After BBC1' s Real Story screened a documentary on the Rochdale Satanic Ritual Abuse case (11th Jan, 2006) the focus is back on SRA and not a moment too soon. Despite every case falling apart because of lack of evidence and clear signs that various parties have been imposing their agendas on the situation SRA just won't go away and Private Eye have recently highlighted a resurgence in Scotland.

I'll starting with mid-January issue (Eye 1150:11):

SATANIC PANIC

THE appalling damage done to 20 children separated from their families - for up to ten years - in Rochdale in 1990 by social workers with an "obsessional" belief in satanic abuse was revealed in a powerful BBC1 Real Story documentary last Wednesday.

The social workers Jill France and Susan Hammersley and their bosses were caught up in a professional panic that children were being sexually abused by devil worshippers in bizarre black magic rituals, including drinking blood and sacrificing animals and children.

The notion spread in the US and the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s through satanic abuse survivor stories in the born-again Evangelical Christian movement and into mainstream child protection circles through literature and the conference circuit. The scare led to around 80 satanic abuse investigations in the UK, including the notorious Nottingham and Orkney cases (see Eyes passim). Police found no corroborating forensic evidence and a government inquiry in 1994 concluded it was a myth.

In October 2003, on the Scottish island of Lewis, nine adults including a 75-year-old grandmother were accused of sexually abusing three children in satanic rituals. In July 2004 the charges were dropped for lack of evidence. The accused are still fighting to clear their names.

How could it happen again? The Eye has established that there is still a network of believers across the UK among professionals and assorted therapists who work with children and adult "survivors" who reinforce each other's convictions that what they now term "ritual abuse" exists, through literature, websites, conferences and training courses.

Dundee is a hotbed of activity. It is where Laurie Matthew, who was indecently assaulted by an uncle as a child, runs several organisations for ritual abuse survivors and plays a key role. She is the author of books (including Where Angels Fear: Ritual Abuse in Scotland) and a key speaker at conferences on ritual abuse. In Connecticut USA in August 2004 she spoke on "The Fight against Ritual Abuse in Scotland".

Groups run by Matthew, all based at 1 Victoria Road, Dundee, include Ritual Abuse Network Scotland (RANS), which has a website offering "support for survivors" and a resource for counsellors, parents and concerned friends, packed with ghoulish detail about "the reality" of ritual abuse, including allegations of babies being bred for sacrifice and children being sexually abused and mutilated and a checklist of signs and symptoms to look for; Dundee Young Women's Centre, which organised conferences on ritual abuse in Dundee in April 2002 and Edinburgh in August 2003; TRASH, Tayside Ritual Abuse and Abuse Help, a service run by volunteers for survivors of ritual abuse, which ran a "survivors only" day in May 2003; and 18 and Under which ran two "training days" on ritual abuse in February 2005 for professionals working with young survivors.

Matthew is now helping to influence policy-making in Scotland via her presence on the Scottish parliament's cross-party group on Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse, which produced a national strategy for adult survivors in September 2005. Her group 18 and Under is a member of the group.

Last month, celebrating the cross-party group's work, the Scottish Executive launched a new booklet, A Can of Worms � Working with Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse, funded by the Scottish Health Department as part of a �2m national strategy to improve services for adult survivors. The booklet is aimed at "healthcare, social work professionals and other frontline workers".

Useful contacts include 18 and Under and TRASH, which it describes as giving "support for people who have experienced ritual abuse."

The booklet was co-written by Dr Sarah Nelson, a member of the all party group and a research fellow in the sociology department at Edinburgh University, who describes her main research activity as "childhood sexual abuse and related issues of child protection". Her publications include chapters in books including Ritual Abuse: The Challenge for Feminists and an account of the Orkney case in a forthcoming book Ritual Abuse in the 21st Century: Clinical, Forensic and Social Implications to be published by Southern Methodist Press. How long before there is another Satanic Panic?

Dr Sarah Nelson then exercised her right to reply (Eye 1151:15):

The devil's work

Sir,

Thanks for the free publicity for the Scottish Executive's excellent new National Strategy for abuse survivors, for our publications and for Laurie Matthew's ace 18 And Under Project, which supports young people suffering sexual assaults of any kind (Satanic Panic, Eye 1150). By the way, Laurie's been a Dundee Citizen of the Year - sinister!

To critics without the honesty to sign their names:

The sweeping "Satanic Panic " which wildly enthused professionals is a fabrication, invented by abusers and spread by their apologists. No one who confronted evidence of unspeakable sadistic abuse believed its reality with anything but the most profound reluctance.

The Satanic Panic Conspiracy is the only known alliance in history of evangelical Christians, militant feminists, sectioned psychiatric patients, social work managers, psychodynamic psychotherapists and Highland police sergeants � all orchestrated from California by Prof. Roland Summit.

Get real!

The Satanic Abuse Witch-Hunt is the only witchhunt in history where those supposedly leading it were its victims, and found their careers destroyed.

Who's been gullible in all this? Don't join them. Private Eye.

Conspiratorially,
SARAH NELSON,
Edinburgh.

Then we got another letter from one of the accused in the Western Isles case (Eye 1152:16):

Satanic panic

Sir,

The letter written by Sarah Nelson in response to the article Satanic Panic (in Eye 1150), has puzzled me. She states: "The Satanic Abuse Witch-Hunt is the only witch-hunt in history where those supposedly leading it were its victims, and found their careers destroyed. "

Judith Jones (Dawson), a social worker in the Nottingham Satanic case, is now listed as an expert witness and living and working in London. She was part of the review team who wrongly labelled Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed as ritual abusers in the Shieldfield Nursery Nurses case.

