 here. So did you know that we have an epidemic of child abuse? We have an epidemic of white supremacy? We have an epidemic of carbs? We have an epidemic of Islamic terrorism? How do we know that we have an epidemic? Well, we are blessed by activists who tell us that we have an epidemic. If we didn't have those gosh darn activists telling us that we have an epidemic, we'd go along thinking that life was just peachy. But thank God for the activists. Thank God for those people who are putting it all on the line and who are so incredibly dedicated to letting us know that we have an epidemic in our midst. Guys, there's an epidemic of child abuse just raging in the Jewish community, in the Orthodox Jewish community, in the Christian community, in the Catholic Church, in the Mormon community, in the Islamic community. And how do we know this? We have activists who get most of their feeling of importance in life from making the case that we have this malady, that we have this epidemic. And I remember one friend of mine who was very active in one of these causes. And he said to me how tired he was, how beaten down he was, how he was dealing with nothing but syrups, nothing but trouble, trying to raise consciousness about an epidemic in our midst. And he said, there's nothing that I'm getting out of this. He said, yeah, you get a reason to feel superior to everyone else. So you'll notice that most people with the cause, whether it's for climate change or child abuse or white supremacy, these activists, they invariably have this very strong sense that they're better than everyone else. They are the brave truth seekers who are going to save humanity. And why do they get out of it? They get out of it, this sense that they're important. Just like I get a sense of my importance out of puncturing the pomposity of other people. So we all got to get our feeling of importance somewhere. And I think the person who did the best job on this topic of child abuse is a philosopher by the name of Ian Hacking. He wrote, he wrote in 1991, the making and molding of child abuse. So did you know that prior to 1962, there wasn't any such category as child abuse? There was cruelty to children, which was a movement opposed to cruelty to children, which really grew out of the cruelty to animals movement. But there was no grand thing called child abuse. So I was born in 1966. So as long as I've been conscious, there's been growing and growing and growing awareness about the evils of child abuse. And child abuse has been extended to a parent who yells at you, a parent who doesn't give you the right diet. It's child abuse. A parent who lets you watch too much TV, that's child abuse. A parent who sends you to church or to synagogue, that's child abuse. But prior to 1962, there wasn't any such category as child abuse. So how did our values and our moral codes change so quickly and so dramatically? You think, whoa, you got whiplash from suddenly gay marriage has gone from this idea on the fringe to now it's a dominant moral credo of our time. And you think like, how the hell did this happen so quickly? I'm bewildered, I'm bedeviled. Well, all sorts of moral categories just whipped up seemingly overnight. And then there's this major force behind them. And then they just blow through society like a gale. And all sorts of our institutions and values and the ways that we understand life, it just turned upside down. So, you know, what's awesome about Christendom, Christendom is the unpolitically correct term for the West. What's awesome about Christendom is that we're constantly engaging in consciousness raising. And I mean, that's what I'm all about here. I'm here to raise your consciousness. And you can call this civilizing. We're just constantly getting educated and our awareness is getting is getting raised. So, we're just finding out more and more about child abuse, not just the horrible facts, but we're clarifying our ideas. Right. We're sharpening our moral sensibilities. Right. And so this is not like getting a better conception of multiple sclerosis or of the gene. Right. It's not that we're getting closer to some permanent truth about child abuse. Right. We're just evolving our ideas about what it means to be human and what's acceptable and what behaviors are unacceptable. And so we're becoming more self-conscious about hurt and what is abuse. We see all sorts of events now in terms of child abuse, which prior to 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, 50 years ago now, prior to 1962, would never been considered child abuse. So we just make up stuff. And that's not a criticism because sometimes we make up stuff which evolves us, civilizes us, makes us better. But I remember from my first years of schooling, I noticed that every year there'd be some new educational fad blowing through the school system. As a child, I wasn't able to articulate it. But you just experience the world around us. Black lives matter. All the latest fads and epidemics. And yeah, stuff is just being made up. We start labeling things like child abuse, climate change, white privilege. And we make these labels and then we become affected by these labels. And then these classifications start describing and shaping our own actions. And they start shaping our own constrained choices. So we decide how we're going to act and what we're going to do in large part based on these new descriptions and classifications. We behave differently in the light of how we are classified. We behave differently according to how we present ourselves to ourselves and to other people. So starting in 1970s, but really accelerating in the 1980s, it was always some new TV spectacular about child abuse. And Ian Hacking first read about this, the philosopher in 1986. And he saw what was coming. He saw that there'd be this enormous feeling of liberation. What type of people are going to be most likely to experience enormous feelings of liberation? Those who are really into feelings. I don't want to classify people. I don't want to be biologically reductionist. I don't want to say, oh, women are more into their feelings than guys. But let's just say there's been a continuous, enormous feeling of liberation that women have been experiencing and expressing when they're finally allowed to recover the ways in which their parents sexually molested them. All right, recovered memory. You get a therapist and the therapist helps you uncover, discover, recover, all these memories of, you know, satanic things that happen to you. So in the late 1980s, you had all these accusations of ritual abuse and satanic abuse, and it just like spread from town to town. It was just the, it was just the in thing. I mean, it was on Oprah. It was on, it was on all the tabloid TV shows. Vicki Poland, who's a major sexual abuse activist in the Jewish community. She was on Oprah talking about how she was raised in, you know, a satanic cult. And I talked to people who grew up with her. I talked to, you know, family members. They had no memory of this particular cult. But it absolutely shaped her whole way of life. So you had the McMartin preschool trial where there was this preschool in Southern California where supposedly, you know, all this awful stuff was going down. And and then eventually there were no, there were no convictions. All right, it was just just kind of petered out. So there was a terrific six part podcast series on Teal Swan, The Suicide Catalyst. And part five talks about this whole whole system of recovered memories. Right. Suddenly, all these people are recovering their memories about being abused as children. Not not not particularly validated, not not not particularly strong, you know, evidence for these for these memories. But they are powerful to some people. Said to me was like, well, you know why we're here, right? I was like, you know, like you invited me. And she started talking about how like we knew each other from past lives and stuff like that. Tori says she was skeptical of Teal. But she liked hanging out with her in Blake, Teal's friend and business partner. She says they'd cook meals together and binge watch New Age self-help DVDs. There was something about Teal that had me kind of stick around. We kind of had this little like understanding of depression and difficult situations growing up. I was just the depressed loner. Hers was to a different level. But so there was like that type of like people want importance. People want attention. And these movements, you know, give people attention just like alternative medicine. It's bespoke, meaning it's personalized. And gurus like Teal Swan, you know, give people the individual attention and affirmation that they need, even though often it's leading them down a very self-destructive path. After really like, okay, like she kind of gets me. The summer after they met in 2012, their relationship shifted. Teal started telling Tori some strange things, like how they actually knew each other when they were kids, even though they grew up in different areas of Utah. We got in a fight because she was telling me these things that were insane. She began to start telling me that I had actually grown up with her and that I was a part of this cult that she had been experiencing. That when we were at this ritual in the woods in the mountains, it was like a child sacrifice. And she would kind of say things like, do you remember the trees? Do you remember the fire? The people? And I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. That's insane. She just said that there was a lot of work that I needed to do because I was repressing all of these memories of being abused to the degree that she says that