‘Whatever happens, I will never trust them’

ANNE BROWN August 18 2006

It was early in the morning of February 27, 1991, that it happened. It was a dark, murky sort of day – like so many February days on Orkney – but brothers Jonathan and Sam were warm and comfortable in their beds.
It happened at 7am. Sam, 15, and 12-year-old Jonathan woke up to find a crowd of police officers and social workers pushing their way into their bedrooms. "It was a strange way to wake up," says Jonathan. "I was told to get dressed and I was watched while I dressed and told we couldn't take anything."
Sam considered trying to escape, but didn't want to leave his younger brother. Apart from anything else, he just wanted to hug his mum. "A policewoman told me I couldn't. I told her to **** off and did it anyway."
Forbidden from picking up a favourite toy or any other thing to remind them of home, the brothers were hustled out of the door and into waiting cars. Without any explanation, they were driven away into the murky morning, across the Churchill Barriers towards Kirkwall.
It was a pattern happening elsewhere on the island that morning. In all, nine children from four families were taken from their homes on South Ronaldsay that day. They were flown from Orkney to foster homes in Inverness and Glasgow. Sibling was separated from sibling, and any contact with home, family or friends was completely cut off. No letters, cards, parcels or phone calls were allowed from anybody, and the foster families were told not to allow the children to read the papers or watch the news.
Their case went on to become one of the most controversial in British child-protection history. It featured a small island community that learned how to use the press and news media to fight against the power of the state. Now, 15 years on, some of those involved – including Sam and Jonathan – have spoken for the first time about their ordeal for a new BBC documentary.
Sam was placed in secure accommodation for young offenders in Ayrshire, even though he had never offended in any way. There, he alone of the nine children had access to news reports. Speaking now, he remembers how angry he was. "It was an unbelievable situation. It's not that you've committed a crime and been caught – it's just you're at school and the next day you're at school in a borstal."
Sam knew he had to remain calm. "You try to behave in the most dignified manner you can, but internally you are completely freaking out. You have no idea what's going to happen. Nothing about anything you're doing is in your hands any more. Nothing."
Sam, now 30, and Jonathan, now 27, were initially reticent to talk about that time. It was a part of their lives they had put well behind them. Then they realised they didn't want the story to be told without them. Jonathan said that only the other side would be heard without them.
Both brothers now have children of their own. They are not prepared to release many personal details, but they are both back living in Orkney after spending a few years based in Edinburgh, from where they travelled and made films. They are two young men getting on with their lives – but that day 15 years ago is still a powerful memory.
The story of Jonathan and Sam, whose parents Sandy and William also take part in the documentary, had its roots in another case altogether. All the families involved were incomers to Orkney. They had chosen to make their homes in a place that offered a peaceful way of life, and were made welcome and quickly included in island life.
But another family that came to Orkney were not made so welcome. The W family, as they became known, turned up with 14 children and another on the way. Social worker Charlie Fraser happened to observe them as they disembarked from the ferry; he thought to himself that this dishevelled family could mean trouble that would land on his desk. It did. The social work department kept a close eye on them – especially the wild antics of the children – from the moment they arrived. But no-one could have foreseen how their case would blow up, or the impact it would have on so many lives.
The 1980s had seen a revolution in child protection, when people became more aware of the sexual abuse of children and began to discuss the problem openly. But this revolution had passed Orkney by, and the islands' social workers had no experience of interviewing child victims. So when allegations of cruelty and physical abuse against their father began to emerge from the W children, Orkney Islands Council engaged the services of the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (RSSPCC) to take care of the disclosure interviews.
Mr W was jailed, and the children under 16 were taken into care and moved away from Orkney. It was then that suggestions of sexual abuse within the family began to emerge.
Leading the interviews with the children, in November 1990, was social worker Liz McLean, employed by the RSSPCC. She was an adherent of American theories on how to find and identify incidents of sexual and satanic abuse, believed by certain groups to be rife.
A list of "abuse indicators" was widely used by social workers. One of these said that if children said they hadn't been abused, they had. Liz McLean was recognised as a pioneer in her field, and her team, including Orkney social workers, followed her lead, adopting her conviction that child abuse was widespread and had to be discovered by any means. She was robustly criticised by Lord Clyde in the inquiry that followed the whole sequence of events. She hasn't been seen or heard of since.
Jonathan remembers her well. "Liz McLean was there and she is a very large woman, quite intimidating in a friendly way, if you understand what I mean, so there would be a mean air about her while seeming to be nice … 'We know that something happened to you – we know this' … in a nice soft voice. But it was relentless, didn't stop.
"They were talking about things people wore and things like that and saying, 'I'm not a very good drawer, can you draw it for me please?' You want to be obliging as a child with adults … It was a ring of people with someone in the centre and you don't know why you're being asked to draw this so you don't resist. And you get an idea that you don't want to have done that and you feel foolish and sort of duped."
Another social worker, Janette Chisholm, worked with Liz McLean at the time. Together they conducted disclosure interviews with the W children, and with the nine others who were taken from their homes in February 1991. They were relentless in their search – some call it a witch-hunt – for admissions by the children that they had been abused.
The disclosure sessions lasted for hours every day. The children were asked leading questions, told what to draw and promised food if they gave the "right" answers. Some gave the answers they thought were expected just to make the interrogation stop.
It was from the interviews with three of the younger W children that Liz McLean gathered enough "evidence" to convince her that a paedophile ring was operating in South Ronaldsay. This led to the removal of the other children, and allegations of lewd and libidinous behaviour being levelled against their parents and against the local minister, the Rev Morris MacKenzie.
May W takes part in the BBC2 film. An attractive young woman, she talks about the treatment she received at the hands of the social workers, the leading questions, the instructions to draw certain things and the way everything she said or drew was misinterpreted to fit a scenario that they already had in mind. "In order to get out of a room, after an hour or so of saying, 'No, this never happened,' you'd break down," she says. May and her siblings were kept in care for many years. She is still angry, and says that the authorities stole her childhood.
The children, away from their island homes, were subject to embarrassing medical examinations. Sam was told it was a medical to test that he was in good health: "I was told to strip from the waist down and given an examination of the genitals and an anal swab," he says. "That's when I thought they were obviously looking for signs of sexual abuse."

Janette Chisholm makes it very clear that, 15 years on, her views about the case have not changed. She still believes the nine children were abused, despite their denials as children and their denials today. She still believes it was right to allow them no contact with their families while they were in care, because they could have received coded messages designed to control them. She laughs at the parents pleading innocence and maintains their denials means they are still keeping secrets. She says the children have been let down.
What she doesn't say is that the RSSPCC eventually admitted they had got it wrong and apologised to the Orkney parents in a live broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland.
The families who were identified following the interviews with the W children were mostly people who knew the W family or had become involved with helping them in one way or another. Sandy and William, both trained teachers, had bought a farm on South Ronaldsay. They were asked by the local authority to take on the education of one of the W girls, a school refuser, and they extended their interest in the family by inviting the children to come and socialise with their own. Others in the area knew the children, or offered their skills to help. It was their children who were removed in that dawn raid.
After the children had gone, the parents were driven separately to police stations in Kirkwall and Stromness where they, as well as the minister and his wife, were interrogated for hours. One family didn't fit the picture at all: they had had no contact at all with the Ws. The uplifting of their two young children was a mistake.
There were many other mistakes. Orkney Islands Council took the rather garbled interviews from three confused young children and decided they were absolute truth. Without checking anything with teachers, doctors or anyone else, they acted. They decided that "everyone" in the community was involved, and conducted their whole operation in secrecy. It was conducted without finding out that one child suffered badly from asthma or that two came from a Jewish family and had certain dietary requirements. They knew nothing at all about the children they removed.
Medical evidence was never found. After they returned home at the end of five agonising weeks, the other children voiced their anger at not being believed by Liz McLean and her team. It didn't matter how often they said nothing had happened to them, or that their parents wouldn't hurt children; each time they were told: "Oh, but we know what happened" or "We know you know about this".
It was distressing, too, for siblings to be separated. It was thought they might exercise some sort of control over each other. Jonathan was taken to Inverness before the plane flew on to Glasgow. Sam says it was hard for them to be split up there: "We weren't allowed to say goodbye to each other when he got off in Inverness and I went on to Glasgow. We did a handshake which was like a family thing which our older brother had invented, which was very suspicious and didn't help us in the long run at all."
Jonathan recalls: "It was pretty alarming because with my brother came the sense of home, but then from there on you didn't know where you were going. I remember I cried with the foster mother and she sort of hugged me and I cried with the foster father as well and it was the same thing. They were great."
The community was left shocked and scared. Everyone worried that their children would be next. A meeting in St Margaret's Hope village hall, chaired by local paediatrician Dr Helen Martini, laid the foundations for the whole campaign that would follow. The media were beginning to arrive in Orkney in large numbers; in the main they expected to write their stories of "poor abused children" and speculate on what all these incomers had been up to on a remote Scottish island.

One parent from each of the families related what had happened at 7am two days before. Each told their story simply and with dignity. They described how the police searched their homes, examining everything, and how they took an assortment of private papers, books, video tapes, clothing and other diverse objects away with them. They realised they were looking for evidence of rituals.
Attitudes changed perceptibly during these testimonies. The atmosphere was electric; there was real anger at the way the local authority had behaved. An action committee was formed and the decision was taken to use the media, and to fight against this affront to the community.
The Children's Hearing system was in something of an upheaval in Orkney at the time. It wasn't working in the way it should have been: the children were not brought back to the island to attend panel meetings. As the case went to court, the parents worried that instead of being innocent until proved otherwise, they had to prove their innocence. It seemed it would be decided on the balance of probablilities; William, the father of Sam and Jonathan, says he didn't think the law would be strong enough.
But when the case came before Sheriff David Kelbie in Kirkwall, he was delighted to be proved wrong. Sheriff Kelbie listened to the tapes of the interviews with all the children, heard their denials, heard the leading questions, and decided he could not let the case continue. It was, he said, fatally flawed. The atmosphere in the courtroom that day was highly charged, and you could have heard the proverbial pin drop.
After the sheriff stopped speaking, the quiet sobs of one of the mothers broke the silence. The children were returned to Orkney the next day. Sheriff Kelbie died in 2001; William describes him as a real law-giver.
Sandy, reflecting on the events that brutally affected the lives of her family, says that the those in authority can't admit to mistakes. "Once people get hyped up with witch-hunts, be it Salem, Orkney or terrorism, it gets exciting," she says. "And you get tyranny."
The whole family praises the community of South Ronaldsay for the wonderful job they did. Sam and Jonathan say the events altered but didn't impede their lives – although they did change for ever the way they feel about authority, and about social workers in particular. "Whatever happens," says Jonathan, "I will never, ever trust them."
Accused is on BBC2 at 9pm on Tuesday August 22. Anne Brown was the author of the 1992 book Orkney, A Place of Safety, under the pseudonym Robin Black.
It was early in the morning of February 27, 1991, that it happened. It was a dark, murky sort of day – like so many February days on Orkney – but brothers Jonathan and Sam were warm and comfortable in their beds.
It happened at 7am. Sam, 15, and 12-year-old Jonathan woke up to find a crowd of police officers and social workers pushing their way into their bedrooms. "It was a strange way to wake up," says Jonathan. "I was told to get dressed and I was watched while I dressed and told we couldn't take anything."
Sam considered trying to escape, but didn't want to leave his younger brother. Apart from anything else, he just wanted to hug his mum. "A policewoman told me I couldn't. I told her to **** off and did it anyway."
Forbidden from picking up a favourite toy or any other thing to remind them of home, the brothers were hustled out of the door and into waiting cars. Without any explanation, they were driven away into the murky morning, across the Churchill Barriers towards Kirkwall.
It was a pattern happening elsewhere on the island that morning. In all, nine children from four families were taken from their homes on South Ronaldsay that day. They were flown from Orkney to foster homes in Inverness and Glasgow. Sibling was separated from sibling, and any contact with home, family or friends was completely cut off. No letters, cards, parcels or phone calls were allowed from anybody, and the foster families were told not to allow the children to read the papers or watch the news.
Their case went on to become one of the most controversial in British child-protection history. It featured a small island community that learned how to use the press and news media to fight. against the power of the state. Now, 15 years on, some of those involved – including Sam and Jonathan – have spoken for the first time about their ordeal for a new BBC documentary.
Sam was placed in secure accommodation for young offenders in Ayrshire, even though he had never offended in any way. There, he alone of the nine children had access to news reports. Speaking now, he remembers how angry he was. "It was an unbelievable situation. It's not that you've committed a crime and been caught – it's just you're at school and the next day you're at school in a borstal."
Sam knew he had to remain calm. "You try to behave in the most dignified manner you can, but internally you are completely freaking out. You have no idea what's going to happen. Nothing about anything you're doing is in your hands any more. Nothing."
Sam, now 30, and Jonathan, now 27, were initially reticent to talk about that time. It was a part of their lives they had put well behind them. Then they realised they didn't want the story to be told without them. Jonathan said that only the other side would be heard without them.
Both brothers now have children of their own. They are not prepared to release many personal details, but they are both back living in Orkney after spending a few years based in Edinburgh, from where they travelled and made films. They are two young men getting on with their lives – but that day 15 years ago is still a powerful memory.
The story of Jonathan and Sam, whose parents Sandy and William also take part in the documentary, had its roots in another case altogether. All the families involved were incomers to Orkney. They had chosen to make their homes in a place that offered a peaceful way of life, and were made welcome and quickly included in island life.
