A TALE OF TOUGH CITIES
Nottingham

La Fontaine’s 1994 report includes a map of England and Wales displaying clusters where satanic abuse has been alleged, and among these Nottingham is prominent. An extended family living on a public housing estate in the city formed the unpleasant habit during the 1980s of holding ‘sex parties’ which involved their small children. This family was known to police and social services, who together brought ten men and women to court in February 1989. Nine men were gaoled, and a total of twenty-seven children were taken into care.

So far so good. It was at this point, however, when the police believed their job was done, that liaison between them and the social workers threatened to break down. The ladies at social services had got hold of something and were not about to let it go; they suspected that bigger and nastier things lurked beneath this case of sexual mistreatment. Ritual abuse!

The first satanic stories had begun to appear in Britain about 1988. Police were aware that they were being drawn into investigations which would consume their resources with little reward, but they felt powerless before a hysteria which had its own life. As a Rochdale policeman would put it: “What I think is happening is there are some cranks among social workers. They are getting wind of these [satanic abuse] documents and they are trying to tie it up with routine abuse cases. If social workers came to us with allegations of this nature we’d have to investigate. I don’t see how it can be stopped ….”

In due course relations between the two services became so bad in Nottingham that a dual investigation was instituted by the council. This Joint Enquiry Team (JET) of police officers and social workers produced a report which went over the Broxtowe case and the authorities’ response to it.  The report was presented in 1990 but never officially published. A condensed version was leaked widely to the press and eventually appeared on the internet — at a time when the difficulties that had flared in Nottingham were threatening to race through the entire country.

The JET report’s essential finding was that the social workers had encouraged the child victims of the proven sexual abuse to keep up their ‘disclosures’ about their families, even after the criminal prosecution had been concluded. The children had been removed into care and the social workers exploited their control over them by eliciting ever more macabre revelations which happened to match the interrogators’ requirements. This second phase in the Nottingham tale was ostensibly entitled ‘Listening to the Children’, but it was only a certain kind of revelation that the workers listened to. The disclosures were recorded by the foster carers in diaries, and in time these diaries came to allege a wide range of ‘satanic’ activity.

Some forty distinct acts are listed in the JET report.  The children’s first few claims read like this: babies were killed by being jumped on and then left in garages; babies were cut out of the tummies of females; babies were shot and put in garages; babies were taken from next door and from across the road and had their heads bashed on the floor; babies were thrown on a bonfire; a naughty policeman killed babies.

The naughty police were by this time well at loggerheads with social services and may not have been thrilled by the last revelation, but they might have found comfort in the little boy who claimed that his social worker had murdered him. How? — “because she shouted at him”.  The report into all this is careful not to name names, but in after years its chief author made clear where he thought the satanic trouble was coming from. John Gwatkin was before his retirement director of social services at Newark, so he had no obvious axe to grind:

“It was Nottinghamshire Social Services Department which imported the concept of satanic ritual abuse from the USA into the UK. It was staff of the Department who helped to found RAINS (Ritual Abuse Information and Network Support). The same staff ignored the [JET] Report’s findings and continued to promulgate the idea of ritual abuse by means of conferences, articles in the social work professional journals, TV appearances and an advisory telephone service. It was the Nottingham experience that became the foundation stone for a widespread belief by professionals in ritual satanic abuse and to this day Nottingham is still quoted as a proven case — which it most definitely was not.”

The police understood that the social workers expected them to believe whatever the children said — that this was a point of dogma. “We have been told that we must suspend disbelief and that children should be believed but the first statement that needs to be made is that the diaries cannot be taken literally but have to be interpreted.”  To take the children literally would have meant accepting such statements as:

“My mum flies on a broomstick.”

“They throw lots of babies in the bins. I was murdered when I was a baby and shoved in the bin.”

“They kill all of us at the parties. I’m Superman at the parties and I kill the witches.”  

The police did their best but commonsense won out over their desire to mollify the women. The police after all had a wide experience of mendacious witnesses. One of the children spoke about an uncle having killed a man before cutting him up and putting him in a bag — this following a visit to a castle in a boat with Mr. Pooh Pants and the local vicar. Another told of “all the family going to hospital dressed up as witches and ghosts, clowns and monsters, to abuse the babies” — while the doctors and nurses watched. A third confirmed that the children had all been killed and then “magicked better”.