she had been abused. So we just got in this argument that ended with me just being in tears because I'm like, I care about you as a friend, but I can't grasp this. I don't understand what you're doing here, why you're telling me this and why you're trying to convince me so much that this thing happened. So finally she just wrote down on a piece of paper, Barbara Snow. Barbara Snow, remember that name? She was Teal's therapist and Teal wanted Tori to go see her, but we'll come back to that a little bit later. When I started reporting on Teal Swan, I was concerned with her current practices and how it might harm some of the people who find her online. But the more I found out about her past, about the abuse she says she suffered, the more I realized just how much it shaped her current methods and the authority she has today with her followers. And no one understands that better than Teal. If there is no abuser, there is no Teal Swan in the world today. They're not mutually exclusive. It is because of a lot of the suffering. So why do we get these hysterias? Number one, we like drama. So the emptier we are, the more predisposed we are to getting swept away by drama, right? The more desperate we are to feel important, the more vulnerable we are to conspiracy theories and drama. And two, a lot of people get their primary feeling of importance from whipping up fears about an epidemic, an epidemic of homelessness, an epidemic of global warming. You don't know who Teal Swan is. She is a guru who talks a lot about suicide. And I'll put a link to a great podcast series about Teal Swan here in the comments section. So activists get their primary sense of importance in life and superiority from raising awareness about a particular issue. And then news media plays a role in here. How does news media make its money by attracting eyeballs and subscribers and advertisers? And you do that by compelling attention. So two groups of people are strongly incentivized to get you to believe that there are major dramas and epidemics and crises. We've got a homelessness crisis. Guys, we've got an epidemic of cancer and heart disease. We need a war on cancer. We need a war on heart disease. We need a war on drugs. We need a war on homelessness. We need a war on poverty. We need a war on white supremacy. We need a war on Islamic terrorism. We need a war on child abuse. Next time you hear about a crisis, ask who benefits. Sometimes there are genuine crises, but it doesn't hurt to ask who is benefiting. Just look at the space that I'm in now, live streamers. What's the best way to attract the following is to tell people that they're being screwed over, that they're being victimized. You white man, you are being screwed over. You are being left behind. The white race is going extinct and all the elites are against you, but I'm standing up for you. I'm on your side. That kind of con is the most effective way to build an audience. You tell your audience that they are victimized, but you're going to fight for them. You're going to stand up for them against the evil elites. There's an enormous appetite for that. But what kind of people? Unhappy people who want to believe that their problems are not their problems. You do a show on toxic masculinity. There's an enormous audience out there. There's an enormous audience out there who wants to be told and believe that their primary problems in life are due to toxic masculinity. There's an enormous audience out there for men's rights activists. Men, you're being screwed over. The elites are out to get you. The whole legal system is biased against you. The big corporations are biased against you. Organized religion has turned its back on you. I am there for you, though. I will fight for you. And if necessary, I will die for you. And if you can just, whatever you can give, I just appreciate your support because I'm on your side and I'm there to protect you against these evil outside forces. That's the Khan. And it's very effective. Okay, so you get to uncover all these memories of when you're abused as a child and you allow people to kind of get off the hook for their own failures or you tell people about toxic masculinity or white supremacy or global warming and you get people, you know, a distraction away from the fact that they are the primary source of their own misery. You come on here, you do a show and say, you are the primary source of your own misery. That's not blaming you. You didn't choose to be miserable. You did not choose to be a porn addict. You did not choose to be an under owner. You did not choose to be an alcoholic. You did not choose to be a dope fiend. You did not choose, you know, to be an incel, right? You didn't deliberately choose to be miserable, right? But you are still the primary source for your misery, even though you didn't consciously choose it, you ingrain certain habits, right, which started off as adaptive. Like, you started off as a tiny infant, your parents were ignoring you and you learned to get pleasure from playing with your genitals or you learned to get pleasure from eating a lot or you learned to get pleasure from, you know, inflicting pain on yourself, right? You learn these adaptive ways of dealing with, you know, your parents not paying attention to you or your pain or your struggles or, you know, calming your anxiety. You learn these techniques which start off as adaptive and then they quickly spiral into maladaption and that's where we are, right? That's where we are. We are the primary source of our own problems, but there's not a gigantic audience for that. Eventually, nobody wants to hear that they are the primary source of their own problems. People want to hear that their ex-girlfriends are primary source of their problems, that their rabbi is the primary source of their problems, that their church is the primary source of their problems, that capitalism is the primary source of their problems, that toxic femininity is the primary source of their problems. Like, that's the way to build a following. As a guru, you say, look, the problems are out there, and I am going to do battle to protect you against these evil forces out there that are holding you down. So in Great Britain in the 1980s, did you hear about the Cleveland affair? Right? There was an article in Lancet that recommended a forensic technique known as anal dilation. It detects possible buggery of infants and children. Right? So this is in Lancet, the most prestigious British medical journal. And so two pediatricians in a working class area of northeast England used it as grounds for placing 121 children in care. So why do people become activists? Now why do people like publish articles in Lancet? And a large part to feel important, how do you get to feel important? You get to increase your power, right? You get to take children away from their parents and put them in care, like in the care of the state, right? And you got to do that so you can feel like you're saving those children and you have the power over people's lives. So pretty much everyone is driven by a desire to feel greater and greater importance, pretty much all professions, whether it's rabbi or social worker or psychiatrist or accountant or lawyer or doctor. Everyone wants to maximize the income and the prestige of their profession and to try to cut down competitors at the knees. So you had now in Britain with the Cleveland affair, you had daily tabloids in the local MP talking about these experts who are destroying British family life and preempting the rule of law. So in America you get all these new child abuse scandals provoking untold amounts of rage against the accused. In Britain it became the pediatricians and the social workers who were bitterly hated. So anal dilation was at the center of this public inquiry. So by 1986 it started to be a growing backlash against child abuse dilation. And so by 1990 California was repealing all these programs to teach young children to recognize the abuses, the signs of sexual abuse. So by 1990 California was repealing this on the grounds that young children did not reach an age of maturity which they could understand what was being taught to them. So why is this kind of hysteria happening? Why are we constantly being made aware of all these new evils in our midst that until now we've just been so good at ignoring? Well this is all constructed. So socially constructed we're just making up categories and people. Now sometimes what we're constructing and what we're making up does more good than harm. Like sometimes it does raise our awareness and provide us with more clarity. There is a real thing called child abuse. Child abuse is a useful term for some things. But this whole child abuse movement has gone, has just completely transformed life as we know it. And it's done some good things and a lot of bad things. So in 1960 we had absolutely no glimmerings that we would be in the midst of a child abuse epidemic by the 1980s. We had no idea that there were all these evils that needed to be ferrated out and would become called child abuse. So did you know what the most striking feature of child abuse is? A pervasive feeling of depression. So if you're feeling down it's probably because you're abused as a child. So here's a panel, Washington DC, a panel of child care experts. So you know they're disinterested and objective. That'll be fair. Pointed by the government has concluded that child abuse and neglect in the United States now represents a national emergency. So what do these child abuse experts get out of proclaiming that child abuse is now a national emergency? They get power, prestige, speaking engagements. They get to go