But another family that came to Orkney were not made so welcome. The W family, as they became known, turned up with 14 children and another on the way. Social worker Charlie Fraser happened to observe them as they disembarked from the ferry; he thought to himself that this dishevelled family could mean trouble that would land on his desk. It did. The social work department kept a close eye on them – especially the wild antics of the children – from the moment they arrived. But no-one could have foreseen how their case would blow up, or the impact it would have on so many lives.
The 1980s had seen a revolution in child protection, when people became more aware of the sexual abuse of children and began to discuss the problem openly. But this revolution had passed Orkney by, and the islands' social workers had no experience of interviewing child victims. So when allegations of cruelty and physical abuse against their father began to emerge from the W children, Orkney Islands Council engaged the services of the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (RSSPCC) to take care of the disclosure interviews.
Mr W was jailed, and the children under 16 were taken into care and moved away from Orkney. It was then that suggestions of sexual abuse within the family began to emerge.
Leading the interviews with the children, in November 1990, was social worker Liz McLean, employed by the RSSPCC. She was an adherent of American theories on how to find and identify incidents of sexual and satanic abuse, believed by certain groups to be rife.
A list of "abuse indicators" was widely used by social workers. One of these said that if children said they hadn't been abused, they had. Liz McLean was recognised as a pioneer in her field, and her team, including Orkney social workers, followed her lead, adopting her conviction that child abuse was widespread and had to be discovered by any means. She was robustly criticised by Lord Clyde in the inquiry that followed the whole sequence of events. She hasn't been seen or heard of since.
Jonathan remembers her well. "Liz McLean was there and she is a very large woman, quite intimidating in a friendly way, if you understand what I mean, so there would be a mean air about her while seeming to be nice … 'We know that something happened to you – we know this' … in a nice soft voice. But it was relentless, didn't stop.
"They were talking about things people wore and things like that and saying, 'I'm not a very good drawer, can you draw it for me please?' You want to be obliging as a child with adults … It was a ring of people with someone in the centre and you don't know why you're being asked to draw this so you don't resist. And you get an idea that you don't want to have done that and you feel foolish and sort of duped."
Another social worker, Janette Chisholm, worked with Liz McLean at the time. Together they conducted disclosure interviews with the W children, and with the nine others who were taken from their homes in February 1991. They were relentless in their search – some call it a witch-hunt – for admissions by the children that they had been abused.
The disclosure sessions lasted for hours every day. The children were asked leading questions, told what to draw and promised food if they gave the "right" answers. Some gave the answers they thought were expected just to make the interrogation stop.
It was from the interviews with three of the younger W children that Liz McLean gathered enough "evidence" to convince her that a paedophile ring was operating in South Ronaldsay. This led to the removal of the other children, and allegations of lewd and libidinous behaviour being levelled against their parents and against the local minister, the Rev Morris MacKenzie.
May W takes part in the BBC2 film. An attractive young woman, she talks about the treatment she received at the hands of the social workers, the leading questions, the instructions to draw certain things and the way everything she said or drew was misinterpreted to fit a scenario that they already had in mind. "In order to get out of a room, after an hour or so of saying, 'No, this never happened,' you'd break down," she says. May and her siblings were kept in care for many years. She is still angry, and says that the authorities stole her childhood.
The children, away from their island homes, were subject to embarrassing medical examinations. Sam was told it was a medical to test that he was in good health: "I was told to strip from the waist down and given an examination of the genitals and an anal swab," he says. "That's when I thought they were obviously looking for signs of sexual abuse."

Janette Chisholm makes it very clear that, 15 years on, her views about the case have not changed. She still believes the nine children were abused, despite their denials as children and their denials today. She still believes it was right to allow them no contact with their families while they were in care, because they could have received coded messages designed to control them. She laughs at the parents pleading innocence and maintains their denials means they are still keeping secrets. She says the children have been let down.
What she doesn't say is that the RSSPCC eventually admitted they had got it wrong and apologised to the Orkney parents in a live broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland.
The families who were identified following the interviews with the W children were mostly people who knew the W family or had become involved with helping them in one way or another. Sandy and William, both trained teachers, had bought a farm on South Ronaldsay. They were asked by the local authority to take on the education of one of the W girls, a school refuser, and they extended their interest in the family by inviting the children to come and socialise with their own. Others in the area knew the children, or offered their skills to help. It was their children who were removed in that dawn raid.
After the children had gone, the parents were driven separately to police stations in Kirkwall and Stromness where they, as well as the minister and his wife, were interrogated for hours. One family didn't fit the picture at all: they had had no contact at all with the Ws. The uplifting of their two young children was a mistake.
There were many other mistakes. Orkney Islands Council took the rather garbled interviews from three confused young children and decided they were absolute truth. Without checking anything with teachers, doctors or anyone else, they acted. They decided that "everyone" in the community was involved, and conducted their whole operation in secrecy. It was conducted without finding out that one child suffered badly from asthma or that two came from a Jewish family and had certain dietary requirements. They knew nothing at all about the children they removed.
