Deliberate Disinformation in the Orkney Ritual Child Abuse Case – Sarah Nelson
S.M.A.R.T.
The 2021 Online Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference Aug 14 -15 2021 https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2021-conference
All accusations are alleged.
Please note: None of the material on these pages or at the conference is meant as therapy, or to take the place of therapy. These presentations may be heavy to read for survivors.
Deliberate Disinformation in the Orkney Ritual Child Abuse Case
Sarah Nelson OBE
CRFR, University of Edinburgh
Sarah.Nelson@ed.ac.uk
In this presentation I hope to illustrate, through the example of the Orkney child abuse case which had its thirtieth anniversary last year, disinformation deliberately employed to dismiss and ridicule the existence of satanist ritual abuse (SRA). Because this was such a prominent child abuse case in the UK, it set the tone for reaction to any future cases with ritual elements. I also criticise the official Inquiry set up in its aftermath, and give examples of Inquiries which did put the children in the case at their heart, which should be followed in future.
Finally this presentation invites you to recognise any similar common threads in cases you are aware of, or in which you have been involved. We may I hope in future be able to put these together, both for academic papers and for other forms of public sharing, to inform the wider community, raising awareness and critical thinking about such disinformation.
I will give first a brief history of the Orkney case and Inquiry, not assuming people are necessarily familiar with it. The Orkney islands are a small group of islands off the far north-east coast of Scotland, capital Kirkwall.
Brief history of the Orkney case and inquiry
In November 1990 a teenage girl, one of 15 children in the disadvantaged W family in South Ronaldsay, Orkney, alleged sexual contact by her older brothers and a church minister. Seven younger brothers and sisters were removed from home into state care by social workers under place of safety orders.
Until February 1991, a public campaign by some Orkney people to return the W children included the clergyman and his wife, a doctor, and several parents whose own children were later removed. Social workers were puzzled by the huge volume of correspondence being sent to the young W children, and by the many baffling messages, objects (such as a hammer) and symbols it contained.
In February 1991, during interviews by Royal Scottish Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children (RSSPCC) and police officers, three young W children separately made allegations of organised sexual abuse and strange outdoor rituals in a quarry and on a beach in South Ronaldsay. They claimed many adults and children were involved, including the clergyman and four families. They described strange costumes, musical equipment, portable lights, trailers, a ‘hooker’ (a type of shepherd’s crook) and being pulled from a circle of people into the abusive clergyman at the centre.
On 27 February at 7 am, police and social workers removed nine children into care from the four named families under place of safety orders. All four families were English ‘incomers’; three were professional middle class. Grounds for referral mentioned group sexual activity including “ritualistic music, dancing and dress”. The parents and church minister were questioned by police.
A major campaign with huge publicity was immediately launched against these children’s removal. Media involvement was almost entirely in support of the parents, who very articulately protested their innocence and made skilful links with journalists. In particular, journalists from the “quality” press and media often came from the same social background and found it visibly hard to believe people like them could do such things, a reason I think why their coverage was usually as incredulous as that of the tabloids. I have noticed this in other RA cases involving middle class parents. The churches or religions the four families claimed to belong to also supported the children’s return and did not seem to consider that the children might be at risk.
These nine children, aged from 8 to 15, were interviewed repeatedly by RSSPCC staff and police. Words and behaviour by five of the children at interview – and especially with foster parents- appeared to confirm aspects of the W children’s allegations. These included a seven year old graphically enacting childbirth and saying the baby would die; an 8 year old who said her father kept blood in the fridge; an 11 year old drawing fantastic frightening images, and acting out plays involving bloodshed, sex, religion and violence; and an 8 year old saying his mother could hear him through the radio, and chanting to his foster parents during a power cut: “May the light not be upon us, and God not be with us”.