on TV. They get a feeling of importance and they likelihood get more money. And this panel assailed America's lack of an effective response. So this is like 1975. And so you got new methods, new agencies, new laws, new education of children, new information for parents, new therapies, and new and growing knowledge that will transform the world. So how do you go from a few hundred kids in America being victims of child abuse to millions of kids being victims of child abuse? You just change what counts as child abuse. How do you get a massive increase in the number of Americans who suffer from an anxiety disorder? You change the definitions of what counts for anxiety disorder. How do you get an epidemic of depression in America? You change the definitions and the classification for what counts as depressed. How do you get an epidemic of obesity? You change the definitions for what counts as obese. How do you get an epidemic of cancer and heart disease? You reduce other forms of death. Therefore, people live longer and they die from these long running disease of cancer and heart disease. So by 1981, there were over a million reported cases of child abuse and neglect. So now neglect is child abuse. By 1989, 2.4 million cases were reported. So did the number of child abuse cases double entirely due to better reporting because our consciousness was raised? Did child abuse significantly increase from 1975 to 81 to 89? Out on the streets, you've got all these weary, overworked and under-trained social workers all depressed and feel like giving up. You say, oh, if only we had more time, if only we had more power, if only we made more money. So what do we get for more and more activists in the child abuse industry? You get more and more child abuse. If you have more and more anti-racism activists, what will you get? You'll get more and more racism. You have more and more anti-Islam activists. You'll have more and more reports of bad behavior by Muslims. So California first passed its Child Assault Prevention Training Program about 1986. And by 1990, it had done away with it. So the program taught children to be on the lookout. So you got the journal Child Abuse and Neglect established in 1976. It was full of harsh news but confident knowledge. But now the tenor of the article is very different. The child abuse scene is far more depressed than it was in the 1970s. So this concept of child abuse is completely reworked the way we understand morality, religion, law, psychology, medicine, etc. So child abuse is perhaps the most heinous crime. But there was no such category as child abuse prior to 1962. There was cruelty to children, which kind of an extension of cruelty to animals. So we used to have a visceral moral revulsion against a parent neglecting a baby or beating a child or beating an animal or engaging in incest. But now we're taking all these categories and lumping them under child abuse. And people who perpetrate them, we call them child abusers who are just like the worst people. And children tend to be fairly innocent. You start bringing in these incredibly loaded terms like child abuse and their primitive, their primitive moral deep-seated sensitivities are going to become highly, highly aroused. So our whole value system is being affected by this trajectory of child abuse over the past 30 years. A lot of the suffering I went through with him and a lot of the awakening experiences I had in that torture that I'm even doing what I'm doing today. That's Teal Swan. So were you raised in a satanic cult? Yeah, child abuse is not giving your five-year-old daughter testosterone shots as she says she feels like a boy. I'm Jennings Brown with Gizmodo and this is The Gateway. Thanks Jennings. Memories. So this is a really good six-part podcast series on Teal Swan, The Suicide Catalyst and I'll throw in a link here to Vicki Poland who... It's a secret world full of abuse that many refuse to believe exists. Tonight one Idaho woman is sharing her story. This newscast is from October 2014. It's a local ABC affiliate in Boise, Idaho. For 13 years reality for Teal Swan was that of a satanic cult. Life according to Swan consisted of abuse both physically and sexually and murder. Teal Swan is sitting in an office chair across from a local news reporter. Stock footage of fire and occult symbols flash on the screen. The trauma in Teal's childhood is a major part of her identity as a spiritual leader. She spoke publicly about it, written about it, made videos. It was a part of her spiritual awakening and many of her followers cite her history as one of the main reasons they follow her. Many of the people I spoke with throughout reporting this story mentioned Teal's abuse. I feel like it gave me permission not to be perfect too and I think that's why a lot of people are so inspired by her. So one of the major crusaders against sexual abuse in the Jewish community is Vicky Poland. In 1989 she appeared on the Oprah TV show as Rachel. So the show was broadcast May 1, 1989. The show was titled Mexican satanic cult murders and during one segment Oprah presents Vicky Poland going under the pseudonym Rachel who's undergoing long-term psychiatric treatment for multiple personality disorder. As a child my next guest was also used in worshipping the devil, participated in human sacrifice rituals and cannibalism. She is currently in extensive therapy, suffers from multiple personality disorder, which there's no such thing by the way, meaning she's blocked out many of the terrifying and painful memories of her childhood. Meet Rachel who is also in disguise to protect her identity. So Rachel said she had witnessed the ritual sacrifice of children and had been a victim of ritualistic abuse. I was born into a family that believes in this. And does everyone else think it's a nice Jewish family? Ask Oprah, introducing Rachel's religion. From the outside you appear to be a nice Jewish girl and you are all worshiping the devil inside the home. Right, said Rachel. There are other Jewish families across the country. It's not just my own family. Okay, so the Jewish community rose up in outrage and got this show taken off the air. Like just, just shut it down, shut it down. So when you were brought up in this kind of evilness, did you just think it was normal over us? Rachel says she's blocked out memories but she remembered enough to say there are rituals in which babies would be sacrificed. Not all Jewish people sacrifice babies. It's not a typical thing. This is the first time I heard of any Jewish people sacrificing babies. But anyway, so you witnessed the sacrifice as Oprah? Right. When I was very young I was forced to participate in that and I had to sacrifice an infant. So the phones at Jewish organizations just started, you know, ringing off the hook. The phones at Oprah's production house Harpo, you know, jangled with hundreds of irate callers objecting to Oprah's blithe acceptance of Rachel's claims about Jews practicing devil worship. TV stations across the country were inundated with furious callers. Jewish groups rose up in condemnation. Oprah's show became a national news story and it's probably the worst publicity Oprah ever received. She was criticized for offending sensibilities of race and religion and she'd always put herself forward as a champion on, you know, the whole issues of race and religion. So Oprah had said on the air that Rachel was one particular person talking about her particular situation and she was identified at the top of the show as being mentally disturbed. So recognizing the danger of a national boycott of the Oprah Winfrey show and the potential loss of the sponsors, the CEO, the chief operating officer of Oprah's production house offered to meet with Jewish leaders to salvage the situation, but neither he nor Oprah offered a public apology. So feeling battered by the bruising she was taking the nation's press over a devil worshiping show, Oprah stayed at home and then a nice Jewish lady said, I think I can help you. She got on the phone to a good friend, Abraham Lincoln Moravitz, federal judge. He agreed to help and so he, Judge Moravitz, worked on Oprah's behalf to assemble a group of representatives from the Jewish community to try to quell this raging controversy and they all sat down. Oprah said she was really contrived. She vowed never again to broadcast the show on devil worship. She reached out to Ben A. Brith, which fights anti-Semitism and racism. So she'd reach out there whenever her show focused on those subjects. She promised to exercise better care in selecting her guests. The two sides came together to put out statements to the press and now she refused to make an apology on her show or to publicly comment on the program, but she embraced her two major Jewish defenders and she kept them close to her for the rest of her life. They were invited to all her parties and because of them, Oprah became much more involved in Jewish causes. So the story has a very happy ending. Something about how authentic she was about her past really resonated with me. If someone can go through the darkness and like see the light, then like anyone can because she was so her her story is just unbelievable. Like it's just she went through fucking hell, like actual hell. And because my story is as dark as her story, she could relate to someone who I've been through, what she has been through too, because she has been through the worst of humanity and I've been through the worst of humanity too. This last voice is Emmanuel Amana, I met him at Teals Philius Center in Costa Rica. Emmanuel is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. Spirituality helped him cope with