Witch Hunt Research Paper

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The Witch Hunts What do you think about when you hear the word witch? Do you hear their cackles in the back of your mind? Witch hunts have been going on since the 1400’s. The three I am going to talk about are, the Salem witch hunt, and the play written on it, The Crucible, and also the War on Terror. In 1962, the term witch hunt meant actually hunting the women and men who called themselves witches, or practicing witchcraft. Now a day, a witch hunt describes the hunting of an unjust group, such as a gang or cult. The pattern of a witch hunt has three steps, the starting even, hysteria or panic, and then the norm can be resumed. A good example of a modern day Witch hunt would be the 2011 Stanley Cup Riot, and how the police and law system…show more content…
This even started when a mother, Judy Johnson, of a young student attending the preschool, had been sodomized by a teacher at the McMartin school by the name of Ray Buckey. Several kids that attended the school had to undergo sever questioning, letters were sent home to all the parents asking them to ask their children if they had been sexually abused, or if they had witnessed it happening to another child. By spring time, over 360 kids had admitted that they had been abused. Judy’s child originally had painful bowel movements which was what had started all the accusations. Letters had been sent home to the parents, over 200 had originally responded saying their children may have been abused. During the interviews with the children, there had been over 360 kids who said they had been abused by the teachers. Medical examinations had been done, and pictures had been taken of possible scarring which the medical examiner stated to be due to anal penetration. Ultimately, only 41 of the original 360 testified during the grand jury. On March 24th, 7 teachers were charged with 115 counts of sexual abuse on 40 children, which had later expanded to 321. In 1986 new district attorney called the evidence ‘extremely weak’ and all charges had been dropped. Johnson had later been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and had been found dead in her home due to chronic alcoholism. The McMartin preschool trial is an excellent example of a recent witch hunt, which follows the exact same pattern as the witch hunts that happened earlier in history in 1692, the Salem Witch hunts in Salem

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