Satanic Ritual Abuse Fanatic Wilfred Wong Guilty of Conspiracy to Kidnap a Child

From North Wales Live:

A man who helped abduct a child and threatened a foster mum with a knife claimed the courts and social services are “infiltrated by Satanists”.

Wilfred Wong’s outlandish claims where made on a YouTube video and played to a jury at a Caernarfon Crown Court trial.

Wong, 56, from London was later convicted of conspiring to kidnap a child who he wrongly believed was at risk of falling into a Satanist’s hands.

Sentencing will take place next month. It is notable that the devout evangelical Wong did not offer a defence of justification, or even of mitigation that he had made an honest mistake. Instead, as reported by the BBC, he

denied any involvement, saying he was in north Wales for a short walking holiday and had arranged to get a lift back…

He told the court: “I’d have been more of a liability than a help with any abduction plan. I would have been too old and too slow for that sort of thing.”

The “lift” was with Janet and Edward Stevenson, who have also been found guilty. Janet Stevenson, according to the BBC, is “a counsellor who specialises in working with victims of satanic abuse” – an unfortunate phrase that takes at face value a victim identity that is often coaxed into being by therapists obsessed with the subject (as I discussed here). Several other individuals who were drawn into Wong’s kidnap caper have also either pleaded guilty or been found guilty, and one, a former nurse, died while on remand last November.

Wong is a veteran Satanic Ritual Abuse fanatic; he featured in a sceptical Daily Telegraph article (“The People who Believe that Satanists Might Eat Your Baby“, by Damian Thompson) way back in 2002 as the organiser of a conference on the subject that took place at the Palace of Westminster while he was working for Lord Alton as Parliamentary Officer for the Jubilee Campaign (1). In recent years, he has contributed articles about SRA to religious outlets such as the English Churchman and Heart Publications, and in 2017 he also presented at a pseudo-academic conference on the subject in London.

So why was it only recently that Wong decided to cross the line from merely going on about Satanic Ritual Abuse to actually breaking the law in such a serious and tragic way? Perhaps he had reached a time in his life when he felt he had to do something to make his mark in some concrete way before he really does become too old; but he may also have felt spurred on and validated by the mainstreaming of conspiracy thinking over the last decade. In 2019 he was sought out by Jon Wedger, and their interview was promoted by David Icke. In 2020 he also did two interviews with Shaun Attwood. And even now he has his supporters within the conspiracy milieu, who can easily assimilate any counter-evidence into a grand theory of Satanic manipulation.

Note

1. A 2018 profile of Wong in the evangelical magazine Prophecy Today states that his interest in SRA “began in 1993 when he was approached by an MP on the matter”. It’s not clear why the MP is not named, but Louise Dickens (var. Lou Dickens) has reportedly confirmed on a podcast called the Jimmy O Show that this was her grandfather Geoffrey Dickens.

The Prophecy Today profile, by Paul Luckraft, adds that

SRA is far more prevalent than is ever reported, and… is growing in the UK… Since the revelations concerning Jimmy Savile became public knowledge there has been an increasing acceptance that SRA does exist and needs to be countered. Some of the UK media have reported on Savile’s involvement in Satanism and SRA.

The profile also includes a well-known photo of Savile with Edward Heath.