The devil on South Ronaldsay

Last night BBC2 showed Accused - a remarkable documentary on the Orkney "Satanic Ritual Abuse" case of 1991. I cannot find a page on the BBC site devoted to it, but this news report includes some of the material from the programme.

Although it included dramatic reconstructions of some of the interviews social workers conducted with the children, what was most impressive about Accused was the way it allowed all the participants in the affair - including the children, who are now grown up - to speak for themselves. In the case of the social workers this ultimately involved giving them enough rope to hang themselves, but they cannot claim that they were unfairly treated.

The obvious question to ask is how it could happen. The answer lies in the nature of social work, which has the appearance of a profession but lacks the body of theoretical knowledge that a profession needs. Clinical psychologists, for example, apply the knowledge gained through psychological research, but social workers have no equivalent body of knowledge to apply. Sociology certainly does not supply them with technical knowledge that the rest of us lack.

So there is a vacuum at the heart of social work. When you add to this the fact that the people attracted into it are, for the most part, well meaning but of no particular intellectual accomplishment, then it is not surprising that they come to hold strange beliefs.

At one time Marxism filled the vacuum, at least to some extent, but its influence had been on the wane for a decade before the Orkney affair. Accused emphasised the feminist roots of the belief in Satanic Ritual Abuse amongst social workers, and it certainly had roots there, but the concept was also strongly influenced by American Evangelical Christianity.

Again, the fact that those who think themselves politically radical can be so easily influenced by the most reactionary movement in the Western world shows there is something odd about social work. It sounds fanciful to say that the raids on homes in Orkney were a result of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the decline of Marxism, but there is probably something in it.

Social workers are easy targets for public scorn, but some of the practices revealed in Accused would raise serious questions about the competence and morality of those involved even if you believed that the devil had been walking on South Ronaldsay. In particular, there was the endless browbeating of children in the guise of skilled questioning and the inexplicable decision to send one of the boys lifted from Orkney to a unit for young offenders. As his mother was only too well aware, he really was at risk of sexual abuse there.

With her bovine complacency Janette Chisholm, one of the social workers shown, made an easy hate figure. She refused to entertain the thought that she might have been wrong, and treated the parents' protestations of innocence as proof of their guilt. But then in America people used to argue that the lack of evidence that Satanists were murdering children in huge numbers was proof of how powerful their conspiracy was.

The other social worker interviewed came over as a more sympathetic figure. Yet at the end, when describing the way the children had been flown back to Orkney, he claimed that he had heard them use language that proved they had been abused.

So there are words whose use, by themselves, constitutes proof that Satanic abuse has taken place, and social workers can recognise them and no one else can? You only have to type that out to see what nonsense it is.

There were heroes in this case. One was the Sheriff David Kelbie, who recognised the evidence for the mumbo jumbo it was and threw the case out at the first opportunity. Never underestimate the importance of an independent legal system to the maintenance of our freedom.

But the real heroes were the people of South Ronaldsay, who stood by the families involved even though they were not from Orkney and one of them was difficult to deal with. As one of the parents said, if it had not been for the support of the community, they would not have got their children back.

The press played a part too. Journalists arrived in Orkney thinking they were there to report a particularly juicy kinky vicar story, but had the sense to realise what was really going on.

Socialists and liberals tend to see progress as consisting in professionals (and pseudo-professionals) supervising more and more areas of our lives. The Orkney case should remind us that these people can sometimes be wicked or stupid or just disastrously wrong and that the people often show far better judgement.

That is a lesson we should never forget.

Later. I wrote another short posting on the Orkney affair.