An Hour a Year

The children who suffered in the satanic abuse witch-hunts of the late 1980s and early 1990s are now adults, and we’re starting to hear their stories. In advance of a BBC documentary to be shown tomorrow night, Carol Midgley in the Times reports on the barely credible Rochdale case where a family were torn apart after a 6-year old boy was foolish enough to mention to his teacher that he’d been dreaming about ghosts:

Daniel has only hazy memories of the day that his childhood effectively ended. He vaguely recalls, at the age of 6, being taken to the head teacher’s office at school, of strangers arriving and taking him away in a car. He remembers sitting in a small room filled with toys as a social worker asked him endless questions, of pleading for his mother but instead being taken that night to a Catholic children’s home where they put him in a bath and scrubbed him with nailbrushes. He didn’t know it then, but he would not return home for another ten years.
Though the details of these early events are fragmented in his mind, the memory of his tearful bewilderment and desperate longing to go home remains vivid. Today Daniel, a tall, pleasant but anxious young man of 22, is still uncomprehending and very angry.

Incredibly, he was forced to live in care between the ages of 6 and 16, torn from his distraught parents, despite a judge ruling that there was no evidence that he was being abused.

But that is not the worst of what happened to his family. The full story beggars belief. Thanks to the zealousness — some called it obsessiveness — of a handful of social workers in Rochdale, Lancashire, Daniel’s parents, Andrew and Beverley, were wrongly accused of involvement in a Satanic abuse network, a cult that supposedly involved ritualistic sex with minors, the slaughter of animals and the sacrifice of newborn babies. All four of their children were taken from them.

Three months later, in June 1990, 12 more children, all friends of Daniel, his sister and the family, were taken from their beds in traumatic morning raids, forced to endure intimate medical examinations and placed in care for months while investigations were conducted. During this time, bizarre though it seems, parents and children were kept apart because social workers suspected that they were communicating secretly with their children via coded signals and gestures.

Andrew and Beverley’s other sons, James and Matthew, then 3 and 4, spent seven years in a children’s home. Their daughter Julie, then 11, spent five years in care. Andrew and Beverley were allowed to see their children for just an hour a month, monitored by social workers.

Contact with Daniel was reduced gradually from an hour a month to an hour a year.

Update: more here.