I’ve finally started converting some of my old articles to PDF and putting them up on my website. Here’s the first:

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Devil’s Advocate: Converging claims and the construction of Satanic ritual abuse (2001)

The Satanic ritual child abuse panic of the 1980s and early 1990s is analyzed using Spector and Kitsuse’s claims-making theory of social problems. The role of a convergence of claims-making behavior amongst three groups — fundamentalist Christians, the Anti-Cult Movement, and the Child Savers — in establishing Satanic ritual abuse as a social problem is discussed and used to explain how Satanic ritual abuse became a social problem without any abuse taking place. Spector and Kitsuse’s theory is found to be successful in explaining the causes of the Satanic ritual abuse panic.