Prolusion:
Tim Tate's book runs to over 370 pages of unmitigated tripe. We have no intention of wasting our time exposing the hundreds of mistakes and untruths in every chapter. The SAFF had already completely discredited Tate's claims of having found historic cases of SRA when his book was first published, which you can read here: ) so by way of a review we have analysed two salient chapters. Chapter 5 and Chapter 8 in detail. These chapters concern the 1990 Satanic Panic and the resultant abortive Cases of the 1987-1991 period.

Failures in the Broxtowe, Epping, Ayrshire, Rochdale and Orkney SRA cases dealt the idea of SRA a death-blow from which it has never recovered. This is the nub of SRA claims. They all failed miserably. It is interesting to read again with the hindsight of what we now know of the corruption of social services and the creation of false-cases by bigoted Social Workers and fundamentalist Christians which caused untold suffering to hundreds of small children and their families, and see how Tate presents these obsessives as 'professional' people who have childrens' best interests at heart. It is salutory to see him use the 'authority' of discredited informers to back up the SRA myth. Please note that the notations 'pp325' denote page-breaks in the original book and are included for reference. All SAFF information is appended in blue type.
All images on this page can be seen full-size, in easy to read format, simply by clicking on them.

Chapter 5: The Organisation of Evil (2) page 5:

"There are people who claim to be Satanists and who are abusing children. We know it."
- David Austen: Satanist, May 1989.

[SAFFedit: David Austen is an ex Mormon whose perverted form of homosexuality began in his teenage years when he was involved in a nationwide expose of a homosexual orgy in Exeter Cathedral with other clerics which had 'satanic' overtones. It was certainly a desecration. Austen has frequently trafficked with the press and almost always injects claims of sexual perversion. You can see him do it again in the cutting shown here on the right 'Satan's Desire For lust.' where Austen is quoted as saying:

'in order to get initiated into the Temple of Set, would-be witches have to perform unnatural sex.' " Both men and women have to go through a homosexual experience which is carried out by or in front of the High Priest of the coven" Dave said.'

Now you may wonder why the moral entrepreneur Tim Tate who consistently takes the moral high-ground over SRA is using quotations by David Austen as some authoritative source. Particularly when Tate was fully aware when writing Children For The Devil, that the Temple of Set, Austen and Michael Aquino were at loggerheads with Chris Bray, whom Tate framed in his 'The Devil's Work'. These involved the posting of faeces to Mr Bray and David Austen leaving telephone answering machine messages with anti-semitic curses and threats amongst which were:

'You've had your day baby and the sooner you pack your bags with the rest of your mutant morons and your, I think it's Jewish wife is it? Is that why you are so anti- Nazi? Helps to pay your gas bills. Take care Bray.

and

"I hope someone sticks a knife in you!"

All captured and on tape. We will see if I can obtain the recording from Mr Bray to put on this webpage so you, dear reader, can listen to the evil little nonentity whom Tate seems to prefer to listen to for information on Satanic Abuse even though, unlike Austen, Chris Bray is not a Satanist. In fact you will see Tate confirm that Mr Bray has nothing to do with SRA in a surprising legal statement in the book, (below). ]

Children for The Devil: Chapter 4 - The organisation of Evil (1) Published 1991

Traditional Satanist groups have - and still do - conduct human sacrifice'.

Anton Long, Practising Satanist, July 1987.

In May 1989 Britain's foremost occult businessman, Christopher Bray,* published the results of a unique survey. Bray, owner of the Sorcerer's Apprentice bookshop, retailer of ritual equipment and regalia and self-appointed spokesman for the British pagan movement, had polled more than 1,000 of his established customers. The idea was to provide the first reliable guide to the beliefs, interests, affiliations and motivations of occultism in this country. Bray also hoped to find evidence to 'disprove' the existence of satanic ritual abuse.

Occult Census Front Cover

'The Occult Census' , as he called the poll, was a thorough and impressive piece of collation. What it revealed, amongst many other facts was that of the sampled 1,000-plus pagans, 41 were practising Satanists and more than 200 others registered some interest in the religion. Who are these modern Satanists; how do they become Devil-worshippers and what, precisely, do they do in pursuit of their worship'?

Satanists, at the end of the twentieth century, are often divided into three categories: dabblers, religious Satanists, and members of what police sometimes describe as 'satanic cults'. Because little academic research has ever taken place into the incidence and nature of Devil-worship it is unclear whether there is much...

* Christopher Bray is not himself a Satanist and has no personal involvement in any of the practices described in this book.

[SAFF edit: Just to make sure you got that. Here, at the start of his chapter on Modern Satanism, Tate is unequivocally stating that Mr Bray is NOT a Satanist and has no personal involvement in any of the alleged abuses or perversions mentioned in Tate's book.   Now you may be asking yourself why, if Tate, who has spent years amassing 'evidence' of SRA, cannot find any link with it and Mr Bray, is he mentioning Mr Bray at all?

The answer is simple. Using TV trickery Tate and the Cook Team had implied that Mr Bray had some involvement during Tate's despicable 1989 Cook Report Special, The Devil's Work . When Chris Bray took Tate and Cook to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission after the Cook Report was broadcast the commission ruled categorically for Mr Bray against the Cook Report on the basis that their mistake had been to not make it clear to viewers that Mr Bray wasn't involved in any form of abuse mentioned in the programme. In his book Children for The Devil, Tate is, wisely, making it clear before he says anything else.

Tate and the Cook Report had persecuted Mr Bray, an innocent man, using Trial By TV, because they wanted a fall-guy. They had no evidence to link him with SRA yet without using him as a focus for the documentary they would not have had a programme at all and would not have been able to get that money-shot of the doorstepping of him at the end.    Once the dishonest documentary had been broadcast the die was cast and Tate has continued to imply fault with Mr Bray ever since.   Tate's position appears to be that Bray is somehow responsible for SRA wrong-doing because he published an article by The Temple of Set in his magazine The Lamp of Thoth (more on this below). This is like accusing Hutchinson publishers of being responsible for gassing Jews because they published the first English Language version of Mein Kampf before WWII.

The more Mr Bray highlighted Tim Tate's un-facts the more Tate appears to want to try to heap opprobrium upon him to drown out the truth. The depths to which Tate and his bullies stooped to pour blame on Mr Bray were pretty low, including using an old TV interview Chris had given for another purpose years back and deceitfully editing it to make it appear Chris Bray was condemning himself, when the original clip said exactly the reverse!

Not content with that, in order to frame him further, Tate visited Mr Bray's shop ( Astonishing Books @The Sorcerer's Apprentice bookshop) incognito and purchased occult regalia which was then used in a mock-up of a Satanic initiation ritual involving David Austen and Michael Aquino; a clip of which was used in the Cook Report to convince viewers that Satanism was rife in the UK; when it isn't.

The manager of the S.A. who was putting the sale through the till had intuitively distrusted Tate and so questioned him about whether he was from the Media, Tate, shocked, denied that he was from the Cook Report and said that he worked for a Yorkshire newspaper. That is in itself a breach of the broadcasting code.

Chapter 8 in Tate's book has frequent mentions of Mr Bray even though, as you have seen, Tate starts by exonerating him of blame.
Tate then spends the whole of the Chapter 8 trying to besmirch him! Tate picked the wrong patsy for his Cook Report and it is largely due to Mr Bray continuing to fight for his rights and declare himself innocent of all crimes, that the UK has been spared more of this SRA nonsense which the coterie of people surrounding Tate has created. The full deceit of those who worked on that despicable Cook Report programme can be seen here. ]

pp104

Children for The Devil: Chapter 8: Perpetual Holy War : Published 1991

Perpetual Holy War.

'Witch-hunt is launched over books and TV ..
Satan's Care Bears banned.' -
Headlines in Independent on Sunday, October 28, 1990.

In September 1990 Christopher Bray, occultist, entrepreneur and self-appointed saviour of the pagan world, railed to his customers a new call to arms, an invitation to embark upon a New Age 'jihad' in defence of their rights of worship. Occult belief and practice, he thundered, were under attack from accounts of satanic ritual abuse.

This is The Greatest Confidence Trick of Modern Times. Religious extremists have deluded millions of Britons by massaging their bigotries and prejudices. How were a handful of warped people able to create a nationwide terror which bound up government, police and the social services in utterly futile investigations without a shred of evidence to support their allegations And why are the authorities still, even now, giving credence to their discredited allegations' ?

The answer, according to Bray, was that there was an international conspiracy to persecute perfectly peaceful and law-abiding pagans: a conspiracy that took in all levels of government agencies, press, television and therapists. Behind it were a shadowy collection of fundamentalist Christians determined to manipulate unsuspecting children for their own sinister purposes.

Evangelicals Marching To War - Independent 20 April 1988

Evangelicals Marching To War - Independent 20 April 1988

This is, of course, paranoid gibberish.

[SAFFedit: Paranoid Gibberish?   Really?   Tate tells you it is gibberish and demands you believe him, the SAFF however provides detailed facts alongside to show that what Mr Bray wrote is anything but gibberish,
'Next month 50,000 evangelicals will march through London', and,
'The Evangelical Alliance claims to represent a million active Christians'. These quotes, from the article alongside, 'Evangelicals Marching as to War' was published in the Independent in April 1988. Tate first got involved in investigating SRA in August 1987 after a Christian psychiatrist Stuart Checkley convinced him that he had a patient who claimed he had been Satanically Abused (pp xi).

There is no doubt about the Evangelical/Fundie push in the lead up to the Millennium. It was incessant. Tate ignores and repudiates it because it doesn't fit his narrative.
Tate is expert at diverting the reader's attention and selectively reporting history to suit his message.
The truth is that In 1988 (two years before Tate's crack about 'Paranoid Gibbersh') Chris Bray published a printed pamphlet called The Decade of Evangelism (see panel below for text) which alerted the public to the societal dangers of a world-wide fundamentalist campaign to convert 20 million people to Christianity by the year 2000. This campaign, started by the obscenely wealthy TV Ministries which put Reagan into power, came from the US. Just as false allegations of SRA did. Three years afterwards when ample evidence of an up-tick in evangelistic agitation has occurred right across the nation Tate baldly tries to confuse his readers by claiming in Children For The Devil that Mr Bray is talking paranoid gibberish!    What he doesn't say is that Tate himself publicly confirmed the existence of fundamentalist attacks on Mr Bray and his shop in July 1989 when, in a head-to-head interview on Radio Leeds, Tate said: '   Decade of Evangelism Leaflet - 1988

TATE: "Let me state very briefly I think Chris has a very valid point in what he says that there is some form of organised campaign against Occultism and I must stress that the Cook Report had no part in that. I share Chris's view that it is unhealthy for Fundamentalist Christians or Fundamentalist whatever else to persecute someone whose ordinary religion is part of that religion. Full script here:

By mis-portraying Mr Bray as a paranoid religious fanatic Tate undermines Mr Bray's unparalleled knowledge of comparative religions and besmirches his valid point of view.

Nowhere is this more evident than when Tate states that Mr Bray is paranoid about Christian fundamentalist extremists seeing as how Tate was writing this two years after they had firebombed Mr Bray's bookshop! Yes dear reader, there is no mention of the firebombing of The Sorcerer's Apprentice by manic fundies anywhere in Children For The Devil. The arson attack occurred the week after Tate's despicable Cook Report 'The Devil's Work' was broadcast. Mr Bray is adamant that the Cook Report incited that criminal act. For the record SAFF have tracked Chris Bray's pronouncements and predictions about the fundie menace for three decades and, unlike Tate, he has rarely, if ever, been wrong. ]

pp319:

But then so is the opposite view, shared by many evangelical Christians, that there is an international conspiracy of Satanists who are busy taking over the planet. The truth is that the rival paranoias of pagans and priests have created their own war - a war in which children's quite genuine disclosures of satanic ritual abuse are either abused or discarded as battle rages on. And as with all wars, truth - in the pages of the newspapers or in television reporting - is one of the first casualties.

The aim of this chapter is to untangle the history of the conflict and show how the ill-considered evangelical battle-cry led to a misinformed pagan backlash, which in turn helped create a canon of entirely inaccurate reporting. The final result was an apparently insoluble public confusion.

[SAFF edit: Tate's choice of headline for the title of Chapter 8 is interesting. Perpetual Holy War. He nicked it from an article in Mr Bray's own magazine, The Lamp of Thoth, issue 22 (summer 1988) - see the illustration of it to the right. Tate, relied on cherry-picking controversies from The Lamp of Thoth, which, being an occult magazine, is replete with hard-hitting articles and debates, though, importantly contains nothing promoting criminality. Mr Bray's article on Perpetual Holy War in LOT22 discussed the then burgeoning campaign by fundamentalist activists to attack and discredit all mystical and occult methods using false claims of sexual abuse related to Witchcraft and Satanism. A campaign which the SAFF has incontrovertibly proved existed beyond any shadow of doubt in subsequent years, regardless of the dismissive way Tate tries to brush it away in his appalling book.