In April 1991 a proof hearing was heard by Sheriff David Kelbie. (Scottish Sheriffs are a type of judge). He held that the proceedings had been incompetent, dismissed the case calling it “fatally flawed”, and the evidence was not heard – nor ever has been – in any civil or criminal court. The parents and minister have neither been found innocent nor guilty. The children were immediately returned home amid huge publicity. The Orkney Inquiry report (see below) noted that a social work manager who accompanied the children home said the behaviour of several on the ‘plane changed greatly, their language became sexualised and they made sexual propositions to staff.
In June 1991, after the Crown Office (responsible for prosecution of crime in Scotland) announced there would be no criminal proceedings, the government launched a public inquiry under Lord Clyde. Its remit was to inquire into the authorities’ actions, and make recommendations. Its remit did not include exploring whether the children had been abused.
While the report said everyone had acted in good faith, it was strongly critical of the authorities’ actions. It made more than 190 recommendations for future good practice. These included conduct of investigations, removal of children, rights of children when detained, proper treatment of foster carers, training needs, conduct of medical examinations, and interviewing of children (Clyde, 1992, pp. 353–63). Many recommendations influenced the subsequent Children (Scotland) Act of 1995. The Act saw changes in child protection orders, a tightening of conditions surrounding such orders, and provision for removing suspected abusers from home. Basically, it became harder to protect children at genuine risk.
Scotland’s prosecution service announced there would be no criminal charges and in March 1996 the four families accepted financial compensation, with an apology from Orkney Islands Council.
SATANIC PANIC THEORY AND ORKNEY
However, descriptions of the Orkney case (apart from the one in my book!!) feature little of the above facts or mundane detail. Instead, it is held up internationally as a notorious “child abuse scandal” and a ridiculous case of “satanic panic”.
Thus one Scottish journalist in 2001: “South Ronaldsay (Orkney) is where the ritual sexual abuse theory leapt from the pages of social work journals and entered the popular lexicon of the nation”.
Such versions have been recycled in Wikipedia, in documentaries, books, ‘faction’ dramas and newspaper features. The allegations, it is claimed, were completely baseless, the social workers were gullible or worse, the parents were innocent and the “dawn raids” heartlessly cruel. The case was held up as a warning against believing nonsense about satanic anything in any subsequent case where ritual abuse was claimed or suspected. Indeed this example, and another Scottish case in Ayrshire (not discussed here) seemed to frighten the Scottish authorities so much that to my knowledge no case where ritual abuse was prosecuted or mentioned has been brought to court since.
MEDIA MANIPULATION
When I visited Orkney to cover the case and Inquiry for A Scottish newspaper and a social work journal at that time, (I later returned to academia) I was a fairly experienced journalist. Yet I encountered a powerful scent of organised media manipulation I had not met before.
The leading example was ‘satanic panic’ theory, repeated uncritically in the media when pushed by these vocal parents and their supporters. This rose to prominence in both the USA and UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s, most especially when middle class ‘respectable’ parents were accused or suspected. It’s still widely circulated today where there’s any suspicion of ritual or occult activity in a child abuse case.
This theory described stories of a widespread, highly organised cult of devil-worshippers who engaged in blood sacrifice and ritualistic child sexual abuse. These stories were said to be propagated by a surprisingly wide assortment, and a more surprising collaboration, of people including evangelical pastors, police, psychotherapists, radical feminists and social workers. (Despite neither radical feminists nor social workers being known for their staunch fundamentalist Christian convictions, nor for their belief in the devil!)
It was claimed that the panic then swept across the Atlantic to Europe, with the beliefs of child protection staff fuelled or even instigated by, it is often said, Schreiber’s Sybil (2009), Smith and Pazder’s Michelle Remembers (1989), and Bass and Davis’ The Courage to Heal (1988). Supposed links with these books were again repeated in a BBC Radio 4 documentary by David Aaronovitch in 2015, so these stories continue. It was claimed child protection staff were instantly converted to ‘satanic abuse’ and zealous to prove it, even after attending a single conference on the subject. Child protection officials have been said to use dubious, vague, nearly always unspecified techniques to extract bizarre disclosures from children and adults.
