This paper was delivered at the online symposium Researching Representations of Child Sexual Abuse in Contemporary Culture, hosted by UCD Dublin on May 26.
This paper frames QAnon as the latest example of the cultural ‘spectacularisation’ of child sexual exploitation. When I refer to ‘spectacularisation’, I’m drawing on thinkers like Debord (1998) and Baudrillard (1988), and referring to a mode of representation in which social phenomena are rendered primarily in the registers of fiction and fantasy. In this process, they lose connection to facts outside the spectacle. By way of introduction, QAnon is a right wing conspiracy theory which positions Donald Trump as a messianic figure appointed by God to the US presidency. According to QAnon, Trump’s primary purpose and goal as president was to defeat the Satan worshipping paedophile cabal supposedly driving the Democratic political party and controlling liberal politics on a global scale. In the wake of Trump’s electoral defeat, journalistic and academic attempts to analyse and understand QAnon have frequently drawn parallels with the so-called “satanic panic” of the 1980s, with the suggestion that QAnon is the latest iteration of a conservative moral panic over child sexual abuse (e.g. Caldwell, Shapiro, Jarenwattananon, & Venkat, 2021; Vrzal, 2020). I want to complicate that analysis by pointing to long-standing silences and gaps in public discourse on child sexual exploitation. The mass media and academia have struggled to generate a coherent framework of analysis and discussion of complex child sexual abuse cases. In the early 1990s, journalists and academics fell into conspiracy theories of their own making in their widespread promulgation of the claim that sexual exploitation allegations were the product of “false memories” and “moral panic” (Salter, 2013). Such conspiracy theories have delegitimised journalistic and academic inquiry into child sexual exploitation, and I argue that QAnon is the latest iteration of epistemic failures to constitute allegations of child sexual exploitation as meaningful and actionable.
Public discourse and child sexual exploitation
QAnon sits at the intersection of three key forces: 1) increasingly online and reactionary right wing politics, 2) long standing evangelical Christian conspiracy theories, and 3) expanding public awareness of child sexual exploitation. I turn to this third force to set the backdrop for the emergence of QAnon.
The issue of child sexual exploitation emerged forcefully to public awareness in the early 1970s with a landmark case in the United States, where a number of teenaged boys were abducted and murdered. During the subsequent investigation, it became apparent that some the boys had been exploited in sexual images and videos before their deaths. Outcry around the case contributed to a campaign of law reform to protect children vulnerable to exploitation, and to criminalise the production of what was then called “child pornography” (Shouvlin, 1981), with most Western jurisdictions passing similar legislation by the early 1980s. These reforms coincided with increased recognition and reporting of child sexual abuse as a whole.
As criminal justice and child protection responses to child sexual abuse and exploitation began to scale up in the 1980s, conflicts emerged between the state, mass media and academic understandings of the problem. For some sociologists and historians of sexuality, law reform efforts focused on child sexual abuse and child pornography represented a victory for conservative and reactionary forces. Sex researcher Weeks (1981) described the criminalisation of child pornography in the United Kingdom as the product of “moral panic”. A range of other scholars and commentators described expanded child protection efforts as a censorious “witch hunt” (Hechler, 1988) . This label was appended to a number of high-profile child sexual abuse cases, particularly where exploitation and the manufacture of child sexual abuse material was alleged.
During the 1990s, this sentiment would be enshrined in “false memory” and “moral panic” discourses that spanned the mass media and academia. It was widely alleged that child protection workers and psychologists were implanting false memories of bizarre sexual abuse in their clients (Ofshe & Watters, 1996), while communities, authorities and institutions were deemed to be over-reacting to the threat of sexual abuse (Jenkins, 1992). Content analysis of news coverage in the United Kingdom and United States demonstrates a dramatic shift in media attention from the early-to-mid 1990s away from child sexual abuse as a social problem, to the threat of false allegations (Beckett, 1996; Kitzinger, 2004). In academia, the arts and humanities disciplines played a leading role in characterising public concern about child sexual abuse as exaggerated and irrational, particularly where groups or networks of abusers were described.