Note well that Perpetual Holy War was a warning from Mr Bray about the constant Holy War throughout history waged by the Christian churches against Paganism and other dissenters, it was not a call to arms. Using emotive and thoroughly reprehensible terms like a 'New Age Jihad' Tate reveals his attempt to portray Mr Bray as a dangerous religious extremist, however you, dear reader, need not fall for that malarkey, you can purchase a copy of the Lamp of Thoth yourself and see that Mr Bray is one of the most sensible and responsible people alive .

Mr Bray is a man of peace, he has never ever used the term 'New Age Jihad' or anything remotely close to it. It is purely an invention of Tate's. So you can see what Mr Bray actually wrote, instead of the evilly twisted misrepresentations of it put out by people like Tate, we have obtained permission to reproduce Perpetual Holy War and you can find it at the bottom of this webpage here: ]

Christians and the occult

Maureen Davies holds her first Reachout Meeting in Rhyl March 1988

Maureen Davies is tall, Welsh and approaching middle-age. Desperately sincere in her Christianity, she has claimed to have been involved on the outer fringes of a Anglican coven and to have been abused as a child. She brought both alleged experiences to bear on the vocation she adopted in 1987 - director and full-time case-worker for the Evangelical Alliance's new mission to the occult: Reachout.

[SAFFedit: Tate is misleading the reader. Reachout Trust was inaugurated by Doug Harris as an outreach to provide 'safe houses' for escapees from the Jehovah's Witness Christian sect. He ran it like that for several years without mentioning SRA; until Maureen Davies, a dental assistant, who had a long history of fundie activism joined him. Davies was in touch with extreme fundie groups in the U.S. in 1987 where the SRA myth first started. She imported those false accusations of SRA into the UK. She started her own Reachout branch (which specialised in accusations of SRA) in her home town of Rhyl, in the spring of 1988 and did impromptu exorcisms on the day! (see illustration right).

The Evangelical Alliance's move into campaigning against SRA occurred after Maureen Davies and Kevin Logan (both Reachout Directors) went to the EA with their false allegations of SRA in 1989. The Evangelical Alliance then created it's 'Coalition against SRA', in response to a conglomerate of fundie activist groups like Reachout Trust, Christian Response to the Occult, and The Christian Medical Fellowship, all of whom were heavily involved in pushing the lies about Satanic Ritual Child Abuse from 1987 onwards. The reason we outline this in detail is that Tate appears to be portraying mainstream evangelical Christianity as originating the SRA allegations when it all came through Reachout and associated OTT fundie groups. The EA were drawn into the SRA controversy by Reachout which made the running, not the other way around. Note also that Stuart Checkley, the psychiatrist who first turned Tate on to SRA in 1987 was a key leader of the Christian Association of Psychiatrists. What we have here is a fifth column of fundies taking over the mainstream Evangelical Alliance and radicalising it. The full history of Reachout's strategy can be seen in our expose of it here: http://saff.nfshost.com/reachout.htm: ]

'Reachout Trust is a Christian organisation. Part of its work is to help those people who are trapped in the occult, and we cooperate with other agencies in this. I head up the occult side of the work on a national level, and this work can be divided into three parts:

a) To monitor the occult problem in this country by doing research into this field, where necessary taking action against some activities and teaching others how to do this.

b) To come alongside and give support to victims and their families. To encourage, counsel and share with them the different avenues they can pursue.

c) To challenge and educate the church about the problems of the occult and ritual abuse.... Millions of pounds are spent on the occult every year in this country and abroad. There are hundreds of occult products listed in their mail order catalogues - tarot cards, ouija boards and satanic ritual regalia. Some are also involved in pornography and drug dealing. Most of the satanic groups, if not all, are networked with other groups in this country, Europe and the rest of the world - in particular America. The subject of the occult is vast and varied. Occult shops are opening up everywhere and under many banners; for example, they are sometimes called 'New Age Centres' or 'Alternative Lifestyle' shops, or just plain 'Occult Shops'. These shops ran be open recruiting grounds for satanic or witchcraft groups, preying on the minds of teenagers-especially those craving for power and control on others, or those who are lacking in self-esteem and worth, thinking power will give them a boost. Who would want to have a girlfriend through manipulation that is not love. The occult openly distorts the truth and undermines the security of family life, We have to act. We are not saying that everyone involved in witchcraft is molesting children, but unfortunately there are groups that do, '

In this privately circulated 1989 pamphlet., Maureen Davies set out the evangelical case against, the occult. It was, she concluded a broad church - everything from Neo-pagans to cannibalistic Satanists - and the one quite frequently led to the other.

[SAFFedit: It was not a privately circulated 1989 pamphlet, it is an 'official' Reachout overview of SRA first published in 1988 and sent out to journalists, media, social workers, campaigners and particularly other fundamentalist agitators. It was titled 'Satanic Ritual Abuse' and was given as a lecture at most of the notorious Satan Seminars during the 1990 Satanic Panic and handed out to delegates afterwards. The unpalatable bits which Tate does not mention are when Davies says :
'A year ago I was introduced to my first case of ritual child abuse' (denoting that Davies knew nothing prior to 1987 and was still on a learning curve herself) and 'The details which I will share in this article may be difficult for you to believe. You may ask, Do these problems with the occult really exist? I would have to say yes, from my own personal experience and from the inquiries we receive.' which denotes that Davies has no real evidence and is simply working on supposition. If Tate had wanted to display the true religious extremism of Davies he might have shown you transcripts of the best-selling Reachout audio-lecture 'How To Deal With The Occult In Your Area, where Davies schools other fundie agitators on campaigning against the occult, where she says:

'I remember I started by putting tracts on cars and then running away in case I was caught. Tracts in doors and running away and hoping that...then I started putting letters in the paper and became petrified in case they were printed and now I had the opportunity to present a situation to Parliament with some MPs at the Home Office and senior police officers and God sees where you are coming from and uses that but we have all got to start at the beginning and I find that exciting.'

You get the idea? Davies spent years complaining about silly things like Astrology and Transcendental Meditation, then suddenly jumped into high-gear to promote Satanic Ritual Child Abuse. Reachout's primary intention was to save souls, not protect kids from sadistic abuse. Anyone who believes this religious fanatic needs their heads examining.

pp320

The problem with this argument is that it is simply not sustainable: nor indeed was Davies' research anything more reliable than unchecked (and indeed uncheckable) rumour and accusation. None the less, the Evangelical Alliance, Reachout's parent organisation set about pursuing a new crusade against all things occult; all non-Christian religions or superstitions are linked in this analysis. Witchraft was an umbrella term - a sinister blot on the world, in whose shadows lurked everything from clairvoyance to child abuse in the name of Satan.

Unfortunately, the EA appeared unable to determine what precisely that religion was: its pamphlets and educational packs lumped horoscopes, Halloween, Spiritualism and tarot cards under the one banner of witchcraft. There was no mention of the existence of the definable and historic religion of Wicca - the real base of modern Witchcraft as opposed to Satanism - much less a realisation that only Halloween and some aspects of the Tarot have any faint relationship to it. Instead, the EA's concept of witchcraft was of an all-embracing non-Christian distraction into the path of evil:

pp321.

A neighbourhood seance. An astrologer's telephone help-line. Teenagers' fun with ouija boards. These seemingly innocent entertainments could be entrances to a sinister world of evil and destruction. Involvement with the supernatural through tarot cards, ouija boards and Spiritism is inflicting mental, spiritual and physical damage on growing numbers of people, many of them still at school. And seemingly trivial activities such as horoscopes and Halloween parties can be part of the process.... While there is no evidence of anyone having been hurt through checking their stars in the entertainment media, there is a danger that for some this will create an interest in seeking to know their future through more direct occult involvement. As the Rev. Tom Walker says in his book, 'The Occult Web': 'A strong fascination with astrology can bring anyone into bondage and fear,...' Witches are real: There are real witches in this country today. They don't wear pointed hats and ride broomsticks, but they have been tricked into following Satan. At Halloween they pray to Satan and enjoy evil.'

The message of this highly inaccurate leaflet - boldly entitled 'Doorways to Danger' was clear. Any form of occultism was the top of a slippery slope into the madness of witchcraft, And to be sure that its audience understood the nature of that religion, the EA subsequently issued a press release, with an explicit warning from its general director, Rev. Clive Calver:

'Witchcraft and spells may be fun as long as they remain fiction. But when reality rears its ugly head and children are abused on the altars of pagan gods then the Church and society must respond.'

SAFF edit: The sectarian lies against Neo-Paganism in Doorways To Danger caused massive controversy at the time it was published in late 1987. Amongst the people giving 'witness' in the now infamous screed were Kevin Logan and Audrey Harper, both directors of Reachout Trust. Later in the video version Judith Dawson of Broxtowe's Team 4 also appeared hyping the threat of SRA. Doorways to Danger was thoroughly discredited in this forensic analysis here:

The EA was not alone in spreading its message. Maureen Davies worked closely with American evangelical groups - regularly exchanging 'intelligence' with Larry Jones' Cult Crime Impact Network Inc. - and the growing number of ad-hoc and amateur 'support groups' for ritual-abuse victims in Britain. Among the best organised of these - and, to be fair, least amateurish - was Dianne Core's Childwatch organisation.

pp322

Throughout 1988 and 1989 Core regularly turned up in the press, on television and at public meetings to push the witchcraft- satanic international conspiracy line. She, like Davies, seemed to make little attempt to distinguish between the religions.

Core's motivation was not primarily spiritual. She was - and remains - a passionate and caring advocate for children who have suffered. Her concern is genuine; her efforts tireless and unstinting. Yet she shared with Maureen Davies one fatal trait: ritual-abuse 'fact' to both women was established when one apparent survivor gave them a new detail, incident or allegation. No matter that these were generally impossible to verify, the mere voicing of a word or phrase was enough to establish that as a solid pillar of their 'research'. Just such an example was the so-called 'Scorpio' and 'Devil-fish' satanic child-abuse rings.

Core first heard the names of the groups in Hull and Newcastle respectively. 'Scorpio' was the name Matthew - the teenage rent boy whose case brought Childwatch and Humberside social workers into conflict in 1988 - had put to the group of his abusers. Anxious to find supporting evidence, Core routinely asked those who sought her help if they had heard of it. Occasionally one or two children would say they had, and the therapist would typically 'share' her existing information about Scorpio with them. From such contaminated and uncertain evidence did Childwatch build a conspiracy theory. 'Devil-fish' originated in information supplied by a Tyneside church-worker. He rang Core to tell her about two teenage girls who had come to him several years previously with a strange story of sex-rites and drug-taking in the name of Satanism. The girls said the group involved was known as 'Devil-fish'. But by the time Core took his call both girls had disappeared.

Undeterred, Dianne Core pressed every survivor or parent she met for information. By suggesting the names to those contacts she had effectively made any confirmations evidentially worthless. One of those she spoke to was Janie, the South London mother whose family Childwatch re-located in Hull. Janie put the names to Laura and Bobby. Some vague confirmation emerged, and the information was passed back to Core.

[SAFFedit: Here Tate refers to the supposed SRA case of Janie (mother) and three children , Laura (3 yrs) and Bobby (2yrs) and a babe in arms, who lived in Lambeth, South London, which Tate covers on pp28 and pp189. The Lambeth SRA case began in August 1988, shortly after the first claims of SRA were made on 15th April 1988 when Geoffrey Dickens MP, ( Childwatch's parliamentary representative) , made a statement about Satanic Abuse in Parliament which caught headlines across the country.

The mother Janie, took her children to the social service department to be tested for abuse, ostensibly due to her abusive and violent husband. Both parents were dysfunctional and had drug and mental problems. The family was breaking up. The test proved inconclusive in one instance but possible in another. Under disclosure questioning the two year old boy said to one social worker that he had been tied upside down and a crucifix had been inserted into his anus. How a 2 year old boy would be able to convey this or even know what a crucifix was, is problematic. Clearly the social worker (quite possibly one of those then taking a keen interest in the latest new social work fad of SRA) had prompted the 2 year old.

This set off a train of events. The mother Janie, repetitively questioned the two children. By February 1989 Tate says 'Laura and Bobby were disclosing more and more detail about rituals' including a 'Leopard Man' . One must keep in mind that the Satanic Abuse hysteria in the British Press was running parallel with this case and allegations and narratives were appearing consistently to 'guide' any evangelical Christian social worker who sought confirmation of SRA.

One such article appeared in April 1988 'Evil Rites Threat To Our Children.' from Dianne Core's Child-watch group. During 1988 Core had managed to generate over eighty (80) scaremongering articles about SRA in the press, so the public were being tutored in the 'dangers' on a weekly basis. Tate was already working on his 'Devil's Work' TV documentary and production was at an advanced stage. Although the public were only just becoming aware of SRA behind the scenes in social-work circles it had been the leading-edge buzz since Autumn 1987.

On 16 April 1988 Mr Bray had telephoned Dianne Core to complain about a radio interview she gave in which she had complained of children getting hold of goods he sold. He explained to her that he had a hard and fast rule not to sell any items to under 18s and she should be careful of defaming him. During that telephone conversation Core 'threatened' Chris Bray with the Cook Report; sort of 'I'm working with the Cook Report on SRA and they're looking into businesses like yours' . Chris said to tell them to get in touch, he had nothing to hide and would be glad to assist with his expertise, whereupon she rang off.

