site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27509 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I have been looking into previous social manias such as the satanic panic and the child care workers given wrongful convictions and it's shocking how difficult it is to reverse the tide of mania once it's begun. Parents, police, the justice system, and media all fall into lockstep and condemn innocent people to terrible fates they and their families bear in almost total isolation, with only a few supporters able to parse the information in front of them and figure out what is going on.

This book which I read some time ago seemed quite convincing in arguing that the most notable daycare abuse convictions were based far more on actual physical signs of abuse than lurid stories about ritual abuse and that the narrative of innocent adults just being hounded by witch-hunting media for no reason at all was in itself created by media on thin grounds.

You should look into the individual cases. The three I looked at via podcasts, docos all had the same characteristics: no real evidence beyond child's testimony, leading and irresponsible questioning techniques (now considered disreputable), widespread parental panic -eg active and suggestive questioning of them now considered a process of suggestion and false-memory creation, shonky experts, escalating numbers of children reporting over the period with outrageous child testimony (drinking blood, murders enacted, ritualistic abuse, macabre acts that would have entailed serious physical injury where none was present, large groups of people involved, impossible sequences of events etc.). These events were all supposed to have gone on repeatedly with multiple children over long periods of time in a public daycare with staff, parents oblivious and no reports of any concern prior to the initial satanic panic event that blew up. Sometimes unrelated people were caught up in it, in one case a policeman who happened to be there.

The police and prosecution for their part formed their view from day one and bought entirely into the thinking of the times (believe the child) in the US McMartin case completely relying on one untrained, unlicensed counselor who with puppets and leading questions would forcefully get testimony from the children.

For all the cases I looked at the defendants were ultimately exonerated, though after lengthy battles. Often children involved have recanted their evidence.

This doesn't rule out that some children were abused in a more typical sense - the Canadian CBC documentary points to one likely case. But there's little doubt that the vast majority of charges are created from a condition of social mania.

The interesting thing is that many of these children do believe they were abused even when it's most likely they weren't. It is actually possible to implant memories through suggestion. And so in a very real way these children were abused by a failed system.

Looked up the author of that book and he is not a disinterested party:

Himself a victim of child sexual abuse, Cheit is interested in the issue of repressed memory vis-a-vis childhood sexual abuse in cases like McMartin and the Catholic Church sexual abuse cases and put out his theories in the book The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children.

Recovered memories are a morass; the issue has gone from "it's Science, we must believe it" to "a tangle of fake and implanted" and all points in between. You've read the book so you're better informed on it than I am, but if he's relying recovered memories as evidence that "it's all, or in the majority, true" then it's very shaky.

And as pointed out, the Satanic Panic as distinct from sexual and physical abuse was extremely elaborate and became fantastical, yet the authorities were convinced of its truth because of the 'expert witnesses' promoting it. If you look at the cases in Britain, for instance: there's at least a few where the social worker/instigator of the investigation was moved on to another area and started the same thing up again. Some set themselves up as specialists in ritual abuse and advised local councils, police forces and the likes about how to recognise cases of Satanic Ritual Abuse.

The Rochdale case:

In November 1989, teachers at a school on the Langley estate in Middleton drew the attention of social workers to the disturbed, withdrawn and strange behaviour of a six-year-old boy. He talked to teachers about ghosts and a ghost family who were part of his life. The social workers to whom the case was referred were so concerned about the boy's behaviour and the strange stories that further investigation was made of the family background. That revealed that the boy's father had spoken of ghosts in his previous home. The social workers therefore took the boy, his 11-year-old sister and two other boys into care and made them wards of court. The parents were denied access to the children.

Altogether, a total of 20 children on the estate were taken into care because of their association with the original family. They were taken after dawn swoops by police and social workers. The social workers were convinced that they had unearthed a ritual abuse group on the estate. On 14 September 1990, a special meeting of the social services committee in Rochdale supported the action of the director of social services and invited the Secretary of State for Social Services to ask the social services inspectorate to confirm that all the council's policies and procedures on child abuse were in accordance with Government guidance.

When the case was heard in court earlier this year by Mr. Justice Douglas Brown, he enabled the public to learn the facts of the case. By working carefully through the facts he gave a clear, sober account of an extraordinary chain of events.

Mr. Justice Douglas Brown found that the accusations of ritual abuse were unproven, that there was no evidence of drugs connected with any abuse and no evidence that anyone was missing, mutilated or murdered. He emphasised that the staff of the Rochdale social services department were decent people, not heartless or ruthless, who had acted throughout with the children's best interests at heart. However, they had made mistakes, and criticisms were justified.

The judge said that the social workers were obsessive and mistaken in their belief that a six-year-old boy's ghostly fantasies were real. He accused the social workers of serious errors of judgment because they based their decision almost entirely on the evidence of a disturbed boy who had been fed on a rich diet of utterly frightening and unsuitable videos, such as "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "The Evil Dead".

