A Look at the Legend: "Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy"

Okay, so a couple of months ago I was pretty hyped about getting a copy of Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy, a weird children's book about Satanic Ritual Abuse. It was produced during the height of the big Satanism scare and it's attained a semi-mythical status among SRA researchers because it contains illustrations like this:

I don't recall a scene like this in The Pokey Little Puppy.

Yes, that's a picture of black-robed Satanists menacing naked children with a noose in a snowy forest with the caption "Nothing that happens in the circle can be told outside of the circle. There is no way out because there is no end to it. Your parents have given you to us. They know what is happening." Pretty creepy stuff.

Unfortunately that's also kind of the money-shot of the book. I had planned to do a full review of Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy, but it's virtually impossible because the story is presented, as the back cover notes, in vignette format. We see little snippets of the story: Little Allison suddenly doesn't like chicken anymore; Little Allison misbehaves at home; Little Allison is scared because Halloween is coming; Little Allison takes part in the above-pictured Satanic Mass. Ultimately, with the help of a heroic SRA counselor, the police arrest the swarthy proprietors of little Allison's daycare and they go to prison. Finally, Little Allison gets a kitten and learns to love again.

As you can see, there isn't much to this book but a vapid repetition of the standard ritual abuse claims followed by a warm, fuzzy ending. In a sense that's to be expected - it was part of a larger children's book series called "The Hurts of Childhood" that was intended to help kids and families move past traumatic experiences. Critically examing the claims at hand wasn't a priority for the author*- the only priority was trying to help the children. In and of itself trying to help children is a noble goal, but bad things happen when a social movement is built around having a big heart and an empty head.

This unthinking mindset wasn't limited to Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy, it was symptomatic of the entire Satanic Panic: Lots of good intentions, lots of fear, but very little critical thinking. This book may be a curiosity, a quaint relic from a truy bizarre period of recent American history, but it's also an emblem of the harm that can be caused when society gives into fears that aren't backed up by fact.

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* Officially the book was written by Doris Sanford, the lady who penned the rest of the "Hurts of Childhood" books. Rumors abound, however, that the story is actually the work of one Laurel Rose Wilson, aka Lauren Stratford. Stratford is most famous for writing the pseudo-autobiographical book Satan's Underground, in which she claims to have been victimized for most of her life by members of a sprawling Satanic cabal. A thorough discussion of Stratford's claims can be found here.

Mike Warnke's Still Selling Satan...

I'm reading Selling Satan by Mike Hertenstein and Jon Trott. It's an extension of the Cornerstone article debunking the claims of one Mike Warnke, a preacher/comedian currently skulking about Kentucky whose "hook" is that he's a reformed Satanist. Hertenstein and Trott took issue with some of Warnke's more bizarre claims, such as that he participated in rituals of child murder and cannibalism, and ultimately uncovered witnesses, records, and other evidence that indicate very strongly that most of the claims made his autobiography The Satan Seller were utter fictions. (Especially damning, and hilarious, is a picture of Warnke from 1966 that shows him to be a scrawny, button-downed, bespectacled everyman when his book claims he spent the 60s as a long-haired, wild-eyed, drug addicted Satanic priest with 6-inch fingernails "filed for fighting".*)

The debunking in and of itself is kind of interesting, but it's also old hat: Trott and Hertenstein published their original article in 1992. It got me wondering, however, what ol' Mike was doing these days. See, I have a theory that prominent preachers don't go away. Ever. No matter what kind of earth-shaking scandal or criminal convictions they may be faced with, famous evangelists virtually always retain enough of a following to make a living off of their preaching. Seriously, that sounds silly, but think about it: Peter Popoff was outed as a fraud by James Randi in 1983, but he's still on TV and people still send him money for "miracle spring water". Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker were both caught in sex scandals (Plus Bakker was indicted for mail fraud), yet they still have active ministries with large followings. Fred Phelps is a slobbering lunatic and he still draws crowds.

Mike Warnke? All he did was lie about his entire past to create a preaching industry that allowed him to pay himself and two confidants a total of over $800,000 a year while simultaneously using his ill-gotten reputation as a Satanism expert to stoke the fires of the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare. Small potatoes! Surely he's still around, right?

Yep, he is. He runs the Celebrations of Hope Ministry out of Harrodsburg, KY. He also has a website with the phone number for his Product Sales Department on every single page. Despite his 17 year-old debunking Warnke still markets himself as an ex-Satanist, his current answer to the 1992 scandal being a 2006 report by a tribunal of "elders" in his own church saying that he's awesome. Apparently that's good enough for somebody, since he appears to have speaking engagements all over the country throughout the rest of 2009.

I can't say I'm surprised, but I'm a little let down.

*Warnke claims to have converted to Christianity after joining the Navy in 1966, but the photograph was taken in April of 1966 and Warnke didn't join the Navy until June of that year. (Source)

Satanic Ritual Abuse...For Kids?