Promoters of ‘satanic panic’ theory drew parallels with historic witch hunts in mediaeval times, with the Salem witch trials or even with McCarthyism, leading internationally to respected, loving families being accused of ‘satanic’ child abuse; and to ‘witch hunts’ against respectable parents. This tale was quickly wheeled out in Orkney to explain the removal of the children.
MYSTERIOUS NEWSLETTERS!
During the child abuse inquiry of 1991–92, a series of English pagan and occult bookshop newsletters, with titles like The Lamp of Thoth, circulated widely on the islands and were sent to elected local politicians. I found these strewn about in the council and Inquiry. “At last the full truth about the satanic abuse allegations can be revealed!” they dramatically claimed. They alleged that minority religions such as paganism were being persecuted- another common theme. Whole sections of their propaganda about worldwide conspiracies by social workers and/or evangelical Christians or both were repeated as fact, even in some ‘quality’ papers, despite clearly coming from such a partial source.
FOLK DEVILS OF BACKLASH PROPONENTS
These stories keep reappearing in the media and on the internet, sometimes with a ‘folk devil’ of the backlash, Dr Roland Summit thrown in. For instance, a normally discriminating journalist Torquil Crichton, was persuaded to write this:
. …” A psychiatrist Roland Summit’s controversial idea was that organised, ritualistic abuse of children was happening everywhere. … it was out there and all social workers had to do was go and find it. And they did so with a passion of a zealot rooting out evil. The idea crossed the Atlantic gaining professional credibility as it spread like wildfire.” (Crichton, 2001) … On demonic wings, presumably!
I was told on Orkney by one of the suspected parents that Roland Summit had influenced this Orkney intervention because he wrote that if children denied abuse, it meant they had indeed suffered it. This was a distortion of Summit’s well-known paper The Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome. He has publicly refuted this allegation, which has kept appearing in other cases, as nonsense.
It is interesting that both Summit and Bass and Davies (The Courage to Heal) have been so targeted and so consistently, especially as neither is particularly known for talking about satanist abuse anyway!
Dr. Summit , the eminent psychiatrist working in California, has been an angry, fearless and outspoken pioneer in protecting children from sexual abuse, both highly respected and shunned for speaking out consistently for child and adult survivors when few were willing to put their professional reputations out on the line. Maybe that’s what has so angered and frustrated abusers and their allies for decades? He has been an inspiration to me, and I suspect to many of you also.
As for Bass and Davies’ The Courage to Heal, in its many-more than 20 editions, it has proved one of the most helpful and inspiring, widely read and life- changing books for adult survivors, particularly female survivors; I think that is the source of the threat they seem to pose to abusers and their allies, who consistently over the decades have tried to smear them.
SATANIC PANIC -MANY UNTRUTHS
In my book, chs. 2 and 3 (Tackling Child Sexual Abuse: Radical approaches to prevention, protection and support, Policy Press/University of Chicago Press 2016) I have tried comprehensively to challenge the string of untruths in satanic panic theory. I don’t want to labour that now and time doesn’t permit, but it includes-
· We’re expected simultaneously to believe that ‘satanic abuse’ disclosures and allegations are unbelievable, incredible, ludicrous and completely without evidence – and would be to any normal person – yet that educated professionals in child protection and mental health swallowed them whole after reading one book, or attending one conference!
The verbal disclosures, actions and behaviours of children and adults abused in ritual settings were so baffling, so esoteric and so unlike content previously heard that it would be incredibly difficult or impossible to generate them through pressured interviewing techniques by professionals such as social workers. (Even had these illegitimate techniques been specified and proved to have occurred.) It was in fact the foster parents of children taken into care in both the English case in Nottingham and Orkney, not professionals during interviews, who produced by far the most evidence of children’s bizarre statements, drawings and actions. These were ordinary people who were baffled and disturbed by what they witnessed and heard from the children in their care. No convincing explanation of this point by ‘satanic panic’ theorists has ever been made.
