I agree. I was prime age during this, playing D&D and listening to the Devil’s music at the time and it barely registered then. At this point it’s barely a footnote.
Satanic panic was a sociological phenomenon that bears study in niche corners of psychology and pop culture. The associated police investigations, prosecutions, and convictions of innocent people are just a small part of much larger story about flaws in our public institutions that haven’t even finished playing out historically.
I remember arguing with people who claimed that ritual Satanic abuse was rampant, but stubbornly denied there was anything to claims of Catholic clergy abusing children.
When I was in grade school, they taught us about the Salem witch trials. If that’s still covered, I think it would be instructive to concurrently bring up the 1980s Satanic panic. Too often, we think those kinds of thing can’t happen today.
Nope. Other things were happening here in South Africa at the time that, for some odd reason, seem more important to cover now.
I say this sincerely and not snarkily-
That is comedy gold! Bravo!
I remember one specific case that the tv news shows like 20/20 covered.
Several Kids at a Daycare or preschool accused the owners of abuse that included Satanic rituals.
It blew up in the news. The couple were ruined financially defending themselves. They were eventually exonerated.
The police used leading questions and the kids story was embellished.
The publicity inspired similiar accusations. Parents were panicking.
Update, found a cite
The McMartin Preschool case was mentioned by a number of people upthread, as well.
It was a very bad moment for the press and the Justice system.
Imho it’s not big enough to cover in a school textbook. American History is a very broad topic and educators have to carefully choose what should be covered.
For example, Iran-Contra Affair was a much,much bigger event that occured at about the same time.
You could devote an entire semester course on the Reagan years.
I remember my American History classes in the mid 1970’s cut off with WWI. We had to cover the founding of the country, several wars, Manifest Destiny, the building of transcontinental Railroad and the most important Presidents.
The next year was World Civilization and that went back to the Babylonians and Phoenicians. It was more of a survey course. It was impossible to get into much detail.
Makes me wonder what gets left out in todays schools. I’m sure both World Wars and the Great Depression are covered today. A teacher can only cover so much material in a school year.
My history education was incredibly superficial. You’re trying to jam a lot into a very limited amount of time and only towards the end of high school can kids really get the nuance.
Certainly here a lot of it is whatever the school board feels like teaching. From grade 5 to 8, I was in a French immersion program, and history was taught in French. Only the history of Quebec was studied, nothing else. We’d do Remembrance Day every November (but not really study the events related to it) and once I did a project about pioneers, and when the Constitution was repatriated in 1982 we briefly learned about that, but otherwise it was just Quebec. My Grade 6 teacher honestly did not know that Labrador is not part of Quebec. We had a big map on the wall and everything.
In my senior years of high school I was able to take a few more in depth things.
When my kid was in history more than half of her instruction was about First Nations. They did a little bit about pre-Confederation history and some of the Britain-France conflict, but not much else, really. Every assignment was about the First Nations.
In ten years it’ll be something else.
I agree. I grew up in northern Virginia. We learned that the king of England (IIRC James) sent people to Virginia. The native people were friendly. They had stuff the English wanted. The English had guns. The English took the land and founded Virginia. We learned a few details of the story of Pocahontas saving the life of John Smith. The Disney film, of couse, has almost nothing to do with reality.
Over the years we went on to cover-
Revolutionary war
The Constitutional Convention
War of 1812.
The Industrial Revolution
The Civil War
Reconstruction
The Gilded Age
The Teapot Dome Scandal.
We never made it anywhere near the present.
As I and others have said, the Satanic Panic was excedingly minor in the scope of history. Maybe it could be studied on its own as a college history course. I still say it should be studied as another example of mass panic/ mass hysteria along with a bunch of other events starting with the Spanish Inquisition.
The term was coined by Stanley Cohen in his 1973 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers .
However, I suspect that you first heard I less than fifty-one years ago. I know I did.
That said, my friend (who served as Best Man at my 1983 wedding) spoke of his concern over “ritual satanic abuse” some time in the mid-eighties. He had a toddler at the time.