Medical evidence was never found. After they returned home at the end of five agonising weeks, the other children voiced their anger at not being believed by Liz McLean and her team. It didn't matter how often they said nothing had happened to them, or that their parents wouldn't hurt children; each time they were told: "Oh, but we know what happened" or "We know you know about this".
It was distressing, too, for siblings to be separated. It was thought they might exercise some sort of control over each other. Jonathan was taken to Inverness before the plane flew on to Glasgow. Sam says it was hard for them to be split up there: "We weren't allowed to say goodbye to each other when he got off in Inverness and I went on to Glasgow. We did a handshake which was like a family thing which our older brother had invented, which was very suspicious and didn't help us in the long run at all."
Jonathan recalls: "It was pretty alarming because with my brother came the sense of home, but then from there on you didn't know where you were going. I remember I cried with the foster mother and she sort of hugged me and I cried with the foster father as well and it was the same thing. They were great."
The community was left shocked and scared. Everyone worried that their children would be next. A meeting in St Margaret's Hope village hall, chaired by local paediatrician Dr Helen Martini, laid the foundations for the whole campaign that would follow. The media were beginning to arrive in Orkney in large numbers; in the main they expected to write their stories of "poor abused children" and speculate on what all these incomers had been up to on a remote Scottish island.

One parent from each of the families related what had happened at 7am two days before. Each told their story simply and with dignity. They described how the police searched their homes, examining everything, and how they took an assortment of private papers, books, video tapes, clothing and other diverse objects away with them. They realised they were looking for evidence of rituals.
Attitudes changed perceptibly during these testimonies. The atmosphere was electric; there was real anger at the way the local authority had behaved. An action committee was formed and the decision was taken to use the media, and to fight against this affront to the community.
The Children's Hearing system was in something of an upheaval in Orkney at the time. It wasn't working in the way it should have been: the children were not brought back to the island to attend panel meetings. As the case went to court, the parents worried that instead of being innocent until proved otherwise, they had to prove their innocence. It seemed it would be decided on the balance of probablilities; William, the father of Sam and Jonathan, says he didn't think the law would be strong enough.
But when the case came before Sheriff David Kelbie in Kirkwall, he was delighted to be proved wrong. Sheriff Kelbie listened to the tapes of the interviews with all the children, heard their denials, heard the leading questions, and decided he could not let the case continue. It was, he said, fatally flawed. The atmosphere in the courtroom that day was highly charged, and you could have heard the proverbial pin drop.
After the sheriff stopped speaking, the quiet sobs of one of the mothers broke the silence. The children were returned to Orkney the next day. Sheriff Kelbie died in 2001; William describes him as a real law-giver.
Sandy, reflecting on the events that brutally affected the lives of her family, says that the those in authority can't admit to mistakes. "Once people get hyped up with witch-hunts, be it Salem, Orkney or terrorism, it gets exciting," she says. "And you get tyranny."
The whole family praises the community of South Ronaldsay for the wonderful job they did. Sam and Jonathan say the events altered but didn't impede their lives – although they did change for ever the way they feel about authority, and about social workers in particular. "Whatever happens," says Jonathan, "I will never, ever trust them."
Accused is on BBC2 at 9pm on Tuesday August 22. Anne Brown was the author of the 1992 book Orkney, A Place of Safety, under the pseudonym Robin Black.
It was early in the morning of February 27, 1991, that it happened. It was a dark, murky sort of day – like so many February days on Orkney – but brothers Jonathan and Sam were warm and comfortable in their beds.
It happened at 7am. Sam, 15, and 12-year-old Jonathan woke up to find a crowd of police officers and social workers pushing their way into their bedrooms. "It was a strange way to wake up," says Jonathan. "I was told to get dressed and I was watched while I dressed and told we couldn't take anything."
Sam considered trying to escape, but didn't want to leave his younger brother. Apart from anything else, he just wanted to hug his mum. "A policewoman told me I couldn't. I told her to **** off and did it anyway."
Forbidden from picking up a favourite toy or any other thing to remind them of home, the brothers were hustled out of the door and into waiting cars. Without any explanation, they were driven away into the murky morning, across the Churchill Barriers towards Kirkwall.
It was a pattern happening elsewhere on the island that morning. In all, nine children from four families were taken from their homes on South Ronaldsay that day. They were flown from Orkney to foster homes in Inverness and Glasgow. Sibling was separated from sibling, and any contact with home, family or friends was completely cut off. No letters, cards, parcels or phone calls were allowed from anybody, and the foster families were told not to allow the children to read the papers or watch the news.
