SOCIAL WORKER EVIL: stolen childhoods

Sixteen years after false claims of satanic abuse in Rochdale, the children involved can at last talk about their ordeal. Carol Midgley meets a brother and sister who still bear the scars of being taken from their family and spending much of their lives in "care"

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.

Yet there was never any proof - forensic, medical or otherwise - to support claims of ritual abuse against any of the families, and the case remains one of the most scandalous misjudgments by a British social services department. The "evidence"? It was this: Daniel told his teacher that he was dreaming about ghosts - apparently a mummy and daddy ghost and a baby ghost that died. He was at the time a withdrawn, disturbed child, often hiding under desks and being disruptive. His speech was poor for his age. This, says Beverley, led to him being bullied. The teacher was concerned enough to alert social services.

Unfortunately for residents of the Langley council estate in Rochdale, this coincided with a particular climate in Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s in which social workers were being trained to spot "satanic indicators" - signs that a child was suffering ritual abuse - after a spate of alleged cases in America. Social workers interpreted Daniel's "ghosts" as being his abusers. They read his fantasies of being locked in a cage as reality - evidence of satanic abuse - and pursued the notion with a vigour that Professor Elizabeth Newson, an expert witness in the case, describes as unhealthy single-mindedness.

Now, for the first time, Daniel, his siblings and the other children whose lives were wrecked by the scandal can speak publicly about their experience after the BBC successfully challenged a longstanding injunction that gagged them and prevented the media from identifying the two key social workers involved in the case, Jill France and Susan Hammersley. Both still work in child protection. It also obtained social services ' original video-recorded interviews with the children - a legal precedent - which can be seen in a documentary tomorrow night.

One child, Caroline, then 6, is seen being so distraught throughout her "interview" that the judge said it was one of the most abiding and disturbing parts of the case. As many of those children, now adults, say, the only abuse they suffered was at the hands of the authorities.

When I meet Daniel, he is in his parents' house (they still live on the same estate), drinking tea and struggling for words to describe how those lost years have scarred him. He finds talking about his fractured upbringing harrowing and there is a palpable air of sadness about him. "I lack the confidence that everyone else seems to have," he says. "I find it hard to strike up conversations with people. I've missed such a lot." How would he describe his childhood in care? "Unhappy."

The first time Daniel heard that suspected satanic abuse and his dreams were at the root of his family's nightmare was when he was 16 and left foster care to return to his mother. He had spent ten years in a fog of uncertainty, never told the specifics of the case or allowed to read newspaper reports of it. "I couldn't believe it," he says. "At the time I didn't understand what was happening. I had no idea. I kept asking if I could go back home and they just said `No, it's not safe for you,' they didn't explain more than that. I didn't believe it but they are in control of you, there's nothing you can do. But I always wanted to go home. Always."

His social workers were not even consistent in their explanations. When he was about 12, Daniel, still totally in the dark, asked a social worker why he was in care. "I remember her saying that it was because of me," he says. "Nothing else, just that." It was a particularly cruel statement, given a child's propensity to feel responsible for problems in the family.

He and Julie were placed in one children's home, James and Matthew in another. Julie, now 26 and a carer in a nursing home, recalls social workers refusing to let them take any toys or clothes from home. "They took the clothes we were wearing and threw them away," she says. "I'd got a new coat for my birthday and they put it in the bin, saying it was filthy."

When police raided the house they took as "evidence" a cross that Julie had made from two lollipop sticks, and a religious wall plaque that she had given her mother, portraying Jesus on the Cross, which bore the words "God bless our home" and featured a small well for holy water. It was later alleged that this had been used to hold blood. It is still on the family's wall.

Julie winces at the memory of the medical examination she underwent in hospital to determine whether she had been sexually abused (it was negative). "I felt sick. Invaded," she says. She, too, had no inkling of the satanic abuse allegations and wasn't told why she was being examined.

After a few years in the children's home Daniel and Julie went to a foster home in Stockport until, unable to bear it any longer, she walked out at 16 and went home to her parents. It felt, she says, the most right and natural thing in the world. But she still feels the stigma following her. "Being a kid in care is hard," she says. "When people at school asked why I was with foster parents I'd just say that my real parents were ill. "It makes you wonder about the way people look at you, what they think about you. I'm still not as confident as I should be; I tend to keep myself to myself. I don't know if we'll ever get over it."

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