Okay and again, granted, but that's hardly new, is it? In the limit case it can't be younger than the blood libel, which has been "going to and fro in the earth" for a dog's age. Outside some coincidental variation in targeting, there seems little enough to tar one example as categorically worse than the others, and I don't recall any overt pogroms from the 80s or 90s, though I think the "satanic ritual abuse" people may have got close to lynching someone a time or two.

It's not that I don't share your opinion of such practices, but mine comes of having been abused and then spent the following several decades studying the literature on the phenomenon to try to understand what happened to me and why it was allowed. The conclusion I've reached is that, even in societies where child sexual abuse is correctly understood as a problem - which is not even all of them - this is an understanding honored, in the vast majority of cases, entirely in the breach.

Oh, sure, you get the occasional high-profile case, usually around a highly atypical serial offender. But most of the time, you get what I got: made clearly to understand that, even if you do find in yourself the courage to tell someone you should be able to trust, you will not be believed and there will be no help coming - and you would be wise to speak no more on the topic, lest you make yourself inconvenient by creating a scandal in the family, for which you rather than those responsible will typically be blamed. And God help you if you should fall pregnant by a male relative! I at least didn't have that to worry about - a very cold sort of mercy, I grant you, but a mercy nonetheless.

And then too, suppose you tell a mandated reporter who actually fulfills that duty, and the state swoops in to the rescue. What then? I've known a couple of people who, I later came to learn from a mutual acquaintance, had spent considerable time in the foster system. They were notable in my experience for being among the few who've had even less to say about their upbringings than I typically do about mine. Which leaves me to ask myself: given the option, would I really have chosen that over the life I actually had? At least my grandfather wept in shame, after. Him I can forgive. Those who insisted what they did was God's work, by contrast, make it worth even an apostate's while to retain some faith in the existence of hell.

Given even those attempts that are made seem so often to net out more ill than good, I think this is not a problem our societies know how to address, and even if it were, that would be the work of decades and thus would still remain the incentive to go on doing as we do now, sacrificing the well-being and sometimes the lives of the most vulnerable among us - children and members of marginalized groups alike - on the altar of just...not wanting to deal with it, and secondarily for the sake of any moral panic's political utility.

This is what I mean when I say there are no easy answers. You're not wrong about the shape of the 80s and 90s in this regard, although I continue to suspect you may have yet to quite encompass the full breadth of the history here. But your analysis lacks of completion, in my view, where it assumes that things went wrong somehow in those decades specifically. They did not; they merely continued as normal, just as they have before and since. Only the choice of targets and some accidents of rhetoric varied, just as they always do. The issue of real interest here is not one example of moral panic over imagined forms of child abuse rather than honestly facing the fact of it; the issue is every example, and more fundamentally there being so many examples because this is what we always do. Because this is a problem we as a society choose simply not to try to solve.

I think I understand the reasons for that. Certainly I've put enough effort into it that I hope I do by now! But to understand is not to excuse, and there is no excuse for the sacrifice of children; it may be only one damnation among many, but a damnation it remains nonetheless.