Moral crusades and historic sexual abuse with Professor Mark Smith.

Bettina talks with Mark Smith, Professor of Social Work at the University of Dundee, Scotland, an expert on residential child care settings. This background led Professor Smith to research relevant child sexual abuse scandals such as the Jimmy Savile saga. Bettina and Professor Smith discuss the current panic over assumed endemic child sexual abuse in residential care: how and why the moral crusade against child abuse took hold, from the McMartin preschool investigations through to Satanic Ritual Abuse scandals in the UK, to more recent events involving Jimmy Savile, and Carl Beech, who falsely accused members of the British elite of being part of a paedophile ring.

References:
Mark Smith – https://discovery.dundee.ac.uk/en/persons/mark-smith

Richard Webster – The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witchhunt, Orwell Press

The Anna Raccoon Archives – Anna Raccoon Archives

Ros Burnett – Wrongful Allegations of Sexual and Child Abuse, Oxford University Press.

Ron Niezen – Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools, Second Edition University of Toronto Press

David Frankfurter (2007) Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History, Princeton University Press