the trauma, but nothing quite resonated with the darkness he felt inside. So I remember I was I was bedridden by some mysterious ailment that doctors call chronic fatigue syndrome and basically held me captive in large part between 1988 and until about nine months ago. And it was my stupid vegetarian diet. Once I started taking these B4 encapsules, all the problems went away. But about six years of my twenties, I was basically bedridden. And I was so lonely because I was living in a fairly isolated part of Northern California. So I was fairly desperate to reach out to people. And so I started placing singles ads. And I was kind of because I was desperate and not really connected to people and not in a good place. My first singles ad was really bad. It's like, you know, lonely, pathetic, you know, desperate guy. That was basically my ad. And what type of women responded that, you know, only lonely, desperate, you know, maladjusted, anti-social women responded. Then I kind of saw what was happening. I reworked my ad to make it like really positive. And then I got positive women coming back. So we attract people. And so Teal Swan attracts a certain type of person like her, her darkness and her tales are being raised in, you know, satanic ritual child abuse. Like it really resonates with some people. And that's the thing when you are a live stream performer, there is this tendency to go to those very dark places that you would not go if you were seeing people face to face, face to face, we get enough cues that we don't tend to go to these really dark places unnecessarily. But when you go on the internet, we tend to become much darker, tend to become much more impulsive, much more self aggrandizing, much more self centered, much more narcissistic. These, these are many of the inevitable consequences of creating an E personality. So, so Teal Swan and, and you know, many people I noticed in these live streaming spheres, they appeal to what's worse than people. And they appeal to the darkness. They, they affirm people's sense of victimhood. You should be enraged. You're being screwed. I mean, talk radio. This is the formula for winning talk radio and for winning cable TV opinion host. Like I'm on your side, but all the elites are just out to screw you over. You're being victimized. Now, child abuse could not become nearly as prominent. If not for the women's movement. All right. So we used to talk about battered wives. Then we started talking about battered children. Right. Well, no, it's actually the other way around. Battered child entered the English language in 1961. Then battered wives came about later after about 1970. But without feminism, this whole idea of child abuse would not have, you know, absorbed the notion of the sexual abuse of children. So wife assault and child assault become assimilated. And so we got this entire phenomenon of child abuse. It's just one more aspect guys of patriarchal domination. And then rights. Right. We're rethinking rights because of child abuse. Right. This whole notion of children's rights is new because whenever you start extending rights to one group, you're simultaneously taking rights away from another group. So civil rights legislation in 1965 raised rights for some groups who'd been oppressed, remove rights from other groups. So grandma could no longer be as careful in who she rented her guest room to or her, you know, her guest house too. Right. You couldn't employ who you wanted. Right. We lost freedom of association. And so when you had this whole movement of children's rights, you are simultaneously taking away from parents rights. When you invite in the state to raise children, you are taking away the rights of parents and of communities and of religions and of traditional ways of life to operate as they see fit. So you never get to give one group rights without simultaneously taking rights away from someone else. Just like in international relations, you never have one country getting stronger without other countries getting weaker by comparison because power and threat is on a relative basis. So we get this whole explosion of children's rights after 1960. The whole relations between the rights of parents and the rights of children have been reconfigured. So men tend to think about how to solve human problems in terms of rights and obligations. Women tend to think about doing so in terms of needs and caring. Right. So this whole area has been moved along primarily by women and then preempted in the public arena by men with their enthusiasm for rights. And men think about children, they need rights. They need ingenious legal mice to create rights for them. Women think, oh, children just need to be loved and cared for. Juries. Right. So 1990, US Supreme Court ruled five to four to allow testimony by cable TV. So you no longer had a right to fight face-to-face confrontation that that's been done away with because of child abuse. In New Jersey, one bad touch of a child gets you 10 years in jail and $100,000 fine. And New Jersey juries have convicted people for cases of sexual abuse that don't involve any violence and no sex. And then the whole notion of cause has been rejiggered. Right. What are the causes of child abuse? Is it poverty? Is it some disease? Is it endemic violence? Is it patriarchal cruelty? So the supposed causes of child abuse have now been labeled abuse. We have the explosion of this idea of multiple personality, which turned out to be completely bogus, like the benefits of chiropractic care. Psycho history. All right. So now we had this new way of understanding history. You've got to do someone's childhood, the history of their childhood, which turns out to be the history of child abuse. Then the state, right? Children's rights. They have to be protected not by parents or community, but by the state. So that means we often have to take children away from their parents. We need to start policing families. So we've got the emerging welfare state and social net increasing state control of the families during the 19th century. And then there's been no greater increase in state intervention into families than all the child abuse legislation, ordinances, social workers, agencies since the 1960s. Now, it reminds me a little bit about agitation regarding climate change. All right. What's the real function of all this agitation? Not so much the protection of the climate or the protection of children, but the increase in power for certain groups. All right. That's just one perspective. I don't know enough about climate change. In the 1980s, there was a fairly radical decline in the amount of federal and sometimes state funds available for children and poor single parents. So child abuse legislation became a cheaper, perhaps more effective control of deviant families and giving them welfare. Then we had this constant extension of what child abuse meant. So fetal abuse, an expectant mother who was drinking alcohol or smoking a cigarette, she was engaged in child abuse before the kid had even been born. So we got all this heightened public awareness of maternal alcoholism, fetal alcohol syndrome. Then you've got the backlash concerned about dubious law, questionable convictions and the use of child abuse in custody cases. The easiest way to separate your children from their father is to claim that the father abused them. So child abuse is perhaps the most potent weapon usually wielded by women in custody cases and in divorce cases. It's about the most stunning and decisive allegation. When Teal teaches people how to heal trauma, she's speaking from firsthand experience. I've told you about how from a young age, Teal knew she was different. She was hypersensitive and said strange things. She was treated like a complete outsider in the mostly Mormon conservative town. She grew up in. Her parents tried everything from doctors and psychologists. You are a super sensitive person. Maybe it's because you're abused as a child. So we can't expect the child abuse movement to show the integrity of the on the record laboratory science. So we know that the child abuse movement is overtly moral and political and psychological. So it's not exactly objective. So before there was child abuse, there was cruelty. That was a category cruelty to children. So we had the beginning of these philanthropic societies in the 19th century to prevent cruelty to children. And the first concern about cruelty to children was sponsored by animal protection societies. And then there was the water fountain movement. That encouraged all communities to have three level water fountains, one for people, one for horses, one for dogs. Then you had movements like Dr. Bonito in the east end of London. They would hustle boys in the carriages to be taken to homes. They had to be given shelter and a Protestant education. So these were usually Catholic children who seized away from their parents. And 140,000 of these children were sent to Toronto. They'd been straightforwardly abducted from being raised in potpourri, in Catholicism. So this created a considerable factor of wealth in Canada. Then you had 1853, you had the first children's aid society in New York. Like the children were committing petty crimes and thought, oh, we've got to take them away from their parents so that they get raised right. But the primary way that we approach child abuse today is through a medical lens. So this whole category of child abuse was introduced to us in 1962 by physicians. Physicians still lay claim to it. It's still a way for physicians to seize power and prestige and influence and money. So the physician for a long time has treated children who've been injured by a