Thousands of satanic child abuse cases go unreported every year in the UK, according to a disturbing new report.
Child rape and ritualised abuse in Satanic pedophile rings are being ignored by police, investigators have warned.
Dailymail.co.uk reports: Dr Elly Hanson, a clinical psychologist and researcher, said victims often do not report ritual abuse to police because they feared their claims would appear too fantastical to be believed.
Others have become ‘disassociated’, a process that sees abuse victims adopt a different identity as a way of separating themselves from the reality of what has happened to them, or simply feel too traumatised to ‘give a coherent narrative’.
‘There are so many hurdles facing victims that nearly all of them end up falling out of the system,’ Dr Hanson told a media briefing held today by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC).
Police recorded seven cases of ritual abuse in 2024 among 4,450 instances of child abuse, a proportion of 0.2 percent, and zero the previous year, figures show.
But a helpline run by charity the National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac), saw 1,311 calls out of a total of 36,700 between July 2016 and January 2025 that mentioned organised or ritualised abuse – about 3.6 percent.
A separate survey of 100 UK clinical psychologists in 2013 also found that 38 had dealt with one or more cases involving the sinister mistreatment.
Police chiefs are recommending that officers urgently receive training to spot ritualistic abuse, including that linked to witchcraft and satanism.
Dr Hanson said organised ritual abuse typically involves family members and starts when children are young.
Perpetrators frequently do not believe the supernatural belief systems they are espousing and simply use them as a means too gain control over their victims, the psychologist explained.
This form of abuse regularly involves torture or extreme acts of violence and may end in murder or animal sacrifice.
While beliefs about witchcraft and spirit possession are often linked to ethnic groups, such as those with links to sub-Saharan Africa, many offenders have British backgrounds.
According to Dr Hanson, ‘cultural sensitivities’ are one factor holding back police and social services, but she believes the issue works both ways.
‘You’ve potentially got a desire to be culturally sensitive with certain cultural communities, then you’ve got the other direction where someone who is British and not from a particular community they are not seen as someone who might be suffering ritual abuse,’ she said.
One recent case saw a seven-strong child sex ring in Glasgow prey on children as young as 13 in a drug den nicknamed the ‘Beastie House’.
The trial heard how the group performed ‘spells’ on the children and convinced them they had been metamorphosed into various animals.
Richard Fewkes, the director of the NPCC’s Hydrant programme targeting child sexual abuse, said the case was an example of paedophiles using claims of witchcraft as a means of control.
‘Those individuals did not necessarily believe in witchcraft, but they used the ritual of it to control the children,’ he said.
All seven defendants were originally charged with witchcraft under a rarely used Scottish law, but the charges were eventually dropped.
Mr Fewkes insisted more work was needed to ensure offences involving witchcraft, spirit possession and ritualistic abuse (WSPRA) were being recognised and investigated.
There have been at least 14 cases in which people have been convicted of sexually abusing children while using ritualistic practices over the last 40 years.
In 1982, Malcolm Smith, his wife Susan and two relatives were convicted of abusing four children aged one to 15 after Mr Smith convicted them he was ‘Lucifer’.
He carved an inverted cross on one child’s abdomen, inserted a lit candle into her anus and vagina, and branded her genitals with a hot altar knife.
In another case, abuser Carole Hickman convinced a girl she was part of a powerful witches’ coven and held her down whilst her husband Albert raped her.
Meanwhile, a trial in Wales heard of horrific abuse perpetrated by a paedophile ring on a group of young boys.
This saw goats and chickens being slaughtered and their blood poured on gravestones prior to the boys being raped.
Gabrielle Shaw is CEO of the National Association for People Abuse in Childhood (NAPAC), which runs a helpline for victims of child abuse.
She said the majority of offenders are male but grandmothers and aunts were ‘overrepresented’ among female perpetrators.
Ms Shaw believes this is due to abuse often being perpetrated by multi-generational family groups.
Other forms of witchcraft abuse involve perpetrators who genuinely believe the believes they profess.
In the most notorious case in Britain, eight-year-old Victoria Climbié was tortured to death in 2000 by relatives who thought she was possessed.
