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The Salem Witch Trial

from private e-mail (Ted)

There is an history of hysterical and public persecution in the United States. The first one was held over 300 years ago in Salem Massachusetts. Those events exercise a deep and continuing hold on the American imagination.

That trial began in 1692, after three girls ages nine, eleven, and twelve in the household of the Reverend Samuel Paris met with other girls and with a Caribbean slave named Tituba. She showed them charms, spells, and ways of predicting the future--such as how to identify the men they would marry. The Puritan girls became frightened that they had participated in pagan "conjurations." They began to behave strangely, "getting into holes, and creeping under chairs and stools ..., [with] sundry odd postures and antic gestures, [and] uttering foolish, ridiculous speeches which neither they themselves nor any others could make any sense of."

The girls parents took them to a doctor who was unable to find a physical cause for their ailments. So he diagnosed satanic possession, and at this, ministers and experts in witch finding were called in. The questioners were convinced that community residents had cursed the girls. All they lacked were the culprits' names. But when they asked the simple question, "Who torments you?" the girls did not answer. Other inquiries were equally futile. So Parris, Reverend Nicholas Noyes, and several other villagers peppered the girls with the names of Salem residents and then watched how they responded. This interrogation process went on hour after hour, week after week. Finally, after a month of it, the youngest girl named Tituba (the slave girl) as a witch, along with two other women who were community outcasts. Eventually, the girls fingered dozens more people, both women and men.

The girls who started the persecution were in no hurry to assume the role of accusers. They made their charges only after being subjected to relentless interrogations, pressed on them by the most powerful adults in their lives.

During the Salem witch trials, dozens of people admitted to being witches, including Tituba, the West Indian slave who was the first to be names by the accusing girls. None of those who confessed were killed, or even brought to trial. But twenty defendants who steadfastly denied being servants of Satan were killed, by hanging or being slowly crushed with rocks.

(Forced confessions and "plea bargains" have always been the most expedient way of solving crimes, especially sex crimes against children where there are not other witnesses and the child is manipulated into making the accusations. In the 1980's similar things happened to dozens of probably innocent people, especially in Kern County, California. Defendants who insisted they were not guilty were put on trial for ritual sexual abuse of children, convicted, and sent to prison for hundreds of years. Defendants who agreed to plea bargain, confess their guilt, and testify against others were not punished.)

For all their rigid intolerance, even the puritans of Salem Massachusetts quickly repented their behavior after the witch hunts of 1692. It is important that American boy lovers digest the end of this story. "We walked in clouds and could not see our way." apologized the Reverend John Hale five years after his testimony against an accused Salem woman helped put her to death. The same year that Hale penned his regrets, Salem declared a day of public contrition, and in 1709 the families of those who were executed received reparations. These displays of repentance helped heal the community at the same time that they preserved it.

In Salem, it was an act of moral strength and social progress to say "we were wrong." Three centuries later, it is up to all who sanction the pedophile hunt to help redress the terrible mistakes. It is not only the credibility of the press and the justice system that is at stake. Demanding that society, especially government and the media, redress its errors would be a step in holding it truly accountable for empowering women and children against unwanted sex and for advancing their well-being in general. The involvement of women's activists in this effort would help cleanse feminism's sullied reputation among boy lovers who have suffered much from false charges of harming boys without (in about 2/3 of the cases, at least) credible evidence. Boys and boy lovers who refuse to mouth the rituals of the dominant society are persecuted and hounded out of society.

Over the weekend I read much of *Satan's Silence: Ritual abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt* by Debbie Nathan & Michael Snedeker Basic Books 1995. Much of the above material is from that book. I recommend it.

And for those who are not Americans, it may be important to also send you the message that British prime minister Wiston Churchill thought very highly of Americans. He felt they always did the right thing in the end. It's just that they do all the wrong things first, he correctly observed.