· Most of all, the idea that any professionals rushed out zealously to find satanic abuse was the very opposite of the truth. No one in their right minds could wish to believe that anyone could inflict such disgusting, horrifying, unspeakably cruel tortures on children. It overturned many people’s whole world view and their faith in humanity. Practitioners also often feared for their own safety.
COMMON SENSE WAS LOST
Critical faculties and the normal discriminatory sense seemed to be lost during the Orkney case and Inquiry. For instance, claims were spread that one ‘born-again’ Christian basic grade social worker, CF, influenced the Orkney social work department and police into jointly carrying out the dawn raids on the families. This influence by a basic grade worker was implied too in BBC Scotland TV’s ‘faction’ drama Flowers of the Forest (BBC Drama, 1996). Among other, often ludicrous, aspects of this drama (listed in Nelson, 1996), which had a social worker angrily ripping up a teddy bear, the fact was ignored that even had the social worker CF sought this far-reaching and long-planned act, he lacked the professional power or status to succeed!
PREVIOUS CASES INFLUENCED ORKNEY INTERPRETATION
Interpretation of the Orkney case was also filtered through a template of child sexual abuse cases during the previous few years. One example occurred in the English midlands city of Nottingham.
The extent to which untruths or – let’s face it- lies have influenced these cases is shown by the Nottingham case. That case also powerfully demonstrates how ‘backlash’ accounts of an organised abuse case with ritual features can still dominate popular discourse, DESPITE in Nottingham a string of court convictions and the official clearing of social workers’ actions. Even these seemed to have little effect.
I think this confirms is that most of the public, media and even professionals find this form of abuse not just very difficult to believe- especially in a society like GB which is more secular than the USA- but too horrifying and unacceptable to believe.
In Nottingham, nine adults from a deprived estate were convicted in February 1989, found guilty of 53 charges of incest, cruelty and indecent assault after their children and 18 others were taken into care. There were claims that wealthy and respected professional people were also abusing these disadvantaged children. The case raised great controversy (which continues) over whether ritual abuse also happened, because some children made bizarre, disturbing revelations to their foster carers. These included the existence of tunnels under the city where some children said they had been taken.
The police, however, were sceptical of cult links and critical of social services who believed the children’s accounts. The local authority set up the Joint Enquiry Team (JET) to resolve these professional conflicts, but it only exacerbated them. The JET team, in dismissing ritual abuse, proposed that social workers had brainwashed children, had been influenced by a specialist with sex offenders, that they and/or the children’s foster parents were evangelical Christians, that the children might have seen horror videos or read books featuring witches, and that the NSPCC persuaded children they were satanically abused (Anning et al, 1997).
But the trouble with this line was that the social workers never formally interviewed the children, who disclosed instead to their foster parents, ordinary people who wrote down the children’s bizarre conversations and who, just like the Orkney foster parents, did not understand what these accounts meant or where they had come from.
The JET team did not interview the social workers yet still proposed that they had induced children to tell these stories. The social workers and foster parents had only consulted the specialist for advice months after the children had described peculiar occult practices. That was also true in Orkney.
The child protection professionals were commended by the High Court and the chief executive of Nottinghamshire Council. Their work was scrutinised by the Department of Health Social Services Inspectorate; the ‘brainwashing’ thesis was rejected by Nottinghamshire County Council and by the High Court.
The county social services committee repudiated this JET report (Nottinghamshire County Council, 1990). However, despite all this the JET report was widely leaked and publicised. Ever since, it has been the most promoted and available account. Its claims feature prominently in media articles and on internet accounts of the Nottingham case, as an example of the ‘satanic panic’. This example gives some idea of the resistance we have all had and still have to face, against scrutinising calmly and thoroughly both the evidence and disinformation in highly publicised cases.
Crucially perhaps, we also very much have to question the whole point of expensive inquiries after child abuse cases which do not actually explore whether the children at the centre of a case were abused or not.
