Fear and accusations lead to moral panic

All the Lies They Did Not Tell by Pablo Trincia (translated by Elettra Pauletto) is a work of investigative journalism based on a series of successful podcasts. It is the story about how, in the late 1990s in rural Italy, there were arrests and convictions for satanic abuse based on the word of children without any external substantiating evidence. This was a phenomenon of the time and similar cases occurred in Orkney and America.

The chain of events began with one six year old boy who revealed abuse based on the worship of Satan and who implicated various adults including the local priest. The authorities removed a number of children from their homes and questioned them. What they said resulted in many more children being taken away and a number of adults being arrested, charged and eventually convicted. The investigation became larger and larger and the allegations of some of the children who were questioned included murder, cannibalism and sacrifice. As a result of the case some children were adopted away from their homes, many spent a lot of time in the care of others, there was at least one death by suicide, careers were destroyed and people served prison sentences for crimes that they never committed.

This book tells the story chronologically and tries to explain what might have happened. This was a time when institutional child sexual abuse was coming to light in the church and elsewhere. Children had not been listened to in the past and now the authorities wanted to rectify that omission. Social services were understaffed and overworked and had no experience in interviewing children about this sort of issue. The justice system seemed eager to find people to convict and the cases that came before them had no corroborating evidence. Many of the families involved were poor and/or illiterate and didn’t have the means to obtain legal representation. It seemed that once the snowball had started rolling it was very difficult to stop it.

This book is frightening in showing how easy it was to demonise people and ruin their lives for what seemed like good reasons but which were actually false accusations. Bad questioning techniques resulted in bad results and the lack of expertise meant that people didn’t fully recognise this at the time. Child sexual abuse happens, most usually within families, and it is terrible but there doesn’t ever seem to have been a properly evidenced case of satanic child abuse, although it was a real fear for a number of years.

Clearly written and with stories from all sides involved in this series of events this book is informative and very interesting.