The Scottish Sunday Times

Focus: Island strife

Those whose lives were wrecked by false claims of satanic abuse on Lewis will find little solace in the official report into the scandal, says Mark Macaskill

The headlights of the police car cut through the early morning mist on the Hebridean island. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, police officers took up their positions outside properties in Leicestershire, West Yorkshire and Dorset.
After weeks of meticulous planning, the detectives were about to swoop on their targets: suspected members of what they believed was a satanic child abuse ring on the Isle of Lewis with tentacles stretching down to the south of England. The police had built up a picture of black magic rituals on the island that involved child abuse, orgies and the sacrifice of animals.
Shortly after 6am, the officers loomed out of the darkness and moved on their targets.
“There was a loud knocking on our bedroom window,” recalls Susan Sellwood, 51, who lives in a two-bedroomed cottage in Ness, north of Lewis with her husband, John. “Our son was asleep in a caravan in the front drive, he was woken by the police marching up the drive, he said it sounded like a stampede.”
According to Susan, four officers barged their way into her home, waving an arrest warrant. “They stood and watched me get dressed, which was very degrading. They bundled each of us into two unmarked cars and they only decided to tell us what was going on when we were in the interview room. We were treated atrociously.”
The Sellwoods were among 11 people arrested during the dawn raids that morning in 2003. Three people, including Susan, were released without charge later that day. Eight others, including John and a 75-year-old grandmother, were charged with sexual offences against children between 1995 and 2001.
The eight, who protested their innocence throughout, found themselves ostracised by many in the close-knit community. People shouted abuse in the street and the walls of their homes were daubed with graffiti. The trauma was such that one of the accused, Peter Nelson, attempted suicide. “The stress of everything, the hatred that was being shown to us — it was like living a nightmare,” he said.

Then, in July last year, the Crown Office dropped all charges. There was no explanation other than a statement, which said: “We can say that all the available evidence was carefully examined before this decision was taken.”

Cold comfort for the eight people whose lives had been shattered after being accused of repellent crimes. Since then, they have been waiting for the official investigation into the case, carried out by the Social Work Inspection Agency (SWIA), hoping that it would explain why they had been thrust into a nightmare they insist was based on “rumour, gossip and lies”.
Now, almost two years after the dawn raids, the findings of that inquiry are about to be published. However, the document, details of which have been passed to The Sunday Times, raises as many questions as it answers.
According to government sources, it highlights failings in the investigation that have “serious implications” for “all those involved in child protection services across Scotland”. It will also criticise guidelines issued by ministers on how to handle child witnesses as “inadequate” and question the way information on vulnerable children is shared among agencies throughout the UK. It will highlight concerns about NHS staff and teachers failing to report suspicions of child abuse. But the report will fail to explain why a case — built on a £100,000 investigation involving more than 100 police officers across four forces — was dropped. Most alarmingly, it will conclude that the girls at the centre of investigation had suffered “prolonged” sexual and physical abuse.
If the children did, as the report claims, suffer such appalling abuse and neglect, who was responsible? Will the culprits be brought to justice? And how can the child protection system be reformed to ensure there is never a repeat of the fiasco?

The Lewis child abuse case was not the first to cast a shadow over Scotland’s remote island communities. In 1991, nine children aged 8 to 15 were placed in care after claims of ritual abuse.
The investigation, which lasted almost five months, collapsed due to lack of evidence. An inquiry by Lord Clyde criticised the authorities’ handling of the case. The cost to the taxpayer was about £6m.