The Orkney case:

The Orkney child abuse scandal began on 27 February 1991, when social workers and police removed children—five boys and four girls, aged eight to fifteen and all from the families of English "incomers"—from their homes on the island of South Ronaldsay in Orkney, Scotland, because of allegations of child abuse. The children denied that any abuse had occurred, and medical examinations did not reveal any evidence of abuse.

The controversy resulted in an official inquiry established in August 1991, chaired by Lord Clyde. The inquiry published its report in October 1992. It described the successful appeal against the first judgement as "most unfortunate" and criticised all those involved, including the social workers, the police, and the Orkney Islands Council. Social workers' training, methods, and judgement were given special condemnation, and the report stated that the concept of "ritual abuse" was "not only unwarrantable at present but may affect the objectivity of practitioners and parents".

Liz McLean, the social worker who led the interviews with the children, had also been involved in the 1990 Rochdale "Satanic Abuse" case. She was later sharply criticised by Lord Clyde in the official inquiry into the South Ronaldsay case, and in another investigation into similar allegations in Ayrshire.

And a list of other such cases here.

In the same way that the Salem Witch Trials kicked off because of allegations by children and young women about persecution by witches, which we now take to be untrue, allegations by children were taken as evidence of witchcraft and Satanism. Human nature hasn't really changed over the centuries.

Though there are real sexual abusers out there, who use the trappings of cults in order to coerce and entrap their victims. Speaking of the "should a dying 13 year old be able to hire a prostitutes for sex before their death?" poll, here is why sex with adults isn't generally a good idea, and the whole notion of "child prostitutes" (even for the dying 13 year old) isn't feasible with regard to consent or free decision to sell sex:

In March 2011, four adults who lived in a cul-de-sac in the Welsh town of Kidwelly were convicted of multiple sex offences against children and young adults. The group led by Colin Batley was described by the media as a "Satanic sex cult", a "quasi-religious sex cult" and a "paedophile cult" however the group members were not followers of Satanism. ...Members of the cult were initiated in a ceremony involving sex with an adult, and they were threatened with being killed if they did not take part in the ceremony. Some of the victims were forced into prostitution.

The cult targeted troubled, impressionable minors, forcing them to undergo an initiation ceremony that ended with sex with an adult. Children were intimidated into participating with threats of murder. One girl testified that after this ceremony (which started with Batley preaching about the occult and finished with sex), she was regularly coerced into having sex with Colin Batley at his house, and with strangers at satanic orgies.

...Five victims testified in court that they were lured or brought to cult members' homes where they were sexually abused, and that there were more victims who had not reported any of their abuse.

One 15-year-old girl who gave evidence described being shared like a "sex toy" between cult members. A second girl was raped by Batley when she was only 11 years old, and testified, "Sex with him was a test, and if I did not pass, I would go to The Abyss." A third girl also testified to being raped by Batley when she was 11 or 12, and being coerced into having sex on camera when she was 16."

You've read the book so you're better informed on it than I am, but if he's relying recovered memories as evidence that "it's all, or in the majority, true" then it's very shaky.

It's not. If I remember correctly, recovered memory doesn't feature in the actual book at all, and at least a quick search on "recovered" prompted no hits. Satanic ritual abuse doesn't really feature either, other than Chait stating that most notable cases actually don't involve ritual abuse or actual allegations of ritual abuse at all, though in some cases there were allegations that media represented as ritual abuse allegations even though they were about something else. The book is about American cases, I don't know how the British examples relate to that.

He also doesn't claim, of course, that all the claimed day care abuse cases were valid and doesn't make final claims even to the ones that he investigates. Like I said, it's been some time since I read the book, but the argument is that the most notable American cases had at least some concrete evidence that abuse had happened (ie. physical evidence and non-coaxed, non-fantastical child testimonies that were consistent with physical evidence) and that even in the most controversial one, McMartin case, even though most defendants were almost certainly not guilty and the case got out of hand with the tunnel allegations etc., the specific case against Ray Buckey was much stronger than commonly now understood and thus the entire case cannot be simply be seen as a "witch-hunt", ie. the implication being that everything was concoted out of thin air and resulting solely from a moral panic.

Cheit's specific point is that he's of course not claiming guilt on parties that are currently innocent in the eyes of the law (ie. like the McMartin defendants) but rather stating that there were credible reasons why jurors might have considered them guilty, and that particularly many of the "lesser" cases outside of McMartin, where the courts issued guilty verdicts and have upheld them, are based on very solid evidence but have still been mentioned in books like Satan's Silence as examples of a national witch-hunt based on nothing.

I still get the strong impression that Cheit was trying to defend the reality of sex abuse cases, because of course they do happen, but was strongly motivated by "I am a survivor of child sex abuse and now with the backlash against the Satanic Panic a lot of people are doubting all allegations of child sex abuse, and I'm going to go to the other side of 'well some of the Satanic Panic cases were true!' in order to make sure allegations are taken seriously".

This seems to be focused strictly on sexual abuse rather than satanic ritual abuse. Even if the cases overlap, and the children were abused, it's valid to call the Satanic Panic a mania, if there's no evidence for satanic ritual abuse.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats