Whether at a family reunion, a town hall meeting, or in diplomatic debates broadcast internationally, it's easy to determine when a wrong door has been opened, when attention has stumbed upon common anathema - deliberately ignored topics of outrage denied, of past embarrassment or current crimes, of universal shame.

Everyone shuts up - or is shut up. Everything quiets down. Everyone tries, again, to forget.

Not all closeted skeletons, mind you. Some are relentlessly discussed, covered, recovered, rediscovered. Scoured. Some are never left to the past, never left to find, like water, their place among the layers of memories and histories as much a part of any personal or social fundament as human spirit or agricultural soil.

It's horror collectively shunned, though, that testifies most about us. It strips away our filmy masks of pride and ego. Generally, these outrages involve terrible secrets still denied, guilt unowned. Sometimes, they are underpinned with fictions still believed. We know when an old demon still has some strength left in its narrative, or was propagated by sources that continue to enjoy privilege, social legitimacy: The subject rarely is mentioned.

Remember "satanic ritual abuse"?

If you're over the age, say, of 25 it's impossible to answer "no" to that question. Two decades ago, satanic ritual abuse was the scrouge of the moment. It was endlessly tracked and profiled on news programs, in books and films, in documentaries, and especially on daytime talk shows - the reality television of the 1980s. Hosts like Sally Jesse Raphael and Geraldo Rivera probably did more than any other source to alert America of the frightening danger comprised by these vastly populated secret cults, which sexually abused children and practiced rites featuring outrage as bizarre and vomitous as murder and cannibalism.

One problem: Satanic ritual abuse didn't exist. It was an urban legend writ large and deep. It was part of a widely held, fervently believed article of pure, perverse faith - that child sexual abuse was as widespread as ragweed, as endemic to our society as the internal combustion engine and government waste.

And it was a fairy tale. One with virulent, awesome power to destroy people and families.

In a landmark Womens' Quarterly article, "Sex, Lies and Audiotape," one of the most unflinching testiments recognizing the profound mistakes that had been made, Rael Jean Isaac summed it up this way, backtracking the phenomenon to its roots in the womens movement's political agenda: 

Believe the women. Believe the children. These refrains became the mantra of the incest movement. While the womens movement would be enormously successful in turning sexual abuse--including incest--into a major public issue, women, ironically, would become the chief victims of the hysteria it generated.

The obsession with this supposedly rampant sexual abuse played our in two ways: "Believe the women" became the repressed memory hysteria. "Believe the children" turned into the daycare hysteria.

This spring, a stunning film produced and narrated by Sean Penn brought up that social taboo, that all-but-forgotten subject. On MSNBC, Penn's "Witch Hunt", looks at what has become known simply as "the Bakersfield case", a 1984 "legal panic" in California, in which 39 people were eventually convicted of and most imprisoned for child sexual abuse. Over the years, and after serving hard time in high-security prisons, all the accused have been released; the last, John Stoll finally was freed in 2004, and at age 60, he had spent 20 years in jail for crimes never committed.

Although this film is a powerful indictment of legal injustice, and the criminal destruction of families and lives, much of the ground it covers already was examined by a "Dateline" episode in 2004, where the horrendous persecution of John Stoll and the other Bakersfield unfortunates finally was exposed. As the Los Angeles Times notes in its review,

What the film does not explain is the nature of the original complaints, how the district attorney's office and local law enforcement came to target these families or what caused things to reach such a fever pitch. There is neither explanation of why local journalists seemed to accept these extraordinary convictions on face value nor any attempt to put these cases in the context of the general molestation hysteria that gripped the state and the nation at this time.

But more important, there is also no explanation for why many of the people involved in prosecuting these cases are still in public office. That they are is shocking and terrifying. What we are left with is a rather fatalistic "sometimes bad things just happen" message, which cannot have been filmmakers Dana Nachman and Don Hardy's intent.

A big hole is missing, or as the Times reviewer puts it, there is a thick veil hiding reasons behind "the reckless, pornographic and virtually insane nature - and number - of charges brought against a group of clean-record, quiet-living people. (Or why no one in the criminal justice system or the media or the general public protested.)"

It would be better to look back at the genesis of this vast "moral panic" that so gripped us from the 1980s to early '90s - since the Bakersfield case was but one of many. The most famous, at the time, was the McMartin Day School case in Southern California, in which toddler caregivers were accused of satanism and child sexual abuse on "evidence" that was nothing more than fables spun from thin air. Other cases involved hundreds, if not thousands, of persons, mostly one or two people far from media attention, hauled up on the most outrageous and humiliating of allegations.

The psychiatric theory of "repressed memory" provided the context for cases like these. In fact, it was the key to validating virtually all of them: A victim is so traumatized by being molested, the theory proposed, that the memory was banished from the victim's conscious mind. Isaac charts current integrity of this witchy formula:

Paul McHugh, head of the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School, is skeptical of repressed memory. McHugh sees the development of the concept as one of the "misadventures" of the last thirty years that show "the power of cultural fashion to lead psychiatric thought and practice off in false, even disastrous, directions." 

