Should we apologise?

[orsinian]

When I left school, in the early 1980s, I worked for a while in West Germany, right at the height of the Cold War. At the time there were Europe-wide demos against Cruise and Pershing missiles. Whilst I worked in the country I came into contact with plenty of activists, and in due course (well actually quite a few years later) I started calling myself a feminist.

And in the course of the intervening years I've been pretty proud of the movement, with just a few exceptions (the SCUM manifesto for instance).

In the last few months though, particularly when talking to some new female students in Bradford, I'm finding the subject of one of the more embarrassing moments in history is coming up, more and more regularly, and it isn't referencing feminism in a positive fashion.

I'm writing about SRA - Satanic Ritual Abuse, from the late 1980s and 90s. It pretty much passed me by all that time ago, really 'cos I wasn't back in England until the mid-nineties.

But the subject won't go away, and I'm sick to death of hearing the accusation that feminism colluded with christian fundamentalism during the 'witch-hunt' years, and I'm really sick of hearing that idea from student historians and social scientists who are studying the subject in scary detail.

I don't want to start a thread about the existence or not of SRA-there's more than enough on the subject on the Web (try for instance 'feminists satanic ritual abuse' in Google).

No, what I want to ask is, how do we, a generation or two after the events of the 80s and 90s, get a line drawn under all of it? It had nothing to do with feminists of my age and those who followed.

In Germany, I remember that young Germans hated being associated with a generation who had made their mistakes 30-odd years ago previously. If mistakes were made during the SRA years, why should later feminists be expected to be associated with those errors?

I know its a distasteful subject, and I know it stirs emotions. If you think though it will remain just a background hum, then you will be sadly mistaken. The subject, judging by the stuff on the Web, isn't going to go away anytime soon.

I'm not sure this is the kind of consensus the OP meant. :)

A little more on how Christian bucketheads were rather more to blame than 'feminists'...

i remember the SRA but i cant remember any talk of it being down to feminists.

im confused-is this a thread from the op debating/asking whether the feminists at that time should appologise?
or is this a thread from the op saying that people are going about saying this and what do we think?

if people are going about saying this now-why now?

Christian bucketheads are a laughing stock, they have no power at all. Their members are sometimes harassed for wearing crosses at work or for saying prayers in hospitals. They are an ineffectual joke. Feminists also have very little real power. That site is quite good and illuminates some of the issue. But it misses the big picture completely. Christian fundamentalists in social services and feminists were convenient fall guys. There is no way that this would have been international news if it had been whipped up by Christian bucketheads. Politicians watched it on TV with their arms folded, "experts" told them it was real. the police and the judiciary swung into action. There was much more behind this than some Christian fundamentalists working for the social services department.

Claig, while Christian fundamentalists are (quite rightly) a joke in the UK these days, in the early 90s there were quite a few of these nutjobs in positions of reasonable power. Like James ANderton and the other bloke who's name I have forgotten who was head of the Vice Squad in London.

Hadn't heard of James Anderton. Looked him up, he was known as "God's copper". "This led to the press and the public questioning his mental health and capability to perform his job appropriately. He was often in conflict with the city's political leadership during the 1980s". The press and the politicians made fun of him. He was a figure of fun and possibly a laughing stock. "God's copper" probably gave Christians a bad name. Politicians don't take Christian fundamentalists seriously, more often they are ridiculed and used as a stick to beat ordinary Christians with.

I've been googling and found that a couple of feminists:
a Sarah Nelson who said "The Satanic Panic Conspiracy is the only known alliance in history of evangelical Christians, militant feminists, sectioned psychiatric patients, social work managers, psychodynamic psychotherapists and Highland police sergeants - all orchestrated from California by Prof. Roland Summit. Get real!"
AND that Bea Campbell - who wrote in support of some horrible, invasive methods used to determine if children had been abused.
And a working partner of Campbells who was apparently one of the 4 people on the independent review team sued for libel. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrix_Campbell)
have been caught up in and may have exasperated the moral panic.
But on the other hand there were those feminists who criticised the SRA diagnosis for diverting resources from proven cases of abuse.

The Marxist feminist, Bea Campbell, had a Guardian column where she told Guardian readers that it was all real. I think it is not her feminism that is significant, but her Marxism. She was also given an OBE. Seems that the establishment quite like Marxists.

Claig: while people laughed at Anderton, he had the power to ruin lives. There was a problem within social services in the 90s with SWs going on training courses that were run by mad Christians, and absorbing all the madness and putting it into practice. Of course, there were also SWs with fundamentalist marxist viewpoints which were equally unhelpful.
Unfortunately a lot of people who get involved in the 'caring' professions are abusers or control freaks who get off on having power over others: whether they justify what they are doing via a Christian outlook, a marxist one or a feminist one, they are still arseholes.

I agree it's not that she's a feminist that's significant. But she seems to be just about all I can come up with that the OP might be referring to - as the OP won't actually tell us herself just what she is on about.