I don't talk about the Satanic Panic on here as much as I'd like to, mostly because I'm a little bit late to the party as far as debunking it goes, but I think it's one of the most fascinating periods of recent American history. I own a number of a books about the Satanism scare and its kissing cousin the repressed memory movement, and until recently they all had one thing in common: they were all written by skeptics. Don't panic - I haven't suddenly become some kind of True Believer! It's just that, as informative as authors like Loftus, Victor, Pendergrast, Nathan, and Campbell are, they can only go so far when it comes to explaining the mindset of the folks who actually promulgated the wild claims that gripped the U.S. in the 1980s and 90s.

As such, I've recently started buying up books written by the proponents and True Believers of the satanism/ritual abuse scare. Right now this part of my collection is fairly small and is highlighted by Pat Pulling's fantastically hyperbolic anti-Dungeons & Dragons screed The Devil's Web. All that may soon change. I've just ordered a copy of perhaps the most seedy and exploitative work of the era. No, no, it's not The Courage to Heal, Ellen Bass and Laura Davis' black bible of victimhood that served as the cornerstone of the recovered memory movement. It's not even Michelle Remembers, the thoroughly fictitious "true story" that bridged the gap between the recovered memory movement and the ritual abuse panic.

The book is Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy, a 28-page children's picture book about Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA). It was written and illustrated in 1990 by Doris Sanford* and Graci Evans, who have also collaborated on such books the Hurts of Childhood Series, a noble-minded set of books meant to help children deal with things like parental alcoholism and entering foster care. To be fair, these ladies seem to have good hearts and an honest compassion for the intended audience of their books, but Please Don't Make Go Back, Mommy was a vehicle for harm rather than healing.

The children who became swept up in SRA cases tended to vehemently deny that anything had happened to them when initially approached by investigators and only made "disclosures" after hours of cajoling interviews filled with leading questions. It is apparent from both taped interviews of children by SRA proponents and statements made by accusers who later recanted that the kids involved often molded their accusations to fit the expectations of the investigators involved in the interview process. (See Victims of Memory by Mark Pendergrast and Smoke and Mirrors: The Devastating Effects of False Sexual Abuse Claims by Terrence Campbell.) The kids, isolated from their usual supports and surrounded by imposing authority figures, often became more interested in giving the "right" answers than telling the truth and (surprise, surprise) these "right answers" tended to fit the expectations of the interviewer. These expectations, in turn, were molded by what became the cultural narrative of SRA - sadistic sex practices, bestiality, incest, animal sacrifice, genital mutilation and a potpourri of other creepy stuff. Books like Satan's Underground, Michelle Remembers, and The Satan Seller** laid out this narrative for adults. Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy lays it out for children, minus the most prurient stuff. It provides a framework for SRA accusations and, I suspect, helped more than one child guess the "correct" answers in an interview that would eventually be used against an innocent adult.

There aren't a lot of copies of Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy floating around out there (Supposedly less than 8,000 copies were ever printed.), which is probably for the best except that it's impossible to find quotes and pictures from it online. I plan to alleviate this - When it arrives I'll do a much more thorough review and probably post a few scans.


* I've heard stories that Lauren Stratford, the author of the allegedly autobiographical horror tale Satan's Underground (and who was later outed as a fraud by the Christian magazine Cornerstone), actually penned the text of this book, but as far as I know that's just a rumor.
** All of which were eventually unmasked as fraudulent accounts.

Mail-Order Fun

I keep forgetting to mention this, but I was overcome by curiosity the other day and ordered a copy of Pat Pulling's immortal fear-mongering classic "The Devil's Web - Who is Stalking Your Children for Satan?" Pulling, who passed away around 10 years ago, was the founder of B.A.D.D., or Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, an apparently now-defunct organization the set out to prove that D&D plays were not only nerds, but also agents of Satan! Hey man, I've DMed before, so I guess that also means I sacrifice giraffes and eat babies in the name of Baal.

In reality her story was a sad one - Her son, Irving, committed suicide in 1982 when he was still just a high school kid. Looking for something to blame for her son's death, Pulling focused in on his interest in D&D and ultimately brought lawsuits against both his high school (because it had a D&D club) and TSR Inc., the company that was producing the game at the time. (TSR was absorbed into Wizards of the Coast Inc. a few years ago. That's the company that makes the [also apparently evil*] card game Magic: The Gathering.) Ultimately she founded B.A.D.D. to pontificate about the game, and shortly thereafter she wrote "The Devil's Web". Somehow she managed to pass herself off as some sort of expert on the occult despite the fact that she was apparently making it up as she went along. She reportedly thought "The Necronomicon" of H.P. Lovecraft and "Evil Dead" fame was a real grimoire, and her command of even basic mathematics was shaky at best. (She once declared that since 4% of adults and 4% of children in America were Satanists, that meant that 8% of the country was Satanist. How she arrived at even the 4% figure is a mystery.)

In any event, I'll have her book soon and I look forward to giving it the old go-through. For slightly more balanced overviews of the ol' Satanic Panic, I recommend the definitive work on the subject, "Satanic Panic - The Creation of a Contemporary Legend" by Jeffrey S. Victor and, to lesser extent, "Smoke and Mirrors: The Devastating Effect of False Sexual Abuse Claims" by Terrence W. Campbell. Campbell's book is very interesting but devotes only a couple of chapters to the cult scare.

*Pogs (Remember pogs?) are also evil, according to the linked source.