SAFF RESPONSE TO ELEANOR STOBART'S REPORT 

STOBART REPORT STILL LEAVES CHILDREN IN DANGER FROM CHURCH EXORCISMS.

The fanfare over Eleanor Stobart's government report on 'Child abuse linked to accusations of "Possession" and "Witchcraft" might lead an uninformed observer to think that the government has actually done something to protect children at risk but in fact they have simply muddied the waters.

The problem is not 'child abuse linked to accusations of possession and witchcraft'. It has nothing to do with witchcraft and it is wrong of The Minister and Eleanor Stobart to use that phrase.

The problem is that some self-appointed Christian Pastors in doomsday sects which are prospering in Britain are regularly abusing and torturing children AS PART OF THEIR CHRISTIAN BELIEFS.

Cataloguing the entry into the U.K. of lone children, which this report espouses, is a good idea but it will do nothing to save the children of parents who adhere to these beliefs, black or white, most of whom have themselves been born in the U.K. and given birth to their children here.


The suggestion that it is some cult like belief in Possession and Witchcraft which is causing the problem is disingenuine. The people who are abusing children in this way are following tenets from the Christian Bible and have nothing to do with Witchcraft. Their belief in possession is REAL. These Christians may have irrational beliefs that their children are infected with Witchcraft but it is they who are torturing and killing these kids under the auspices of Christianity. Unless the government have the courage to name it, they will never solve it. The only thing which will stop such abuse is for the government to enact a law which makes the exorcism of children illegal and anyone who is involved in it an accessory in law. Plain and simple. There are many laws which prohibit the involvement of children but the government appear not to have the gumption to either accuse those who are responsible for this risk against children or take these obvious measures to combat it for fear of losing the Christian vote.


Eleanor Stobart's report (published by the Department of Education and Skills 29th June 2006) focuses on unaccompanied children entering the country as either asylum seekers in their own right or who are travelling alone to be looked after by relatives who are already living in the U.K. There has only ever been two instances of children like that being sadistically abused or killed in a religious framework and both of them were Christian. But unaccompanied children are a minuscule figure compared with the number of children who are made to attend these Christian House Churches by their obsessive parents or guardians.


The government is fully aware that the real cause of the death of Victoria Climbie and the severe torture which occurred in a case recently (which the British media with their typical disregard for the facts termed the 'Witch Girl' case), was not witchcraft, but a belief within these extreme Christian Churches that a badly behaved or willful child whose behaviour does not respond to prayer is a clear symptom of possession by Satan and must have the devil beaten or tortured out of them.


For goodness sake, for once let's have the facts. Average folk may prefer to think that it is Satanists or Witches or African Witch-doctors who are torturing, beating and killing these children but in reality it is people who call themselves Christians and who attend non-mainstream churches where they observe the tenets of the Christian Bible LITERALLY.


It is clear to anyone with a modicum of intelligence that this type of abuse can be stopped overnight at little cost simply by having the police and social workers visit all the fundamentalist churches in their locality and make it clear to the pastors that the exorcism of children (with or without their parents or guardians knowledge and agreement) will be considered an assault and they will be prosecuted for it. There is PLENTY of precedence for this action under definitions of child abuse in law, which include mental abuse which would clearly bring exorcism under the definition of abuse now recognised by the courts. To paraphrase the NSPCC's TV jingle. No Exorcism. Full Stop!


Until the government stops massaging the stereotypes and attacks this problem head on more children will undoubtedly suffer. But despite their platitudes the authorities continue to apparently ignore the real causes all the same. Just as they put off addressing the world-wide scandal of thousands of cases of priests and clergy who have abused hundreds of thousands of children over the years.


When the SAFF produced research to prove the extent of Priestly Abuse in 1989 the government turned a blind eye, as did the NSPCC and most other agencies within child protection, for we had uncovered a scandal that dare not speak it's name. Within ten years the Vatican had been forced to pay out billions of dollars in damages to victims of their child-abusing priests and most of the public are now aware that churches in many instances knew what was happening yet conspired to hide the abuse from the public and move the paedophile priests to other areas where some actually abused children again! So even the mainstream churches can lie and cheat about these things, yet in the pie chart of possible threats to children (which include Uncle Johns, Dangerous Strangers etc) put out by the NSPCC you won't find a single mention of priestly abuse. Even though cases are still running at an average of 3 a week! So it is no wonder that you, as just a regular person in the street, are ready to believe that Witches or Satanists did it because Christians couldn't do anything so awful, could they? Let's see if we can open your eyes...