An alternative response
A different response could have been made to Orkney. Such as a limited-term inquisitorial judicial inquiry into official conduct with recommendations for improvement; an exploration of best practice from elsewhere; a funded research programme into organised abuse; and protective measures such as children’s rights officers, children’s resource centres or helplines, including rural and remote areas. Alternative strategies, however, demand a willingness to pause and reflect before responding to public scandal and public outrage. Particularly where there is an added ritual abuse dimension which authorities themselves find hard to believe, or which is too scary to address, which is all too easily discredited by disinformation, or indeed sometimes where there has been active collusion.
They call for political courage, and determination to place the needs of children above the raucous demands and wounded sensibilities of adults. Those are what we need from child abuse inquiries, whether they involve ritual abuse or not.
Imagine if police and prosecution services had instead been resourced to prioritise sound ways of prosecuting organised abuse, including effective surveillance and evidence-gathering in remote communities, or if a pilot project had been funded to create an informed, aware, protective local community. It is only through realising how hard these things are to imagine that we appreciate how skewed our child protection system actually is, and how much it needs to change.
It is even more important that, if indeed some young people needed protection in places like Orkney, they retained the hope of protection and justice and restitution. There was surely a responsibility to maintain continuing vigilance, so that new evidence could be collected if it was there to be collected. If any Orkney children did indeed need protection, justice or restitution, then they are still waiting for it as adults today.
Afterword: has anything changed?
In 2005, a courageous and outspoken Inquiry Report which did put children at its heart was published, which in my view should be a model for any future child abuse Inquiries. This reported on shocking, longstanding abuses against three girls in Eilean Siar, or Western Isles, off the far northwest coast of Scotland (Social Work Inspection Agency, 2005).The case was investigated by respected senior practitioners Alexis Jay and Gill Ottley from this arm’s-length agency (Children in Scotland (2005). Alexis Jay’s child-centred integrity was again illustrated later, when in 2014 she authored the report which found that at least 1400 young girls had been sexually exploited without protection, mainly by gangs and groups, over 16 years in Rotherham in the north of England, and uncompromisingly described their suffering (Jay, 2014).
The 170-page SWIA report catalogued years of graphic, distressing physical, emotional and sexual abuse by the father – already a convicted child sex offender – and his friends. There were also allegations of ritual abuse. The sisters had been on the child protection register in England as at risk of sexual abuse before moving to Lewis in 1995. Their mother (Mrs A) had mental ill health and learning difficulties. The girls were again registered as at risk of sexual and physical abuse and neglect. Mrs A, then the girls, reported sexual abuse by the father and others. There were 222 official concerns registered – from cigarette burns to genital soreness, repeated soiling at school, and being clingy, tired and weepy in the classroom. In all 100 professionals were involved, and there were 29 case conferences, 21 statutory reviews, and 24 children’s hearings.
Yet the eldest girl was not removed from home and fostered long-term until 1998, the other girls not until 2003. In late 2003, nine adults in the Western Isles and England were arrested for seriously harming the girls. This followed allegations by Mrs A which included some ritualistic behaviours, wearing of robes and masks, involvement of animals and abusive ceremonies.
In July 2004, the Crown Office dropped all charges against these adults for undisclosed reasons. It has never explained the reasons, and no one has been called to account.
The SWIA team concluded that: a) the girls all experienced severe and prolonged abuse; b) social work authorities made seriously flawed decisions and should have protected the children much sooner; and c) health authorities failed to respond appropriately to the children’s needs. They made 31 recommendations, including basic safeguards when a convicted sex offender acts as a parent. Again, in 2005, they made the call the Orkney Inquiry had urged, indeed more strongly: ‘A multi-agency national resource should be established to assist in the effective investigation and resolution of complex child protection cases anywhere in Scotland”. A National Child Abuse Investigation Unit was only set up in Scotland in 2014.
