Word: salem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Salem was raging. The Court of Oyer and Terminer, convened in 1692, convicted 19 people of witchcraft, and hung them. Much of the incriminating testimony came from a group of young girls who claimed to have been possessed by the devil...
...trials, the excesses the "possessed" spawned appall us. One wonders how people could be convicted to death on such slim evidence, and one feels grateful that our modern legal system is not so vulnerable to gross error. But in fact, some seem to say, the injustices of Salem are not so remote; the people now accusing childhood authority figures of sexual abuse based on previously repressed memories are perhaps as deceived as the possessed children of Salem were. Their imaginations, too, might be out of control...
...World Report article said that skeptics believe the accusers "may embrace a `discovery' of past abuse because it offers a single, unambiguous explanation for complex problems and a special identity as `survivors.'" Skeptics, then, also seem to believe that the desire for attention, as it did the possessed in Salem, motivates today's accusers...
Lastly, some perceive a feminist agenda as informing the current accusations, most of which are made by women against male relatives. In this, the present situation is not analogous to but opposite of that in Salem. There the accused and convicted were almost all women, many of them women with power and property--too much for their own good. The agenda behind the witchcraft trials and executions was ten times as misogynist as the current agenda--if it indeed exists--is feminist. None of today's convicted have hung...
...while it is worth while to recognize parallels with the travesty of justice that was the Salem witchcraft trials, it is also important to recognize differences. Certainly, the mind can deceive us. But evaluated correctly, its impressions can also inform...