We can be confident then that Tate was working with Dianne Core at that point. We know Core had been retained by the Cook Report as a paid specialist advisor and that Tate was heavily involved working behind the scenes with Ray Wyre, promoting the idea of SRA in the Broxtowe SRA case. Wyre, who had been trained as a Baptist minister before he switched careers to try to rehabilitate paedophiles, had introduced SRA memes which he and Tate had acquired from the USA into the Broxtowe case during early February 1988.

During March 1988 Tate first interviewed US 'SRA expert' Pamela Klein, whose expertise was later dismissed by a USA judge as 'not a legitimate therapist' but, according to the JET report, before that happened Tate and Wyre obtained from her the bogus 'Satanic Indicators' which were at the root of at least 10 sensational cases of abuse which believers designated as Satanic Abuse during that period; all of which turned out to be completely false. In one shocking case, the Epping SRA case, Klein designated it as a full-blown case of SRA over the phone!

The JET (Joint Enquiry Team report) into Broxtowe said that until Wyre introduced the Satanic Indicators to the social workers there the children had not mentioned anything remotely satanic but were afterwards interrogated on that issue until a tissue of fantasies was generated. Broxtowe was pivotal to the creation of the Satanic Ritual Abuse Myth in the UK and Tate's involvement with it was seminal. Tate is not just an observer he is a prime-mover of the SRA scare. The full story about Broxtowe and it's pivotal effect on the SRA myth is contained in this SAFF expose here:

Laura and Bobby were the small children whom the Cook Report team exploited by being filmed undergoing an 'exorcism ceremony' in Tate's 'The Devil's Work' (see here at 4mins57secs in ) in Rev. Kevin Logan's Blackburn church. Logan is a director of the Reachout Trust. In the 'congregation' is Maureen Davies, another director of the Reachout Trust and the woman in the blue twin-piece is Audrey Harper, another director of the Reachout Trust. Davies controlled the 'helplines' after the programme. This exorcism scene was utterly unnecessary and fabricated for the cameras. Laura and Bobby are lead to the altar by their mother who is holding their baby brother. In a voice-over she says:

They've had ritualistic things done to them with Snakes, with crucifixes, they've been taught to pray to the Devil; they were in fact brainwashed'

What the camera did not record is that during this ceremony the godfather of the children became possessed, and fell onto the floor, writhing for 15 minutes. The kid's mother, Janie, said in a later news report that she believed the demons had been driven out of the children and took up residence in her relative.

As the children are being 'spiritually healed' Roger Cook's voiceover says ;

'most of these people are two frightened to be identified,....amongst the victims is the 12 year old son of Jean Bolonovski' .

Jean Bolonovski is the mother of the boy Tate calls 'Matthew' in Children For The Devil (pp208). He was the unruly glue-sniffing boy who later admitting lying to the police and making up stories of satanic rituals in Core's Longhill SRA case. He is therefore not allowed to speak for himself - his mother speaks for him and outlines a catalogue of Satanic Horrors. Horrors which the boy had already admitted were fantasies but which the Cook Report included anyway.

The Lambeth case and the Longhill case were both from Dianne Core's stable of SRA 'survivors' and both turned out to be made-up cases - another two fails from Tate's list of 'proven' SRA cases! Don't believe us? Then hear Laura's own words:

Laura's Story
In 2016 Laura was now in her early thirties with a family of her own. By chance she spotted the SAFF's training video on The Devil's Work, on the SAFFutube Channel which analyses and discredits Tate's documentary. She wrote to us to thank us for uploading it. She wanted to tell us, and everyone else, of what really happened. We ran checks to confirm that it was indeed her. Her level of knowledge could only come from someone who had been at the centre of things. For instance she correctly identified the family's Streatham address and then where they moved to in Norwood, SE19 after the initial SRA allegations were made. She confirmed that when Core moved the family up to Hull they lived at Louis Street and then Sunny Bank, Spring Bank. She was indeed Laura, the little girl dragged in front of the Altar to be filmed by Tate and the Cook Report team.

This is what Laura (not her real name of course but we will use the one Tate invented to ensure continuity) told us:

'As far as the incident in the church, I was told by my mother that we were being 'Christened' to protect us from evil.

The whole thing started when my father had been sent to prison for an assault on my mother whilst she was pregnant. ( I witnessed this and it's one of my earliest memories). Whilst in prison my mother said that I had made allegations against my father and other people he knew. These abuses were said to also involve my brother.

At the time I was just turning 4 years old and my brother was 2... I cannot remember this abuse I remember missing my father terribly and only have good memories of my father from that time (other than the assault on my mother). My father nor anyone else was ever charged with any of these [SRA] allegations.

We were then moved from south London to Hull aided by Diane Core. I remember my mother had a lot to do with Dianne Core and she became a key figure in our lives at this time.

What you need to know is that my mother was mentally ill and I believe the members of the Reachout Trust and Dianne Core helped to feed my mothers crazy ideas and enabled her.

How Laura was used and abused by a National Newspaper to increase its circulation and sell a book based on fantasies from The Satanic Circus.

SATAN'S CHILDREN
Exposed - The Devil's Disciples Corrupting our Young.

'....Some mothers have already begun to fight back. One told me what happened when she arranged for her three year old son and four year old daughter to be baptised. Until that day at the font, the two blond-haired children cried out in the night, reliving the nightmares of sex and sin that are beyond the wildest dreams of the script-writers of Hollywood horror moves.

As the vicar blessed the boy the godfather collapsed groaning on the floor. ' He writhed around on the floor for about 15 minutes' the mother told me. '

I now believe that the evil spirits were transferring themselves from my son into his godfather'

That boy now sleeps in peace. If the Rev. Kevin Logans brand of magic works today many more children will rest easier tonight.'

Fred Harrison ,
Daily Mirror 4th may 1989.

Note: In October 1991 Harrison co-wrote a mass-market book with Dianne Core titled. 'Chasing Satan' which was heavily criticised for sensationalism and inaccuracy.

We were featured in at least 2 papers at the time and I remember being met by journalists. I know one was 'The Mirror' and I think the other may have been 'the News of the World'. We also featured in Tim Tate's book 'Children for the Devil'.

I grew up being told my by mother that this '[SRA abuse ] had happened and obviously remember the questioning and I used to have nightmares frequently. My mother told me that the things in my nightmare had happened to me but that she had made it so I couldn't remember them.

My mother went on to emotional and physically abuse me throughout my whole childhood and would have frequent mental breakdowns. She was fixated on Satanic Abuse and everyone was a suspect, she accused my stepfather, Childwatch, my school.

She even accused my friends family of abusing myself and brother again in around 1994/5 and that we had witnessed a child being sacrificed. No matter how many times I told her this had not happened she would not accept it and physically beat me by punching, kicked, biting me and pulling me around my by hair. She carried this out for about 2 days whilst constantly ranting warped ideas until I 'admitted' it out of pure fear and wanting the abuse from her to stop. She made us give statements to the police about this but I was never questioned without her being present ,or watching via video, so was too frightened to tell them she had made it all up.

My life from then on was horrific, I was mentally, emotionally and physically abused by my mother on an almost daily basis, she would also 'examine' me for signs of sexual abuse. I was kept off school for long periods and alienated from everyone. We had no contact with family or friends and I felt totally helpless and hopeless.

It's then I started to wonder if the 'abuse' by my father really did happen of if it was a very vivid figment of my mother's twisted imagination.

I have documented proof that social services were constantly involved and recognised my mother's bizarre and intimidating behaviour but did nothing to safeguard us. There are reports form neighbours of hearing my screams and cries, witnessing our pale and scruffy appearances, even one report of mum confessing to a friend that she heard voices telling her to drown us all...but yet we were left in her care.

I remember meeting Tim Tate 100%. Me and my brother tied his shoe laces together while he was talking to my mum. It could have been when he interviewed mum for his book.'

Now I don't know what this says to you dear reader but what it says to me is that Laura was abused and traumatised by the very people who were accusing imagined Satanists of abusing children.

Why did none of them see that Laura's mother needed help and that the children were at risk from her? Why did social workers allow these amateur SRA vigilantes to control the lives of these needy children instead of giving them the help they really needed?

Why? Well, as the SAFF has said many times before, the primary purpose of Satan Hunters is not to protect children but to establish the idea of the existence of SRA which is actually a figment of fears from their own minds. How Tate can now present that period as entirely the fault of Dianne Core without admitting his key part in the scandal, is an utter disgrace.

pp323 ***

Throughout 1988 and the first half of 1989 'Scorpio' and 'Devil-fish" became unshakeable fixtures in the apparent firmament of satanic groups preying on children in Britain. By the time Core met up with Natalie and Kitty they had assumed a disproportionate status in her eyes. Inevitably, given the feverish paranoia under which she worked, Core somehow assumed that Natalie's abusers were part of the same organisation.

In March 1989, she travelled to America on a lecture tour sponsored by Lyndon LaRouche's New Federalist magazine. Core had already established firm links with his German-based publication, Executive Intelligence Review, and absorbed something of both its obsession with the OTO and its own escalated paranoia. When she spoke in Europe under its auspices she travelled with an armed bodyguard.

Natalie on the Cook Report which Tim Tate produced

Natalie on the Cook Report which Tim Tate produced

The speech Dianne Core gave in Atlanta, Georgia, that March was the epitome of the evangelical-inspired conspiracy theory. It also recklessly identified Natalie, by using her real name and discussing the forthcoming Old Bailey trial.

The group Natalie [this pseudonym did not appear in the speech] was in - Devil-fish - was a subsidiary of a group called OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis) which was started by Aleister Crowley. He initiated a lot of very high-ranking people into this organisation and it became very powerful and still is very powerful. It is a very dangerous organisation.... Let's go through the facts [of Natalie's case] . The first fact is that human remains were found in a house where Natalie lived with her grandmother. The second fact is that she is so badly mutilated inside that she won't ever be able to have children.'

It is an indication of Core's regard for the 'facts' that none of those statements concerning Natalie are true: the girl had never heard of 'Devil-fish' - much less confided its name to Core; no human remains were ever found, anywhere, at any time during the investigation into her case; and - happily - Natalie has every prospect of successfully having as many children as she wants.

pp324

Core's speech was dutifully recorded on videotape and transcribed by her enthusiastic hosts. Both were made available via mail order by the end of March. The details she gave not only put in jeopardy the forthcoming trial but, more seriously, made Natalie vulnerable by disclosing her identity. It was a stunningly irresponsible act.

[SAFFedit: Misdirection, Tate's book was published in 1991, Natalie's trial was over and done with by May 1989 and therefore Tate already knew what had affected the trial outcome - SRA fantasies dreamed up by Natalie.

This section on Core is typical Tate humbug. For sure, it was wrong of Core to reveal 'Natalie's' real identity in fact she could have been prosecuted for it. Apart from the upcoming trial of Natalie's alleged abusers at the Old Bailey (which was sub-judice at the time) , children in cases like this are always legally anonymised to avoid further suffering of themselves and their family. However, look at the two images above and right.

The first is from The Cook Report's Devil's Work, broadcast on 17th July 1989. The second is from an episode of the Australian 'Sixty Minutes' documentary series also broadcast in July 1989 titled 'Servants of Satan'. Because Australia is not subject to the laws of the United Kingdom it was not legally necessary for them to black-out Natalie's features to avoid anyone identifying her, nor did they, like the Cook Report, put images of her mother in silhouette; Natalie's mother 'Kitty' was openly shown as well.

Did Natalie and her mother agree to this waiver? A witness or victim can waive their anonymity. In another section of the Cook Report's Devil's Work, the mother of 'Matthew' was filmed full-face. Matthew was a ward of court so she must have given permission for her face to be shown.   If Natalie and Kitty did give permission then that waiver would also apply to the UK so why was the Cook Report showing them in silhouette?   Some may say that Tate had to be careful of breaching sub-judice for the upcoming trial, but the fact is that the trial was already over and done with by the time the Cook Report broadcast. Was there a legal reason or was it all dramatisation?

Tate's research for The Cook Report on 'The Devil's Work' was his scoop. He and the Cook Report were first in the queue to break the SRA 'threat' in the UK. Tate had the inside track because he had been crucially involved behind the scenes with the clique of Christian social workers and fundie agitators in the 1987 Nottinghamshire Broxtowe SRA case, (the first claimed case of SRA in the U.K.) and was therefore networked with the major Satan-Hunter cliques in social work in this country.

Servants of Satan was almost a copy-cat of The Devil's Work and contained extensive interviews with the same 'SRA victims', Ray Wyre, (the abuse specialist who worked closely as a team with Tate to bring the idea of SRA to the Broxtowe case) was interviewed; as you can see from clips of it on the SAFFutube channel here:   Journalists are proprietorially defensive about precedence on scoops like this; It is therefore unbelievable that Tate did not know 60 Minutes were covering the story.

It may well be that the producers of Servants of Satan dug out all the evidence on Natalie from Dianne Core's records and did their own spade-work, but essentially Sixty Minutes must have liaised with the Cook Report or/and Tim Tate at some time.

Remember that Dianne Core was a 'paid adviser' to the Cook Report and worked with Tate on the 'Devil's Work' . She must have been working with them on preparation of that documentary when she went to Atlanta and revealed Natalie's identity because the last bit of preparation work on The Devil's Work occurred in May 1989 when Tate and Cook filmed the 'doorstepping' of Mr Bray in Leeds. So here is a classic instance of Tate hypocrisy where he distances himself from people he had earlier accepted evidence on SRA from, and then turns it around to try to establish the un-fact that their sensational antics obscured the proof of SRA in those cases when the reality is that the cases were faulty from the start.

Tate expounds the Natalie case in detail on pp216 of Children For The Devil.   What was not conveyed in Tate's The Devil's Work TV documentary was that months before that Cook Report was broadcast Natalie's trial had come up at the Old Bailey and after 3 days the Judge threw it out, exonerating all three accused because of contradictory and conflicting testimony by the main witness, Natalie had made up her supposed SRA experiences.

Natalie had lied to her social workers, lied to Tate, Lied to the police and lied to her legal team.   Decades later, as a grown woman, Natalie admitted making it up and excused herself by saying that she was vulnerable and constantly pressured into making the false allegations by her mother and social workers.    You can see this actually happening when Tate writes

'As part of the constant therapy, the teacher encouraged Natalie to write down her experiences in a cheap school notebook. Whenever the teenager became visibly stressed .....she would be assigned a sort of essay with titles designed to exorcise the past by writing it down. The notebook began to fill up quite quickly. pp220

So the 'star' case which formed the greater part of Tate's 'Devil's Work' and which had plucked at the heartstrings of millions as Natalie wept out her story on-screen, was actually fantasy. It failed in court three months before Tate'ss documentary was broadcast. There was time enough for them to re-edit, or apply the news that the people she had accused had been exonerated, but the Cook Team just let it run and made those terrible already disproven accusations of child murder, sacrifice and cannibalism, on prime-time TV to 9 millions of viewers who ware falsely lead to believe the case was real.

Today the interview with Natalie from 'Servants of Satan' has been uploaded to the internet as though 'proof' of Satanic Ritual Abuse and it has been viewed over 5 million times. Nine million viewers watched Tate's original Devil's Work programme. Tate is responsible for promoting a fictitious case of SRA to bend the minds of millions of ignorant people the world over.

It is of course entirely possible that such groups as 'Scorpio' and 'Devil-fish' exist. It is theoretically possible that they may indeed be affiliated to the Ordo Templi Orientis. The problem with Core and Davies is not so much that they have no evidence upon which to base their allegations, but that in parading these stories around the world in such a cavalier fashion they contaminate an unknown number of children's disclosures.

[SAFFedit: This section of Children For The Devil, where Tate highlights the grandstanding tactics of Dianne Core reveals just how far off the mark Geoffrey Dickens and Core were, trading on superstition and supposition to self-create facts about SRA which did not exist. They weren't alone of course, almost every single person involved in pushing SRA did the same; but Tate writes from personal experience as he was in close touch with Childwatch and worked with Core throughout the early part of the first Satanic Panic.

Tate seems to have decided that Core's Satanic circus was discrediting the 'genuine' cases of SRA which 'professional' social workers were handling nationwide.
In a Sept 1991 article in the Hull Daily Mail, (right) Tate is taken to task over the way he portrayed how the Hull Social Services dealt with the Longhill SRA case in Children For The Devil. Patrick O'Flynn, the reporter who interviewed Tate, pointed out that

'a statement in Children For the Devil that the boy's allegations had resulted in a successful prosecution failed to say that this was for Indecency and not for Satanic Abuse' (pp208).

So that's another claimed SRA prosecution in Children for The Devil which turned out to be untrue!

Tate also claimed, the article continues, that 'the boy was to be silenced to prevent secondary abuse in the form of further disclosures.'

In fact Matthew was simply lying to the police about SRA and later admitted it.
The Cook Report still went ahead and showed the interview with his mother (see pic left) as a genuine case of Satanic Ritual Abuse! That's THREE cases in the Cook Report which were untrue. Eventually all 20 of the cases they said they had found failed in a similar way in the course of time, once the true facts were known.

The message Tate gives in Children For The Devil is that the police somehow covered-up the SRA claims in the Longhill case. This is a perennial claim when Satan Hunters back a case which turns out to be untrue. It is simply sour grapes but it happens a lot. The facts are, according to Hull Social Services, Core badgered Matthew and interfered to such an extent that Hull Social Work department had to take out an injunction to stop her contacting him because they felt he was being harmed by her continuous interference.

Additionally, the police claimed that Core showed the boy photographs of the main suspect which completely undermined the police case and they had to let him go. For a time Hull police intimated they might prosecute Core for 'Interfering with the course of justice'. In response Geoffrey Dickens MP demanded an Inquiry and got it. It cost two million pounds, took 18 months to complete and concluded that the Hull police were correct to do what they did. ]

The Atlanta speech also found Core spreading the message about the evils of witchcraft:

Now, concerning recruitment into satanic-abuse cults, Teachers infiltrate the schools and start to teach your children history lessons about witches and paganism and the occult. You get after-school recruitment where teachers will take pubescent children at an extra-curricular lesson, and start talking quite casually about ouija boards, Tarot cards, herbalism and other kinds of off-the-wall things. And the children are naturally curious, as you know. The Satanist loves this natural curiosity. He really homes in on it and makes a meal of it.'

Part of the satanic technique, according to this analysis, was heavy-metal rock music. Core was about to educate her listeners with the second strand of the evangelical assault on all things occult.

The next thing I have to tell you is quite unusual. You would think it was unusual, but kids are being recruited through rock music. Through Heavy Metal. Have you ever been upstairs in your son's bedroom to read the words on these heavy rock records? It is horrifying... brainwashing and it is stored in the sub-conscious to emerge, if the child becomes hooked on the stuff, in quite catastrophic ways.... So what can we do? I know what we can do.... We must become one loud voice - a choir of Christianity, whose collective voice will drown out the voice of Satan, who will smash his trumpet of victory never to be heard again.

pp325

That collective voice found expression in 1991 when Childwatch's long-time patron, the Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens, introduced an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill as it progressed through Parliament. If accepted - and it is almost certain not to be - the clause would make illegal child participation in witchcraft and paganism in all its forms as well as Satanism itself. Dickens could not distinguish between Satanism and Wicca - let alone between malefic and non-malefic Devil-worship.

'I don't want children getting involved in witchcraft - whether it s paganism or black witchcraft. What I object to is children being ensnared and corrupted and enticed into witchcraft, which I think is totally unhealthy and is leading to many sinister things.'

[SAFFedit: Again Tate misleads. He posits Dickens as a bumbler who couldn't tell the difference between Paganism and Witchcraft but in this clip of Geoffrey Dickens on the James Whale Show on 8th October 1988, he clearly makes a distinction between Pagans and Satanists and assures Pagans that his proposed new law will not affect them - then in February 1991 he broke his promise and submitted his official amendment to the Lawyers in parliament who scrutinise new Acts. Dickens demanded '

(2) A person who commits an offence under this section shall be liable on
conviction on indictment to IMPRISONMENT for a term not exceeding FIVE YEARS.

(3) The ceremonies and activities to which this section applies are those of,
OR ASSOCIATED WITH , SATANISM and other DEVIL WORSHIPPING, BLACKMAGIC, WITCHCRAFT OR ANY ACTIVITY TO WHICH SECTION (1) of the Fraudulent Mediums Act (1951) applies.

which clearly would have included Neo-Pagans, Shamans, Clairvoyants and almost all other esoteric beliefs. Thankfully the SAFF were onto Dickens' perverse fundie agenda and our correspondence with the Home Office on his proposed amendment resulted in it being thrown out as it breached the British constitution as well as the UN Declaration of Human Rights.]

There is - as with all good conspiracy theories - a germ of true fact underlying all this evangelical eye-wash. Without doubt some of those attracted to the occult do progress from Wicca to Satanism. David Austen, the British representative and high priest of The Temple Of Set, was one such:

For me it was basically just a gradual development. I found conventional religion didn't really answer what I was looking for. I wanted a bit of excitement, something slightly different, something that gave me an experience. I started off with witchcraft and then the various branches of ritual magic. Gradually I drifted into what is basically black magic, the left- hand path: Satanism."

The key to the reality of the supposed slippery slope to Satanism is contained in what Austen said. He was, in any event, looking for the thrills and spills of satanic worship, having tired of conventional - Christian - religion. There is no empirical cause-and-effect data to prove the slippery-slope hypothesis that Dickens, Core and EA advance.

SAFFedit: Ah, the old fundie 'slippery slope' argument. We have questioned Tate's reliance on Austen's 'expertise' earlier. t.   He was an early member of the Neo-Nazi British Movement. He used to say he had been thrown out of the BM because he is gay. His involvement in Satanism is long standing, we have absolutely no evidence that he started off with an interest in Paganism and Witchcraft. An ex Christian (He was for a few years a member of the Mormon church) Austen turned to Satanism and is known to have involved masturbation and other sexual antics in his rites. At the time Tate was trafficking with Austen he was becoming the head of the Temple of Set's UK arm, but a decade earlier he had inaugurated several unsuccessful satanic groups of his own which incorporated Onanist rites in their ceremonies. In his teenage years his first foray into self-publicity was when he was outed in a full page spread in the News of the World for taking part in a scandalous homosexual orgy in Exeter cathedral with other young clerics on the High Altar. Witches and Pagans do NOT desecrate the sacred temples of other religions.

Tate worked with Austen on his research for The Devil's Work. Part of this was when he wined and dined Austen at a swish Surrey country-club where the notorious faux 'Satanic Initiation' scene was shot for The Devil's Work using paraphernalia purchased from Mr Bray's shop bought secretly for that purpose and then gifted to Austen afterwards.

In the trumped up ceremony, Austen was 'initiated' by Michael Aquino, the American founder and leader of the Temple of Set who was later on in the documentary falsely portrayed as a Satanic Child Abuser. To get this filmed scene The Cook Report had to pay for Aquino to travel to the UK and also footed the bill for his stay at the country club.    Milking the resultant publicity Dianne Core criticised the Cook Report for bringing Aquino over and giving him house room.   Although this Initiation scene purportedly showed Aquino initiating Austen into the Temple of Set, in reality Austen had been the de-facto head of the Temple of Set in the UK organising recruitment and publicity for at least the previous year, yet during the filmed ceremony Cook specifically exonerated Austen in a voice-over. As the ceremony was being shown, he said:

'David Austen, has never been accused of any crime.'

No such exoneration was given for Mr Bray whom Tate's programme tried to frame for promoting Satanism. Let's reality check that shall we? Mr Bray is NOT and never has been a Satanist, ( Tate admits this in his book) , but The Devil's Work portrayed Mr Bray as guilty of promoting Satanism.   The sole 'crime' Chris Bray had committed was not to be a Satanist but to promote Satanism, they said. The sub-text of which was the unstated implication that by promoting Satanism he had also tacitly promoted Satanic Abuse. Yet David Austen has been a key Satanist and promoted that belief in the UK for most of his life. His reward is to get exonerated!

Let's run that again: Here we have the spectacle of Austen, a 'friend of the programme', helping to organise a 'sting' on Michael Aquino, who is filmed initiating Austen as the leader of the Temple of Set in the UK, and he is exonerated of any involvement in SRA, yet later in the documentary the Cook Report smears Chris Bray for the 'crime' of carrying a single article on the history and aims of the TOS in his LOT magazine (Horns Across The Water - LOT22). Surely if the TOS was a hive of Satanic Child Abusers the Cook Report should have concentrated more on Austen's history and occult back-story, not exonerate him? As The Devil's Work shows, after the mocked-up initiation ceremony, the camera fades to scenes in the U.S. where Aquino and members of the Temple of Set are accused of Satanic Child Abuse. However, says Cook, Austen 'has never been accused of any crime' .

Surely, either the Temple of Set are involved in Satanically Abusing children or they are not. If they are then why is Cook exonerating Austen who heads up the TOS in the UK and is already on record as having said :

'in order to get initiated into the Temple of Set, would-be witches have to perform unnatural sex.' " Both men and women have to go through a homosexual experience which is carried out by or in front of the High Priest of the coven" Dave said.'

Didn't Austen's past make them suspicious of him? If the abuse was perpetrated solely by Aquino and not by the members of the TOS itself then why are Tate and Cook blaming Mr Bray for carrying an article on the Temple of Set?   None of it makes any sense. In fact for those 'in the know', whom dear reader you are now going to join, there is an extra worrying consideration. The Devil's Work broadcast statements that Aquino had abused a child AFTER the police inquiry into it had found there was no case to answer!   The false allegations were made by a chaplain who had already had personal run-ins with Aquino in the US. So the Cook Report framed Aquino just as they had tried to frame Chris Bray. They did this because SRA does not exist, they could not find any examples of it in the UK so created an imagined threat by importing Aquino.

Why couldn't they find any UK Satanists to accuse? Look again at the quotation at the top of chapter 4 in Tate's book:

'Traditional Satanist groups have - and still do - conduct human sacrifice'. Anton Long, Practising Satanist, July 1987.

If this was true, why didn't Tate & Cook doorstep Anton Long?   Why isn't Long featured in the Devil's Work as proof of SRA in the UK? The answer dear reader is that it is completely UNTRUE to say that Satanists conduct human sacrifice - there is absolutely no evidence of it. Is that the reason why Tate did not pursue Long? Anton Long was the pseudonym of David Myatt, a long-time Satanist and ex member of several right-wing political organisations. Tate knows this as he names him on pp123. Myatt, like most Satanists, has a touch of megalomania and allows his fantasies and creativity full reign when trying to impress others; it seems to have worked with Tate, who writes 'How seriously should we take Anton Long and his Order of Nine Angles' (pp125) and then fails to tell us, allowing all those who want SRA to exist to implicitly believe in what Long says: I'm a Satanist, Satanists do sacrifice humans, so catch me if you can! And Tate instead chases after Mr Bray. Absolutely bonkers.

Tate implies that he couldn't check Myatt's claims because he is too hard to contact, I would suggest he just telephones the police!   Lots of people within the occult know Myatt and take him with a pinch of salt. Any one of them could have arranged for Tate to speak with Myatt.   My readers should know that Arch-Satanist David Myatt later had an 'epiphany' and converted from Satanism to Islam! So much for tales of Satanic Sacrifice!

In short , at the time Tate was writing Children For The Devil there were only three major Satanic groups/influencers active in the UK, The Temple of Set, the Church of Satan, and the Order of Nine Angles. The first the Cook Report lied about, the second had absolutely no SRA allegations against it, and the third, the ONA turned out to be one man in a garret, enjoying himself frightening the pants off tut-tutters like Tate.

There is no evidence of Satanic crimes in the U.K. None at all. However, to ensure Tate cannot get away with these smears we have obtained permission from the LOT to reprint the entire article Horns Across The Water and you will find it at the bottom of this web page here. After reading it you may think; what was all the fuss about? No abuse, no children, no crimes, no worshipping of the devil, no mind-bending radicalisation - just a sensible and well-informed history of modern Satanism which Tate and his ilk would do well to learn from. Indeed, in Horns Across The Water Aquino specifically distances the ToS from the Satanic Stereotype which Tate uses to smear innocent folk, by stating:

'The Church of Satan borrowed more atmosphere than substance from Wheatley. It had been conceived not as a "inverse-Christianity" movement but rather as one dedicated to responsible and guilt-free self—indulgence. Judaeo—Christianity was castigated for its hypocrisy and repression; otherwise it was considered irrelevant. Although the Black Mass was included in the Church's ceremonial inventory, it consisted of highly stylized psychodrama rather than ritual murder, crucified bats, or turnip—attacks on virgins.'

What, in heaven's name, was all the fuss about Tim?

The same truth holds good for the evangelical approach to rock music. We have seen already that performers like Ozzy Osbourne use a smattering of satanic imagery to sell their product, And without doubt some teenagers are badly affected by it. The case of Andrew Newell illustrated that. Equally there are some bands whose music, lyrics and beliefs are evocative of child abuse in quasi-occult circumstances.

pp326

The Temple ov (sic) Psychic Youth is a loose-knit London-based organisation formed around a rock band called Psychic TV. Videos of the band's performances - sold with accompanying texts from the Temple - clearly show it to be heavily influenced by Crowley. There is a suggestion of child sex - or at least of children present during adult sex - in rituals which take place during the performances. But however nasty it might be - and the Obscene Publications Branch was, in October 1990, examining ToPY's material for potential violations of the indecency laws - there is no reliable evidence to support the contention that satanic rock music is part of an international recruitment campaign amongst pubescent teenagers.

[SAFFedit: The idea that Psychic TV was involved in Satanic Ritual Abuse was a scaremongering hoax promoted by Andrew Boyd, a rabid fundamentalist agitator who wrote a book called Blasphemous Rumours in 1991 which claimed to contain evidence of and testimony from witnesses who had suffered SRA from Psychic TV. On the strength of the so-called research for his book Boyd fooled Channel 4 TV into broadcasting a Documentary entitled Beyond Belief which caused a national sensation when broadcast on 19th February 1992, purporting to show a video of actual Satanic Ritual Abuse occurring.

Broadcast of the documentary was preceded a couple of days earlier by an Obscene Publications Squad raid on the Brighton premises of TOPY. The OPS had been primed with suspicion by Boyd and here in 1991 Tate's mention of it months before the documentary was aired, shows how SRA information is cross-pollinated by believers. Tate's inclusion of the TOPY false accusations could only have come from Boyd.

Within a week of broadcast of Beyond Belief the documentary was utterly discredited when the main witness, Jennifer, admitted lying about it. SAFF covered the full story here http://saff.nfshost.com/devilvid.htm There was no Satanic Abuse found by the police, no arrests were made and no prosecutions followed. It was not evidence of some link between Satanism and Rock Music. As with all Tate's implications this SRA case came to absolutely nothing. ]

The final strand in the evangelical argument linking Satanism and child abuse to less extreme occult religions is a little better grounded. Campaigners like Maureen Davies and Dianne Core point to occult bookshops and mail-order businesses as the major suppliers of satanic texts and paraphernalia. This is unquestionably true: Chris Bray's Sorcerer's Apprentice sells all that the budding Satanist needs to begin a life of Devil-worship. But such is the hysteria surrounding the evangelical campaign that occultists like Bray have closed ranks and denounced even genuine evidence of ritual abuse as part of a Christian witch-hunt.

[SAFFedit|: Wow, four un-facts in two sentences!
(1) There is no genuine evidence of ritual abuse so how can Mr Bray denounce it? He denounced only false facts.
(2) SRA is the invention of fundamentalist agitators, whom Tate has kindly pointed out for us!
(3) Mr Bray's bookshop is not full of Satanic Items - his stock-list of books contains 3,000 titles, only six (6) of which are Satanic. The rest cover all facets of esoteric belief, including Christian mysticism. Additionally his paraphernalia/equipment stock-list contains thousands of items, only a couple of dozen of which relate to Satanism. The idea that Mr Bray favours Satanism or promotes it is false.
(4) Mr Bray does not sell to children and under 18s are not allowed into his shop. This bar on minors was put in place in 1975 when The Sorcerer's Apprentice started. Is Tate's pejorative phase 'budding Satanists' meant to convey that Mr Bray supplies dangerous items to children, because if so that is wholly and despicably untrue. ]

Occultists and ritual abuse

In October 1989, a Neo-pagan known variously as Jeremy Tribe and Peter Elliot published the first issue of a new magazine. ORCRO- 'The Occult Response to the Christian Response to the Occult' - set out to de-bunk the evangelical campaign which indiscriminately linked ritual child abuse to any and every occult religion. Unfortunately, it quickly adopted the worst traits of its opponents - shoddy research and unsubstantiated prejudice. 'At the time of writing - April 1989 - not one substantiated account of child abuse relating to what ran legitimately be called occultism has been produced' .

pp327.

As we saw in Chapter 4, there had been five successfully prosecuted cases of ritual abuse in Britain by the time that editorial appeared. Six months later, far from having discovered its error, ORCRO was pleased to proclaim:

When ORCRO was founded it was clear that many of the Christian experts' comments as regards occultism indicated that they were simply not experts on occultism. That their material was in many cases second hand, inaccurate, misquoted and in general so full of holes that one could drive a bus through it. Court cases cited as examples of occult-related crime turned out to be no such thing. Promised court cases somehow never materialised and continue not to materialise."

The explanation for this apparently perverse refusal to believe in the evidence of decided cases was to be found not in ORCRO itself but in the increasingly hysterical ramblings of Christopher Bray, proprietor of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, publisher of The Lamp of Thoth and compiler of occult surveys. Bray's curiously twisted logic had led him to a profound revelation. Whilst it was true that some people committed serious criminal offences in the course of apparently satanic rituals, these merely proved that those responsible were not occultists, since occultists never committed offences. Therefore, the crimes could not have been occult-related or satanic because their perpetrators were not true occultists. QED.

[SAFFedit: It is nice of Tate to tell his readers what he thinks Mr Bray thinks but this is the second time he has tried it and he made a fool out of himself the first time when he tried to tell the tribunal at the Broadcasting Complaints Commission what Mr Bray thought. 'How would you know what I think! ' retorted Mr Bray, and the tribunal waited whilst Tate shuffled through his papers and stuttered about having it in print somewhere. 'No you haven't, for I didn't know that fact until you mentioned it just now.' responded Mr Bray.   As usual Tate has it wrong again. Tate appears to be constantly putting words into other peoples' mouths which they have not said.   We asked Mr Bray for his comments on this paragraph and he told us: '

"I have never used 'the curiously twisted logic' that Tate ascribes to me. My stance is simply this; Tate falsely accused me of encouraging Satanic Abuse. I didn't know what he was talking about. I discovered that the handful of cases he quoted were not Satanic Abuse, but opportunistic paedophiles using occultism to frighten kids into compliance.   I then saw that almost everything the man said about me was a lie or a deviant misrepresentation of what I do, so I naturally set out to put the record straight whenever he opened his mouth.   Tate did not like this, it embarrassed him and showed up his lack of professionalism, so he became vindictive and has tried to persecute me.

These unfair and wicked attacks went on for years and is clearly evident in 'Children for The Devil'. If anyone' s logic is flawed it is his. I have never said that child-abuse does not exist. The comparatively miniscule number of 'ordinary' abusers who have sought to employ occult imagery and paraphernalia to abuse children have nothing whatsoever to do with the genuine rites of Paganism and Satanic groups the exponents of which are decent people, and good parents.   There is no pan-global Satanic conspiracy to abuse children. It is all in Tate's tiny mind, ergo it is Tate who is hysterically chasing conspiracies, not me.

Oh, and by the way, I do not ramble, I am not the least hysterical and I do not 'compile occult surveys', I have in fact only produced one, The 1989 Occult Census which you can see here and it is now a valuable and historic snapshot of Britains' esotericists at the close of the 20th century.

1986 Sandi Gallant with CCIN Larry Jones satan seminar

Instead, according to Bray, the whole satanic ritual-abuse phenomenon was a sinister fundamentalist Christian conspiracy to stamp out other religions - a campaign that started in America and had been imported unquestioningly into Britain by a gullible press, Behind it all, apparently, was San Francisco Police Intelligence Officer Sandi Gallant⁽¹⁾

Gallant's interest was both professional and religious. Applying her police 'after-incident' training to the imagined problem of ritual child sexual abuse she found a ready-made professional audience willing to listen to her as spokesperson for the SFPD Gallants attempts to inflict upon the UK the same extremes of suppression foisted upon the USA succeeded..., Using her material Maureen Davies was able to link together the Christian fundamentalist network in the UK and manipulate the media throughout the whole of 1988 and 1989. Whether or not you believe that this was a planned conspiracy or a subconscious one is irrelevant to the material results, which is that totally untrue allegations were used as a device by bigots to work against another religious belief,'²

^{[SAFF edit: Is Tate saying that this is
untrue? Because if so then it's another one of his
un-facts. The image on the right shows how Sandi
Gallant liaised with nutter fundie 'Cult Cops' in
1986, at one of CCIN's first Satan Seminars; and
inadvertently helped them whip-up sectarian hatred
against Pagans and Satanists. Her 'expertise was
then imported into the UK in articles in 1987. Tate
has already told his readers that Reachout's Maureen
Davies imported SRA allegations from CCIN in
1987. By late 1990 Gallant was distancing
herself from the fundie nutters and claims of Satanic
Abuse. What exactly did Chris bray get wrong
here Tate?}

pp328:

Perhaps the strident fantasies of Christopher Bray would not matter so much if he had not allowed his magazine to be used in ' 1988 as an unquestioning recruitment platform for two of the international satanic orders we examined in Chapters 4 and 5 - the Temple of Set and the Process Church of the Final Judgement. Bray has subsequently argued that he included their membership drives - and, with them, contact addresses - because he believed in giving his readers access to the full range of occult belief and opinion. Yet this is precisely the charge levelled against him and fellow occult businessmen by the likes of Maureen Davies and Dianne Core.

[SAFFedit: Tate quickly descends into tabloid smear tactics in order to portray Mr Bray in a bad light to readers. Let us inform the reader instead of manipulating him/her.

(1) The proclamation of The Process Church of the Final Judgement was not a recruitment drive. Mr Bray has already explained that the article was a reproduction of a leaflet sent anonymously to all occult bookshops shops and magazines in the UK during 1988. As editor of one of the UK's foremost occult magazines Mr Bray printed it in the LOT along with a warning for readers NOT to trust or contact the group. How Tate can misconstrue this as 'recruiting' for The Process beats me. Largely because Mr Bray made that warning The Process did not take off in subsequent years, hence Tate is actually complaining about Chris Bray doing the right thing! What a snide little man Tate is.

(2) The article written by the Temple of Set for LOT22, Horns Across The Water, was just one of many similar promotional articles written by various occult groups explaining their work and intent which appeared from time to time in almost every issue of the LOT magazine. It was nothing special. Check it out yourself - you can download a copy from here: No special favours were given to the TOS and no special emphasis or recommendation was offered either.

