How many were abused due to their love of D&D, RPGs, and related items when they were young?

[Kichwas]

It was the 'mostly' the opposite for me.

While I do have a nasty RPGHorrorstory on reddit, tRPGs in general were some of the first times I met / dealt with white people that were not aggressive or violent towards me.

That was around high school age in the mid 1980s. It coincided with me moving to San Francisco. As such external factors were involved as well - being around people who were not overtly racist.

It was never a negative issue with people. Quite a few young women I knew at that age were aware I played tRPGs and didn't care - hovering around me and inviting me into things. I was too geeky to exploit that opportunity, but I always had a steady supply of non-gamer friends, male and female. None of whom expressed any bias against it.

The only 'negative' is that some of the adults in my life back then presumed it was an addictive hobby. Something I now think was a failure to recognize ADHD in me.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

It was, actually, but it was limited to basically just police officers and social workers - a really bad group to get into it, and they caused some serious harm, but the overall impact was vastly smaller than in the US. As to why police and social workers, it's because they're more religious on average than UK people (both groups, or were then), and imported US Satanic Panic nonsense, and even paid US lunatics to come over and "teach" them about Satanic Panic drivel (this also happened in the US - one of the main vectors of the Satanic Panic was cops paying lunatics to "teach" them about it, since before the actual "panic" happened).

It also happened a little later here, more in the very early 1990s than 1980s, and that was when it started to fall apart in the US, which kind of put a wet blanket on it here. Still, there will be thousands if not tens of thousands of people out there in the UK, who in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, suffered because police officers and social workers pushed demented theories at them. Particularly in the Midlands, it seemed to center there - you can see how it was basically a mind virus that people with certain beliefs and weak minds* were predisposed to contract.

The Satanic Panic spread to Orkney of all places. That boggles my mind: The woman who could have stopped Orkney satanic abuse scandal

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The Satanic Panic spread to Orkney of all places. That boggles my mind: The woman who could have stopped Orkney satanic abuse scandal

Yup and the real catalyst of course isn't the poor girl who feels bad about not saying who was abusing her, but the bloody social worker who was such a goddamn half-witted late-medieval peasant that she coached the kids into making up fictional Satanic abuse.

The girl feels bad, but people like that social worker, they live in a bloody magical reality where evil cultists lurk around every corner, and if she'd told the truth, because it was an authority figure abusing her, they probably wouldn't have believed her, and would just have tried to convince her to make up ("recover") some Satanic nonsense.

Of there are actual "evil cultists" in this story - but they're the ones coaching people to talk about Satan! Honestly people like that should do jail time, or at the very least be permanently barred from any jobs where they have contact with vulnerable people. But because they're in the sort of positions where they determine who even gets accused/arrested, they never do.

 

[billd91]

It might not have even been explicit or intentional coaching. Childcare sex abuse panic was pretty much an industry in the 1980s and 1990s. People went nuts all over the place because, when subjected to repeated questioning and faulty assumptions, kids say the darnedest things.

Day-care sex-abuse hysteria - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It might not have even been explicit or intentional coaching.

The methodology being taught was absolutely intentional in design by the time they started spreading it. The people who came up with it knew what they were doing, and they knew perfectly well that they were getting completely insane and impossible results. They actively decided it was better for them and their careers to destroy lives than accept that kids telling them they were involved with the ritual sacrifice of giraffes and elephants were just making all this up.

Then they took large amounts of money to spread this insanity to dim-witted and fanatic people with the power to destroy lives. There's no possibility they weren't aware that this was nonsense. It's like the tobacco companies knowing for decades that cigarettes caused cancer, or oil companies and climate change, whilst they publicly fought tooth and nail to deny those things.

The social workers and police who believed it (which was a minority overall, but significant in some regions, especially backwaters with no cities where a chief might have found out and said "Stop this at once!") in the UK were absolutely medieval peasant mentality and with limited ability to understand reality. They shouldn't have been allowed to be cops/social workers (but even now we can't ban cops from being cops just because they're unfit to work with vulnerable people, even though that's 90% of the job - the government is changing the law finally, many decades too late). That they were allowed to teach this to them is like giving matches to toddlers.

 

[Joshua Randall]

In the USA one very high profile political figure got her start in this “trick children into saying what you want them to say” nonsense. I shall say no more given it crosses the politics line.

But: Lives were ruined. None of it explicitly had to do with D&D, but it was the same insanity.

 

[aramis erak]

It was, actually, but it was limited to basically just police officers and social workers - a really bad group to get into it, and they caused some serious harm, but the overall impact was vastly smaller than in the US. As to why police and social workers, it's because they're more religious on average than UK people (both groups, or were then), and imported US Satanic Panic nonsense, and even paid US lunatics to come over and "teach" them about Satanic Panic drivel (this also happened in the US - one of the main vectors of the Satanic Panic was cops paying lunatics to "teach" them about it, since before the actual "panic" happened).

It also happened a little later here, more in the very early 1990s than 1980s, and that was when it started to fall apart in the US, which kind of put a wet blanket on it here.

There were RPG aimed book burnings in the US after 2012... Jerry Prevo did one in Anchorage in 2012, some similarly local preacher did one in 2015 (but the news vids are no longer available for that one). Prevo also did one in 2002 when BoVD was released.

So, no, it wasn't dead in the US in the 90s. I've encountered people objecting on religious grounds into the 00's. Almost all of them fundamentalist, not all of them Christian fundamentalist. And watched Prevo continue to burn books into the 2010's. Harry Potter, Palladium Books' RPGs, D&D...

It's low-key, but still a factor. Many college students from the US "Deep South" (former confederate states) have stated locally (I'm in Oregon) that they experienced religion-based persecution of board, card, and RP games into the late 2010's. Some specifically left the Deep South to escape both LGBTQIA persecution and anti-games persecution.

In Alaska, where I grew up, there was active opposition by "Dr. Jerry Prevo," DDiv, all the way to the 2012 timeframe. He left Anchorage after I did... And there were a dozen other preachers speaking the BADD talking points into the late 00's. The "Moral Majority" political group was still opposed to RPGs into the 00's.

2002's BoVD didn't help any, nor did FATAL.

 

[Joshua Randall]

It’s almost like the younger generations deliberately create pastimes and modes of entertainment that are outrageous to the older generations, as a way to rebel and to tweak their elders.

Nah. That couldn’t be it.

Must be Satan at work.

 

[Umbran]

It’s almost like the younger generations deliberately create pastimes and modes of entertainment that are outrageous to the older generations, as a way to rebel and to tweak their elders.

...Gygax was 36, with kids of his own iirc, in 1974. Was he still trying to tweak and rebel, you figure?

 

[Bedrockgames]

...Gygax was 36, with kids of his own iirc, in 1974. Was he still trying to tweak and rebel, you figure?

I don't think wargaming was extremely on the rebellious end of the spectrum in those years