Talk:Ritual abuse

In which section?

Just after I added Infanticide in "Parent topics", I noticed it was already in section "Other related topics". Which one is the right section? Cesar Tort 16:59, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

It's not hard and fast. I didn't think it was properly a subset if it's considered tribal population control and not done in a ritualistic way, but you could make an argument that there's almost always some ritual. Where is the line, I suppose, between ritual and tradition? Howard C. Berkowitz 18:09, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Michelle Remembers (book)

Should our article describe the so-called phenomenon in terms which imply that it really exists?

• It was Dr. Pazder who coined the phrase "ritual abuse"

To be neutral, maybe it would be better to write an article on the ritual abuse scare of the 1980s. I would define a "scare" as a highly-publicized episode of some danger or problem which turns out later not to have happened - or to have been greatly exaggerated.

I might have some difficulty being impartial about this, although Larry knows how hard I'm willing to try!

One scare I've followed closely for the better part of 3 decades is the "mind control" and "brainwashing" scare of the 1970s and 1980s. Hundreds of members of my church, the Unification Church, were "deprogrammed" as a supposed "remedy" for the alleged cult abuse they had suffered. But it all died down when the Margaret Singer, Ph.D., Emeritus Prof. of Psychology, Univ. of CA, Berkeley, was unable to prove that the theory of mind control had any scientific basis. Courts stopped accepting her "expert testimony", and she died soon thereafter.

Anyway, I'm interested in "scares" in general and hoping that a neutral scholarly project such as this can shed light on at least some of them. Perhaps the best way to describe them, is to take each one on its own merits and say that X asserted this about it while Y said that. --Ed Poor 00:35, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, I think moral panic is a good top-level articles for scares. Do look at thought control, which I prefer to "mind control" in the sense that it addressed what was real, as opposed to "Manchurian Candidate" style brainwashing and mind control. Biderman's Korean War study, cited there, as well as Robert Jay Lifton, are important references. Howard C. Berkowitz 00:46, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

I think that the title of the article should stay the way it is. The topic is best known by this title. I have never heard of the topic defined as a scare in any of the literature. Neil Brick 04:02, 6 May 2009 (UTC)