The entire content of the LOT magazine openly discussed different occult philosophies and methods from Christian Mysticism through Spiritualism, Wicca, Neo Paganism, Shamanism, Thelema, Jainism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Theosophy, New Religious Movements, Archaic Philosophies, Hermeticism, Theosophy, Spiritualism, Alternative Healing, Mysticism, Astrology and many, many more philosophies, including the occasional article on Satanism. As Mr Bray has pointed out (above). Because SRA did not exist it was not considered a problem until Christian fundamentalists invented it in 1988, therefore he couldn't ban or censor something which had not then taken place! Tate is idiotic to conclude that Mr Bray was in some way pushing Satanism; and why would he? Tate has already made a clear legal statement in Children For The Devil that Mr Bray is not and never has been a Satanist! ]

If Bray and his opposite numbers at ORCRO had genuinely wanted to protect the good name of most occult practitioners they would have offered their help rather than bilious invective. The occult community is - almost by definition - a hidden one: while most of what occurs behind its closely guarded doors is anodyne to the point of bland tedium, a proportion is not, The curious point about such occult. evangelists as Christopher Bray is that he has tried to sweep the reality of ritual abuse further than ever from public view. To do so he needed the help of the media, and in 1990 he got it.

[ SAFFedit: Tate spinning his web of deceit again!   Firstly, the purpose of the Sorcerer's Apprentice bookshop, was to publicise the wide range of ideologies and philosophies which were available across the UK so that bigots like Tate could not misrepresent them. Fundies would like to think the occult is 'hidden' because it makes it sound suspect but in reality it is wide open for any and everyone to see. That's the problem! The fundies WANT to suppress it and make it hidden so others cannot get access to pre-Christian Wisdom of the Ages. The entire SRA myth is an attempt at censorship of the Ancient Wisdom.

Secondly, A Christian evangelist is someone who promotes Christianity. Mr Bray cannot be an 'occult evangelist' because he promotes ALL aspects of occultism under which there are several dozen serious belief systems.

Chris Bray has never prejudicially promoted any single aspect of occultism but creates pathways to all of them. This is because the different systems are attractive to different types of people. People with different natures gravitate to different things and develop on to other insights as they evolve spiritually. If Mr Bray is evangelistic about anything it is access to the Universal Truths of the Ancient Wisdom; something Tate and the fundies apparently does not want you to see.

There is no 'reality of ritual abuse'. There has not been one instance where a Satanist or Witch has been caught perpetrating Ritual Abuse on Children in the last three decades since Tate originally promoted the false allegations. Every single one of the 21 cases of SRA Tate claimed to be ongoing in the Cook Report failed. Not one of them was what he said they were. How many years must pass and how many opportunities must Tate have to try to prove his barmy ideas about SRA and get them wrong, time after time after time? It is not Mr Bray who is 'sweeping reality' from view, it is Tate who is in a state of denial about the existence of a chimera upon which he wagered his whole career and lost.

Thirdly Mr Bray DID offer his help directly to Tate and the Cook Report. How could Tate forget this?    Mr Bray's diary shows the following:
On 2nd February 1989, I issue a 4 page public statement of my own philosophy and business intent and send a copy of this to the Cook Report. I then ask my solicitor to write personally to Tim Tate (Feb 10th) and underline that whilst previous and recent   examples   of misreporting have sapped my confidence in the media to such an extent that I do not wish to give an interview I am prepared to assist with background information about occultism to assist their campaign to locate child-abusers .

Well readers, there it is in black and white. The letters to the Cook Report and Tate were all sent 'recorded delivery' and so Mr Bray knows that they arrived because he has receipts for it. There are copies of these letters at Mr Bray's solicitors and in his own files. Tate tells readers that Mr Bray should have 'offered help' and that's exactly what he did. What did Tate do in return? Ignore Mr Bray's kind offer and fabricate the lie that Bray refused to help find SRA abusers. You can now see exactly what the SAFF have had to deal with over the years. ]

Ritual abuse and the media

It is a truism to say that we get the press we deserve. It is none the less true. Until the latter part of the 1980s, reports of Satanism and bizarre ritual abuse were confined to the screaming headlines of the Sunday tabloids Under such banners as My witchcraft made the rock idol Eric a Daddy - I used magic blood potion' or Sex in a field to make plants grow', self-styled occultists made less than credible claims about smells, spells and bells. Gradually, throughout the decade these became rarer, to be replaced by scarcely better-documented claims from a handful of alleged ex-Satanists. Doreen Irvine and Marion Unsworth were amongst the first in Britain, Jacquie Balodis and Cheryl Horton their counterparts in the United States.

pp329

Their stories, announced in 72-point type as 'I saw teenage girl killed in a sacrifice to the Devil' or 'Babies sacrificed to Satan' became standard gutter-press fare. What they lacked in discernible detail - and they lacked a great deal - was made up for in gory colour, A common feature was that most had rejected the occult for one of Christianity's more evangelical sub-divisions,

This early generation of alleged adult survivor stories has been superseded by a small cottage industry devoted to churning out autobiographies of women who claim - on very slender evidence - to have been involved in satanic abuse and sacrifice. Like their forebears, these new survivors' stories are almost without exception cynical and exploitative trash.

[SAFFedit: More unmitigated nonsense from Tate who delights in rewriting history to suit himself, regardless of facts that are staring him in the face.

(Unfact 1) Interest in positive occult articles in the popular press did not wane during the 1980s, they actually increased. See Secret of Britain's White Witches (1981) and Spell Bound Britain, Daily Mirror (1983), and The Great British Witch Boom, New Society Magazine (1984), Witchcraft and Old Art Reborn (1987), and many, many more in SAFF files.

The positive, exciting, unharmful and creative aspects of Pagan and esoteric philosophies is clearly illustrated from this period in the cutting (right) from the Sun magazine of 25 April 1982; a four page special entitled The Witch Report. If you click on the illustration to get a larger image you can read what Chris Bray's stated principles and intentions were and you will see they have been consistent throughout the past three decades. This is clear evidence that what Tate is telling you is untrue.

These articles and tons more in the SAFF Research Library show that Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft have nothing to do with perverted sex, abuse or harmful methods.   Exactly the reverse of what Tate is trying to put into your mind.   In short Tate simply doesn't know what he is talking about.

(Unfact 2) Doreen Irvine wrote her book 'From Witchcraft To Christ in 1973, not during the 1980s as Tate insists. This proves that the conflict between books written for the Christian pound by evangelicals warning about the dangers of occultism has been a constant feature and ran parallel to the growing interest in the positive aspects of the occult which had occurred during the 1960s / 1970s / 1980s.

Books and articles from born-again converts to Christianity which libelled Paganism and Witches increased in response to the popularisation of Paganism. These fundies wrote polemics which lied about what witches did in order to stop the public seeing how Paganism could benefit our society. You can clearly see this in the SAFF analysis and review of Irvine's From Witchcraft to Christ here; and the SAFF dissection and review of Audrey Harper's Dance With The Devil here:   which we prove to be sectarian malice from start to finish.

In listing these over-the-top fundie books written to defame Paganism Tate fails to mention the most influential one - Audrey Harper's Dance with the Devil.   Is that because he filmed and interviewed her on camera in 'The Devil's Work' using her unproven allegations as 'proof' of SRA!   Remember folks Tate has just stated that these kind of

survivors' stories are almost without exception cynical and exploitative trash.

...and for once we agree with him, but then Tate filmed Harper in front of an Altar 'exorcising' small children. Nowhere did the Cook Report make it clear that she was a director of the Reachout Trust which almost single-handedly started the 1990 Satanic Panic! During that on-screen interview the bigot Harper verbally attacked homosexuals and told viewers that most Witches were Lesbians!   There was no need to show that despicable untrue statement, they could have edited it out easily, but the Cook Report was so appallingly trumped-up they left it in and Central TV was besieged with complaints from the public and had to issue a public apology for broadcasting it. If you want to see just how worthless SRA claims in The Devil's Work were you can see clips from it here. ]

This cheap and nasty journalism ensured one result above all else. When genuine ritual child-abuse stories - stemming not from adults making uncheckable allegations, but from the tortured disclosures of toddlers and pre-school victims - emerged in 1987, the cultural climate was set against them.

'I could never understand why we didn't get more interest from the press and media,' Judith Dawson recalled in 1990. 'When I asked reporters they said their editors found the subject "too tacky", or "too much like the tabloid scare stories". The ritual abuse of children in Nottingham just wasn't going to be on the agenda for the national media.'

What the coverage needed was a new angle. It got one in 1988 and 1989, when previously respectable organisations like Childwatch and the Christian Church - albeit in the guise of the Evangelical Alliance - began issuing press releases, speaking at conferences and doing their best to raise the temperature. But before long journalists began asking to see some genuine evidence of what the campaigners had asked them to take on trust. Maureen Davies was in something of a fix. Her information was, as ORCRO had rightly pointed out, frequently second-hand, and rarely verified. Anyone with an axe to grind against the occult was guaranteed a sympathetic ear at Reachout, provided they had a story to tell of drugs, death or danger.

pp330

By the summer of 1989 the honeymoon was over. The satanic ritual-abuse phenomenon had once again been relegated to the bold headlines of the Sunday tabloids. If it was raised in the serious press it was treated to a wry and knowing turn of phrase. Even the NSPCC was widely criticised for having been duped.

SAFFedit: Like the Serpent from Eden Tate's silvery tongue flicks out forked, mixing fact and fiction to bend the reader's mind to his point of view. His theory is that SRA existed but genuine cases of it which were being pursued by respectable and sensible social workers could not be heard for the cacophony of mindless sensationalism and internecine squabbles between Pagans and Christians in the tabloid press. What absolute bunkum!

The SAFF have logged over 20 major articles which Dawson and her team either wrote or were involved in giving lengthy interviews during 1988 and 1989 in both professional journals and the national press, including the discredited 'Listen to The Children' Channel 4 TV documentary on Broxtowe which Dawson was heavily involved in, and several of the now infamous Satan Seminars at which Dawson spoke to promote her belief in SRA all of which uncritically promoted Dawson and RAINS take on SRA. Interestingly Tate also spoke at some of these seminars, and was interviewed alongside Dawson on the BBC's Outlook programme for the World Service in September 1989. How could Tate possibly state that Dawson was in any way censored or her information suppressed, or that articles questioning SRA silenced the quite large coterie of believers in SRA. Keep in mind that attendances at Satan Seminars ran into the hundreds of delegates. Dawson was not an oppressed 'victim' of unbelievers, she was an agitator active in founding and setting up RAINS (Ritual Abuse Information Network and Support) which brought together hundreds of SRA believers from across the country and is still fighting to prove SRA exists to this day.

Furthermore, Tate's implication that the NSPCC shouldn't have been questioned or challenged for supporting the idea of SRA is contemptible . The SAFF had continuous correspondence with the NSPCC over that 1988-1989 period trying to inject some rationality into their eagerness to discover SRA. The NSPCC wickedly refused information and evidence from the SAFF which showed that SRA was a fantasy. When we said we would tell the full story in print and expose them for rejecting our evidence, they paid for Blue Chip barristers Mischon de Reya to threaten to sue us and shut us up!   SAFF told the NSPCC to stuff it and we published anyway - the NSPCC did not have a leg to stand on, you cannot sue someone for telling the truth and so their cover-up failed.

Since then their scandalous mishandling of the Victoria Climbie case, ( the poor child who was murdered by her parents because the NSPCC couldn't be bothered to go around to see how she was doing because the local branch was having a party!). This coupled with recent complaints about unfair funding etc, has shot the NSPCC's reputation as the 'nation's favourite charity'. You can see how the NSPCC manipulated the minds of British people and donors on the subject of SRA here:   Yes dear reader the NSPCC truly deserved the criticisms that were levelled at it.

Nor does Tate mention that the NSPCC timed their 1989 Press Conference announcing their teams had found evidence of SRA across the country, to co-incide with broadcast of Tate's 'The Devil's Work', presumably to increase the publicity, which it succeeded in doing; the NSPCC was at the heart of the Satanic Panic even though not one of their cases which started it turned out to be true.

What brought the issue to some kind of life once again - and ensured that the pendulum swung even further against understanding - was a series of so-called dawn raids on a council estate in the Lancashire mill-town of Rochdale during the long hot summer of 1990. The Mail on Sunday - never a paper perceived by social workers as one to support them in the perennial battle against sexual abuse - led the pack:

'They came and they snatched children. They ignored the screams and the yells. They were unmoved by the tears and the lamentations. They had timed their call for 7am. All over a council estate in Rochdale, Lancashire, uniformed and plain-clothed policemen accompanied by social workers went about their work.'

The date was June 14 - let not only the people of Rochdale, but the rest of us, too, not forget it easily.