parent or a caretaker just like doctors treat burns caused by arson. But arson is a matter for the police and the fire brigade. And so for a long time cruelty to children was a matter for the police, the courts, philanthropic societies, not medicine. Now child abuse has become a medical concept. Well, cruelty to children was not primarily medical. Now, anti-cruelty agitation is largely fading away with regard to child abuse. Now child abuse is thought, you know, we primarily think of it in terms of sex. So now we're into child saving, you know, separate children from their parents. So much of what's going on in the black community is like rabbit-proof fence where white social workers or non-black, you know, social workers in schools are like trying to take their black kids away from their their parents, feed them, educate them, you know, get them away from the bad influences of the ghetto. So child saving is what's going on. So this whole concept of social work unknown prior to 1900. But by 1910, there are all these university schools of social work. So prior to 1900, there were no social workers. After 1910, you couldn't walk down the street without running into one. Thank God, someone who knows what she's doing. Someone will save us. She said he was a member of this satanic cult that involved her in their rituals. He was supposed to be like a mentor to her. She would assist him when he would treat sick animals. Often he was using holistic healing methods. He taught her about metaphysical pseudoscientific ideas like quantum healing. Now a lot of people who want to save you, they get something out of a power prestige, maybe sexual access, money. So who benefits? Art Bell notes, no live speeches from Donald Trump are allowed on YouTube. Interesting. So when did we get child abuse? Child abuse was invented in 1962. Prior to 1962, there was no child abuse. There was cruelty to children, but there's no such thing as child abuse. 1962, there was a group of doctors in Denver led by Henry Kemp, and they published the Battered Child Syndrome in the Journal of the Medical American Association. And it was accompanied by a very stern editorial on society's long silence about injuries that should have been acknowledged. So the editor speculated that more children died of battery from parents and guardians than from leukemia, cystic fibrosis, or muscular dystrophy. And the media got the message. So you need activists, you need media to get a strong social movement. So the media got the message. Newsweek led the way, right? Then time had a big story. Then the Saturday evening post came in with a long piece, parents who beat children. A tragic increase in cases of child abuse is prompting a hunt for ways to detect sick adults who commit such crimes. So this is a particularly flamboyant article. It just kind of savers all the ghastly things that parents have done to children. So we have this tragic increase. Nobody's tracking battered children. So we can't really talk about increase in rational objective terms, but adults are sick and we've got this new disease. So child abuse is a crime and it's a disease, right? It's a crime in existing law, but if it's a disease, is it a crime? And now we get child abuse becomes entrenched in the public mind. So starting in about 1945, you had doctors in noting that there are all these infants who suffered excessive blood collection beneath the skull. And under x-rays, this shows fractures of the arms or legs when there'd been no previous history of injury. So this was a phenomenon. And maybe someone was interfering with these children. Their parents were beating their children to the extent of breaking their bones. So physicians were failing in their responsibilities. Now the tide is turning. The doctor's not just going to treat the symptoms, but the cause. The parents who commit the battery, the parents are sick and they require help from the medical profession. So professions want to expand their power, expand their influence, expand their sources of income. And now there's a whole new category of people that they need to treat. Their parents who beat their kids. And then the paper puts into place one of the most widespread beliefs about child abuse, battering parents with battered children. Child abusers were abused when they were children. Right? Parents are just repeating the type of child care practice on them in their childhood. So not a whole lot of evidence for this. And then we've got the assertion that child abuse just stretches across all social classes, all races and religions. And physicians are particularly eager to declare this is their parent problem. This is their area. Hands off anyone else. Physical or nutritional or emotional abuse is one of the most common maladies of the young child. Medical profession has exhibited a lack of interest in this problem until recent years. It is the responsibility of the medical profession to assume the leadership in this field. And how you can manipulate energy with your mind to heal others. She thinks him in her first book. Well, he was a brilliant man. That's the truth. I learned a great deal about the quantum physics reality from him. A great deal about brainwaves. Whenever I hear someone talking about quantum anything, my skeptical mind immediately thinks that they don't either don't know what they're talking about or they're a scam artist. One of those two things. Yeah, great deal about human behavior. Great deal about how your energy affects other things and other people. Tons of information about vanishing into the wilderness. If you started to countdown right now, I could vanish and you'd never find me again. I doubt it. The problem with the skill that you need to use to often? Probably not. But what do you mean by quantum physics? How do you use quantum physics? The way that mind affects reality. That's basically what I teach every day. And it was one of the obsessions. But Teal also says that Doc abused her emotionally, physically, and sexually as a part of this satanic cult he was in and that her parents had no idea. How come there are satanic cults right and left in the 1980s and they're starting about 1991? You almost never hear of them again. There was this frantic phenomenon of satanic cults here and there and then the evidence for them just fails to substantiate. So there's only one prominent writer who is publicly denouncing these attitudes and it was Thomas Zaz, the outspoken critic of medical claims of psychiatry. So in his view, the battered child obviously needed medical help for it and being injured. But doctors weren't just interested in providing help for the battered child. So that just limits their power, limits their money making opportunities and their prestige. So typically children who'd been beaten were treated in outpatient clinics. But now doctors wanted to push for hospitalization of the children to separate them from the parent. The physician should never be satisfied to return the child to an environment where even a moderate risk repetition occurs. So the new agenda by the medical profession is that the parent or the caretaker is also sick, also in need of medical care. So Thomas Zaz ridiculed these assertions that parents came in asking for help and always of their own free will asked for inpatient or outpatient care once they were given a chance. So in Thomas Zaz's view, the courts are the place to deal with wrongdoers and these helping professions of psychiatrists are just fraudulent. But his piece may have amused some readers that had no effect on wider society. So we just have this explosion in child abuse literature. Like one index begins listing child abuse as a new medical category in 1965. By 1970s, there's just hundreds of papers listed there. You've got new journals, Child Abuse and Neglect, The International Journal of Child Abuse. There were no books on the topic of child abuse in 1965. There were nine books in 1975. By 1980, there are 105 books on child abuse in print. An abstract of journals such as Criminology and Penology shows 1706 entries with regard to child abuse. By 1990, there are over 600 books in print in the English language on child abuse. 1974, we got Whiplash Shaken Infant Syndrome. We got Moon-Charleson Syndrome by proxy introduced in 1977. So the medical model has been central to the early understanding of child abuse. So we've got state-by-state American legislation demanding reporting of all incidences of child abuse. So it's basically mandated on rules for notifications of disease. We've medicalized child abuse. So she got caught up in this horrible cycle. It was like this, even though he was causing me to get sicker, sicker, sicker, mentally, physically, everything. My parents, because they called him, I mean basically the reason they brought him into the begin with is because of the fact that I was having issues. So they just thought I was getting worse and worse and worse and worse and never actually a trivia that she's getting worse and worse and worse and worse to him. She says that throughout her childhood and teenage years, it was like she was living a double life. It'd be the weekend. I'd go with him doing whatever we were doing and during that time there would be like serious abuse then back home. Then it got even more intense for some time. As I grew older, it was like at nighttime, my parents would be sleeping. I'd be gone, come back right before school, start school, go to school and occasionally also where he'd be taking me out of school. I've learned about her past through talking to her and from her books and her videos and blogs. And while reporting on this story, several other people have talked