'Satanic abuse' rides again Claims for the reality of 'satanic abuse' including ritual sacrifice and cannibalism have emerged again, five years after being officially dismissed by the Department of Health as a child-abuse threat.

Psychotherapist Valerie Sinason announced the findings of her research on BBC Radio 4's Today programme (9.2.00), giving the impression that the claims were well-founded and that their publication by the Department of Health was imminent. It was said that a senior police officer from the Metropolitan Police would be investigating further prior to publication. Her findings were based on the interpretation of signs and symptoms displayed in 74 patients who received treatment at her Harley Street clinic. Ms Sinason, a respected therapist with handicapped children and adults, is known to practise a psychodynamic technique of therapy that has been criticised as being highly suggestive in relation to abuse claims. In the past few years she has favoured a 'dissociative model' of alleged trauma akin to the theory of multiple personality disorder. This model has been identified with the production of false narratives of satanic abuse resulting in multi-million dollar law suits against practitioners in the USA.

Further broadcasts on the World at One and PM revealed that although the Department of Health had funded the research, it had not been officially commissioned or vetted by the DoH. In the Mail on Sunday it emerged that that the acting detective inspector assigned to the task was acting in a private capacity.

Interviewed by the BBC, Professor Jean LaFontaine, author of the official report dismissing the phenomenon as an overblown rumour inflated by fears of welfare professionals and evangelical Christians, dismissed the research as methodologically unsound. The claims, she pointed out, were essentially similar to those made a decade or more ago, for which no empirical evidence had ever been found.

Though previously at London's Tavistock Clinic and an erstwhile research psychotherapist at St George's Hospital, Ms Sinason is now director of the Clinic for Dissociative Studies in Harley St. In 1994 she edited the controversial book Treating Survivors of Satanist Abuse based on clinical observations and representations of controversial child abuse cases where satanic networks had been alleged. Two colleagues at her clinic, psychologist Dr Phil Mollon and psychiatrist Dr Arnon Bentovim, were contributors to the book.

On the following day (10.2.00) newspapers reported the claims while The Scotsman included a commentary dismissing the claims as coming from one of the 'weirder homes of psychotherapy' responsible for the 'recovered memory' fiasco. Both the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Telegraph ran critical articles. In the MoS Professor Sydney Brandon condemned the research as irresponsible and based on the ramblings of unstable groups of people.

The Sunday Telegraph warned of the danger of 'personal testimony' of self-styled 'satanic survivors' being accepted as sufficient evidence for conviction, echoing developments already established in the case of prosecutions of uncorroborated retrospective accounts of serious sexual abuse, if Ms Sinason's findings were accorded official recognition.

See also forthcoming BFMS newsletter.