Behind this arch and melodramatic prose are the results of 'an investigation' the paper had undertaken. Sixteen children were removed from four families on the estate in conditions of some secrecy. The cause was suspected satanic ritual abuse. The spur had been disclosures to social workers in the town by a six-year old boy. He told a now familiar story of having been locked in a cage witnessing strange ceremonies in which sheep were sacrificed by adults wearing white robes and hoods, He identified the other children who were present, It was these youngsters who were taken into temporary care.

[SAFFedit: What a unsympathetic hack Tate really is. Those little Rochdale kids were asleep in their beds when police burst in on them at the crack of dawn and strangers from social services dragged them screaming from their beds as parents fought to prevent it all. All Tate has to say about this absolutely disgusting act it is that the Daily Mail should be castigated for using the term 'Dawn Raids' when the sun had probably come up an hour earlier! Then after ameliorating the despicable tactics of Rochdale Social Services department, he tries to say it wasn't so bad because the youngsters were taken into 'temporary care'. TEMPORARY CARE? One of those innocent children from their equally innocent parents was kept from his loving home for SIX YEARS. The parents had to mount extensive and expensive legal challenges to get their other kids back after 18 months. Tate should hang his head in shame at trying to minimise the suffering of these children and the mistakes that the people he supports made in that scandal, for which there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever. To get a flavour of what happened from the mouths of the children themselves, now adults, you should watch When Satan Came To Town: on the SAFFutube channel here:

pp331

The boy's initial disclosures had been made to a teacher at his school. She had found him one day cowering in a cupboard, clearly and visibly distressed, In addition to the rituals involving sheep, he also described seeing a baby being born and then being killed, and graves being dug up and crosses burning in ceremonies.

The teacher told Rochdale social services and on 28 March the boy was taken into temporary care under a Place of Safety Order. The raid which took away the other children did not happen for another three months - months in which the boy's stories were assessed carefully. Rochdale's mistake was to attempt to keep the case under wraps. Despite having acted perfectly properly at this stage, the social services department believed that it. could avoid the attention of the media. It was wrong.

[SAFFedit: Again Tate rewrites history like some Stalinist agent, recreating a new truth to hide the scandalous actions of Rochdale Social Work Department from the readers' gaze. The RSWD had no real evidence of any form of abuse, let alone Satanic Abuse. They lied, and cheated and corrupted the process which was designed to protect children.

They refused point blank to provide the court with the disclosure questioning tapes which had kicked off the case. Only after the Daily Mail had spent thousands on dragging RSWD into court whilst the poor kids languished in care homes in a twilight-zone they simply couldn't understand, devoid of parental visits, comforters and birthday cards, did anyone outside RSWD get to see the SRA evidence.... and it was utterly and incontrovertibly nonsense from start to finish.

The two Christian social workers who had controlled and directed the case had attended Satan Seminars of the type Tate spoke at and were using 'evidence' from Reachout and others involved including RAINS. In the inquiries which followed they were roundly and publicly condemned for their stupid actions. Tate says that 'they thought they could avoid the attention of the media' , does he mean sweep their dishonourable actions under the carpet? ]

The Mail on Sunday located the parents of the six-year-old whose tearful disclosures started the process. His mother confided in the reporter that it had all been her fault: she had let her son watch video nasties - horror films she named as The Evil and the Dead, Dungeons and Dragons and The Boy Who Could Fly. Gratefully, the Mail on Sunday accepted this excuse and announced that the whole story had been a fantasy based on watching television. There was one problem; none of the films mentioned contained any of the details the six-year-old had given to Rochdale social services, Some of those details did, however, match known indicators of satanic ritual abuse.

[SAFFedit: Dishonourable obfuscation! There were no 'indicators of Satanic Abuse' until people Tate supports invented them in 1987! Tate pulls this trick on every other page. Kids talk about the same Satanic things, he says, so there must be Satanic Abuse. The truth is that kids talk about horrors which are common to their own childish fears and it is Satan Hunters like Tate who define those horrors as Satanic. The fact that the child on which the Rochdale case hinged was frightened through watching 'video nasties' is true and it is also true that it was the Video Nasties which caused the child's nightmare fantasies, not Satanists! Tate is trying to imply that the Daily Mail seized upon the idea of Video Nasties as an easy excuse to cover up Satanic Abuse, but there was no Satanic Abuse and it wasn't just the Mail which accepted horror films as the prime cause of the little boy's fantasies, so did the official inquiry ( which was held after Tate's Children For The Devil went to press). It resulted in Lord David Alton spearheading new laws in parliament to avoid children watching Video Nasties which came into effect in 1994. ]

From September onwards the media had what it wanted - a new angle. In truth it was a reprise of the old Cleveland myth - social workers as over-zealous busybodies persecuting innocent families. And, as in Cleveland, the Rochdale social workers would not allow the families even to know where their children were placed. Parents complained about being refused permission to send their offspring birthday presents or cards: the press gleefully reported each new heart-rending story.

[SAFFedit: Tate here reveals his political agenda. The Cleveland Scandal was an attempt by Radical Feminists who were moving to take over social work to find a 'witch-pricker' to diagnose abuse in children so they could find the 'epidemic' of sexual abuse they expected, so they could blame it on men whom they hated.

190 children were kidnapped in dawn raids and taken into care based solely on the new 'trick' Anal Dilation Syndrome (ADS) invented by other leading edge Radfems and applied in Leeds and Newcastle by the despised Marietta Higgs and Geoffrey Wyatt where suddenly mass-cases of abuse began turning up.

The scandal was a permanent blot on child protection in the UK. A judicial inquiry found ADS to have no value whatsoever and the Radfems who used it were publicly castigated. All but two of the children were returned to their innocent parents.

The people who caused Cleveland are the same people who were involved in the first claimed cases of SRA and who populate RAINS. Even today, three decades after the glaring mistakes of the Cleveland Scandal, Tate and his buddies are still trying to insist that the coterie of RadFems were right, there was abuse in Cleveland and everyone else is wrong. This SAFF webpage here shows Tate doing it, and analyses the true background.

What the reporters did not bother to discover, much less report, is that in cases of ritual abuse it can be vital to isolate a child completely from the circumstances of the abuse. There is good evidence - from law enforcement as well as from therapeutic analysis - that offenders in such cases attempt to silence their victims by sending or delivering little reminders of what went on in the rituals. Often these have taken the form of birthday or greetings cards with an animal featured prominently on the front, To the untrained eye they look as innocent as their manufacturers intended: for the ritual-abuse victim they can act as a subliminal trigger to revive past warnings about keeping quiet. [SAFF edit; The idea of Trigger-words or Trigger-symbols was invented by Satan Hunters to condemn parents they had falsely accused on specious grounds and has absolutely no basis in fact. See SAFF trigger-word analysis here: ]

pp332

There was one other difference between Rochdale and Cleveland. In the Lancashire town the social workers had not gone to untrained magistrates asking for rubber-stamped care orders; they had placed decisions about the children in the hands of a senior high-court judge. Wardship orders were sought, and most were granted - but only after the judge heard counsel for the families make out their case.

Wardship, as we have seen, effectively stifles debate. With the Rochdale case now largely out of reach, the press began to look anew at the issue of ritual abuse itself. It did not like what it saw.

The reporter most prominent that summer and autumn worked not for a sleazy tabloid but for a supposedly respectable paper of record - the Independent on Sunday. Rosie Waterhouse had joined the paper several months before after a highly publicised dispute with her previous employers at the Sunday Times. There she had been just another young woman reporter: she had not delivered many memorable stories and, although she had been offered details of the early stages of the Broxtowe case, when the children were taken into care and before the disclosures of ritual abuse, she had not managed to get the item published.

The Making of a Satanic Myth - Rosie Waterhouse. Independent on sunday 12 Augus 1990

The Making of a Satanic Myth - Rosie Waterhouse. Independent on sunday 12 Augus 1990

Waterhouse began investigating the origin of and evidence for the ritual-abuse phenomenon, by August she had become convinced that it was a fake. On 12 August 1990 she published a lengthy article under the headline 'The Making of a Satanic Myth'. The story alleged that there had never been a proven case of ritual abuse; that the phenomenon was entirely the work of fundamentalist Christians who had imported bad research from the United States, which had undergone a similar witch-hunt; and that the sole starting point of every story was the publication of Michele Remembers in 1980, Waterhouse complained:

There have been police investigations across the United States, in Canada, the Netherlands and now in Britain. They have produced no evidence. No bodies, no bones, no covens, no underground tunnesl, no animal carcases, no bloodstains. Nothing.'

pp333

Any reporter can be wrong; any writer may make a mistake. Waterhouse was wrong on all counts - as we have seen there have been bodies and bones, there have been tunnels, mutilated dogs, and blood by the bucketful. All have been explicitly and judicially linked to Satanism.

Nor was she finished. Between August and October she published several more 'investigations', each purporting to show that ritual abuse did not exist and was a myth sustained by fervent and fundamentalist Christians. Every single article was grossly misleading. The Independent on Sunday refused to publish retractions. It ignored letters from therapists, psychiatrists, doctors and the association formed to research the issue, RAINS - Ritual Abuse Information Network Support. Waterhouse refused to talk to anyone whose view opposed the paper's line. Instead she made herself available for television chat shows.

[SAFF edit: Note the vindictive way that Tate mis-portrays honest work by people who challenge the SRA myth.   He dissembles history to portray Rosie Waterhouse as some obsessive and prejudiced journalist out to destroy the Truth and insult everyone who believes in SRA.

In fact Waterhouse was initially a believer in Satanic Ritual Abuse, just like him, and the article on the right, Satanic Litany of children's suffering proves it. This article was written by Waterhouse and published 15th March 1990 and it supports Reachout's SRA allegations (as can be seen from the interview with Kevin Logan) it does not challenge them. This was eight months after Tate's Devil's Work, (the first TV programme to 'expose' SRA in the UK) had been broadcast to a hail of supportive publicity. So Rosie Waterhouse had been following Tate's own line for half a year.

Waterhouses' first anti-SRA article came on 12th August 1990, The Making of A Satanic Myth. What had happened? Simple, instead of believing everything Logan, Davies and Tate said she began to ask for EVIDENCE and there was none. None at all. So Rosie Waterhouse looked further into it and obtained evidence that changed her mind about SRA. She realised it was a myth and in this article she coined the phrase The Satanic Ritual Abuse Myth.

After unique and top-notch journalistic investigation Rosie Waterhouse found there was nothing to claims of SRA.   Instead of convincing her that she was wrong by providing evidence Tate has stooped to character assassination. He is unfairly victimising her as some kind of pro-occult activist and piss-poor journalist, when she's an award winning highly professional journalist who ended up teaching students journalism on the City University London. Rosie Waterhouse got the true story, and it has infuriated Tate every since.

Indeed Tate's secondary charge, that Rosie Waterhouse, in a conspiracy with the Independent newspaper somehow refused to carry any opposite views or criticisms of her stance on SRA is untrue.   You can see from the image on the right, ' Shedding Light on Satanic Abuse' published in the Independent on the 26th August a couple of weeks after 'The Making of A Satanic Myth' went out, that the newspaper did not censor pro-SRA views. Indeed Vera Diamond, a members of RAINS and ardent SRA believer was well known to Tate.   Maybe he forgot it?

Keep that in mind as you read his words and he says 'Waterhouse was wrong on all counts'. She was right on all counts!

Just as with Tate's vindictive attacks on Chris Bray, his even more puerile insults and un-facts concerning poor Rosie Waterhouse in his book resulted in her writing a no-holds barred review of Children For The Devil published in The New Statesman on 6th September 1991 which found, as SAFF has done here, repetitive errors of fact. She also castigates Tate for getting her background and CV wrong. That review of Children for The Devil is reproduced at the foot of this page.

Throughout the autumn the Independent on Sunday created a new truth: ritual abuse was a fantasy, a chimera conjured up by hysterical social workers and improperly motivated priests.

NSPCC Sorry for Wild statements on SRA

The NSPCC was singled out for a smear campaign. Waterhouse alleged that it had been responsible for brainwashing the Rochdale social workers. The NSPCC denied this. [SAFF edit: Another rewriting of history by Tate. As you can see by the cutting shown to the right in which the NSPCC admits fault for priming social workers with false SRA evidence.] the NSPCC was behind Anyone who had attended any seminar on ritual abuse became, de-facto, unreliable, their judgement clouded simply by listening to carefully presented workshops. The Nottingham social workers were not immune.' Judith Dawson was once again under attack, and in an article for the New Statesman in October 1990 said:

'A contagion is spreading throughout the land, one that is insidious and dangerous. This contagion takes the comforting form of a sceptical and rational enquiry, and its message is comforting too: it is designed to protect 'innocent family life' against a new urban myth of the satanic abuse of children inspired by evangelic fundamentalists. Social workers are depicted at once as all-powerful professional zealots who brainwash children into evil fantasies, and as credulous dupes who will believe ridiculous tales of witches, wizards and inquisitorial tortures. But as long as they are discredited and the public remains on guard, the children will be safe. Will they 2 In just a few weeks this contagion has demonstrated a devastating power that has deeply impressed the Nottingham team in which I work. For three years we have worked with children who have been grossly abused, sexually and physically tortured in a context that would be difficult to describe other than as ritualised. During the past few weeks our personal and professional reputations have been eroded. It is being said that we were influenced by our contacts with occult groups - but the children's disclosures came first. It really is totalitarian nonsense to imply that additional knowledge produces a closed mind."

pp334

Dawson's private life - and those of any other workers prepared to admit that they believed in ritual abuse - became the subject of ill-informed speculation. Ray Wyre was assumed to be a fundamentalist because he had once attended a theological college; one of the Rochdale councillors on the social services committee was condemned because he was (openly) homosexual. Dawson herself was accused of being part of the Christian conspiracy because she gave an interview to the Evangelical Alliance. She was forced to preface conversations with colleagues outside her authority with the declaration that she was not a believing Christian. A new witch-hunt began in 1990 - but this time it was the professionals who were being hunted.

