lawyer Hopkins, parasitising laws,
Self-appointed Witchfinder General,
A reign of terror brought to God-fearing doors.

Evildoing’s hunter was its embodiment;
A Judas purse wed brutality’s handmaiden,
With Stearne, stoked Essex witch hunt mania,
Puritanical zeal’s sadistic cruelty.

His victims were cast into dungeon pits;
Bloodied and broken in outcast desperation;
Disease helped some cheat the hangman;
The only fortune anyone deemed fair.

Extracting confessions through torture’s pain;
Their skin pricked to find Satan’s mark,
Victims, forced to run until collapse,
Sleepless starvation hastened their bleak end.

Then to the wicked ducking stool gauntlet,
Lowered into muddy ditches or icy water,
A survivor’s noose or drowned exoneration?
None met the Witchfinder’s imperious eyes.

“I, John Lowes, a minister of God,
Was martyred so. Hopkins, thou pestilent knave!
Bade me to run, held aloft by mocking hands,
Funeral rites as I dug mine own grave.�

Sensing his gaslit flames turn back on him,
Hopkins went to ground with his ill-gotten gains,
Slowly he faded, from infamous to obscure,
Scars linger on 300 unmarked graves.

Some say that Hopkins was executed as a witch,
Or faced a tubercular end in his village,
Where he is buried, no one knows or cares,
Hexed in a barren field for karmic tillage.

Rat-catcher to an imagined pestilence,
Communities, not covens, he did churn,
A toxic chalice for New World lips,
Fanning Salem’s pernicious turn.

© 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford