How the SRA myth infected Westminster

Back in 2002, The Telegraph published an interesting article, titled “The people who believe that Satanists might eat your baby”. The article’s author, Damian Thompson, wrote:

RITUAL satanic abuse is back. Yesterday, a private meeting at Westminster, chaired by Lord Alton, discussed assaults on children by hooded, chanting Satanists. “You may be aware,” the organisers said, “that, for several years, there have been reports of the ritual abuse of children and in some cases ritual murder. The rituals reportedly often involve the Black Mass and the wearing of robes. Adult survivors of ritual abuse are divulging important evidence regarding the large scale of this problem in the UK.”

One of the organisers, Wilfred Wong, an evangelical Christian, is campaigning for ritual abuse to be made a specific crime, so that the Satanists – responsible for “hundreds, if not thousands” of sexual assaults and murders – can be brought to justice. “But so far little has been done,” he says plaintively.

We’ve mentioned Mr Wong here, as the Parliamentary assistant to ex-MP Russell Brown, who co-ordinated another invitation-only meeting at Westminster in 2011, nine years after the one chaired by Lord Alton. While Robert Green, spokes-thingy for the Hollie Greig hoax, was a featured speaker at the 2011 event, the 2002 version featured none other than Dr Valerie Sinason as its main draw.

Writing of the 2002 meeting, John Freedom of the Sub-culture Alternatives Freedom Foundation (SAFF) said,

On Thursday March 21st (The day of the Spring Equinox) Lord David Alton will join forces with long-time Witch-Hunter Valerie Sinason to kick start another Satanic Panic in the U.K. They are hosting a meeting of ‘like-minds’ in the Jubilee Room at the Houses of Parliament about Satanic Ritual Abuse. Thirteen years after Sinason helped create the previous panic she is back again with her obsessive and persistent tales of Satanic Ritual Abuse. Why has David Alton given his support to this new push for medievalism? Because he is a Christian activist who is using his political position to further the interests of the Christian lobby at the expense of pluralism of the U.K.

Mr Freedom points out that Lord Alton “used to write a column for the Catholic Herald and the Catholic Universe. He gave up his seat in Parliament because of the conflict of his beliefs on abortion and that of his party. He was one of the founders of the Christian Movement for Democracy, launched try  to impose ‘Christian Values’ on politics. For a time there he was  seriously moving towards starting a Christian Democratic Party”.

Even earlier than Lord Alton, Russell Brown, Wilfred Wong, and those MPs and lords who attended their various SRA-promoting meetings, there was of course Geoffrey Dickens, who fanned the flames of the Satanic panic until his death in 1995.

SAFF has an entire page dedicated to Mr Dickens, carefully documenting his antics. Here’s a brief excerpt:

After his attack on suspected  child-abusers in Westminster, he turned to berating the Church of England for gay priestly abuse. As a bigoted Christian lay preacher Dickens, an unsophisticated man who saw all beliefs but Christianity as counterfeit, equated the New Age with Satanism. After the shock-value of these earlier campaigns  had  run out of steam he kept the impetus going by jumping on the Satanic Ritual Child Abuse bandwagon.

He turned inevitably, to fringe Christians who had invented the  idea of Satanic Ritual Abuse using horrific images conjured from their sick minds. Dickens was the prime political driver of this myth from 1988 until his death in 1995, and his  only political legacy is that those SRA lies caused this country very dear not only in having to fix his fantasies afterwards with obscenely expensive public enquiries but in social dissension, intolerance, and the victimisation of innocent  people  by the Child Scare Industry which rallied around Dickens to expand its own  remit. …

The Dickens SRA Dossier was just a collection of tittle-tattle unworthy of note. We can say that because we know the people who gave him his unsubstantiated rumours and know that their evidence was faulty. For months Dickens claimed to be sending this dossier to the Home Office. Each time he metaphorically waved it in the air the press would dutifully print that claim as though the evidence for SRA was so convincing it was beyond debate, just like they are doing today with the Westminster Dossier.

The SAFF wrote to the Home Office about this: Their official reply is clear:

“Firstly, as you point out, according to press reports, Mr Geoffrey Dickens MP has sent the Home Secretary a dossier of child abuse cases allegedly connected with witchcraft.  However, this has not been received and the Home Office has no other evidence that there is a problem of the kind Mr Dickens describes.”

Wilfred Wong and the conspiraloons

We heard from Mr Wong most recently in relation to last month’s “Satanic Ritual and Extreme Abuse” event in London, where he joined headline speakers Dr Rainer Kurz, Canadian “regression therapist” Sandra Fecht, and Anne Redelfs, “professional listener” and all-round space cadet.