The pivotal figure in promoting these fantasies was Judith Dawson (also called Judith Jones), chief social worker with the council.  It is amazing that her performance in Nottingham did not finish her career. Dawson was certainly helped by the fact that the JET report was not released (an omission which she may have had some hand in). The silence gave her time to reconstitute herself as a child-abuse counsellor, to take up lecturing, and get onto the Law Society’s list of expert witnesses for family and child cases — that is, the list of ‘experts’ like Meadow or Southall (or Klein in Illinois) and so many others: experts who for a fee would be useful in prosecuting a case.  Dawson lectured at the Reading conference (held in the aftermath of the Nottingham case, just seven months after the criminal trial, and at a time that the JET findings were still under lock and key). By the time the JET report did at last get loose, Dawson had reverted to her maiden name of ‘Jones’ and had left the Midlands. [check this]
 
Dawson’s approach to factual evidence was individual. Gwatkin noted that it was her practice to ignore completely any evidence that contradicted her preconceptions. “For example, she believed a 10-year-old girl who said her stomach had been cut open in the front room of a council house. We learned that the girl had previously been in hospital for an appendix operation, and her surgeon was contacted. He identified his scar and told us the girl was otherwise untouched. When we informed Judith Dawson of this, she replied that satanists were clever people and would cut along the same scar so that it wouldn’t be noticed. We put this to the surgeon, who said it was medically impossible as scar tissue heals poorly. But when we told her what he had said, she was dismissive. She didn’t want to know and refused to accept it. It was quite astonishing.”  

A while after this Gwatkin saw a satanism article by Dawson in the New Statesman, speaking of a girl who’d recounted “how she was laid on a table and had her stomach ritually cut open.”  “It was as though the evidence we had presented to her never existed.”  Dawson contributed several articles to the social-work journals about this time, describing the situation in Nottingham and presenting herself as a hardworking professional who was being pilloried for uncovering the facts as she found them.  She was active in her publicity, and disingenuous about her own role and opinions. She described her team in Nottingham as “secular” (though she appeared in the video Doorways to Danger which was made by the Evangelical Alliance).  She seems to have made no clear statement about her own religious beliefs, but her close colleague Christine Johnstone is said to have been a fundamentalist Christian who appeared on video bearing witness to the Nottingham ‘satanism’, and praying to Jesus to save the children’s souls.

A policeman involved in the original enquiry was detective superintendent Peter Coles, known for his old-fashioned thoroughness. It was he who’d had police dig up the basement of the Old Lodge Gatehouse in Derby Road for proof of the satanic rites the children said had gone on there. Coles offended some of the ladies by being insensitive over Dawson’s credulity. A jest he made about a child in a microwave had not gone down well. “I was slightly mischievous and said to one of Judith’s team that I had checked this out and it couldn’t be right — because experts had told me if you did that, the baby’s eyes would explode and the door of the microwave would come off. I was just kidding, but before long one of the team came back and said disclosures had now been made [by one of the children] about babies’ eyes being taken out before they were microwaved.”  

No wonder Dawson complained that the JET report, so critical of her team of four women, was sexist. Of course it was sexist, in a broader and more important sense than she had in mind. It was a critique of feminine fantasies from the viewpoint of a masculine enquiry. The point is important for the Nottingham débâcle was clear evidence of what might happen with the handover from male to female culture in the policing of the country: every wafty notion was now ruled in, and objective measures of probability were pushed out. A public catastrophe was the result. In the end Dawson’s views were quite properly discounted as contagious rubbish, but that would not stop her doing tremendous damage in the years ahead. She had of course not bothered to ask whether her own orientation was ‘sexist’ — a detail in that wider campaign we may call The Prevention of Men.

It is said that Dawson had wanted some twenty-seven additional children taken into care because of their exposure to satanism. She told her tale to Beatrix Campbell, lesbian feminist and another passionate seeker-out of male wickedness. Campbell was the author of a book about the Cleveland episode which managed to see the Butler-Sloss report as a complete vindication of the pædiatricians.  She had come to Nottingham after reporting on the child-abuse case in the Orkneys, and she was soon at work on a TV documentary about satanists in the East Midlands.  (In 1992 Dawson would move to Sunderland to work, and not long after that she began co-habiting with Campbell. ) For all the Nottingham débâcle and her madcap past, Dawson was able to get appointed to the four-person committee in Newcastle which gave such a hefty shove to the Shieldfield catastrophe.

But whither now, sister? Manchester? Where the Devil farts, we needs must follow ….