As the internet became popularized in the late 1990s, the digital evidence of a significant online community of sexual offenders began to undermine the confidence of advocates of the sceptical position (Jenkins, 2001). This position was further challenged by rolling clergy abuse scandals, which vividly illustrated the complicity and passivity of institutional authorities in the face of child sexual abuse allegations. The contemporary situation is paradoxical, in which theories of false memories and moral panic continue to circulate alongside the very same allegations of sexual exploitation that they claim to debunk (Salter, 2017). Despite cyclical attempts to deny its existence, sexual exploitation has never gone away, but rather its victims and those who work with them have been pushed to the margins, where they continue to encounter significant challenges in their efforts to access health care or criminal justice (Salter, 2017). These challenges include the persistence of a sceptical view of allegations of sexual exploitation in the community and across a range of sectors. It should, perhaps, be no surprise that sexual exploitation has been woven into conspiracy culture, where journalistic and academic reluctance to engage with the challenges of sexual exploitation have been interpreted in sinister ways, and gaps in public understanding have been filled by less-than-credible sources.
Pizzagate and Qanon
QAnon can be described in multiple ways. Since the Enlightenment, some evangelical Protestant communities have intuited the presence of a satanic cabal behind the securalisation of the nation state (McKenzie-McHarg, 2014), and to a certain extent, QAnon is simply the contemporary reassertion of this clumsy attempt to explain away the forces of modernisation. The kinetic spread and appeal of QAnon is also attributable to the structure of social media, where millions of users have elaborated upon the QAnon mythos in a kind of collective fictional authorship (Zuckerman, 2019). It’s also important to situate QAnon within the broader context of the covid-19 pandemic, with a rapid escalation in QAnon social media activity linked to the paranoid milieu of lockdowns and related anxieties.
However I want to focus here on the origins of QAnon in the 2016 US presidential campaign. The then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and her husband and former president Bill Clinton have long been dogged by various rumours of malfeasance promoted by right wing interests. These rumours were only further amplified when it emerged that Bill Clinton was an acquaintance of now-deceased billionaire and child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and had repeatedly flown with Epstein on his private jet. In November 2016, Clinton’s connections with Epstein were the subject of significant discussion on the infamous imageboard 4chan, a well known online forum for far right, reactionary and pro-Trump politics (Tuters, Jokubauskaitė, & Bach, 2018).
During this period, the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign director John Podesta were hacked and released by Wikileaks. As 4chan users scoured the emails, they noted references from Podesta to “cheese pizza” (Tuters et al., 2018). Cheese pizza is coded slang on 4chan for “child pornography”, since they share the acronym CP. In the darker depths of the internet, child sexual abuse material is sometimes referred to in coded terms using the pizza emoji. This superficial similarity prompted some 4chan users to conclude that not only did the Clintons have links to Epstein but that they were also involved in child trafficking. 4chan users would go on to suggest that Hillary Clinton was involved in satanic rituals on the basis of an email to Podesta from his brother about performance artist Marina Abramovich, whose avant-garde “Spirit Cooking” performances include occult overtones and cooking with bodily fluids (Tuters et al., 2018).
These 4chan discussions established the basic narrative conventions of what came to be known as “Pizzagate”: the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was involved in child trafficking and satanic rituals. As the “Pizzagate” narrative migrated to social media, it took on increasingly poly-vocal and schizoid forms. The Trump campaign actively monitored and courted Pizzagate, with high profile Trump supporters and campaign members expressed sympathy for Pizzagate, including Erik Prince (brother of Trumps’ secretary of education Betsy DeVos and founder of military contractor Blackwater) and Michael Flynn Jnr (the son of Michael Flynn, advisor to Donald Trump).
The Pizzagate conspiracy experienced a significant boost in October 2017. On 4chan, an anonymous user named “Q” claimed to be a highly placed official in the Trump administration with so-called “Q clearance”, which is a US government term referring to permission to access top secret classified material. In a series of over 3000 posts, first on 4chan and later on the related site 8chan, Q claimed that Pizzagate was in fact true, and that Trump was implementing a secretive military coup that involved the clandestine trial and conviction of political opponents such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for egregious offences against children amongst other crimes. Q actively encouraged followers to elaborate upon his posts, which often took the form of obtuse questions and admonishments to “connect the dots” and “expand your thinking”. QAnon became a major social media phenomenon, with an internal Facebook analysis in 2020 identifying thousands of QAnon related Facebook communities with millions of users (Sen & Zadrozny, 2020).
While the precise number of QAnon adherents is unclear, the movement became a significant cultural and political force. In early 2019, an e-book collectively authored by QAnon supporters peaked at #2 on Amazon’s list of best selling books. At least two dozen US Congressional candidates who espoused QAnon-related beliefs appeared on ballots during the 2020 US presidential election, with Marjorie Taylor Green elected in Georgia while running openly as a Q adherent. On his social media feed, Trump repeatedly promoted QAnon-related accounts in the final weeks of his presidency and refused to disavow the movement when asked a question about QAnon at a press conference. Following Trump’s loss to Biden, there have been no posts on 8chan from ‘Q’ since early December 2020, although QAnon adherents featured prominently in the riots in Washington on January 6 this year.
