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Comment by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | Hacker News Reader

A similar travesty of justice happened in Italy in the late 90s with a bunch of parents going to jail, their kids being taken away by the local child protection services, parents committing suicide from the trauma etc.

Two decades later, as part of an investigation, the kids (now adults) came out as saying that they were brainwashed, they were pressured into confessions of satanic rituals in the local cemetery, of blood sacrifices and live burials and so on.

The investigation concluded that it was ultimately a combination of a popular moral panic, a special spot-the-satanist training that the teachers received as part of their professional development, and a collusion between psychologists and orphanages trying to fill out their facilities with kids harvested from accused parents. An absolute horror show.

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diavoli_della_Bassa_modenese (unfortunately no En version of the page)

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> a special spot-the-satanist training that the teachers received as part of their professional development [...] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diavoli_della_Bassa_modenese (unfortunately no En version of the page)

I'm curious, as there is no English page, do you have any more information I can pursue regarding the 'spot-the-satanist training'? Curious what exactly that entailed and the signs they looked for.

It's cited in the Audible series itself (that's where the investigation was originally published: https://www.audible.com/pd/Podcast/B08JJNYH2J), which is many hours of content, so I wouldn't be able to easily dig that up unfortunately. If I recall correctly, it was a wave of professional instruction that was making its way through either teacher ed or psychologist ed, I imagine of US/UK origin. Do a search for "satanic ritual abuse" and all of the studies around it, e.g. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3813055

By the way, here's one of the psychologists involved in the scandal getting jail time 20+ years later: https://www.ansa.it/english/news/politics/2021/11/11/psychia...

Just to clarify, since I misspoke, the training was not about spotting satanists, it was about spotting symptoms of satanic ritual abuse in children victimized by them.

Those responsible rarely get their comeuppance. I mean the academics and psychiatrists who invent this baloney, and continue pushing it for years, sustaining the delusion. Some of them are still practicing today. They've casually moved onto other things.

Academics? At least in what I've seen of the US satanic panic, there were no academics that I know of. Journalists, police consultants, quack shrinks (I forgot which kind of psy.* they were), political and religious authorities, and generally people who had some power and/or money to gain from the panic.

GP posted an article by someone who was then (and appears to still be[1]) a professor of psychology at Pepperdine. If he's not an academic then we are fairly far into "no true Scottsman" at this point.

[edit]

I also forgot about the Bragas who were child psychologists at the University of Miami who have been accused by defendants (and their team) of inducing false allegations that put at least 3 people in jail.

1: https://gsep.pepperdine.edu/about/our-people/faculty/louis-c...

In that case, my bad.

Diane Ehrensaft is one. She wrote a paper on it. She's still around.

Absolutely horrible. As always, all these things that made no sense at all, boiled down to certain people trying to gain something/make money.

It was never about saving the kids :(

> It was never about saving the kids :(

It never is (see the chat control ideas of the EU Commission).

I think on Prime Video the video report of the investigation (“Veleno”) has English subtitles as well and closely follows the Audible podcast.

>unfortunately no En version of the page

For the best. My blood is fucking boiling.

I can't even imagine what these families were put through, this is beyond horrible. This is the work of demons indeed!

> This is the work of demons indeed!

Unfortunately, no. Just regular humans.

Only a human can be demonic.

Talk about making wrong conclusions...

Ah bummer that's why this story seemed familiar, I remembered the case in Italy, not the one in the US, thanks for mentioning this.

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