Detrimental legacy of Orkney
It was left to the SWIA report to suggest what the final legacy of the Orkney case and Inquiry had been: excessive caution (some would say paralysis) about taking these desperately vulnerable girls into care:
“Professionals tried hard to help both parents. … at this time new legislation [the Children (Scotland) Act 1995] was designed to protect children, within the context of partnership with their parents. This, together with the aftermath of the Orkney Inquiry (1992) may have contributed to the prolonged attempts to engage with the family rather than to try to remove all three children”. (SWIA, 2005 p. 25)
The respected media commentator Gillian Bowditch wrote powerfully of this case, a case few of the public are likely even to recall, in comparison with Orkney:
“We have now reached a situation where the new legislation itself is a contributory factor to abuse.
“The Lewis children were abused for so long with the authorities’ knowledge partly because the Children (Scotland) Act puts the emphasis on keeping children within families wherever possible.
“… What do you call it when three little girls are routinely battered, burned, starved, neglected, raped and sold as sexual playthings to other adults and it is observed, documented, recorded and discussed for more than a decade by scores of caring professionals – good people – without anybody preventing it?
… What this case exposes is nothing less than the complete and utter failure of both social services and the criminal justice system in Scotland. When a social worker can discover a five-year-old sleeping in a urine-soaked cupboard, document it but fail to stop it; when a convicted paedophile can abuse three children for years under the noses of the authorities; when the Crown Office has concrete evidence of prolonged abuse of the worst kind, but fails even to attempt a prosecution, it is hard not to conclude that what we are witnessing is the collapse of a fundamental plank of civilised society.” (Bowditch,2005)
(You can also read a comprehensive account of the Orkney case, in the context of cases which preceded and followed it, in chapter 3 of my book Tackling Child Sexual Abuse: Radical Approaches (2016) published by Policy Press in the UK, and Univ of Chicago Press in USA.)
References
Anning, N., Hebditch, D. and Jervis, M. (1997) The JET Report: The Broxtowe Files, republished at www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~dlheb/jetrepor.htm
Aaronovitch, D. (2015) ‘Ritual abuse: anatomy of a panic’,
Analysis, BBC Radio 4, 25 May and 1 June.
Bass, E. and Davis, L. (1988) The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, New York: Harper Perennial.
Bass, E. and Davis, L. (2008) The Courage to Heal: A Guide
for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, 20th Anniversary Edition, New York: William Morrow.
BBC Drama (1996) ‘Flowers of the Forest’, Director Michael
Whyte, 26 October
Bowditch, G. (2005) ‘A chilling wake-up call to the triumph of evil’, The Times (Scotland) 11 October
Children in Scotland (2005) Briefing on SWIA Report on
Western Isles Child Abuse Case, 12/05 [S],Edinburgh: Children in Scotland.
Clyde, 1992, pp. 353–63). Clyde, James (1992) The Report of the Inquiry into the Removal of Children from Orkney in February 1991, Edinburgh: HMSO. (Crichton, 2001)
Crichton, T. (2001) ‘Orkney: 10 years after’, Sunday Herald,
25 January.
Jay, A. (2014) Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham (1997–2013), Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council.
Nelson, S. (1996) ‘Pointing fingers without the facts’, The Herald, Glasgow, 26 October.
Nelson, S. (2016). Tackling Child Sexual Abuse: Radical approaches to prevention, protection and support, Bristol: Policy Press.
Nottinghamshire County Council (1990) Report of Director of Social Services: Child Abuse, to Social Services Committee, Nottingham, 7 November.
Schreiber, F. (2009) Sybil, reissue edition, New York: Grand Central Publishing. Original published in 1973.
Smith, M. and Pazder, L. (1989) Michelle Remembers, New York: Pocket Books.
Summit, R. (1983) ‘The child sexual abuse accommodation
syndrome’, Child Abuse & Neglect, 17: 177–93.
Social Work Inspection Agency (SWIA) (2005) An inspection into the Care and Protection of Children in Eilean Siar (Western Isles), Edinburgh: Scottish Executive.