The "mad Christians" were running seminars on satanic abuse for police forces. Who do you think agreed to these seminars and signed them off? The NSPCC said it was happening. There were "experts" like "Diane Core from Childwatch, who at one time was reported as claiming that over 4,000 children a year were being sacrificed to the devil in the U.K.". The media was pumping out the news on every channel. Documentaries were made that fanned the flames. The socialist Guardian gave the Marxist Bea Campbell a platform where she told Guardian readers that it was real. The right-wing Daily Mail, as so often, stood against the tide. Do you think that the Director General of the BBC, the politicians and the "experts" were all stupid enough to be taken in by some "mad Christians" from the backwoods of the Bible Belt in the USA, talking about Satan's battle with the Lord?
The "mad Christians" were fall guys.

I remember the Rochdale case and also remember being a bit dubious about it all at the time. Don't remember bugger all about it being to do with feminism though. There's been so many media frenzies since - swine flu, MMR, I really can't keep up with them all.

OP - please explain things fully and don't ask me to spend my time googling just to work out what you're talking about. I have a young baby, not much time, and a reduced attention span as I MN whilst BF. Doesn't mean I'm stupid or not interested though. Just make it easily accessible please.

Oh, and in answer to your title question:

NO.

These media frenzies are interesting. The "experts" told us that satanic abuse was happening and Bea Campbell in the Guardian told us it was real. The "experts" told us that tens of thousands of us would die from swine flu and the Guardian's Ben Goldacre didn't go against the advice. The "experts" tell us that we have passed the "tipping point" and we are all doomed because global warming is real, and the Guardian's George Monbiot tells us we should heed their advice. The "experts" tell us that the MMR scare is unfounded and the Guardian's Ben Goldacre agrees with them. You pays your money and makes your choice. I choose to read the Daily Mail. They were right about the satanic panic and they challenged some of the swine flu scares, and they were one of the first to publicise the Climategate emails. They don't take what the "experts" say at face value.

Claig: DO you also think the Daily Mail is right about immigrants eating the royal swans?

SGB wrote:
"there is a strand of feminism which often does hook up with rightwing religious knobbers: what the two strands have in common is hatred and fear of sexuality and a desperate desire to control other people."

Examples please

BEcause it's starting to do my head in SGB, that you confuse feminists acceptance, celebration and promotion of female sexuality with canned, cookie-cut representations of male-sexuality of the kind you see in porn.
HAve your opinion , but if you think that feminists' condemnation of porn is somehow connected to a fear of female sexuality then you have it backward. Porn is a stamping out of female sexuality for a male market. And women who participate in porn have probably conditioned to believe that their sexuality can only exists mirrored through male eyes i.e it's not authentic.

It's really obvious why this thread has been started. (Claig, it's not about Christians, so don'T worry.) It's been started in the feminist topic because someone has taken it upon themselves to smear feminists and link the movement with SRA.
NOw I am a feminist and I'd never heard of it. The OP talks about a "deep flaw in feminism". ONly someone who didn'T know anything about feminism would say that, or someone who was an anti-feminist.
I have no idea who the OP is, and I'm not interested, but what has been interesting about this thread is how threatening feminists appear to be to some people if they have to really go scraping the bottom of the barrel to dig up some non-existant dirt.

Hasn't really worked has it though Sakura? No-one's going to read this thread and go "OMG feminists! So naughty with their witch-hunting tendencies!"

Bloody ironic when you think of how often feminists get accused of being "witch hunters" - er, no, that was the other guys. You know, the ones who tortured and terrified and killed thousands of women across Europe? I imagine any feminists of the day were far more likely to be on the bonfire than targetting women to put on it. :(

(Is it weird that I am still sad about the witch hunts?)

Claig, your claig Sun 26-Sep-10 23:26:25 post was brilliant.

off-topic: I've only just clocked that you are a Christian conservative, which is interesting because I agree with many of your posts, and I'm a feminist socialist. I take on board the points you make about a too-heavy state, I hadn't considered them before

Elephants, I'm starting to think patriarchy is ALL about projection.
Look at that Malicious MOther Syndrome thing that's just come out in courts, when in reality it's the fathers who behave like that. OR gossip- men are the worst gossips EVER. OR materialism- men are more materialistic but everyone acts like women are. ANd here, a witch-hunt, and if you protest you're accused of witch-hunting yourself

I know exactly what you mean, in fact I started a thread a while ago talking about things likes that. It comes right down to the ridiculous "spends ages clothes shopping" and "gossiping" stuff. Men gossip IMO far more than women, how else do the old boy networks keep going?

It's like that tosser on the M&S thread - keeps positing himself as a lone "alternative" viewpoint in a feminist wilderness.

Oh yes, I remember that thread. It wasn't my idea at all then- a straight steal, sorry!

LOL at "that tosser on the other thread". He thinks he's so original, doesn't he . That he has to keep posting, otherwise we'd forget people like him exist

Ha I don't think you can steal ideas like that - you just listen to the crap people come out with and eventually think ooh but wait a minute, do women actually do this? Not really.

Did you see where he accused us of not reading his posts, and then asked whether I had asked him another question? I had, he just hadn't read the post

Do they think they're providing a service or what?

Projection thread here :)