about the specifics of her abuse like Tori and John Leslie's widower. This man would like program her to hide this entire part of her life from her family. So there was one bloke who was particularly influential in our understanding of child abuse and his name was David George Gill. He recently died at age 96. He taught at Brandeis University's Hello School for Social Policy and Management. And here's the first definition of child abuse that he came up with. Non-accidental physical attack or physical injury including minimal as well as fatal injury inflicted upon children by persons caring for them. Now that seems fairly objective. Then this is a second definition. Child abuse as inflicted gaps or deficits between circumstances of living which would facilitate the optimal development of children to which they should be entitled and their actual circumstances irrespective of the sources or agents of the deficit. Every one of us has suffered from child abuse according to this second definition. So both of these come from David Gill. First was used in 1967 in the first US wide survey of abused children. The second he proposed in testimony to the US Senate in 1973. So his colleagues prepared these. The first one a standardized form centered out to all state and local child abuse reporting agencies and he was getting about 6,000 reports a year for the first fairly objective definition of child abuse. But then once you move to a second definition you understand that there are millions and millions of people that everyone really has suffered from child abuse. So the first definition is about as good as you can do in 25 words or fewer. The terms are clear. They're completely non-technical. They have well established meanings. They have legal meanings. They have precedent, non-accidental physical attack, physical injury persons caring for. But his second definition is a grammatical monster. And I'm reading from this terrific essay on child abuse by Ian Hacking in 1991. So he's framing his opinion in cumbersome way. He's trying to say something immensely important. He's trying not to appear radical in public. He thinks that child battery is not such a big deal. He thinks that American society is giving kids, most kids, a bad deal. So what does he want from this second definition? Like how do you explode the number of people who suffer from anxiety or depression or high blood pressure? You start changing the meaning of what constitutes suffering from these things. You start downgrading the level of blood pressure that someone is now suffering from high blood pressure. You want more poor people? You just lower, no, you just raise the amount of minimal income and still be considered poor. So David Gill thought there were three levels of child abuse. The family, the institution, society. So institutional abuse means schools, daycare centers, police, traditional system, foster homes, medical establishments, welfare organizations. So essentially means the whole of society. And he complained, we're not going to the root causes in all three levels. We just stick to mere amelioration of the problem. But when you construe his definition strictly, that every known family with children is engaging in child abuse. So that was really his intent. So as he becomes more famous, more influential and more powerful, he seeks more fame, more influence, more power, becomes more radical. So he could have just emphasized the catastrophic character of physical abuse. But no, that's not the definition he goes in. He says, problems in our society, that abuse is just endemic in our society. Amelioration is just not cutting it. We need a paradigmatic revolution towards nonviolent societies. And he's going to show the way, guys. He's going to show the way for an egalitarian, libertarian, democratic, and nonviolent society. It's not beyond the realm of reason and human potential. These are not unrealistic in utopian. And so he's always testifying before Congress and speaking in the news media and getting famous and making money and getting to feel really important. So child abuse has become just malleable to me almost anything. February 3, 1984, the United States House of Representatives voted 396 to 4 to expand the definition of child abuse to include the denial of care to newborn infants who have life-threatening handicaps. Right? So every physician, every priest is obliged to report any incident of child abuse no matter how confidential. So if one physician believes another physician has curtailed care to a child who's about to die, who's curtailed care on the grounds that the child is irremediably damaged, then the physician must by the law report that colleague. So whole neonatal discretion has been terminated. Used her as bait to bring in a Mexican child and that child was actually burned alive as part of a satanic ritual. I think they called it the blood covenant. Teal's gone into explicit detail of the heinous things she says docked to her. Psychological manipulation, abuse, and torture. She was comfortable sharing these stories with me and with her followers but they're too explicit and unsettling to play here. Even though the events she describes are extreme, they actually sounded a little familiar to me. The details of Teal's story reminded me of this very strange chapter in American history in the 80s and 90s when people around the country were afraid that satanic cults were abusing children. The apparent practice of satanism that's worship of the devil. Now police have been skeptical when investigating these acts just as we are in reporting them but there is no question that something is going on out there and that's sufficient reason for 2020 to look into it. This 2020 special on the rise of satan worship aired back in 1985. In the 80s the fear of satanism was taking over the country. People were terrified that children were getting abducted by satanic cults and abused in demonic rituals. It was known as the satanic panic and I'll tell you how it connects with Teal in a bit. But major talk shows covered what was known as satanic ritual abuse. I'm talking Oprah. My next guest was used also in worshiping the devil, participated in human sacrifice rituals. And Heraldo Rivera. Satanism is more than a hodgepodge of mysticism and fantasy. More than a Halloween motif. It's a violent impulse. It frays on the emotionally vulnerable, especially teenagers, often lonely, lost. Heraldo, the famous show where he proposed that there was a satanic cult that was operating covertly in this country going after children. Adult satanism is violent and deemed centered on sexual ritual. He played a very large role in spreading the propaganda with all of this. This is Mary DeYoung, a sociologist at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. She's written books about the satanic panic. DeYoung says that the beginning of the satanic panic probably started in 1980 with the publication of this book called Michelle remembers. Michelle was an adult woman who recovered memories of having been satanically abused as a child. Michelle Smith went to therapy because of depression. Then her therapist started doing something with her called recovered memory work. She recovered memories of being abused in satanic rituals as a child. Michelle co-authored the book about this with her therapist. No evidence was ever found that substantiated the claims in the book. But it became a best seller and inspired other therapists and social workers to start asking their clients if they had been abused in rituals. More and more stories of satanic ritual abuse came out and many went to court. The most significant case that helped set off this nationwide panic about satanism was the McMartin preschool case in Southern California. Literally hundreds of children came forward to blame their seven daycare providers of sexually abusing them in rituals that involved cannibalism and infant sacrifice and a lot of other you know very improbable kinds of things. The McMartin case started in 1983 and lasted for seven years. Two daycare teachers went on trial and were found not guilty. At the time the case ended it was the longest trial in U.S. history. The case created a huge media frenzy and during that time similar cases were popping up all over the country. Hundreds of daycare centers were investigated about 50 trials. And let me be clear Teal's story was not one of these. We'll get to how this relates to Teal in just a bit. But there was this national panic around satanism. Even the FBI looked into it and no definitive evidence of satanic ritual abuse was ever found. Like nothing. Not one single piece of evidence. So what was going on? A lot of small things have to come together before it seems plausible to people that there could be some kind of satanic conspiracy to abuse children. So sexual offenses against children used to be kept completely distinct from cruelty to children, distinct from battery against children. But now they're all thrown in there together. So when you hear child abuse our primary understanding of the term is referencing sexual molestation. So it shows you the incredible malleability of the whole idea of child abuse. So most people now think child abuse primarily means sexual abuse and sexual abuse could mean many different things. It could be flashing, it could be molestation in a park, kangaroo humping you. Children picked up in cars by strangers and assaulted. And so we've got this increasing interest in incest. So you've got all these social workers and psychologists worrying about incest and they started speaking out. So it was just an explosion of these academic papers and books and popular books and popular