Their case went on to become one of the most controversial in British child-protection history. It featured a small island community that learned how to use the press and news media to fight against the power of the state. Now, 15 years on, some of those involved – including Sam and Jonathan – have spoken for the first time about their ordeal for a new BBC documentary.
Sam was placed in secure accommodation for young offenders in Ayrshire, even though he had never offended in any way. There, he alone of the nine children had access to news reports. Speaking now, he remembers how angry he was. "It was an unbelievable situation. It's not that you've committed a crime and been caught – it's just you're at school and the next day you're at school in a borstal."
Sam knew he had to remain calm. "You try to behave in the most dignified manner you can, but internally you are completely freaking out. You have no idea what's going to happen. Nothing about anything you're doing is in your hands any more. Nothing."
Sam, now 30, and Jonathan, now 27, were initially reticent to talk about that time. It was a part of their lives they had put well behind them. Then they realised they didn't want the story to be told without them. Jonathan said that only the other side would be heard without them.
Both brothers now have children of their own. They are not prepared to release many personal details, but they are both back living in Orkney after spending a few years based in Edinburgh, from where they travelled and made films. They are two young men getting on with their lives – but that day 15 years ago is still a powerful memory.
The story of Jonathan and Sam, whose parents Sandy and William also take part in the documentary, had its roots in another case altogether. All the families involved were incomers to Orkney. They had chosen to make their homes in a place that offered a peaceful way of life,
A list of "abuse indicators" was widely used by social workers. One of these said that if children said they hadn't been abused, they had. Liz McLean was recognised as a pioneer in her field, and her team, including Orkney social workers, followed her lead, adopting her conviction that child abuse was widespread and had to be discovered by any means. She was robustly criticised by Lord Clyde in the inquiry that followed the whole sequence of events. She hasn't been seen or heard of since.
Jonathan remembers her well. "Liz McLean was there and she is a very large woman, quite intimidating in a friendly way, if you understand what I mean, so there would be a mean air about her while seeming to be nice … 'We know that something happened to you – we know this' … in a nice soft voice. But it was relentless, didn't stop.
"They were talking about things people wore and things like that and saying, 'I'm not a very good drawer, can you draw it for me please?' You want to be obliging as a child with adults … It was a ring of people with someone in the centre and you don't know why you're being asked to draw this so you don't resist. And you get an idea that you don't want to have done that and you feel foolish and sort of duped."
Another social worker, Janette Chisholm, worked with Liz McLean at the time. Together they conducted disclosure interviews with the W children, and with the nine others who were taken from their homes in February 1991. They were relentless in their search – some call it a witch-hunt – for admissions by the children that they had been abused.
The disclosure sessions lasted for hours every day. The children were asked leading questions, told what to draw and promised food if they gave the "right" answers. Some gave the answers they thought were expected just to make the interrogation stop.
It was from the interviews with three of the younger W children that Liz McLean gathered enough "evidence" to convince her that a paedophile ring was operating in South Ronaldsay. This led to the removal of the other children, and allegations of lewd and libidinous behaviour being levelled against their parents and against the local minister, the Rev Morris MacKenzie.
May W takes part in the BBC2 film. An attractive young woman, she talks about the treatment she received at the hands of the social workers, the leading questions, the instructions to draw certain things and the way everything she said or drew was misinterpreted to fit a scenario that they already had in mind. "In order to get out of a room, after an hour or so of saying, 'No, this never happened,' you'd break down," she says. May and her siblings were kept in care for many years. She is still angry, and says that the authorities stole her childhood.
The children, away from their island homes, were subject to embarrassing medical examinations. Sam was told it was a medical to test that he was in good health: "I was told to strip from the waist down and given an examination of the genitals and an anal swab," he says. "That's when I thought they were obviously looking for signs of sexual abuse."

Janette Chisholm makes it very clear that, 15 years on, her views about the case have not changed. She still believes the nine children were abused, despite their denials as children and their denials today. She still believes it was right to allow them no contact with their families while they were in care, because they could have received coded messages designed to control them. She laughs at the parents pleading innocence and maintains their denials means they are still keeping secrets. She says the children have been let down.
What she doesn't say is that the RSSPCC eventually admitted they had got it wrong and apologised to the Orkney parents in a live broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland.
The families who were identified following the interviews with the W children were mostly people who knew the W family or had become involved with helping them in one way or another. Sandy and William, both trained teachers, had bought a farm on South Ronaldsay. They were asked by the local authority to take on the education of one of the W girls, a school refuser, and they extended their interest in the family by inviting the children to come and socialise with their own. Others in the area knew the children, or offered their skills to help. It was their children who were removed in that dawn raid.
