America’s paranoia began to cross national boundaries at the start of the 1990s, when it arrived in the United Kingdom. Mazzoni told me that many of the British communities that succumbed to it had recently hosted seminars where experts—or alleged experts—“basically told teachers and parents about the existence of collective sexual abuse based on Satanism, and they invited parents, teachers, and social workers to question the children, without actually teaching them how to question the children. And it’s extremely curious how a few months after these seminars, the reports started to rain
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