Documentary on BBC 1 tonight about the "Satanic abuse" children.

[Caligula]

I've got such a dilemma, it clashes with Big Brother. How shallow am I?

Info \link www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-perl/whatson/prog_parse.cgi?FILENAME=20060111/20060111_2100_4223_11826_60\here}

I suppose I could plug in the video...

No, no, didn't see the programme, was just reporting my "insider knowledge"

'insider knowledge' sounds like a part of the face saving operation as if any other kind of abuse were happening, the SW could have used that to save their faces. the only reason given for the one family not getting their children back was because the parents were in debt.

it was a witch hunt plain and simple. just shows what happens when you give partially educated people too much control over the lives of others.

The most striking thing for me was the sort of preposterous tales that social services were prepared to believe about organised satanic cults abusing children on that estate. When these stories first started breaking in the press it was patently obvious that it was all cobblers. It also smacked more of social workers trying to make a name for themselves as the first to uncover these alleged goings-on than any real concern. The fact that there was not a scrap of evidence didn't deter them in the slightest.

To be honest, there is something medieval about the whole thing.

There was absolutely no abuse of any kind, unless you count having debts as abuse. The one set of parents whose children weren't returned to them (every single other child was) had been on parenting courses in the past but had been taken off them as the SW's had decided that they could now cope adequately on their own. David was not returned to his family because of nebulous concerns over debts and parenting skills, not because of any incidents of abuse.

That whole "there was abuse, just not satanic" sounds exactly like the face-saving lying techniques that are still being employed about the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, along the lines of "well yes, not all of them were guilty and it was very unfortunate that they were accidentally tortured, but (wink) we know that some of them really were guilty". So in other words, we were wrong in the detail, but right in the substance. And it's all bollocks - both the substance and the detail were wrong, but no-one who was involved in any of these cases (the six, the four, or the unfortunate Rochdale parents) is ever going to admit they screwed up good and proper. In the SW's case I can understand why, because after all, their careers rest upon it - they've got a hell of a lot to lose.

Makes you want to satanically abuse them. I really hope the court cases succeed, the sws are named and shamed and the families get compensation. It is Salem all over again, and it is every parent's worst nightmare.