Did you hear about the Catholic Priest who strangled a teenage parishioner whom he had made pregnant and then chopped up her body and dumped it in a cemetery? I wonder why you missed that? Did you hear about the congregation of a House Church who killed a 11 year old child in an exorcism and then kept her body in a roll of carpet, brought it out every Sunday and tried to resurrect her with prayer but had to admit defeat when she decomposed? No? I wonder why? Did you hear about the priest who knifed a nun he was having an affair with 32 times and then arranged candles around her body to make it look like satanists had done it? No? Missed that too? Did you hear about the high-level Welsh Vicar who for years used to secretly cut the penises off the corpses of parishioners consigned to him for burial and kept his collection in a drawer in his living room? Didn't splash that across the headlines did they? Did you hear about the fundamentalist minister who placed his son into a bessemer converter of molten metal as a sacrifice to god in a parody of Abraham's story in the bible? No? Strange that. Did you hear about the mental patient who was exorcised in Wakefield and who promptly went home and clawed his wife to death believing that she was the devil - she choked to death on her own blood? No you probably won't have heard about any of these cases because the British Media and the Government are so full of self-righteous humbug about the supposed danger to society of Witches and Satanists! However, the SAFF have for nearly two decades made a study of these and hundreds of other disgusting cases of Christian Abuse. We published them in 'The Black Museum of Priestly Abuse'. Once we had started collecting them there were so many that we had to add a second volume a few years later 'Black, Museum II'. And since then our files became so voluminous we just gave up publishing them because we have already categorically proved our point beyond conjecture. But wait! Can you just point me out the bit where 'witchcraft' comes into all this? No, thought not. You can check out some of these reports yourself in detail on www.saff.ukhq.co.uk/sickvics.htm


Be under no illusion, although fundamentalist churches are the main crux of the exorcism problem the mainstream churches are as much to blame. The Church of England has its own exorcists and whilst they have a history of working with doctors and psychiatrists they still insist that possession is possible and exorcism necessary. Only last week The Church of Scotland announced an expansion of its exorcism squad stating that half their clergy believe they have encountered 'Satanic Forces'. They claim to be getting ready to exorcise parishioners 'who are possessed'. I wonder if that includes children and the mentally unstable?


Today we tell the hard truths again. We say that the exorcism of children should be made illegal. Anyone attempting it should be checked for their sanity and deprived of the ability to mislead other pious Christians down the road of persecuting their own children.


The established church and mainstream religions should come out instantly to support a voluntary ban on child exorcisms in their services. Why haven't they done that already? We demand that they do!


The S.A.F.F. publicly challenged the government and the churches about the dangers of exorcism as long ago as January 2002 in response to a BBC Everyman programme which promoted Exorcism as a valid alternative to psychiatry and carried the message that possession was a reality. This programme was quite simply an encouragement to untrained and irrational people to believe in the possession of people by spirits and undertake exorcisms to 'heal' them. Our 2002 report on the dangers of exorcism can be seen on www.saff.ukhq.co.uk/everyman1.htm  and catalogues dozens of horrible cases over the past few years where Christian inspired exorcism lead to the death, killing and harm of innocent people. What a pity Beverley Hughes and Eleanor Stobart didn't read it when compiling theirs. We warned Everyman at the time that they had a duty to rebalance the issue and show the dangers of exorcism to their viewers. They failed to do anything about it and the people who made that programme must carry some of the responsibility for the evils that exorcism has caused since.


