eva & the devil 1.4

eva, originally uploaded by John Barleycorn.

Tonight there was a documentary called Könskriget, War of the Sexes, on SVT2. It's about ROKS, one of two organizations for Women's Shelters in Sweden (the other one is Sveriges Kvinnojourers Riksförbund). There are a lot that could be said about this documentary. Personally I think it's sad that the documentary implies that all Women's Shelter's are full of paranoid feminist fundamentalists. That's not true. ROKS and SKR are non-profit organizations and their members does one a hell of a job running the shelters and supporting abused women, a job that the society doesn't want to take any responsibility for.

The documentary also focus a lot on Eva Lundgren. She's a sociology professor at Uppsala University and one of Swedens most renowned and influential researchers in women's studies and feminist theory. She and some of her friends promotes the idea of Satanic Ritual Abuse and has turned it into a convenient conspiracy theory. A male satanic network that abducts and abuse women and ritually kill their kids. I think the use of this theory is horrible and very unfortunate. It doesn't help abused women or abused children in any way. Rather the opposite. There are no firm evidence at all that supports the SRA theory. It's a theory that has caused plenty of human tragedies and it's supporters have almost always used very questionable interrogation techniques to make their case. This is a phenomenon that has its origins in American Christian communities in the early 80's. In 1987 their "satanic panic" was used by the sensationalist journalist Geraldo Riviera in a series of special reports on his primetime television program. As he so elegantly put it in the first show:
"Estimates are that there are over 1 million Satanists in this country [...] The majority of them are linked in a highly organized, very secretive network. From small towns to large cities, they have attracted police and FBI attention to their Satanic ritual child abuse, child pornography and grisly Satanic murders. The odds are that this is happening in your town."
One could ask how it's possible to know that there are "over 1 million Satanists in this country [...] linked in a highly organized, very secretive network". That doesn't seem very secretive. But subsequent to these programs, there were outbreaks of Satanic hysteria all over America and in several European cities. But there were still absolutely no facts behind these claims of a Satanic Ritual Abuse network. On the contrary. Police investigation after police investigation came to the same conclusion. That there were no proof at all for a satanic ritual abuse network in action. But before that many people had their lives destroyed by this mass hysteria. Some of the most eager participates of the SRA panic were themselves found mentally ill. One social worker who had been involved in several SRA investigations was even committed to a mental institution in 2003 for harassing and threatening Steven Spielberg and Jennifer Love Hewitt and claiming that she was controlled through "psychotronic weaponry."

If the police manage to find and arrest both "ordinary" and "prominent" citizens in pedophile networks - then why shouldn't they be able to find any traces of this satanic network? What's the difference? There are no doubts about pedophile networks and there are plenty of evidence to find for research. Why are there no such evidence in the case of Satanic Ritual Abuse networks? I can't understand why Eva Lundgren support this myth. It's very disturbing. Does she take just as lightly on the importance of empirical evidence when it comes to her other theories? I think that's a question you'll have to ask. I think that women's studies, gender studies and feminist theory are very interesting and important scientific fields. But, as with all other scientific research, you have to have some real empirical evidence to back your theories up with. This uncritical support for SRA by some of Swedens most prominent feminist's and feminist researchers put a lot of important work at risk in the whole field of feminist science and research. I do hope that this "satanic panic" won't get a foothold in the Swedish feminist movement and that they instead focus their minds on real problems. There are far too many of those to let oneself get distracted by these telltales and fantasies.