The Satanic Panic, alternatively known as the Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) hysteria, was a moral panic among those who believed that secretive Satanic cults were busy ritually abusing and murdering children on a vast scale. Sparked in large part by Michelle Remembers (1980), a book in which co-author Michelle Smith claimed to reveal repressed memories of such abuse, the panic spread across the United States and thence to other western countries. Buying into these claims, law enforcement officials initiated several criminal investigations, the most famous being the McMartin Preschool Trial of 1983 to 1990. After the collapse of that trial and subsequent official reports in both the United States and Britain highlighting the absence of evidence for any Satanic conspiracy, the panic largely abated in the early 1990s—although committed believers in the reality of SRA have never gone away.
There is already a considerable literature on the Satanic Panic, including...
University of California Press