As you can see from all this, the Christian Exorcism of Children is not a 'hidden problem in parts of our society' as this report states, it is indulged in completely openly and with a vengeance by thousands of adherents of the evangelical wing of Christianity who have things all their own way and feel divinely justified in inflicting atrocities on children they think are possessed with the devil, 'for their own good'. It is their Christian belief in the mediaeval clap-trap of 'possession' which forms the justification for beating the devil out of their children. How the government can pretend that this is not happening when there is such a long and consistent history of mainstream religious beatings and inappropriate abuse by nuns, Jesuit monks and other clergy it is a common joke. To project the blame for such atrocities onto unpopular beliefs such as African tribal religions instead is not only dishonourable but highly dangerous to children who are locked into an irrational situation.


Beverley Hughes should get control of this problem straightaway because the growth of the House Church movement in Britain is exponential and more abuse is in the offing. This was a fabulous opportunity for the government to end once and for all the growing superstition which is not only flourishing within the Happy-Clappy House Church movements in most major cities throughout the U.K. but which is being promoted as a superior form of healing to orthodox psychiatry and will cause extensive harm to the fabric of our society in future if it is not stopped. Instead of wasting £140 million pounds of taxpayers money to set up a new Demonology for so-called 'ritual abuse' Inquisitors the government should be training social workers to spot religious fanatics in local churches.


In conclusion, after tracking these types of allegations for nearly two decades we see this latest twist as yet another method of re-introducing a watered down version of the Satanic Ritual Abuse Myth which, despite its constant failures, is still a sacred cow amongst a minority of influential social work activists today.


When the Satan Hunters came to town in 1989 and destroyed the lives of 86 innocent children and their families over spurious claims that Satanists were abusing children we said it was a smokescreen to cover the incidence of Priestly abuse. Over the next few years we proved statistically that a child is a thousand times more likely to be abused by a priest than by a satanist and in the passage of time the cases heralded as proving the Satan Hunters beliefs failed and our conclusions were proven correct in every respect. There has not been one instance where a satanist has been successfully prosecuted for abusing children as part of their religious convictions. It was all a Myth.

Today Christian evangelicals are doing it again. The people who are abusing children in Exorcism ceremonies are the same Christian fundamentalists who accused satanists of doing it before. The Theraquacks and social work agitators who have been secretly pushing these ideas at the police and local authorities in the intervening years also believe Satan is everywhere. After encouraging religious mania by pandering to the expectancies of the fundamentalists they now believe Satan has possessed their children. It's simply a sub-set of the Satanic Ritual Abuse Myth.

When these manic exorcisms result in harm the mainstream churches don't throw their hands up and say 'we were wrong - some amongst us are irrational obsessive religious zealots who lost sight of the fact that a child needs nurturing and instead they misused Christian tenets to beat to death an innocent child thinking it would do it good' They say instead that beating that child to death would not have been necessary if Witches had not hexed it! They ignore the cause and project it onto non-Christians. Of course the lunatics are unrepresentative of mainstream Christians, so why don't the pious majority come out and say so? Why not admit it instead of trying to blame it on the Witches? Is this the way that Tony Blair engenders his multi-faith, multi-cultural Britain? By accepting official reports allowing religious zealots to get away with dark-age crimes by blaming it onto another section of the community to avoid upsetting nominal Christians?

It's another smokescreen, folks, and the government has fallen for it hook, line and sinker. It isn't 'a belief in Possession and Witchcraft' which is the problem. It's a belief in the fundamentalist tenets of Christianity by a minority of gullible and superstitious adherents. A major cause of the problem is the expediency of the established Churches - they are increasingly willing to indulge in irrational clap-trap in order to put bums on pews . The radical Black African Hallelujah lobby is occluding the traditional Cof E approach and pushing Anglicans towards mediaevalism in the head-long rush for zealotry. Unless the problem of possession and exorcism is tackled head-on by the established churches the long-term dangers for our society are immense.

No Exorcisms. Full Stop!

John Freedom, Mortlake 29 June 2006




Ends.

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Disclaimer:

PAN realises that the vast majority of Christians are not fundamentalist or evangelical in make up and we only criticise religious extremists who seek to disenfranchise other faiths whilst bolstering their own. PAN does not in any way condone violence against any persons or property and we must state that we have always worked towards a more tolerant and equal society.
 

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