articles starting in the 1970s. So the first one was in 1975, sexual molestation of children, the last frontier in child abuse. Then it started hitting the popular press in Ms. magazine in April 1977. Incest, sexual abuse begins at home. Peyton's Place 1956 shows Lucas, the father of Selena was a drunkard, a wife-beater and a child abuser in the worst way possible. He began to abuse Selena sexually when she was 14 and he kept her quiet by threatening a killer and a little brother as she went to the law. So there are all these tremendous passions here. So incest just grabs people's attention and when you grab people's attention, you can get more power and more prestige and it's easier for you to feel important and you can make money. So there's the paper, incest as child abuse. Adult child incest strikes at the very core of civilization. So there's this horror and it grabs people's attention. And then the horror leads to rage accompanied by cathartic relief because we can nowhere to direct our horror and our rage. We should direct it against the patriarchy, against the Catholic church, against men in power. So it's usually the sexual abusers who are reported against children. They're usually men. They're usually fathers, boyfriends, boyfriends of the mother, uncles, grandfathers and often the victims of both boys and girls. So this has a tremendous effect on psychotherapy. So Freud decided that most memories of incest that were uncovered in his consulting room were fantasies. Now therapists start to believe that people having memory of sexual relations with a family member, well that must be true. So the next hinterland is sibling child abuse. Siblings who are abusing others, other siblings. Now sex play among children, especially when there is a significant difference in age, this is increasingly regarded as sexual abuse. Now the whole term child abuse is kind of a weird term. I consider phrases of the form and abuse where n is a noun. Child abuse, drug abuse, substance abuse, alcohol abuse, police abuse, spouse abuse, voice abuse, sex abuse, incest abuse as opposed to doing incest responsibly, confinement abuse, contact abuse, non-contact abuse, older abuse, self abuse, voice abuse. What does that mean? Does it mean verbal abuse, abuse committed by one's voice or does it mean abuse of one's voice? Police abuse, drug abuse. What does drug abuse mean incorrectly using a drug? You're not doing the crack right guys, please just only do the crack on weekends, otherwise you're going to be abusing this great gift from God of crack cocaine. Please don't abuse the drugs guys, please use them responsibly. You're not doing the crack correctly, that's the problem. So sex abuse presumably means sexual abuse rather than abuse of sex. So contact abuse is sexual abuse of a person making contact with another person and maybe a mother in the bath asking her 12-year-old son to bring her a towel. Food abuse. So that means incontinent overeating leading to gross obesity or the opposite problem, anorexia. So we've got an explosion of wickedness and abuse. The Young describes this perfect storm of societal factors going on in the 80s that produced this moral panic. One, there was a rise of religious fundamentalism. Two, there were more women entering the workforce which increased the need for daycare and heightened this existential anxiety over mothers leaving their children behind. And then on top of that you had a third thing which may seem unrelated but they all came together I think really critically and that is that you had the rise of therapy and particularly trauma-based therapy as people became more aware of the effects of early childhood sexual abuse or physical abuse on development. So this is from the podcast, The Gateway. There was this idea that your problems might be the result of childhood trauma that you don't even remember that you might have repressed. This even included the extreme example of satanic ritual abuse. If therapists believe that satanic cults did operate they usually asked rather suggestive kinds of questions and began to build a narrative. There was a common denominator with all of these satanic ritual abuse stories. Therapists who believed ritual abuse was happening and were scared for children or who wanted to help their adult patients recover childhood trauma they might have repressed. So they did things like ask leading questions. One of the therapists who was involved in some of these cases was Barbara Snow. Well Barbara Snow is notorious in Utah for promoting false allegations of sexual abuse and she was Teal Swan's therapist. So many topics are like too abhorrent to even talk about such as incest but if you can put them in the category of child abuse then we can talk about them right. Initially no professional no social worker, doctor, lawyer, teacher, priest wants to you know talk about incest but once you can call it child abuse once we can medicalize it then we can deal with the problem. So we now get a vast variety of sexual misdemeanors like touching that get lumped with incest as though they were the same thing. Then we get non-contact sexual abuse. So we've got this whole region of what is pollution is just radically radically extended. So vice is conquering our society not because we are more vicious but because we are declaring a vastly wider range of acts to be wicked and now we know thanks to thanks to science thanks to medicine that just a well-known fact that a parent who was once fondled a child if that parent's not helped by one of our caring professions he's just going to finally consummate his evil passions. So we've got this disease model that doesn't really fit for child abuse because we don't have any clear underlying causality or structure of multiple causality. Like trying to talk about child abuse as though it's a medical condition or a disease doesn't really work and thinking of treatment for child abuse as analogous to treatment for tuberculosis to create you know highest standards of sanitation and to intervene with the ill on an individual basis. So the medical model child abusing parents are studying in terms of what is wrong with them. Now abuse is seen as a problem with certain parents who are unusual. Abuse results from some individual or family defect. Other parents are seen as normal. So this disease model legitimates the role of various health and welfare professionals who are seen as experts on these exceptional problems. And what do we need with disease? We need early detection right early screening mammograms and you know screenings for butt cancer statistically doesn't do much good but there's a whole industry for early screenings and now we need early detection of abusive families. But research on the prediction of future violence does not exactly instill confidence in the reliability or the validity of the assessment process. Yes, Teal's therapist played a part in the satanic panic. After the break I'll talk to someone who tangled with Barbara People's civilization and banish it of what was dealt these claims. Some of the underlying issues about children's suggestibility and about repressed and recovered memories I think were being scientifically challenged significantly enough that there was a pushback to stop what was going on. Look into the evidence for this kind of hand me down Freudian idea that we utilization and banish it into the unconscious where we're completely unaware of it and that we can then reliably recover it later and I was quite shocked. I found no credible scientific support for this idea. Elizabeth Loftus is a research psychologist and one of the main people who started to speak out about the dangers of recovered memory therapy. Today she's a professor at the University of California Irvine and one of the world's leading experts on false memory. She's famous for proving it's definitely possible and quite easy for people to develop false memories during therapy. I mean I'll give you a kind of a typical situation she goes into therapy maybe she's got one problem she's got an eating disorder she's depressed she's anxious and the therapist says you know the people I've had with your symptoms typically they they were sexually abused as a child did something like that happen to you and even when the patient denies any experience with child sex abuse the the therapist says well many people repress their memories and if you just why don't we just imagine would you close your eyes and try to imagine who might have done this to you. Come on guys let's do this together let's close our eyes and imagine who might have sexually abused us. In the 80s there was a pretty big disconnect between therapists who believed in recovered memory and research psychologists like Loftus speaking out against it. It turned into like a full-on battle the memory wars and the satanic panic and Barbara Snow, Teal's therapist, were all wrapped up in it. The therapists who believed in recovered memory were outraged that anyone would try to invalidate these abuse stories. Please don't don't take anything I said as invalidating your feelings guys. So many doctors and people in the child abuse industrial complex they don't like specific terms such as battered baby syndrome right they prefer generic terms like child abuse which seems weird for for doctors right we thought doctors medical research these professionals that they want causes and cures well not necessarily what they want is power power to do good right these people only want to do good they only want to help right so a more rational policy formation would require greater specificity in policy related research endeavors till there is a further delineation of