Full-blown alleged SRA case in Italy

For at least the past few years, there has apparently been quite a bit of hysteria in Italy about "Satanism". But I was not aware of any full-blown "Satanic Ritual Abuse" allegations over there until just now:

• "Grandmothers arrested over 'satanic sex abuse'"
  by Richard Owen
  Rome, April 25, 2007
  Times Online (U.K.)

Like nearly all such cases, this one is blatantly fishy. The above article starts off as follows:

Three women teachers were among six people arrested today accused of sedating and sexually abusing children as young as 3 at a school near Rome.

The teachers — two of whom are grandmothers who had taught at the school and at Sunday school for decades — are said to have taken part in the repeated abuse of 15 children aged 3 and 5 for a year, filming them in sexual acts with satanic overtones at the teachers’ homes and in a wood.

Had there ever been any complaints about these teachers before, during their many decades of teaching? If not, it is conceivably possible that one old grandmother could suddenly start molesting kids in her old age, but two of them at the same school? I suppose that's possible too, but seems very unlikely to me.

The alleged abuse — in the town of Rignano Flaminio, 25 miles (40km) north of Rome — came to light when some of the children began describing their “games” to their parents. They drew pictures of a “man in black” who wore a hood and drank his own blood, and said they had played a game in which “a wolf chases a squirrel and eats it”.

So far, this sounds like a game that the kids could perhaps have come up with on their own, depending on what kinds of TV shows they had been watching. Kids can indeed have very gruesome imaginations.

However:

They were warned that if they told their parents about the “games”, they would be “taken away from their mothers by devils”. If the truth were to come out and they were asked who had taught them to perform sexual acts, they were to say “my father”.

How was this information elicited from the kids, I wonder? Was care taken to avoid asking the kids too many leading questions? In many alleged multiple-victim, multiple-offender (MVMO) child sexual abuse cases, there have turned out to be serious problems with the way the kids were questioned.

The parents also reported bruising and swelling around their children’s genital areas and that they had returned home from school in a confused state. Police say that the children were given tranquillisers and told they were sweets.

Assuming this is accurate, this does sound as if someone abused the kids. But it seems to me most likely that the questioning got out of hand, implicating innocent people as well as the truly guilty.

The article quotes a local priest and a former teacher at the school voicing skepticism about the charges against the teachers. But, amongst many other people in town, a lynch mob mentality is prevailing.

Thanks to iteration_x for mentioning this story in the "Satanic news" community on LiveJournal.