As noted in the "Witch Hunt", scars and devastation this nonsense left behind is unhealed today.

There is a reason, I think, why the background of this hysteria is so deliberately obscured. And it's a tough one to countenence, even now: The idea of widespread child abuse, which mutated into fantastic, lurid accusations of "satanism" and ritual murder, was fabricated and popularized by radical feminists in the 1970s as a means of attacking "the patriarchy" that dominated Western society from "our house" to Bauhaus to the White House. Isaac gives this atrocity a date, April 17, 1971:

On that day the New York Radical Feminists, a group that at its height boasted no more than 400 members, held a groundbreaking conference on rape in New York. For two days, women held forth on a subject long considered taboo. Susan Brownmiller, who would go on to write Against Our Will, a classic in the literature of rape, later described a speech given by Florence Rush as the highlight of the event. "I have been to many feminist meetings," Brownmiller recalled, "but never before, and not since, have I seen an entire audience rise to its feet in acclaim. We clapped. We cheered."

It was Rush's conclusion that electrified her audience: "The family itself is an instrument of sexual and other forms of child abuse," Rush declared. She added that this abuse "is permitted because it is an unspoken but prominent factor in socializing and preparing the female to accept a subordinate role.... In short the sexual abuse of female children is a process of education that prepares them to become the wives and mothers of America."

...Catharine MacKinnon, the law professor who helped develop the legal definitions of sexual harassment, announced (absent any evidence) that 4.5 percent of all women are victims of incest by their fathers and, if brothers, stepfathers, uncles, and family friends are thrown in, the figure rose to 40 percent. "In fact," wrote MacKinnon, "it is the woman who has not been sexually abused who deviates." Seemingly scholarly studies by feminists-with-credentials such as Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman bolstered the case for widespread incest. Herman dedicated her 1981 book, Father-Daughter Incest, to the women "estimated by us to be in the millions, who have personally experienced incestuous abuse." No wonder Andrea Dworkin wrote that, for a woman, the home is the most dangerous place in the world!

This delusion dwelled and intensified in solicitous cooperation not only of media and academia, but of law and legislature, investigator and social worker; most of the country and the world believed adult males committed child sexual abuse as commonly as they wore shoes. We're living the results: Decades of corrosive, counterintuitive indoctrination, families destroyed by phony "recovered memories" of rape and abuse, and a fractured, alienated sexual dynamic between men and women, children and adults.

Was feminism so radical a good thing or a bad thing? We know this: The bad part, the downside of some movement ideas, is never addressed, never discussed. If the "right" people commit the outrage, it's flushed down the memory hole. In a reversal of how this trendy bit of ugly slander gained traction through incessant publicity and repetition, its progenitors are protected de facto today. The subject merely has been "disappeared" from polite discussion; as relentlessly presented the crazy charge was then, so energetically ignored the entire episode is now.

With no actual proof, not even reliable evidence that child abuse was as widespread as their whim dogma proposed, short-lived luminaries like Gloria Steinem's Ms. magazine were major clearinghouses for the issue, always handled from the most credulous, predetermined positions. There was never a question of whether the most sensational sex-abuse cases were real. They always were.

There was a payoff, of course, for the "victims", or at least, those assigned the victim roles:

Ellen Bass and Laura Davis made this reasoning explicity in "The Courage to Heal". They tell readers who have no memory of childhood sexual abuse that "when you first remember your abuse or acknowlege its effects, you may feel tremendous relief. Finally, there is a reason for your problems. There is someone, and something, to blame." It is no wonder, then that most of the people who have created false memories of early suffering, like those who believe they were abducted by aliens, go to great lengths to justify and preserve their new explanations.

"The Courage to Heal" is a bible of the phenonenon. Still is, but today, it's validity is simply not a subject for debate. Should we hold responsible the counterintuitive authors of any of these toxic blueprints? Or Gloria Steinem? That stalwart pioneer? Don't be reactionary.

For the victims of the genuine witch hunt in Bakersfield, there is another reason this tragic subject isn't grist for more coverage - documentaries, movies and television miniseries - and rarely mentioned at all except in courageous films like this one, and that's because the working-class people who speak in drawls and drive pickup trucks are the victims, not the villains. They just don't fit the demographic for sympathy. 

There's real danger to inflexibility - in being unable to admit you're wrong. Sexual crimes against children are unforgivable, but the preposterous idea that anyone, anywhere could be a child predator has destroyed families and lives, it has poisoned relationships. It has killed people. But it's never been walked back. It's never been "deactivated". As Isaac concluded:

As for the women with "repressed memories" who cut themselves off from their parents, even going so far as to sue them in civil or criminal court, many have recanted their accusations or reestablished ties without saying they were wrong. Many families remain permanently estranged. Many of the women convicted in the daycare or sex ring cases have by now been released (the men are another story). But the lives of all those involved were shattered, and it is hard to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

The feminists who rallied around Florence Rush believed that they could end child abuse by abolishing the patriarchal family, which was its "cause." Instead they launched a child abuse hysteria in which pseudo-science has flourished. Both men and women have been its victims.