Het Complot

Stories of satanic abuse regularly surface around the world. For example, in the United States, where theories about repressed memories and split personalities merge with infanticide and satanic abuse. It began with a bestseller, written by a psychiatrist and his patient, about alleged satanic abuse. This book led to a public panic: the so-called Satanic Panic. Joost Engelberts retraces the steps and discovers how a form of therapy is also being applied in the Netherlands and how news programs have uncritically covered the stories of satanic abuse for years.

The idea that an evil elite abuses and murders children to serve the devil sounds unbelievable. Yet it's taken seriously by journalists, politicians, and therapists. A detective team that investigates child pornography daily devotes two years to thoroughly investigating claims of child abuse by a cult. But what happens when their research findings are ignored, distrusted, or even suppressed by those same journalists, therapists, and politicians because they don't fit? And what is the effect on the people who are identified, hounded, and threatened as perpetrators?