So Utah passed a bill designed to “address” ritual abuse this week. That is a thing that happened in the year of someone’s LORD 2025.
Isn’t ritual abuse bad, you might be wondering? Don’t we want to address it? Ritual abuse would be bad and worth addressing, if it were actually a thing that happens. But—as I and a great number of smart folks have explained extensively—it emphatically does not.
Nevertheless, more than three decades since the FBI published its findings from a decade-long, nearly $1 million investigation showing that ritual abuse does not, uh, exist? Utah’s legislative body amended HB66 to include provisions specific to ritual abuse. Which is not a thing.
Could it be…Satan? (Spoilers: it could not.)
This is not to say that abuse, sexual or otherwise, does not happen to children and adults in religious settings or at the hands of religious leaders. Religious abuse absolutely does happen—because we let it—and it absolutely deserves to be taken seriously.
But the ways religious authority enables, excuses, and obscures abuse is not what this bill is targeting. Its subject is explicitly ritual abuse, a moral panic that began in the early 1980s and reached its public hysteria pinnacle with the McMartin Preschool case (1983-1990).
While fearmongering activists have largely dropped the “Satanic” part of Satanic ritual abuse, public anxiety about a global cabal of evil child molestors preying on American youth has surged in the last decade—largely driven by a sharp uptick in rightwing white Christian political influence and the persistence of QAnon’s literal demonization of its political opponents.
Utah House Bill 66 now includes guidance on how ritual abuse, which does not exist, should be addressed in law enforcement trainings, designates it as an aggravating factor for related offenses, and makes it a legally-recognized and punishable form of child torture. With this amendment, Utah becomes one of a handful of states—California, Montana, and Louisiana—that have anti-ritual abuse laws on their books.
It might seem like a non-issue that Utah or any other state is legislating or policing a crime that does not—and I cannot stress this enough—exist. But America’s original Satanic Panic tore families and communities apart, produced the longest and most expensive US criminal trial of its time, and saw innocent people—including many women, poor people, queer people, and people of color—convicted of and incarcerated for heinous and sometimes impossible crimes. Some spent decades in prison before being cleared of ritual abuse charges.
Why give a damn
Beyond the damage already done by the Satanic Panic, states passing (or in this case, amending) laws to address crimes that do not actually happen should give us pause for a number of reasons. First and foremost, legislation like this does not actually prevent child sex abuse, which overwhelmingly happens in the child’s home and at the hands of trusted family or friends. Neither does the amendment address actual abuses happening in actual religious settings with the knowledge of actual religious authorities—which is particularly concerning given the LDS Church’s massive influence on Utah’s politics as well as its extensive history of systematically covering up numerous incidents of child sex abuse. (On a related note, did you know that insurance against church sexual abuse liability exists? Capitalism works great, 13/10, no notes.)
The spectacle of ritual abuse laws also draws focus from just how stomach-churningly common child sex abuse is, and how very normal most perpetrators seem to everyone but their victims. Such accusations render abusers monstrous, foreign, exceptional—when in reality abusers are most likely to be our parents, our siblings, and other people we trust and even love. This kind of legislation also fails to note, much less address, how rampant sexual abuse is in the very systems meant to remove and protect children from abuse.
Lending legislative credibility to a fresh wave of Satanic Panic also tells us nothing good about the current American political landscape. Elected representatives lending credence to demonic hysteria suggests that QAnon’s satanic fixation is still influencing public policy.
Meanwhile, Utah lost the Sundance Film Festival this week because the state passed a first-in-the-nation ban of Pride flags (and other “nonsanctioned” flags) in public schools and government buildings. While ridiculous on its face, Utah’s new anti-ritual abuse provisions might well signal a rising tide of rightwing efforts to literally and figuratively demonize sexual outsiders—a practice to which many lawmakers across this country seem eager to return.
