Cleared: the story of Shieldfield |
How
our demons fuel witch-hunts THE STORY OF WHAT happened to Dawn Reed and Chris Lillie is so bizarre that it might seem to be without parallel. It would be reassuring to dismiss Shieldfield as a terrible aberration. But that would be to replace one delusion by another. On the day after the libel judgment, the Guardian newsdesk was contacted by a reader who told them of a similar case. And the next day, 1 August, Canadian journalist Margaret Wente published a story which has close parallels with Shieldfield. This concerned a police officer who had lived for 10 years under the shadow of horrific allegations. These allegations had their origins in a panic triggered in 1992 when a couple said that their two-year old had been sexually assaulted at the local babysitting service. Last month John Popowich won an apology from the government and $1.3 million. ‘The most important part’, he said, ‘was getting my name cleared.’ The Saskatchewan case is not an
isolated coincidence. Over the past decade there have been countless other
Shieldfields - in nurseries or kindergartens in Norway, Sweden, Germany,
Holland, in New Zealand, Australia and Canada, and above all in the United
States.
It may well be that in the
fantasy world in which so many people tend to live - the world where men
and women always behave rationally and where superstitions and delusions
have been banished by the onward march of science - events such as those
that took place at Shieldfield do not happen. But in the real world, where
fantasy remains one of the most powerful forces in human history, such
events are all too common.
It is no coincidence that two
key members of the Shieldfield Review Team have both been believers in
satanic ritual abuse. Judith Jones was the social worker at the centre of
the 1989 Nottingham satanic abuse case. Astonishingly, Newcastle City
Council nevertheless appointed her to the Review Team. Meanwhile, clinical
psychologist Jacqui Saradjian has written of satanic cults where
‘children
were caged, hung, chained, whipped, burnt, tortured, drowned, buried
alive, and strapped to inverted crosses and assaulted’.
Although the Shieldfield story
itself contained no satanic allegations, we will not understand its
potency unless we recognise that it was the product of the same habit of
mind which led to the tragedies of Nottingham, Rochdale and the Orkneys.
Why is it that, at the
beginning of the twenty- first century, we appear still to be so
susceptible to such fantasies? Are we, in the very midst of our
rationalism, still witch-hunters at heart?
It is frequently said, and was
said again by Barnaby Jones last week in the Spectator, that it is easy to
overdo the comparison between the zeal to hunt paedophiles and what took
place at Salem:
‘After
all, witches do not exist but paedophiles most disturbingly do.’
To say this, however, is to
misunderstand the nature of witch-hunts. Historically, witches did
exist. There was never any doubt about the reality of those who,
throughout the early Middle Ages, practiced ritual magic or attempted to
work supernatural harm.
What turned anxieties about
real people into the Great European Witch-hunt was the fact that their
existence was overlaid by a demonological fantasy. They were seen as
belonging to an evil and highly organised cult whose members flew through
the air astride pigs, rams or broomsticks to orgiastic gatherings where
they worshipped their master, Satan. Once this powerful fantasy began to
grip the minds of learned men, the empirical reality on which it was based
became all but irrelevant. Completely innocent men and women could find
themselves arraigned and burnt as witches even though they had never
attempted to cast a spell or practise ritual magic at all.
During the last 30 years,
because of the depths of our enduring anxieties, we have managed to
demonise paedophiles in almost exactly the same way. What makes the
fantasy so powerful is precisely the fact that paedophiles exist. There
can, or at least there should, be no doubt that child sexual abuse is one
of the most serious social problems of our age and that it is more
widespread than many people are prepared to accept. But on to this
palpable and disturbing reality we too have projected a fantasy.
When, in the late 1970s and the
1980s, social workers in California - and later in Britain - allowed
themselves to be gripped by the belief that young children were falling
victim to systematic sexual abuse by organised satanic cults, we actually
revived the demonological fantasy which lay at the heart of the Great
European Witch-hunt. It was this fantasy which many highly intelligent and
sophisticated people, including Judith Jones, embraced as a reality.
When this fantasy was
discredited during the early 1990s the belief system it belonged to did
not disappear. Instead it was
‘desatanised’.
In Newcastle, Dawn Reed and Chris Lillie were portrayed not as isolated
paedophiles but as part of a sinister ring whose members abused children
behind black doors. It was this secularised version of an ancient
demonological fantasy which drove the investigation onwards and turned it
into a real witch-hunt.
One of the things which makes
the Shieldfield story so important, however, is that there emerged
elsewhere in Britain, at almost exactly the same time, another, yet more
dangerous fantasy. This was the belief, rapidly embraced by some social
workers and police officers, that children‘s
homes had been taken over by paedophile rings. After a decade of
investigation this belief has been shown to be without foundation. But
once again the fact that some care workers did sexually abuse young people
in their care lent the new secularised demonological fantasy enormous
power.
It was this fantasy which in
the early 1990s was used by police forces in North Wales and elsewhere to
legitimate the most dangerous form of police investigation which has ever
been devised - the trawling operation, in which the police actively fish
for retrospective allegations against care workers. Unlike Reed and
Lillie, the innocent victims of this witch-hunt have not been vindicated
by the courts. They have been convicted by them. So numerous are the
miscarriages of justice which have resulted that police trawling is now
the subject of a Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry.
When David Rose, Bob Woffinden
and I gave evidence to the first session of that inquiry in May, we
believed the committee would succeed in digging out the truth. That
confidence no longer seems so well-founded. There is still a possibility
that the committee may, even under the chairmanship of Chris Mullin, end
by effectively endorsing the very methods of police investigation which
have caused so much harm already, and which have ruined so many lives.
It is because this truly terrifying outcome is a real possibility that we must all learn the lessons of Shieldfield, and learn them thoroughly. …………………………………………………………
© Richard Webster, 2002
www.richardwebster.net
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