After the children had gone, the parents were driven separately to police stations in Kirkwall and Stromness where they, as well as the minister and his wife, were interrogated for hours. One family didn't fit the picture at all: they had had no contact at all with the Ws. The uplifting of their two young children was a mistake.
There were many other mistakes. Orkney Islands Council took the rather garbled interviews from three confused young children and decided they were absolute truth. Without checking anything with teachers, doctors or anyone else, they acted. They decided that "everyone" in the community was involved, and conducted their whole operation in secrecy. It was conducted without finding out that one child suffered badly from asthma or that two came from a Jewish family and had certain dietary requirements. They knew nothing at all about the children they removed.
Medical evidence was never found. After they returned home at the end of five agonising weeks, the other children voiced their anger at not being believed by Liz McLean and her team. It didn't matter how often they said nothing had happened to them, or that their parents wouldn't hurt children; each time they were told: "Oh, but we know what happened" or "We know you know about this".
It was distressing, too, for siblings to be separated. It was thought they might exercise some sort of control over each other. Jonathan was taken to Inverness before the plane flew on to Glasgow. Sam says it was hard for them to be split up there: "We weren't allowed to say goodbye to each other when he got off in Inverness and I went on to Glasgow. We did a handshake which was like a family thing which our older brother had invented, which was very suspicious and didn't help us in the long run at all."
Jonathan recalls: "It was pretty alarming because with my brother came the sense of home, but then from there on you didn't know where you were going. I remember I cried with the foster mother and she sort of hugged me and I cried with the foster father as well and it was the same thing. They were great."
The community was left shocked and scared. Everyone worried that their children would be next. A meeting in St Margaret's Hope village hall, chaired by local paediatrician Dr Helen Martini, laid the foundations for the whole campaign that would follow. The media were beginning to arrive in Orkney in large numbers; in the main they expected to write their stories of "poor abused children" and speculate on what all these incomers had been up to on a remote Scottish island.

One parent from each of the families related what had happened at 7am two days before. Each told their story simply and with dignity. They described how the police searched their homes, examining everything, and how they took an assortment of private papers, books, video tapes, clothing and other diverse objects away with them. They realised they were looking for evidence of rituals.
Attitudes changed perceptibly during these testimonies. The atmosphere was electric; there was real anger at the way the local authority had behaved. An action committee was formed and the decision was taken to use the media, and to fight against this affront to the community.
The Children's Hearing system was in something of an upheaval in Orkney at the time. It wasn't working in the way it should have been: the children were not brought back to the island to attend panel meetings. As the case went to court, the parents worried that instead of being innocent until proved otherwise, they had to prove their innocence. It seemed it would be decided on the balance of probablilities; William, the father of Sam and Jonathan, says he didn't think the law would be strong enough.
But when the case came before Sheriff David Kelbie in Kirkwall, he was delighted to be proved wrong. Sheriff Kelbie listened to the tapes of the interviews with all the children, heard their denials, heard the leading questions, and decided he could not let the case continue. It was, he said, fatally flawed. The atmosphere in the courtroom that day was highly charged, and you could have heard the proverbial pin drop.
After the sheriff stopped speaking, the quiet sobs of one of the mothers broke the silence. The children were returned to Orkney the next day. Sheriff Kelbie died in 2001; William describes him as a real law-giver.
Sandy, reflecting on the events that brutally affected the lives of her family, says that the those in authority can't admit to mistakes. "Once people get hyped up with witch-hunts, be it Salem, Orkney or terrorism, it gets exciting," she says. "And you get tyranny."
The whole family praises the community of South Ronaldsay for the wonderful job they did. Sam and Jonathan say the events altered but didn't impede their lives – although they did change for ever the way they feel about authority, and about social workers in particular. "Whatever happens," says Jonathan, "I will never, ever trust them."
Accused is on BBC2 at 9pm on Tuesday August 22. Anne Brown was the author of the 1992 book Orkney, A Place of Safety, under the pseudonym Robin Black.
It was early in the morning of February 27, 1991, that it happened. It was a dark, murky sort of day – like so many February days on Orkney – but brothers Jonathan and Sam were warm and comfortable in their beds.
It happened at 7am. Sam, 15, and 12-year-old Jonathan woke up to find a crowd of police officers and social workers pushing their way into their bedrooms. "It was a strange way to wake up," says Jonathan. "I was told to get dressed and I was watched while I dressed and told we couldn't take anything."
Sam considered trying to escape, but didn't want to leave his younger brother. Apart from anything else, he just wanted to hug his mum. "A policewoman told me I couldn't. I told her to **** off and did it anyway."
