Jordan Peterson on history: what the evidence says · JRE #1769
SUBJECT: HISTORY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
the satanic ritual abuse accusations that emerged in daycares in the 1980s. And that was a consequence of women going into the workforce en masse, leaving their children with strangers and starting to have pathological fantasies about it, especially if they were borderline schizophrenic.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The 1980s and early 1990s wave of satanic ritual abuse accusations at American daycares, exemplified by the McMartin Preschool case, is documented in the academic and legal literature as arising from a combination of suggestive and coercive child-interviewing techniques, recovered-memory therapy practices, moral panic amplified by media and advocacy groups, and a broader climate of concern about child sexual abuse, not from mothers' workforce participation. Peer-reviewed follow-up research on convicted daycare employees traces the phenomenon to a self-reinforcing "day care ritual abuse master-narrative" that drew in social workers, investigators, and therapists; a 2025 scoping review of the related recovered-memory literature likewise identifies suggestive therapy as the central mechanism by which false abuse memories were generated and later retracted. No mainstream historical or psychological account attributes the panic to maternal employment or to borderline schizophrenia in mothers, and Peterson's claim does not appear in the peer-reviewed literature on the subject. The claim is an unsupported causal assertion that does not match the documented, multi-factor explanation for the Satanic Panic.