Scotland Is About To Have A Good Old Fashioned Witch Trial

11 people are accused of 'Satanic Ritual Abuse,' which is not a thing.

A trial of 11 people accused of taking part in the "Satanic Ritual Abuse" of three children is about to get underway in Glasgow, Scotland and is expected to last at least seven weeks. In total, the defendants are being held on 43 charges, including attempted murder, rape and other serious charges. They are also accused of, though not charged with, witchcraft.

“There are so many people in the case there could be an unusual level of disruption.” Judge Lord Beckett told the court. That would not be surprising, as the accused have been harassed by outraged citizens ever since the case was made public.

The abuse allegedly went on from 2010 through 2020, though it is not clear yet how the defendants knew or had access to these children for such long periods of time — or how they managed to pull this off for an entire decade without anyone noticing, given the extent of the abuse.

As we wrote in August when the defendants were first charged:

The 11 defendants maintain their innocence, but are accused of sexually molesting and raping multiple children over the course of about four years. However, two girls and a boy are at the center of most of the charges. They are also accused of having forced the children to drink blood and eat hearts at Satanic seances, and communicate with demons through a Ouija board. Additionally it's alleged they forced one girl to eat dog and cat food and pretend to be a dog, and also "drugged her, ran a wheelchair into her legs, put a black plastic bag over her head."

Four of the defendants are charged with the attempted murder of the youngest female victim. Specifically, it is alleged that they pushed the girl into a microwave, an oven, a refrigerator, a freezer and various cupboards in a series of attempts to kill her. Thankfully she was more resilient than even Rasputin and survived.

They also chased the girl around “wearing a mask of the devil” and hung her up on the wall by her sweater.
The group also allegedly dressed up in cloaks and horns to teach the children how to do witchcraft, and then convinced them that they had “metamorphosed into animals.” Naturally, the children were also allegedly expected to to sacrifice many animals, and one of the boys was forced to stab a parakeet. The boy was also forced to “courier controlled drugs” and was at one point nearly murdered by someone holding his head under liquid in a bathtub — liquid he was told was blood.

There is also a charge against one of the group members for threatening one of the girls by telling her they were going to send her to live with a stranger in Turkey.

These charges are the same sorts of charges brought against people during the height of the Satanic Panic, during which we put multiple people in prison for decades not just for crimes they did not commit, but crimes that did not happen and which made no sense.

Look, I am not a detective, I am not Jessica Fletcher, but I really just feel like the first question anyone should ask in any case is "Is this even physically possible?" Go to Best Buy, look around at the microwaves. Do any of them seem like they could fit a small child? That's the kind of thing I would personally check on before deciding to believe someone's story about being nearly microwaved to death.

Disturbingly enough, I was able to find a number of instances in which people actually did microwave   a baby   to death . In all of these instances the child was under two months old and was not only dead within 2-5 minutes, but severely burned. While there is no information on how old these children were at the time, it seems unlikely that we are talking about infants too young to remember being put in a microwave, and even if we were, there is clearly no surviving that. Are we meant to believe, also, that 11 adults were unable to kill a small child?

Did they forget to turn the microwave on? Did they try the microwave first and then go "Well clearly this did not work, let's try a cupboard! That oughta do it!?" And why these particular methods? Did Satan demand that the child be killed in the kitchen but not with a knife? That seems like an odd request.

It seems more likely to me that the child simply knew the story of Hansel and Gretel and thought that "putting children in the oven" was a thing bad people regularly do.

If you are thinking "Well, at least it's not happening in America this time!" — I have some unfortunate news for you, because a similar case is underway in Utah County, Utah. Among credible sexual assault accusations against a therapist who, ironically, had convinced several patients that they were victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse, there are less credible accusations that the therapist was himself part of a Satanic cult that was ritually abusing and cannibalizing children. A cult that supposedly (and conveniently) included Utah County Attorney David Leavitt, a progressive prosecutor who has consistently found himself at odds with the County Sheriff pursuing the case.

Ken Lanning, the author of the FBI's 1992 report on ritual abuse, determined that the "Satanic ritual" aspect of these cases was what made law enforcement officers more likely to put aside their skepticism and believe bizarre scenarios involving human sacrifice, shark-infested swimming pools and impromptu trips to Mexico on the private planes of daycare employees, often because of their own personal religious beliefs. He also determine that it was not a real thing.

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