[lbo-talk] Irish priests beat, raped children

[James Heartfield]

Leninology writes: "the 'ritual abuse' cases, which everyone acknowledges 
were a catastrophic failure" - yes, now, nearly twenty years later, 
begrudgingly some have acknowledged that the social services dawn raids and 
breaking up of families was a disaster. But who said it at the time? Did the 
left take up the case for those families who were being persecuted? Search 
the Socialist Worker website for any comment in vain. International 
Socialism seems to have carried its first (wholly uncritical) article on 
Social Work this month. Marxism Today, as we have seen was wholly given over 
to scare stories about Satanic Circles sacrificing babies. I have a 
collection of paedophile panic stories clipped from the Guardian newspaper 
that would disgrace the Sun, and it is the size of your head.

Did nobody in Britain object when social workers seized children from their 
homes on the basis of crazy satanic abuse stories?

"In Britain, in those cases where social services departments have acted to 
defend what they deem to be children's rights, the effects have been 
catastrophic for the families concerned. Cases of alleged sexual abuse in 
Cleveland and the Orkneys destroyed families and left parents stigmatised." 
James Heartfield, Living Marxism, October 1993

"The presumption that child abuse is endemic has led to some extraordinary 
miscarriages of justice. In America the trial of the family that ran the 
McMartin Preschool led to convictions of three generations of the same 
family, all imprisoned on the uncorroborated and wildly manipulated evidence 
of very young children. Years later the convictions were overturned. In the 
Orkneys, children were taken into care on the basis of social workers' 
suspicions and later the children were bullied at length into denouncing 
their parents, only for all but one of the charges to be dropped later on." 
James Heartfield, LM May 1998