Richard Beck revisits America's forgotten moral panics: could it happen again?

We Believe the Children explores the moral panic over so-called ‘ritual sex abuse’ in the 1980s and why, by and large, America doesn’t discuss it

Richard Beck did not set out to write a book about ritual child abuse and moral panics. The way he tells it, it just sort of happened. About four years ago he and some friends in Brooklyn – friends who just happen to be affiliated with the self-appointed intellectual journal of our era, n+1 – started a research group which numbered among its interests “the history and legacy of radical feminism”.

Beck is 28 years old, and was born too late to have any personal memories of what feminists often call the “sex wars”. But as the research group’s work progressed he became interested in something he’d never heard of before: the child abuse panics of the 1980s.

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