[HOME] [BOOKS] [ORDERING] [JOURNALS] [ABSTRACTS] [LINKS] [SPECIAL OFFERS]

Denis Brion, "The Hidden Persistence of Witchcraft", Law and Critique Vol. IV no.2 (1993), 227-252: Recently in the United States, there has been a near-epidemic of prosecutions of individuals for engaging in the organized and repeated sexual abuse of young children through the medium of Satanic rituals. Day care centers are the usual scene for these alleged activities. The typical course of these episodes begins with the revelation of a bizarre pattern of abuse, followed by highly emotional community reaction, trial, finding of guilt, and then, on review, the reversal of the conviction as having been based on wholly false evidence and testimony. In their unfolding of events and denouement, these episodes strongly resemble the tragic prosecutions for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts in the 1690s.

An understanding the genesis of the Salem Witchcraft episode provides a way of understanding the genesis of these latter-day Satanic sexual abuse episodes. The scheme of social cosmologies developed by the anthropologist Mary Douglas tells us that these episodes of false accusation and prosecution are the entirely expectable response of a psychic community experiencing a threat to its cohesiveness. Thus, the holder of a communitarian cosmology will tend to understand a threatening outsider in terms of thoroughgoing evil; although the acts of which the outsider is accused of committing did not in fact occur, the individual holds an unshakable belief that they did occur.

Although the accused in these episodes ultimately are vindicated, they typically experience psychological and economic devastation, a harm for which, because of the strong tradition in United States law of prosecutorial immunity, there is no redress. The falsely accused thereby are "crimeless victims". The anthropological understanding of the genesis of these false accusations exposes a considerable weakness in the processes by which the criminal process is initiated and carried out, a weakness that can be remedied by a modified approach to the matter of prosecutorial immunity. e-mail: DJB@fs.law.wlu.edu

[HOME] [BOOKS] [ORDERING] [JOURNALS] [ABSTRACTS] [LINKS] [SPECIAL OFFERS]