The Lewis case centred on three girls under 16 who had been in the care of the Western Isles social services department. The charges echoed similar allegations of satanic abuse in Orkney, Rochdale and Nottingham, among many others that occurred in the early 1990s. In all, about 50 children in England and Scotland were removed from their homes. However, in all these cases no evidence was found of ritual abuse. A report by the UK Department of Health concluded that there was no forensic evidence to support claims of satanism. It was suggested that the accusations had been the result of “satanic panic”, a phenomenon believed to have been fuelled by fundamentalist Christians in America and taken up by authorities.
So why was the allegation of ritual abuse in Lewis given so much credence? The explanation could lie with the involvement of Angela Stretton, 37, an islander and crucial witness in the case.
Initially, the Lewis case involved allegations against two individuals, who were accused of touching children in an inappropriate way.
However, after Stretton became involved, the number of suspects rose to eight. She is believed to have made claims to police of satanic rituals, at which she maintained adults were filmed having sex with children. Her evidence included lurid claims of animal sacrifice and orgies.
It later emerged that Stretton had been convicted of making false allegations of child abuse in the Midlands in 1987 and that the police in Scotland were aware of her history when they decided to press charges in the Lewis case.

Stretton’s brother, David Disney, who was wrongly accused in the Lewis case, said at the time: “She’s a very sick person and the authorities should have known that . . . she has a long history of making false allegations about sex abuse.”
When the SWIA report is published later this month, Scottish ministers are expected to argue that they have already taken steps to address some of the serious concerns it contains. In January, Cathy Jamieson, the justice minister, Peter Peacock, the education minister, and Andy Kerr, the health minister, approved changes on child protection policy.
The guidance on protecting children from abuse identified a lack of strategic direction from health boards, police and local councils to promote the best interests of young people.
If agencies fail to sharpen up by September, ministers have warned that they may change the law to force them to do so.

The executive has also signalled that it is prepared to prosecute social workers, police and health workers who it judges to have failed children.
This will be of little comfort to those entangled in the Lewis abuse case. One couple, John and Patricia Gray, left the island within days of being released from prison. Last week, a friend said the couple wanted to “forget it had ever happened” and revealed Patricia suffers anxiety attacks at the sight of a police car.
On that October morning in 2003, Ian Campbell was taken from his cottage on the edge of the peat moors of Ness, north of Lewis, handcuffed and bundled into an unmarked car. For the next six months, he was denied access to his children and forbidden to return home, confined instead to a safe house in Stornoway. He says his relationship with his wife suffered and their children have lost their friends.
The Campbells are pagans, and Ian believes the police confused his beliefs with devil worship.
“A lot of people have been waiting for this report, for some explanation as to why so many innocent people were treated like criminals,” he said last week. “I’m not surprised it says the children were abused because they have to justify the money that was spent and what they did. We want it to be made public how this investigation was carried out, how the information was gathered and interpreted because that’s what’s been hidden from the public.”
“I never really expected the authorities to admit they got it wrong,” said Disney. “I think it was inevitable the authorities would insist there was severe abuse otherwise they would be sued. If this was a proper investigation, they would have sought our opinion. They never did.”
The Sellwoods, meanwhile, await nervously the next twist in what they describe as their “living nightmare”. Since their ordeal, both have been on prescription drugs to calm their nerves. They are considering leaving Lewis.
“We’re so very sorry to hear that the authorities still believe the children suffered but it had nothing to do with us,” said John. “We just got caught up in something terrible. It’s been such a horrible time.”
LORD CLYDE'S FINDINGS
IT IS 13 years since Scotland’s procedures for dealing with the ritual sex abuse of children have been in the dock.
On October 27, 1992 Lord Clyde, a High Court judge, found that social workers who removed nine children aged between eight and 15 from their homes in Orkney in a dawn raid were so determined to find evidence of ritual sex abuse that they failed to think before acting. His report, the result of an eight-month inquiry into Scotland’s worst case of alleged satanic child abuse, was highly critical of care workers and police who had allowed their thinking to be “coloured by undefined suspicions”.
He called for urgent research into all forms of child abuse and, in an appeal that has been repeatedly echoed since, for a better relationship between agencies involved.
Among his 135 criticisms, he accused the social work department of not making a detailed enough study of the problem relating to the original family. He judged that it had also failed to consider the position of the nine children individually or to assess the degree of risk to which they were exposed.
Lord Clyde recommended better training for social workers, care workers and police, a call that Ian Lang, the then Scottish secretary, promised to act upon.