Satan's Silence Communties throughout the United States have been convulsed since the early 1980's by accusations, often without a shred of evidence, that respectable men and women in their midst - many of them trusted preschool teachers - secretly gather in far-reaching conspiracies to rape and terrorize children. In this powerful book, Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker examine the forces fueling this blind panic. Satan's Silence is the first book to go beyond documenting individual cases to offer a broad expose of a pernicious national hysteria. The authors demonstrate how the child-protection professions and the federal goverment unwitingly paved the way for the panic and how a strange alliance of feminists and religious fundamentalists promoted it. They expose the scientific baselessness and the inhumanity of the methods used to gather evidence against innocent people and to extract confessions under conditions resembling torture. Hard cover, 304 pages