Reflections
What distinguishes QAnon from Pizzagate, and perhaps what explains the expanded popularity and reach of QAnon, was its increasingly general and vague gestures towards child protection. While Pizzagate was a clearly partisan movement focused on accusing progressive figures of paedophilia, the scope of QAnon expanded over time to theorise a broader, global crisis of child sexual exploitation. “Save The Children” was a major catch cry of QAnon and indeed prompted a number of QAnon marches through 2020. The child protection organisation Save The Children reported significant frustration with the apparent hijacking of their name, while an anti-trafficking services has described being inundated with calls from well-meaning QAnon supporters reporting entirely fictional cases of child sex trafficking based on nothing more than social media scuttlebutt. The persistent and emotional focus of QAnon on child trafficking and protection led to its widespread adoption well beyond the normal bounds of conspiracy culture, including throughout the so-called ‘wellness community’, dominated by yoga and dieting gurus on Instagram.
This heightened concern about imaginary allegations of child sexual abuse, as well as copioius references to satanism and rituals, have prompted many to draw an easy link between QAnon and the so-called “satanic panics” of the 1980s and 1990s. However this argument, while appealing in its simplicity, may only be reproducing the very problem that it seeks to explain. The fact that QAnon’s formulation of sexual exploitation had no clear reference to any actual case of child abuse is in fact what distinguishes it from the so-called “satanic panics” and “witch hunts” of the 1980s and 1990s. These labels have been attributed by sceptical journalists and academics to real child protection cases, albeit contested ones. Not only did these so-called “moral panics” include actual child abuse complaints, but these complaints were supported by forensic and other evidence of child sexual assault. As Ross Cheit (2014) has painstakingly documented in his book The Witch-Hunt Narrative, some of the complainant children in high-profile cases such as the McMartin preschool case in the United States had anogenital injuries that established sexual assault to a medical certainty. And yet this case is the cornerstone of academic and media claims about the existence of a so-called “satanic panic”.
For that reason alone, we should be cautious about simplistic comparisons between QAnon and earlier allegations of sexual exploitation. In fact, I would suggest that the more apt comparison is between QAnon and certain persistent claims of “moral panic”, since neither is amenable or sensitised to actual evidence of child maltreatment. This comparison is, I think, historically useful in explaining the conditions into which QAnon emerged. You’ll recall that the seeds of QAnon lay in online speculation about the relationship between Epstein and Clinton. In the wake of #MeToo, and the sensational circumstances of Epstein’s death, there is now widespread interrogation of Epstein’s peculiar links with rich and powerful men. However, this was not the case at the time of the 2016 presidential election, leaving a vacuum of public understanding that right-wing conspiracy theorists were eager to fill. I would suggest that the lack of media attention at the time was at least in part due to the ongoing legacies of scepticism regarding such allegations, and that the viral nature of Pizzagate and QAnon is indicative of a public appetite for an explanatory framework as to how a billionaire child trafficker became a confidante of a former US president.
It’s also relevant to note the role of 4chan speculation about coded references to child pornography in Clinton campaign emails. While this speculation was clearly bizarre and in bad faith, the problem of child sexual abuse material has also been almost wholly ignored in the media until recently. Reports of child pornography have been increasing annually by 50% for two decades (Bursztein et al., 2019), and this exponential increase has received substantive media coverage only over the last 18 months, at which point annual notifications for child pornography have peaked at more than 90 million per year. Current epidemic levels of child sexual abuse material cannot be disentangled from decades-long patterns of media disinterest and subsequent government inaction, which be traced back to the misplaced beliefs of the 1980s and 1990s that claims of widespread child pornography production were nothing more than panic and hysteria.
In conclusion, Pizzagate and then QAnon took root and came to flourish in the gaps and spaces left behind by respectable mainstream discourse, where serious inquiry into child sexual exploitation has been actively discouraged. There are many lessons, I think, to learn from QAnon, but the endurance of moral panics over child sexual abuse is not one of them. Instead, I think we should be interrogating how we continue to generate imaginary spectacles of child sexual exploitation – either as a conspiracy of Satanists, or a conspiracy of therapists manufacturing false allegations – while at the same time we seem incapable of acknowledging and engaging with the severity of organised sexual violence in the lives of some children.
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