02.02.2006

Two tales of child abuse

Don Williamson reviews BBC's When Satan came to town, an unsettling documentary about social workers obsessed with the idea that a whole working class estate in Rochdale was experiencing ritual satanic child abuse

Eddie Ford's 'Victims and victimisers' did a good job in exposing the current panic over 'sex abusing teachers'. But there is another abuse story, highlighted on a recent BBC television programme, which has received far less attention.

Eddie Ford wrote about the great furore which might have cost the job of Ruth Kelly, the education minister. The press made a song and dance about an alleged 'paedophile' who was allowed to return to teaching as a PE instructor in a school. The teacher, it seems, had been given a caution because his laptop was found to contain sexual images of children.

A caution, we all know, is given by the police when the offence is so minor they risk being laughed out of court, or, as in this case, where the evidence is so dubious their case would not stand up to the scrutiny of a court and the accused would be found not guilty. The police in such circumstances may offer the option of a caution - an official warning over a matter where there are strong suspicions of an offence, but actually, when push comes to shove, probably not a strong enough case to get a conviction.

The cautioned person is made an offer they cannot refuse. They might know damn well they are innocent, but a public trial and all the press attention would punish them and destroy their careers, whatever the subsequent outcome. They are under great pressure therefore just to accept the caution and let the thing stay out of sight. The person then appears on the sex offenders register, but because of the vagueness of the charge and evidence, was previously not placed on the list of those banned from working in schools or with children. This was at the discretion of the education minister, who was charged with considering applications to continue working with children under such circumstances.

After looking at this particular file, Ms Kelly was not convinced there was any evidence the accused man had actually put these images on the computer, even though it was his possession. The implication was that there was evidence he might not have been physically able to download these images at the time it was done - ie, others might have been responsible. So, believing him not really to have been shown to be a threat to kids, Kelly allowed him to work.

Whatever one thinks about that case - and the press and morally outraged have shown little interest in uncovering the facts - contrast this to the horror disclosed on BBC1's documentary, When Satan came to town, shown on January 11. Here we had two social workers with their heads full of religious fundamentalist rubbish, bolstered by materials supplied by the state. They were obsessed with the idea that a whole working class estate in Rochdale was experiencing ritual satanic child abuse. This madness led them to convince otherwise rational people that child murder, cannibalism, the drinking of blood, child and animal sacrifice and ritual sex abuse were taking place on a grand scale.

In raids which can only be described as 'terrorist', one morning in 1990 families were raided by gangs of screaming police and social workers. Children and parents dragged from their beds, parents handcuffed and brutalised and hysterical little kids dragged away. Throughout the whole disgusting affair, not a shred of evidence, not a single body or missing child, not a single amputated finger, not a drop of sacrificial blood or animal was ever discovered. Quite apart from the ruthless separation of the kids - some of them toddlers - from their parents, with all that impacted upon them, there was the actual treatment they received from these social workers in the child protection agency.

We see video footage of a little girl, dragged from her older brother and kept in a room where she is cruelly interrogated despite her anguish and pleading to be reunited with him. The callous, heartless and inhuman interrogation of this six-year-old continued relentlessly - we hear the interrogator tell the desperate child, "As soon as you answer my questions I can let you see your brother." Torture plain and simple. Other video evidence quite clearly shows social workers lying through their teeth as to what the little kids are supposed to have said.

The children at every turn insist nothing whatever had ever happened to them. Despite all of this 16 children spent a total of 34 years in care, separated from their parents and brothers and sisters. It was a miscarriage of justice to rival that inflicted on the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four - and perpetrated against innocent children - the oldest being 15, the youngest six. One boy spent 10 years in care, unable to return to his parents until he was 16. The police dropped the case within weeks of the furore, finding no evidence of any wrongdoing, but the social workers, with their unlimited powers of detention, continued to hound the families until a judge ruled there was nothing whatever to answer, since no crime had ever been committed. Still they used their sovereign powers to detain some of the children, on the basis of the low income of their parents, regardless of the high levels of love and affection.

In this case both social workers went unpunished and remain in their jobs as so-called child protection workers, when they ought to have been jailed for abduction, illegal imprisonment and psychological torture. None of the kids or their parents has received a penny piece in compensation, and not even an apology from Rochdale social services, against whom they are now taking legal action.

The BBC should be congratulated for showing the programme against all obstructions and attempted legal objections. Sadly it was utterly eclipsed by the PE teacher, who, guilty or not, did nothing on the scale of this vulgar and wilful child abuse. A week or two after the Rochdale disaster social services found new 'satanic abuse' on Orkney involving half the island and the local bishop! Except that too was utterly the figment of diseased and repressed religious minds.

That real child abuse exists in society is an unfortunate fact - sadly a lot of it is caused by social workers, witch-hunting cops and the clamour of the press, eager to find a way of incorporating 'child' into any story it comes across, quite regardless of the effect on the victim.