Sexual abuse scandals have turned into a modern witchcraze

THE little girl at the door on Hallowe’en was charmed when I let on to be scared of her witch costume.

She even lifted up the mask to show me she wasn't really a witch at all.

She didn't know her costume was a joking reference to an historic holocaust of women. During the European Witchcraze, hundreds of thousands of women were burned at the stake.

It started as score-settling. A farmer whose cow got the staggers might blame a local 'oul wan', and have her executed. Someone, after a fight with a neighbour, could denounce her as a witch, and watch her burn.

To be young, female and beautiful was to be dangerous. Almost as dangerous as to be old, female and ugly.

Most dangerous of all was to be a 'wise woman' with skills. The healing arts had always been the preserve of women. They used herbs to calm a fever or heal a wound, they knew how to cure infections in man or beast and they were the community midwives.

Which was fine and dandy until the Church decided it was a threat to orthodoxy and that the wise women must have got their skills by sleeping with the Devil. Miracles and mysteries were okay, if authorised by Christianity.

Unauthorised, they were a sinister payoff for Satanic sex.

The midwife-healers also fell foul of the men who were starting to take over the medical profession, in so far as there was a medical profession at the time. Men favoured treatments like bleeding, blistering and purging. None of this old-fashioned namby-pamby herbal stuff.

The old women weren't willing to give up practicing what their mothers and grandmothers had handed on to them and so, all over Europe, a struggle for control began. External economic and health factors raised the tension levels even further.

Into this simmering chemistry got thrown an accusation. Some 'oul wan' had soured

Farmer Jones's milk out of spite. Found guilty, she was burned to death. The idea spread. People in the next village got the message: of course, the haggard, gap-toothed old woman living in the tumbledown shack in the copse was making their well dry up.

Down the road, a cooper whose wife was becoming shrewish decided a replacement would be a good thing, and reported to the authorities his suspicions that she was a frequent broomstick flier, heading off in the night to meet other witches for communal sex with the Devil.

Her detailed confession of Satanic snog-fests helped her husband's case no end. (Enthusiastic and imaginative torture, plus a few leading questions, can make people claim strange things.)

The initially isolated incidents of accusation and assassination gradually came together in an escalating pan-European witchcraze officiated over by the Church which killed hundreds of thousands of women and a small number of men.

The witchcraze legitimated cruelty and caricature, did away with a wealth of folk cures and left a trailing memory of fear.

Some would say it's why, even today, women tend to play down their intelligence and achievements: if memory tells you that just a few centuries ago, being exceptionally smart, or stunningly beautiful, might get you burned at the stake, it makes sense to be self-effacing.

Today, nobody gets burned at the stake. Nonetheless, the eight characteristic components of witchcrazes (identified by science historian Michael Shermer), have been eerily apparent in recent controversies surrounding clerical and institutional child abuse, in Ireland and elsewhere. Those eight components are:

Victims tend to be women, the poor and the marginalised.

Sex or sexual abuse is typically involved.

Mere accusation makes the accused guilty.

Denial of guilt is regarded as further proof of guilt.

Once a claim of victimisation becomes well-known in a community, other similar claims suddenly appear.

The movement hits a critical peak of accusation when almost no one is above suspicion.

Then the pendulum swings the other way. As the innocent begin to fight back against their accusers, through legal and other means, the accusers sometimes become the accused.

Finally, the movement fades, the public loses interest, and proponents, while never completely disappearing, are shifted to the margins of belief.

Interestingly, the first two components in Shermer's list are found in crazes, whether those crazes are based in real abuse or not.

IN 1995, in Washington, an apparent epidemic of child sex abuse led to dozens of court cases, cover stories in publications such as Time magazine and saturated talk show coverage.

It was later found that no abuse of any kind had occurred and that the entire loop of panic and hatred was traceable to one detective, planting ideas in the heads of dysfunctional adolescent girls.

We associate the witchcraze phenomenon, with its irrationality and disregard of due process of law, with the Middle Ages.

In fact, it has been happening more frequently, with greater intensity, but shorter duration in the last few decades. The European Witchcraze took decades to cross the continent. When it reached Britain, it lasted for roughly 60 years.

Modern equivalents, such as the Satanic Killings craze in the '80s and the

'recovered memory syndrome', both of them in America, have raged more fiercely for a much shorter period.

Although of shorter duration, each has left a broad trail of destruction. Some of those wrongly imprisoned for crimes never committed, but 'remembered' by their accusers, have served six or more years of undeserved imprisonment.

Many accusers have recanted and sued the counsellors they say implanted the false memories. Families have been riven, and careers destroyed.

The speeding up of the witchcraze process owes much to mass media. They bring heartbreaking stories of abuse into huge numbers of homes. These stimulate a consequent wave of secondary accusations, in turn, creating a feedback loop reinforcing certainties and exacerbating rage.

That rage typically excoriates any defence mounted by an accused individual or group as unacceptable, because it delivers more hurt to the accuser.

Any doubt that Ireland has been in the grip of this phenomenon for the past few years, was removed by the release of the Christian Brothers statement last week, pointing out that very few Christian Brothers have been accused, although in the popular mind child abuse by their members was rampant and general.

The issuance of the statement, it emerged, was prompted by a newly-formed group of adults who once lived in orphanages and industrial schools and who did not have a miserable time there.

The fury of the response and the calm arguments put forward by the happy survivors of orphanages were powerful indicators that a quite new chapter has been reached in the child abuse story and that what Michael Shermer, the man who has studied witchcrazes in depth, said six years ago about the Washington child sex craze now applies to the totality of religious child abuse issues in Ireland.

"Childhood sexual abuse is real. Now that it has been turned into a witchcraze, it may be some time before society finds its balance in dealing with it"