Will social workers fall for anything? Strange how easily the Marxist demonology on which most of them were trained could be translated into a more primeval one.  

Then again, perhaps it is not strange at all. To have been converted from a world view which divides society simplistically into economic exploiters and victims to one based on religious paranoia could be a fairly short leap. This might be a key to understanding the mass hysteria by which social services departments all over the country seem to have been gripped in the great satanic abuse scare. What was required was widespread ignorance among social workers about children.  

By which I mean real children. Not the quasi-political victims of social theory whose rights as fully fledged citizens are now enshrined in the Children Act. People who have raised flesh-and-blood children who have listened to them scaring each other in the dark with fantasies of horror tinged with infantile obscenity are familiar with the dark side of childhood.  

Irrational fears, half-understood sexual awareness and the desire to attract attention lead quite ordinary children down imaginative paths which can shock those with sentimental ideas about childhood (innocence). Throw in some serious emotional disturbance and the influence of horror videos and, with enough anxious prompting, some children will produce tales lurid enough to satisfy any approving listener. 

Most odd is that they pursued only testimony. They were interested solely in the questioning of supposed victims and not, as would seem logical, in finding factual evidence. Had these stories of human sacrifice in satanic temples, cannibalism and forced abortion been true, there should have been caches of grotesque detritus to be found. Valerie Sinason is a consultant child psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic, and one of the chief supporters in this country of belief in the reality of satanic abuse. In her book, Treating Survivors of Satanist Abuse, one of the contributors describes the cult as a huge social network involving prominent people in a web of diabolical intrigue.  

The explanation given for the fact that no bodies have ever been found is that the corpses were consumed as part of the ritual (as were the sacrificed animals and the aborted foetuses). Why then are there no corresponding records of mysterious disappearances? Because the victims were vagrants whose absence would go unnoticed. But it is not that easy to eradicate all traces of serial murder, even when the victims have few acquaintances. Dennis Nilsen's victims were often unattached loners, but his crimes were eventually discovered.  

If Ms Sinason's book is to be believed, these practices are taking place with a panoply of elaborate paraphernalia and in the presence of many witnesses. Yet no physical trace of these events has ever been produced. Nor are there any medical records to substantiate the results of mutilation. Nor have any of the guilty circle of participants ever cracked and confessed. Based only on the ``recollections'' of adults who claim to have been abused as children many of whom have been ``helped'' to recall these incidents under hypnosis and the tales of suggestible children, who are also ``helped'' to describe their experiences, entire communities have been torn apart. 

Families from the Orkneys to Kent, in Rochdale, Merseyside and Derbyshire, have had their children taken from them with nightmarish suddenness without redress or the most basic guarantees of justice. How was this justified by those who see the protection of children as their professional responsibility? By maintaining simultaneously two quite contradictory views of childhood. 

One of them is descended from Rousseau: that children are innocent even of what the confessional calls ``impure thoughts'' unless they are knowingly corrupted by adults. Hence the failure to understand that children can concoct vile or even sadistic images, that such fantasies are part of their apparatus for dealing with anxiety.  

The other is that children are miniature adults, for whom it is appropriate to ascribe the full set of civil rights, including a spurious ``right to be believed'' even if what they are saying is implausible and unsubstantiated. And even if it is not in their interest that we accept their accounts without allowing for their immature readiness to offer whatever adults are prepared to reward. Both views caricature children, who need guardianship which takes their true vulnerability into account.  

In her report on the myth of widespread satanic activity Professor Jean La Fontaine notes that a belief in organised evil cults can make it easier for childcare professionals to cope with the real damage that is being done to children through disorganised commonplace abuse. ``Reluctant to accept that parents, even those classed as social failures, will harm their own children,'' she concludes, social workers embrace the idea of involvement with devil-worship as an explanation.  

On the one hand, child welfare has been obsessed with the idea that private families are a source of potential threat to children's rights. On the other, it has tried to avoid any condemnation of disadvantaged parents. The combination was fatal.