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