ETA: To provide a data point. I have a 24-year old family friend couch-surfing in my apartment. They report learning about the phenomenon on their own, but it not being covered in school.
Teaching about “witch hunts” in general would be a good idea; as others has said they are a recurring thing in human societies in different forms. The Satanic Panic would mainly be of use as a relatively recent example.
Yeah, my classes in the same era never even got to the 20th century. Basically an endless cycle of covering Columbus to Reconstruction.
I always suspected the point was to avoid talking about anything relevant to the modern world. Even the history they did cover they bent over backwards to avoid mentioning the negative aspects.
To me the McMartin case and the similar Margaret Kelly Michaels case were more about child sexual abuse. Satanism was just a bit of spice for the press.
As a former SVU detective the Michaels case made a huge difference since it happened in my state. It happened long before I was hired so I didn’t know how things were done prior. When I came along it had been established that any possible victim of sexual assault under the age of 12 had to be interviewed by a specially trained forensic interviewer. I would not speak to the child at all and all officers taking the initial report were instructed to do the same. It was possible the child’s accounts could have been influenced by others but it wasn’t going to come from us. I won’t go into what a forensic interview entails, you can look it up. The technique is designed to illicit true information without influencing the outcome while also establishing a baseline of the understanding of the child.
Before any trial there is a Michaels hearing where the judge evaluates how the child was questioned and whether to admit the interview as evidence.
Given the predilection of communities these days to elect RWNJs to school boards, I can foresee the response to such an initiative being “We already teach the children about the witch hunts. They happened during pre-revolutionary colonial times, and don’t happen any more. Analogizing them to anything more recent is just woke-ism run amok.”
An unfortunate typo/misspelling of elicit.
In the late '80s, my former college girlfriend (with whom I’m still close friends) was going through some psychological issues, and wound up under psychiatric care. This was during the height of the “repressed memories/Satanic cult” hysteria, and one of her doctors “determined” that she had those sorts of repressed memories: that her parents (conservative nerdy Minnesota Lutherans) had been actively involved in a Satanic cult when she was a child.
That malpractice caused a great deal of harm to my former girlfriend’s life. The doctor convinced her that the made-up “memories” were real, and as a result, she severed all ties with her family, legally changed her name, and dropped out of school (she was in a pre-med program).
After several years, and treatment by other (less terrible) psychologists, she realized that she had been misled and manipulated by her doctor, and was able to rebuild her relationship with her family. She’s happy now (she eventually got a Ph.D., is a college professor, and is married to a wonderful woman), but that doctor who had gone fishing for certain memories which he was certain were there caused a tremendous amount of harm.
In 1972 I came across a copy of The Satanic Bible in my high school library. It piqued my interest because I thought there was a supernatural/horror storyline. Well of course it was nothing of the sort and I had no intention of joining Anton LaVey’s church.
My father freaked out when he saw me reading it. He became even more concerned when I put up the poster from the Son of Schmilsson album on the ceiling above my bed.
As far as “bad” influences go, my high school friends had a lot more impact on my behavior than Satan did.
South Africa was late to the party. But when they got there, the public, police, and media leaned in HARD. About 10 years ago a Christian cult in Krugersdorp went on a four year murder spree of 11 people their leader convinced them were Satanists. The police (who actually have an “Occult Related Crimes Unit”) were convinced for years that the murders were committed by actual Satanists.
The Last Podcast on the Left took a deep multi-episode dive into the murders.
Oh, there’s definitely been some Satanic panic stuff recently. But that 's too recent for history classes.
I was a teen during this period, and a metalhead. I also had to attend a hellfire and brimstone church during this time. We had to attend a few “classes” on the evils of rock music where we learned about backmasking, anti-government lyrics, satanic lyrics, etc. All of it reinforced how awesome this music was. If anything, it had the opposite effect they desired. 
That, to me, is the really surprising thing about the time. Ozzy, Deo and a whole lot of others added Satanic images, lyrics and other content shock, anger and horrify parents. It worked and parental disapproval just made their music cooler.
Even squeaky clean Pat Boone eventually realized this and said so during interviews about his ‘rock’ album Pat Boone In A Metal Mood.