Teenager Kills 48 for Rituals? “A teenage girl in Nigeria has confessed to taking part in the ritual killing of 48
people in the last seven years, media reported on Thursday.
Police arrested the 13-year-old school student last week as a suspect in the killing of a
two-year-old boy in Maiduguri, northeastern Nigeria, the independent Vanguard newspaper
said.
The girl told police she was initiated into a secret cult by a civil servant seven years ago, the paper
said. The man has since been arrested.” Although it seems to have peaked and receded, I’ve been quite troubled by the last decade’s epidemic of psychiatrically distressed patients’ claiming to be victims of cultic ritual abuse here in the US. Law enforcement agencies up to and including the FBI have repeatedly found no forensic evidence of the killings these quite disturbed patients report. (The claimants have explanations for the lack of evidence too, of course. Recall that a sound hypothesis is supposed to be falsifiable as well as verifiable…) While it’s politically incorrect to disbelieve even the most outlandish abuse claims, they have usually seemed to be, at worst psychotic or at best histrionic/hysterical, fabrications or exaggerations, often subconsciously encouraged by credulous mental health professionals, by character-disordered patients, many of them indeed victims of horrible but far more prosaic abuse histories and stuck seeking pathological attention. Now, of course, the veracity of this report from Nigeria, where, Reuters notes, “ritual killing is common in some parts of Africa’s most populous country, where some people believe
witchcraft involving the use of human parts can make them rich”, is hard to assess. If true as pitched, does its plausibility depend upon the cultural belief system of the society? If so, we should look again at the U.S. situation, because there are probably plenty of depraved people out there with equally outlandish belief systems. While it would not affect my dismissal of the bulk of the claims I hear as distorted elaborations or fabrications, I would not, in the last analysis, be surprised to hear incontrovertible proof that there had been a case of multiple ritual sacrifices by a group of deluded, like-minded individuals conspiratorially working together somewhere in the darker hidden recesses of the American psyche. Addendum: Lo and behold, here’s a story of Satanic ritual murder in the Western world. Guardian UK