that which is to be counted and estimates of its dispersion epidemiological and incidence estimation will be futile right research into child abuse may be premature until there is a detailed specification of what is child abuse until we have more refined manifestations right before events can be expected to have a common etiology cause the events themselves must share some commonality such commonalities yet to be demonstrated in the diverse phenomena the considered to be manifestations of abuse and neglect right this is about as searing a condemnation of the child abuse movement as can be imagined by other academics but doctors have triumph they now own the subject sociologists social workers describe child abuse in terms of etiology and epidemiology so we've got child abuse activists who are raising our consciousness as we find out more and more about the extent of child abuse even stuff that we don't even remember happening but what might it have felt like and who might have done that for you now you may be more cynical you may say oh child abuse is a rhetorical device for diverting attention child abuse is a rhetorical device for seizing power so in the 19th century cruel parents were not deemed sick or even pathological right there was no medical intervention except to try to you know ameliorate the suffering of the child child abuse it began with doctors in 1962 and among its opening assertions were that abusive parents are sick and in need of help and there was this power struggle over who owns child abuse and doctors triumphed so child abuse is now seen in a framework of normalcy and pathology and more and more behavior used to be seen as more normal is now regarded as abusive and abnormal so as we raise our consciousness more and more things are considered wicked and the researchers who disputed it were concerned about people being falsely accused of horrific acts and the possibility that patients were developing a false sense of their own histories these researchers would be called in as experts for court cases involving recovered memory like David raskin who was a professor at the university of utah in salt lake city i'm dr david see raskin i've done extensive research in the context of criminal investigation including how to interview children and how to analyze their statements in a couple major cases raskin was pitted against barbara snow she became the most prominent person in producing these allegations of sexual abuse so these people who whipped up hysteria over sexual abuse which there's no evidence and satanic sex panics they paid virtually no price just like those who whipped up hysteria about weapons of destruction in in iraq they paid virtually no price in fact those pundits who supported the 2003 invasion of iraq have by and large just gone on to more and more money and prestige and power and influence and those who are the loudest and strongest voices against the 2003 invasion they have gone on to no rewards so yeah often the wicked are rewarded the righteous suffer she wrote a major academic article that fueled the satanic panic it's called ritualistic child abuse in a neighborhood setting in the abstract of the paper she writes the majority of children showed little symptomology at initial referral with significant increases during the disclosure process and this study suggests that ritual abuse and neighborhood settings appears secretive coercive and complex raskin says that when he went against snow in court a major issue was that she never recorded her sessions she never took any notes she simply said this is what the child told me even though barba snow so you'll notice fbi agents never record their interactions they just take notes i didn't trust that so i heard about this great 1991 ian hacking essay because i've been reading steven turner's 2013 book the politics of expertise and he wrote in this book ian hacking's classic paper on child abuse shows the triumph of an expanded concept of child abuse it is it is the successful imposition of a definition that serves the interests of certain professional groups like doctors right the experts have a particular expertise of discretionary power right so the whole reason that child abuse is a dicey category is because social workers and physicians acting in the name of the state employ this concept and operate in terms of a consensus about it to then you know take power gain influence and money and seize seize opportunities for aggrandizement as against the interests of regular people was known to be promoting false allegations of abuse in the 80s and 90s as raskin says she continued to practice and even though the satanic panic died down and therapists became more aware of the risk so did the people who promote the invasion of 2003 iraq war step away from public life did they step down from punditry has uh jeffrey gallberg you know given up working in journalism no jeffrey gallberg's the editor of the atlantic right all the the major pundits pushing the 2003 iraq invasion they just got on to you know more and more prestigious positions and greater and greater income none of them like stepped aside none of them were embarrassed and they said oh maybe i should rethink you know how i operate nah are aware of the risks of implanting false memories barbersnow may have still been using questionable therapy practices she was accused of planting false memories in clients minds as recently as the early 2000s and that's around the time she was seeing teal this is when teal was in her early 20s here's tori again who used to be friends with teal teal before she ever mentioned the name barbersnow she would talk about how she was with this therapist who used special techniques to help her uncover her repressed memories when i asked teal about this she contradicted tori's account and said that she didn't recover these memories i'm actually very unusual and that i did not have suppressed memory like most people i've had maybe one or two memories actually that are fully suppressed and the rest of them were conscious the whole damn time at the beginning of this episode tori spoke about how teal tried to convince her she was in the same satanic cult when they were kids when tori insisted she wasn't teal told her to go to barbersnow so tori booked an appointment for an hour session she says she told barbara about her depression and almost immediately she kind of started to do this leading conversation like leading questions she also told barbara about some nightmares she'd been having after explaining these dreams she would go on to mention that i had been drugged and abused for many years and that that's what these dreams are it's just like a warped sense of reality or memory it was like these these memories that were beginning to come to the surface or something and she began to tell me how i was drugged with ketamine specifically ketamine yes i do very clearly in my mind remember her bringing up the ketamine and the fact that i had been tortured and drugged for years what's interesting about that is teal says her alleged abuser also used the drug ketamine on her and the other children they drug them out on ketamine and they have them repeat a phrase it's just basic subliminal programming why is it ketamine like what happened because ketamine gives you access to the subconscious mind so as tori tells it back when they were friends teal told her that they were in the same satanic cult when tori pushed back on this teal recommended she go to her therapist barbara snow and tori says that this therapist told her that she was drugged with ketamine the same drug that teal says her alleged abuser used on her tori was thrown by what teal and barbara were telling her i remember my childhood very well is despite being like kind of a depressed child i mean i'm like diagnosed with depression i had a good childhood like yeah imprinting memories of false abuse is an incredibly heinous thing to do it is destroyed untold numbers of families it's destroyed relations between you know parents and children it's uh who's that who's that bald guy who was into defuing stefan malinu like who who would encourage uh children if you if if children felt like their parents or family were kind of crimping their style to just like cut off all contact just incredibly heinous thing to do now i i'm not a believer in cutting off all contact with people except in very rare instances i believe in turning the volume up of your interactions with people if you want to get closer to them so more proximity more intensity more duration all right do that but you can also turn the volume down on some of your relationships so instead of meeting in person you can just have a phone call instead of talking every day you just talk once a month instead of having intense interactions you can you can reduce the intensity of the interaction instead of talking for an hour you can talk for five minutes so there are a lot of people that i've dialed down how much of a role they have in my life so generally speaking it's a lot it's a lot better to dial people down rather than just have these dramatic breaks with people like i had a great family great friends and none of this that teal had told me and none of what barbara was insinuating was true none of it tory wasn't receptive to barbara snow's therapy methods but we know that a lot of patients did go into therapy and claim to have uncovered repressed memories i wanted to understand why some people did come to believe false things about themselves how do people end up recovering memories so that's from the terrific podcast called the gateway about suicide catalyst teal swan that's it bye bye and good showers