Michelle Remembers by Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder

Finding this book was an odyssey. First, back in January, I placed a reserve on it at Wellington City Libraries and then forgot all about it (standard procedure when dealing with WCL). Six months later the reserve had not only not been actioned, it had actually been unilaterally cancelled by the library. I placed another reserve with WCL and, at the same time, asked my Sociology professor if I could borrow a copy of the book from him. Unfortunately he didn't have one. By this time it was obvious that regardless of what their catalogue claimed, WCL actually did not have a copy of the book - hence the mysterious reserve-deletion - so I tried the VUW library instead. They didn't have one either. I asked them to do a search of all the libraries in New Zealand, but still no luck. In despair I turned to my last possible course of action, an overseas interloan through the VUW library...

... and at last, there it was. All the way from the National Library of Canada (the reference room thereof, no less), it finally came winging its way to me last month. Why did I go to all this trouble to find a book no one's ever heard of?

Why indeed.

Michelle Remembers has been mentioned in two of my sociology courses, in the context of the "Satanic panic" that rocked parts of the Western world during the 1980s and 1990s. Not many people are aware that our society's current preoccupation with child abuse, especially that perpetrated by parents or caregivers on their own children, was effectively sparked off in the 1980s by fears that Satanists were torturing and abusing children as part of their rituals. From California the panic spread to the United Kingdom and, later, to Australia and New Zealand. Here in New Zealand there was one very high-profile criminal case taken during the panic, which resulted in the conviction for child abuse (on what I understand to be rather tenuous grounds) of childcare worker Peter Ellis.

This fear of Satanists harming young children is now considered to be a classic example of moral panic, with little or no evidence for any of the allegations and a growing body of work soundly discrediting them. If no such thing was actually happening, where did the panic come from?

Enter Michelle Smith of Victoria, Canada. In the late 1970s she sought psychiatric treatment from Dr Lawrence Pazder for a sense of fear and foreboding she could not explain. Under his care, she recovered memories of ritual abuse by Satanists that occurred when she was five or six years old - memories so traumatic, they had been suppressed by her subconscious up until now. Once the remembering and therapy were complete, she and the psychiatrist decided to write a book about the experience in order to warn people of the despicable crimes that were maybe being perpetrated on small children every day, right in their home city.

Michelle Remembers, as I learned in my Sociology of Deviance course earlier this year, was released in 1980 into a world ripe for its message. For several decades, fear and concern about the actions of underground Satanists had been growing in two different spheres. First was the "low tradition" of horror films and novels with Satanic or occult themes - these included such classics as The Omen, The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby. At the same time a "high tradition" was developing, featuring largely psychiatric and some clerical research into possession, exorcism, repressed memory syndrome, multiple personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Many of these psychiatric disorders were not widely known until after the Satanic panic broke.

The story of Michelle's remembering was a resource from both traditions - psychiatric in the professional involvement of Dr Pazder, and popular in the sympathy-exciting figure of innocent Michelle, undergoing unspeakable tortures and surviving, emerging the stronger for her struggle. It was seized on by all involved, devoured, widely believed - and other such cases sought... and so the panic began.

Reading the book 26 years later, with all the wisdom of hindsight borrowed from the studies of educated critics, I cannot believe that the book was given any real credence. The first 100 pages are believable, depicting ordinary child abuse like we read about in the newspaper. The next 100 pages are increasingly weird but still more or less plausible, though scepticism begins when Michelle is locked in a pitch-black basement for seemingly weeks on end [why didn't she die of hunger?]. The last 100 pages are absolutely ridiculous. There are appearances from Satan, Jesus, the Virgin Mary and the archangel Michael; the book winds up with what my Sociology professor so accurately termed "an epic battle - with sound effects!" The willingness of both Michelle and the psychiatrist (both committed Catholics) to believe in these supernatural manifestations, apparently never even questioning whether they were actually real or in some way allegorical, entirely destroys any credibility that the first part of their story may have held.

I do not believe this story. It is not merely unfounded and unverifiable, but also dangerous. Its damage is done but is still terribly visible - in any child care centre where male carers are regarded with suspicion; in any school or hospital where children are interrogated by counselors and tricked into incriminating their parents; in any home broken by the seizure of young children, allegedly for their own protection, by apparently well-meaning social workers; and in the broken lives of Peter Ellis and all others falsely accused. The death of love and trust in Western society is due in no small part to fear-mongering stories like this one.