  
ORCADIAN ABUSE

The Orkney Ritual Abuse affair played out on various levels. Sides were taken 
around beliefs about social truth (e.g. about prevalant child abuse), about 
progress towards enlightenment (e.g. that "we are just coming to recognise 
the scale of such problems"). And about justice and the boundaries of 
legitimate power.

The relative weightings of these concerns map back onto social position. 
Appeal to universal values assumed a shared social programme, a set of 
interests backed up by beliefs.

It may be helpful to look in some detail at one of the most revealing 
articles published during the affair; that it was probably written at speed 
and in some anger makes its own agenda visible. The article is Derek Rodger's 
signed editorial "Hands Together for Life!" in the April/May 1991 edition of 
the magazine Scottish Child.

The caption itself brings the first problem. What does it mean? What life? An 
appeal to solidarity on whose part? A solidarity rising above all particular 
interests? "Hands together" but community autonomy has been evacuated in the 
article: community is merely the scab on a wound, a place of denial:"Our 
society's ability, sometimes bordering on the desperate, to deny the 
existence of widespread sexual abuse in ordinary families-next-door is, quite 
simply, to fly in the face of known facts". Known facts, if denied by 
"society", therefore remain "real" only by circulating in the discourse of 
specialists. 

So by the beginning of only his second paragraph, Rodger's proposition that 
child abuse is endemic in society has him veering towards prejudice. Despite 
protestations of even-handedness, his prose is set in its ways. Presumption 
of innocence? The media "lap it up, unquestioningly". Specialists, by 
contrast, "consider the possibility" that the allegations are true. 
(Presumably, the actions and inactions of the various State agencies involved 
in the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four cases were informed by a similar 
logic.)

The five paragraphs devoted to the South Ronaldsay witch-hunt are directed 
mainly against the Press, accused of wanting to cover-up (and thus consent 
in) child abuse. But this howl against the media twists and devours itself. 
Those who live by the media... So ChildLine and soap operas are assigned a 
place above the media swamp: "EastEnders has noticed - why can't our national 
press?" This encapsulates the Left's collapse in the 1980s into identity 
politics: well-meaning television soaps could provide the lint over society's 
wounds; each identified group would be allocated its role models, all of whom 
could discuss their ills away around a kitchen table. The zeal for greater 
realism, better models, more true-life situations cedes the leading role to 
script-writers (more specialists).

So far from everyone holding hands, the original social unity has already 
sundered into a trinity: the mass (place of denial), the expert (place of 
disinterested knowledge), and the media (at worst, an interested group 
pandering to mass prejudice, at best disinterested purveyors of didactic 
entertainment). 

That establishes the essential purity of the social workers: "the first to 
get it in the neck". They are deftly amalgamated with the "children", for 
whose protection, it should be recalled, the whole affair was ostensibly 
organised: "The social workers in Orkney, and the children's panel members 
involved, must be defended aganst tabloid hysteria - but not just for their 
own sake. For it is children who are really under attack in this press 
campaign".

So much for Rodger's article.

Missing is any recognition that "therapeutic" agencies have particular 
interests (although the usual bureaucratic interest in increasing the 
resources under their control has already been nodded through). The response 
to criticism claims a legitimacy in their power: that 'society expects us to 
do its dirty work but complains when our hands get dirty'. This conservative 
concept of the legitimacy of constituted power supposes a consent never 
given, a society never unified.

Furthermore, the policing of "agreed" social norms has been supplanted by the 
formation of a progressive programme: a novelty-based, self-enclosed project 
of developing "new expertises" and new areas of concern. Agencies don't refer 
back to the community for legitimacy but seek to lead. They regard child 
abuse as both exceptional (in that emergency action is needed to deal with 
it) and the norm (in its ubiquity). This condition of super-legality and 
self-referentiality lacks corrective mechanisms, so it escalates into 
continual resource-pleading and collapses into illegality. 

Three codes - the legal, the therapeutic and the police - interwove in the 
Orkney affair. The combination of therapeutic and police interests produced 
the peculiar flavour of the initial raids: police interest in sudden raids to 
snatch "evidence"; therapeutic interest in detaining those assumed to be 
witnesses / victims and interview them in "disclosure sessions" until 
evidence was forthcoming. 

(A fable for those who think the end justifies such means: the victim of a 
beating goes to a hospital casualty department on a Friday night but claims 
the injury was self-inflicted. A "greater good" may be served by detaining 
and interrogating the person over a period of weeks until the assailant is 
named. But justice goes out the window.)

The mediation of Social Workers' relationship to minors through the 
Children's Panel system developed as an ostensibly liberal replacement of 
application of the legal code to children. But like the Staffordshire and 
Leicester affairs, South Ronaldsay showed conditions where the legal code 
admits greater safeguards against arbitrary action. 

Having entered a situation where an agency was defining its own criteria for 
intervention, the system's equilibrium could not easily be restored. Sheriff 
Kelbie was appalled by the extent to which the process (for extracting 
statements by repeated interrogation over weeks) lay outside norms of justice 
and ruled the actions invalid at the first opportunity. (At least some 
Scottish social workers who declined to participate in the original snatch 
had predicted this.)

The Kelbie judgement left Social Work in disarray. Having been criticised for 
refusing to allow children to attend their own Children's Panel hearing (or 
even to know it was happening), Social Work Directors prepared pedantic 
instructions that, if Kelbie's judgement stood, every new-born child being 
taken into care would have to be taken from incubator to Panel Hearing. 
Inability to distinguish between infants and 15 year old children would 
disqualify people from most jobs, but is apparently no inhibition to a career 
in social work management, where the Peter principle reigns.

Normal conditions were restored by overturning the grounds of the Kelbie 
judgement on appeal, while leaving the material outcome unchanged, and a 
judicial hearing is now taking place in Kirkwall. At the time of writing, the 
hard evidence which the Social Work establishment has always claimed existed 
has failed to emerge: social workers are claiming that one child was 
insufficiently outraged by being snatched (a blame-the-victim logic akin to 
blaming Jewish people for insufficient opposition to the Nazis). But some of 
the social workers involved seem to be admitting to individual doubts, but 
had felt they couldn't question the hierarchy.

That last fact points back to problems of agency, problems solved neither by 
increasing resource allocation nor by appeals to "put our hands together for 
life". Problems, including the plight of any child being abused, require 
solution, but ceding them from the family and the local community to external 
agencies is no more than partially adequate, both from the interests of the 
individuals involved and for any possibility for social change. Any 
possibility for radical change starts from elsewhere than propping up 
existing institutions by appealling to abstract solidarity and the spirit of 
youth.
From Here & Now12 1992 - No copyright