In addition to his working relationships with people like Dr Valerie Sinason et al, Mr Wong has written for the English Churchman on the topic of SRA. In June 2016, he wrote:

Satanist Ritual Abuse (SRA) exists in Britain and is a growing problem, harming and destroying the lives of an increasing number of children and vulnerable adults because the UK authorities are simply not taking this crime seriously, a conference in London of about 60 Christians heard on Saturday 21 May. The conference was organised by the Christian organisation, the Coalition Against Satanist Ritual Abuse (CASRA), which was founded in February 2014 to provide a permanent UK organisation that campaigns against SRA, conducts research on this issue and publicly exposes it.

The conference was entitled: “Satanist Ritual Abuse – The Battle for Justice”. …

The conference also heard from Robert Green regarding Scotland’s largest known, current SRA case, the Hollie Greig case. Hollie Greig, a young woman with Down’s Syndrome, has identified 23 alleged abusers who subjected her to SRA, including a senior police officer, 2 Head Teachers, 2 Social Workers and a Judge. Greig has described not only experiencing SRA but also witnessing the Satanists ritually sacrificing an adult male.

Attempts by the Scottish authorities to cover up this case have been very vigorous.

Robert Green, who is the leading campaigner in the Hollie Greig case, has been imprisoned in Scotland at least twice, in an attempt to silence him. In the meantime the alleged abusers named by Hollie Greig have never been thoroughly investigated by the Police. For his tireless attempts to obtain justice in the Hollie case, in 2014 Robert Green was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the same article, referring to himself in the third person, Mr Wong continued:

Wilfred Wong, who is the Chairman of CASRA and a Child Protection Campaigner with 23 years experience of working on SRA, emphasised at the conference that SRA had to be clearly, publicly and extensively identified in Britain as SRA, and not as anything else. He said that too many attempts were being made by people in Britain to dilute the name of the problem. Some of these attempts were well-intentioned but mistaken, while others had a more sinister objective to further conceal the reality of SRA from public knowledge.

Wilfred emphasised that effective and diligent law enforcement against SRA is crucial. The public have to know more about SRA so that they in turn strongly pressure the UK authorities to fulfil their duty to protect children and vulnerable adults from Satanist Ritual Abusers, by bringing such abusers to justice, instead of simply looking the other way, which is what happens in practice most of the time.

Wilfred Wong says, “There is plenty of evidence that SRA exists in the UK. For example, there are several SRA cases that have been successfully prosecuted in the British courts. Given the very high standards of proof and evidence required in Britain’s criminal courts in order to secure convictions, this is conclusive evidence of the existence of SRA. Unfortunately, for every SRA case that is successfully prosecuted in Britain, there are many, many more that are not because the police refuse to thoroughly investigate them or the prosecuting authorities refuse to prosecute the cases.

SRA not only exists but is an extensive problem because the authorities have allowed it to simply grow unchecked for decades. Jimmy Savile was a Satanist who did SRA and yet except for the Sunday Express, no other mainstream British newspapers have reported on this fact. As usual a combination of indifference and fear helps to protect the Satanist Ritual Abusers in Britain. We should be helping to protect children and vulnerable adults from SRA by clearly and extensively talking about this subject and by putting unrelenting, firm pressure on the UK Government to ensure that thorough and effective law enforcement against Satanist Ritual Abusers is undertaken.”

Mr Wong has also been featured on Brian Gerrish’s UK Column show, from whence he has not only promoted the Hollie Greig hoax, but has backed up Mr Gerrish’s allegations about the Hampstead SRA hoax. On  that show he claimed that some police officers “are known to have made reports to the Metropolitan Police’s Ritual Abuse Unit in the Hampstead case, and found themselves threatened by fellow officers”. Mr Wong stated,

Because of the sheer gravity of the allegations, the very least the police should do is thoroughly investigate them and not prejudge them, and neither should the media. We’re only asking the police to do their job.

Asked how the public can best respond to the alleged growing horror of SRA, Mr Wong recommended that the public must pressure MPs to have SRA exposed. An interesting statement, given Mr Wong’s long-standing association with some of those very MPs.

Probably the best way to describe the relationship between the fundamentalist Christian contingent at Westminster and the conspiraloons, insatiable for anything that might appear to validate their bizarre world-view is that the fundamentalists wind them up, and the conspiraloons do the dirty work.

Actually, now that we think of it, it’s not unlike the relationship between Belinda McKenzie and her minions. In both cases, the wind-up merchants are the ones who walk away unscathed, yet still filled with a comforting sense of moral superiority.

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This article was first published on 14 October 2017.