During 1988 the national newspapers of Britain began to carry allegations that children were being sexually abused and murdered by secret organisations during rituals variously described as witchcraft, black magic or satanism. Television and radio programmes, national, local and weekly papers all carried stories linking the sexual abuse of children to witchcraft, ‘the occult’ and devil worship. Alarming indications of the nature of the rituals and their incidence were quoted: at an international conference in 1988, the founder of a British children's charity expressed her belief that ‘at least 4,000 children were being sacrificed a year in Great Britain alone’ (Core 1988). A British psychiatrist, Norman Vaughton, was reported as saying that there were 10,000 cases a year in the United States. A little later, early in 1989, another newspaper article had stated that the Adam Walsh Centre in the United States claimed there were 10,000 young American children involved in demonic cult activities, 200 unsolved murders by satanic cults and ‘thousands of similar cults in Britain’. Extreme versions of the allegations asserted the existence of an international conspiracy and were even reported in The Times (Gledhill 1990).

Children taken from their parents by the social services in a number of Midland towns were said to have been rescued from such cults. They were victims of ‘satanic abuse’, a shorthand phrase which became a label for the new allegations.