The Rochdale case was triggered by two young boys' abuse fantasies. The younger boy, aged 4 at the time, described being present at ritual sacrifices of infants and seeing cult members robbing graves in a local cemetery. A very similar ritual abuse case broke out in the Orkneys shortly afterwards; more children were taken into care. With support from the newspaper, the families challenged the care orders in the High Court. Since there was no hard evidence to show that any abuse had actually occurred, the children were gradually returned home. The two boys who started the arrests were the last of the 21 children to be released. They had been in care for over 6 years when they were given a High Court hearing, released and reunited with their families before Christmas 1996 They have returned to their home on the Langley estate in Middleton, Greater Manchester. However, they will be supervised by a social worker under an approved "care plan." Tony Heaford, a Middleton councilor, has been trying to reunite the family for years. He said "They have been separated from their parents an incredibly long time, despite the ruling in the original case that Satanic abuse was a myth which did not exist...I understand part of the reason for not returning them was that the parents are in debt, which is tantamount to penalisation of the poor." [We suspect that one of the reasons for the parents' financial difficulties may have been legal costs associated with the seizure of their children]. In 1991, the courts determined that the allegations of Satanic Ritual Abuse were false. However an injunction prevented the children from speaking about the case. 3  Cause of (and fallout from) the FiascoThe root cause of the disaster seems to have been a series of social workers' conferences given by what the paper called "fundamentalist Christian evangelists" from the United States. The workers were "indoctrinated" with "so-called Satanic Indicators". Some then returned to their offices, scanned their case loads and found Satanists under every rock. Fatally flawed interview techniques led to many children making false confessions, based on memories of non-existent ritual abuse which had accidentally and unwittingly been implanted by the interviewers. The British government commissioned a study by Prof. J.S. Lafontaine. Her report indicated that: no evidence of Satanic Ritual has been found, that unfounded rumors of SRA had been propagated on the basis of dubious information, and that some Evangelical Christians, psychologists, childcare workers, and health-care professionals were responsible for spreading the myth.Virginia Bottomley, the Health Minister in the early 1990's, said that every social worker in the UK would be retrained with proper techniques for child interviewing, and that the "outrageous" and "traumatic" practice of taking children from their homes in dawn raids would be discontinued. There was a general shake-up within social service groups. Unfortunately, not all areas of the UK got the message. A similar disaster occurred in the Island of Lewis off of the shore of Scotland in 2003.
Aftermath of the fiasco:
References
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