[SAFFedit: Tate self-righteousness is in full swing now giving four inaccuracies in as many sentences. His un-facts are smooth and quick.    Firstly Ray Wyre had not just attended a theological college, he was training to be a Baptist pastor at Bible College. Of all the fundies involved in hyping the SRA myth Bible-thumping Baptists are in the lead. Anyone with Baptist training would surely be prejudiced about SRA and so his beliefs were questioned. What's wrong with that Tate, you question esotericists beliefs regularly? You can see Ray Wyre lying about children being killed in Satanic Ritual Abuse ceremonies in this SAFFutube clip here:

Secondly Tate is wrong; The Rochdale councillor was not condemned 'because he was homosexual'. He was exposed as having a conviction for 'cottaging' in public toilets. Reverend Paul Flowers a Methodist preacher was the vice-chairman of the Rochdale Social Services Committee which had backed the persecution of the Rochdale Parents for SRA to the hilt.   Does Tate not think that a hypocrite priest with convictions for sexual perversion, who stood in moral judgement over others on the subject of SRA should not be challenged?

Flowers is a reprobate, In 1990 he was convicted of drunk driving. In 2011 'inappropriate adult material' was found on his computer, in 2013 he resigned from the Coop Bank after a 1.5 billion pound hole was found in the finances. In 2014 he was done for possessing drugs including cocaine, methamphetamine and ketamine. In 2016 Flowers was exposed again by the Daily Mail with the headline: Shamed Paul Flowers 'is filmed snorting lines as he entertains four naked rent boys at hot-tub party in his back Garden'.   . It was also revealed that, while deputy head of social services at Rochdale Council, Flowers had known about the activities of paedophiles at a residential boys school, but had not informed parents or taken measures to close the school; and was also responsible for rejecting allegations of child sex abuse against the Late Rochdale MP Cyril Smith.

This is not an exhaustive list of his exploits! In 2017 Flowers was finally defrocked by the church - not before time some might say. Of course Tate's book was written before most of this happened but it just shows how right SAFF were to challenge the decisions Flowers was making over other people falsely accused of SRA doesn't it, and how misguided Tate was to defend him.

Thirdly Tate has not fully declared his own Evangelism:

"I read theology for three years with no great belief system when I started out. I found it fascinating and I emerged as what I would term a Christian." (Tate witnessing his own Christianity whilst being interviewed on Religious radio Programme "Sounds Awakening" (Liverpool City Gold Radio, Sunday 25th August 1991)

So when Tate paints a picture and says

Dawson herself was accused of being part of the Christian conspiracy because she gave an interview to the Evangelical Alliance.

he implies that people have over-reacted, yet Judith Dawson's interview was given to an extremist, fundamentalist group of Christians , the Reachout Trust faction of the E.A.who were the prime movers in the promotion of the Satanic Child Abuse Myth. Dawson talks about Satanic Ritual Abuse in this fundamentalist inspired Doorways To Danger Video, and it is significant. It was produced by Tom Poulson of the Christian Response to The Occult group, (not the EA itself but part of the EA's 'Coallition against SRA' set up with the aid of Reachout). If Dawson is not an evangelical Christian then she is the ONLY non-fundie who appears in this Video. Readers will spot Audrey Harper, Kevin Logan and a host of fundie conspiracyloons complaining about everything from Astrology to Transcendental Meditation as 'doorways' to Satan'. Here is what Judith Dawson said:

'My name is Judith Dawson and I am a child-abuse consultant from Nottinghamshire Social Services. In that job I spend most of my time having to help my department respond to families who've had problems partiularly involving the abuse of children, over the past 7 or 8 years social services department have had to come to terms with the fact that children have not only been physically abused but they've also been sexually abused and that's been a very painful thing to get used to. We've had to be taken beyond belief because what we've learned is that children are not only sexually abused but that they are also ritualistically abused that means that we have learnt that some families some adults get involved with satanic groups whose main aim is to destroy everything that is good everything that is good about human life and human values, and one particular target in that would be that they should hurt and defile children. As you are probably aware Christ said 'Touch not one hair of this child's head', satanists believe that they should do the opposite of that.'

We Remind Tate that this video, quoted scripture and damned people with non-Christian beliefs, frightening readers with tales of possession and spiritual darkness. When it was first produced it was sent unsolicited to many schools in the UK and caused an uproar. Several schools actually BANNED it and almost all rejected it for it's manic religious content. Dawson's appearance in it created serious questions. Tate ignores this furore and tries to convince his readers that there was nothing to it. What there was to it is that it appears to prove that the key worker on the Broxtowe case was an active Christian and therefore had an inbuilt bias towards belief in SRA, as he does.

One newspaper alone cannot create such a backlash - let alone the Independent on Sunday, which has the smallest circulation of all the quality Sunday press. But Waterhouse's articles were revealing: the allegations she made, the alleged 'facts' she deployed, and even some of the phrases she used bore a remarkable similarity to those advanced in millions of leaflets mass-mailed by Christopher Bray and other occult campaigners. [SAFFedit: So what?]

National newspapers were a major target. By the end of the summer the campaign seemed to be working. Ritual abuse was deemed to be unreliable in the first place and - more importantly - a distraction from the 'real problem' of incest. The view of Melanie Phillips, social services commentator for the Guardian newspaper, was typical:

p335:

The first and most important point to make is this: the controversy over satanic practices Is a monumental and dangerous irrelevance, a distraction from the banal everyday reality of the emotional and physical abuse of children within some families in which cruelty, neglect, rape and buggery take place as part of a distressing perversion of family life.... The second important point is that there has been no evidence of any satanic child abuse practices. It's all rumour and hearsay.... What we do know is that these satanic allegations have only surfaced here in the last couple of years following unsubstantiated claims from the US.

The previous decade, with all its effort, all its cases - proven or suppressed - and all its hard-won understanding of the special needs of ritual-abuse victims, might as well never have happened. There was no conspiracy among newspapers to snuff out the flickering flame of understanding in 1990. It happened through lazy reporting and an inability to listen to children' s voices.

Melanie Phillips - NSPCC microwaved babies

Melanie Phillips - NSPCC microwaved babies

[SAFF edit: Tate smears Melanie Phillips for questioning the reliability of claims of SRA. He ignores her wide experience and track-record of decades of working for the best interests of child-protection. He selectively picks out a section of her writings as an example of how things had changed because of something he imagines Rosie Waterhouse and Chris Bray did to change the atmosphere, and in so doing obscures the far more pertinent and detailed article which Phillips penned right at the start of the Myth in 1990 in response to NSPCC claims. Phillips was one of the first to contradict the evidence being offered for SRA, as you can see in the cutting on the right, where she lambasts the NSPCC for originally claiming that Satanists had cooked babies in a micro-wave oven even though there had been no instance of it ever happening!

Therefore Tate is wrong, there had been NO change in journalistic interest. Evidence for SRA had been demanded right from the start and there was no new 'campaign' against courageous social workers by anyone. Simply renewed demands from those people who had been falsely accused of SRA by believers like Tate, to prove their contentions after the 10 first SRA cases all failed. ]

But it had an effect. Social workers all over Britain once again put. away their case files and ceased to talk about Ritual Abuse. Children went unprotected or uncounselled. And in Rochdale -

Whatever the strengths of the original case - and there must have been some strength to have carried it through several interim hearings - Rochdale's social workers threw them away. Instead of taking specialist advice, they insisted on handling the alleged ritual-abuse disclosures themselves. They then failed to record some of these disclosures properly: in a number of cases the sound-track to the videotape was so poor that the children' s words were inaudible. In other cases they breached clear practice rules by failing to keep notes, or only turning on the tape after a disclosure had begun. Leading questions were asked, guidelines flouted.

When the case came before Mr Justice Douglas Brown early in March 1991 the department's case was in tatters. Although three of the seventeen children originally taken into care had been returned to their parents, the council was insistent that the remainder should not be allowed home. But its evidence was fatally flawed, even to the point that sworn affidavits were inaccurate or misleading. The judge ordered all but four of the remaining fourteen children to be released at once and issued a swingeing criticism of the social workers' inadequacies.

pp336

Police Drop Satanic Abuse Case in Rochdale - Guardian sept 1990

Had Mr Justice Brown left it at that all might not have been lost. Although right to order the children home - he had no choice given the department's handling of the case and a complete failure by Greater Manchester police to come up with any corroborating evidence - his subsequent comments suggest that he departed from his own judicial duty to rely on empirical truth.

[SAFF edit: There's a simple reason why the Greater Manchester Police could not find evidence to back up the SRA claims of the Social Service witch-hunters - there wasn't any! As the cutting on the right shows. ]

The judge admitted that there was no way of knowing what the Rochdale children had seen which sparked their disclosures. Yet he allowed himself to be convinced that there was no satanic ritual abuse involved in the case. Similarly, he dismissed the social service department's claims that the children had been administered hallucinogenic drugs on the very weak grounds that no evidence had been found to indicate that their parents were experienced drug-users.

Finally, he chose to accept the notion that all the disclosures of apparent ritual abuse and killing were the product of parents who had allowed their children to watch video nasties. That there was no evidence to support this, other than the parents' own claims, and that none of the tapes contained scenes depicting any of the key indicators of satanic ritual abuse, appeared to go by the wayside.

Mr Justice Douglas Brown should have known better. To criticise a social services department for contaminating and sabotaging its own evidence is one thing.   But to come to specific and wide-ranging conclusions because that evidence was missing was very dangerous indeed.

The result was predictable. The issue of satanic ritual abuse became once again derided as the fevered imaginings of social workers over-zealous in their desire to find devils in children' s beds.    The Rochdale case - botched as it was - should have taught the lesson that training and research was needed. Instead it relaunched the myth that ritual abuse was a distracting mirage.

Since the middle of 1990 a new orthodoxy has replaced reality.    This new 'truth' says that children are never abused in rituals, nor by Satanists; babies are not killed, nor toddlers tortured; drugs are not forcibly injected, nor body waste eaten under threats of death.   None of this happens - newspapers tell us such stories are all beyond belief.

pp337 / pp338

Chapter 8 ends.

[SAFFedit: In the finality Tate resorts to sarcasm to try to undermine the Truth. After 21 failed cases which he designated as Satanic Ritual Abuse in which these prototype SRA allegations were made, every single one of the prosecutions failed, as we have proven to you in this review.

How well was Tate's book received in 1991 when it was first published? Not very well. In fact within weeks Tate was being sued for defamation by Peter Cole, the policeman in charge of the Broxtowe case. Tate could not substantiate his claims and his publishers admitted guilt and paid a settlement to avoid going to court. Existing copies of Children for The Devil were recalled and pulped. The few extant copies have remained silent for thirty years until a new generation of fundamentalist Satan Hunters rediscovered it and have begun to try to convince those in law-enforcement and child-protection that SRA did exist after all. Perpetual Holy War. It is this which has made it necessary for the SAFF to publish this page, so that twisted minds do not once again get control of and direct child-protection in a way which unnecessarily tortures and abuses small children.

If SAFF were to rewrite Children For The Devil to correct every single one of the many errors and inaccuracies within it then Tate's tragic book would extend to double it's size. This analysis of Chapter 8 should alert all thinking people to the fact that Children for The Devil is nothing other than a disguised Religious polemic, designed to harness the atavistic fears of all parents to marginalise, demonise and suppress all beliefs other than the narrow world-view of Fundamentalist Christianity. Tate makes appeals to the emotions, he propagandises cases, he misrepresents and he discredits, but what he doesn't do is provide any incontrovertible convincing evidence that SRA is a threat.

The simple fact is that Satanic Ritual Child Abuse DOES NOT EXIST but like the hundreds of thousands of conspiracyloons now pushing the Qanon and Pizzagate fantasies on the internet which are all based on the idea of a Pan-Global Satanic Conspiracy to perpetrate evil in the world, Tim Tate will go to his grave insisting he was right. Woe-betide anyone who believes him.

Tony Rhodes & John Freedom, Mortlake, Lammas 2021.

More background:

SAFF throws the light of Truth on Tim Tate's Worthless Historic Cases of SRA

Chris Bray and Tim Tate go Head to Head, John Hammond Radio Show July 1989

Tim Tate: the man who Cooked up Satanic Ritual Abuse restarts the Cleveland Scandal.

What a Load of Codswallop! Court Pulp Tate's Devil Book.

Witch Hunt - A Review of Children for The Devil - Rosie Waterhouse