Both types are evil, although planned, ritual child abuse would seem to be worse. Of course, abuse is not the only evil with which psychologists deal, but the question of whether satanic ritual abuse truly exists is a common enough problem to discuss more fully before addressing the more general question of evil. The harm that abuse does to children is well known. Until recently, impulsive child abuse, seen in parental reactions to the frustrations of child rearing, dominated the field. Lately, however, ritual child abuse has also become known.
Ritual abuse is planned and intentional.
It is often attributed to satanic worship in which children are forced to sleep with corpses, view murders, and submit to impregnations. Both of these questions have their roots in more basic assumptions about psychological understandings of evil. Considered in reverse order, the discussion about repressed memories reflects a difference of opinion in psychology about unconscious motivation. The Freudian position has always been that traumatic experience can be repressed. Repressed experience expresses itself in symptoms of psychopathology.