Also on this review team was Jacqui Saradjian, who has written ofsatanic cults. She still works as an independent clinical psychologist.

If Ms Nelson believes that their current positions are indicative of a destroyed career, I suggest that she has set her aspirations a little too high. Perhaps she was not able to watch the recently screened BBC1 programme on the Rochdale case, which was handled so incompetently by professionals that 16 children have been left with mental health problems ranging from social anxiety to depression.

Regards,
PENNY CAMPBELL,
(Accused of animal sacrifice, devil worshipping, ritual sacrifice and drinking of animal blood during the Western Isles Satanic case of 2003/4.)

And then Private Eye followed up highlighting a report critical of Dr Nelson (Eye 1153:11):

SATANIC PANIC

A BOOKLET called A Can of Worms: Yes, You Can! Working with Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse has sparked controversy among professionals and academics who specialise in this sensitive field.

As revealed in Eye 1150 (Satanic Panic), the 74-page document, published by the Scottish Executive in December 2005, lists useful contacts including organisations dealing with survivors of so-called ritual abuse (formerly known as Satanic abuse) � a notion long ago exposed as a myth.

The dangers of this nonsense still being peddled by a network of believers across the UK are not lost on people who have been falsely accused of being devil-worshipping, animal-sacrificing paedophiles, as recently as 2004 on the Scottish island of Lewis (see Letters, Eye 1152). But potentially even more widespread harm could be caused by A Can of Worms being distributed to "healthcare, social work professionals and other frontline workers" across Scotland.

A group of eminent psychologists and psychiatrists has written a devastating critique of :he booklet and called for it to be withdrawn, or substantially rewritten.

In a scathing seven-page letter to the Lothian Health Board, the distributors, copied to ministers and officials from the Scottish Executive and UK Department of Health, the critics question the authors' apparent lack of knowledge of the academic literature. And they attack the advice tey give to practitioners that they should "always" look for childhood sexual abuse as the root cause of a range of mental health problems from eating disorders and depression to drug and alcohol addiction and personality disorders. "There is almost no condition that the authors do not consider a sign of past abuse," they wrote.

The booklet's recommended reading list includes a library of discredited "self help" books which suggest the reader should try to recover supposedly repressed memories of abuse. These include a much pilloried American book, The Courage to Heal, which encourages readers to believe they were sexually abused, if they think they were, or have "body memories", even if they can't actually remember it. The Can of Worms booklet also refers to body memories as if they were recognised scientific symptoms.

The letter says: "This document demonstrates an almost total lack of awareness of the necessary information and relevant literature. Consequently, it is at best, a long way from fulfilling its stated aims of providing 'good practice guidelines for working with male and female survivors'. At worst it is propagating pseudo-scientific and widely discredited beliefs about the effects of childhood sexual abuse.

"If the guidance set out in this booklet is followed, then many vulnerable people could be damaged... Some people who have not been sexually abused, but who have the 'symptoms' will be led into a false belief that they were, and may experience false memories; their mental health will also be severely damaged."

The authors of A Can of Worms are Dr Sarah Nelson, a research fellow in the sociology department at Edinburgh University (see Letters, Eye 1151) and Sue Hampson, a "person centred counsellor" with a social work background in the NHS and mental health. They both work for Health in Mind, formerly the Edinburgh Association for Mental Health, which published research by Dr Nelson on 22 adult survivors of sexual abuse in a another booklet, Beyond Trauma, in 2001.

That study was approved only after the group's ethics committee considered concerns from a project advisor, a consultant psychiatrist, that Nelson had no clinical training to qualify her to conduct such interviews.

Approval was suspended and reinstated only after Dr Nelson reluctantly agreed to notify the participants' GPs of their involvement.

Dr Nelson, a former journalist, has published many articles on child abuse, and chapters in books on ritual abuse including the notorious Orkney case. They have generally been carefully worded and measured. But the Eye has obtained a paper she delivered at a conference at Warwick University in 1996 organised by a group called Ritual Abuse Information Network and Support (RAINS), set up for child care workers and therapists who believed in satanic ritual abuse despite a government inquiry concluding in 1994 it didn't exist.

Admitting it was "not an academic paper" and not based on any formal research, and that she did not have the expertise in mental health which others might have, Dr Nelson argued that it was not surprising that many victims of satanic abuse suffered from mental health problems such as eating disorders after being forced to eat and drink such things as "human and animal flesh, blood, urine, excrement, vomit, maggoty meat and drugged drinks". She confidently estimated more than 1,650 people in Edinburgh had been involved in satanic ritual abuse.

Dr Nelson is a member of the Scottish parliament's cross-party group on Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse which launched the Can of Worms booklet as part of a �2m government-funded national strategy to improve services for abuse survivors.

On her university website she writes: "My major research interest is in childhood sexual abuse. Particular interests include mental health and sexual abuse." However, her PhD. from the University of Strathclyde, in 1979, was not about child abuse or mental health but loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. In a later book she explained she worked as an "unqualified social worker" to do the research.

This one will run and run so I'll keep an eye out for further developments.

On a sidenote you can see why Dr. Susan Clancy wanted to focus on recovered memories in alien abduction cases (see her book Abducted for results) as it seems that questioning the existence of SRA gets one accused of siding with the paedophiles.

News reports on the Rochdale case:

• When Satan came to town - BBC report on the Real Story episode.
• Innocent but presumed guilty
• Satanic abuse: Town in shock