Forbidden from picking up a favourite toy or any other thing to remind them of home, the brothers were hustled out of the door and into waiting cars. Without any explanation, they were driven away into the murky morning, across the Churchill Barriers towards Kirkwall.
It was a pattern happening elsewhere on the island that morning. In all, nine children from four families were taken from their homes on South Ronaldsay that day. They were flown from Orkney to foster homes in Inverness and Glasgow. Sibling was separated from sibling, and any contact with home, family or friends was completely cut off. No letters, cards, parcels or phone calls were allowed from anybody, and the foster families were told not to allow the children to read the papers or watch the news.
Their case went on to become one of the most controversial in British child-protection history. It featured a small island community that learned how to use the press and news media to fight against the power of the state. Now, 15 years on, some of those involved – including Sam and Jonathan – have spoken for the first time about their ordeal for a new BBC documentary.
Sam was placed in secure accommodation for young offenders in Ayrshire, even though he had never offended in any way. There, he alone of the nine children had access to news reports. Speaking now, he remembers how angry he was. "It was an unbelievable situation. It's not that you've committed a crime and been caught – it's just you're at school and the next day you're at school in a borstal."
Sam knew he had to remain calm. "You try to behave in the most dignified manner you can, but internally you are completely freaking out. You have no idea what's going to happen. Nothing about anything you're doing is in your hands any more. Nothing."
Sam, now 30, and Jonathan, now 27, were initially reticent to talk about that time. It was a part of their lives they had put well behind them. Then they realised they didn't want the story to be told without them. Jonathan said that only the other side would be heard without them.
Both brothers now have children of their own. They are not prepared to release many personal details, but they are both back living in Orkney after spending a few years based in Edinburgh, from where they travelled and made films. They are two young men getting on with their lives – but that day 15 years ago is still a powerful memory.
The story of Jonathan and Sam, whose parents Sandy and William also take part in the documentary, had its roots in another case altogether. All the families involved were incomers to Orkney. They had chosen to make their homes in a place that offered a peaceful way of life, and were made welcome and quickly included in island life.
But another family that came to Orkney were not made so welcome. The W family, as they became known, turned up with 14 children and another on the way. Social worker Charlie Fraser happened to observe them as they disembarked from the ferry; he thought to himself that this dishevelled family could mean trouble that would land on his desk. It did. The social work department kept a close eye on them – especially the wild antics of the children – from the moment they arrived. But no-one could have foreseen how their case would blow up, or the impact it would have on so many lives.
The 1980s had seen a revolution in child protection, when people became more aware of the sexual abuse of children and began to discuss the problem openly. But this revolution had passed Orkney by, and the islands' social workers had no experience of interviewing child victims. So when allegations of cruelty and physical abuse against their father began to emerge from the W children, Orkney Islands Council engaged the services of the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (RSSPCC) to take care of the disclosure interviews.
Mr W was jailed, and the children under 16 were taken into care and moved away from Orkney. It was then that suggestions of sexual abuse within the family began to emerge.
Leading the interviews with the children, in November 1990, was social worker Liz McLean, employed by the RSSPCC. She was an adherent of American theories on how to find and identify incidents of sexual and satanic abuse, believed by certain groups to be rife.
A list of "abuse indicators" was widely used by social workers. One of these said that if children said they hadn't been abused, they had. Liz McLean was recognised as a pioneer in her field, and her team, including Orkney social workers, followed her lead, adopting her conviction that child abuse was widespread and had to be discovered by any means. She was robustly criticised by Lord Clyde in the inquiry that followed the whole sequence of events. She hasn't been seen or heard of since.
Jonathan remembers her well. "Liz McLean was there and she is a very large woman, quite intimidating in a friendly way, if you understand what I mean, so there would be a mean air about her while seeming to be nice … 'We know that something happened to you – we know this' … in a nice soft voice. But it was relentless, didn't stop.
"They were talking about things people wore and things like that and saying, 'I'm not a very good drawer, can you draw it for me please?' You want to be obliging as a child with adults … It was a ring of people with someone in the centre and you don't know why you're being asked to draw this so you don't resist. And you get an idea that you don't want to have done that and you feel foolish and sort of duped."
Another social worker, Janette Chisholm, worked with Liz McLean at the time. Together they conducted disclosure interviews with the W children, and with the nine others who were taken from their homes in February 1991. They were relentless in their search – some call it a witch-hunt – for admissions by the children that they had been abused.
The disclosure sessions lasted for hours every day. The children were asked leading questions, told what to draw and promised food if they gave the
right" answers. Some gave the answers they thought were expected just to make the interrogation stop.
It was from the interviews with three of the younger W children that Liz McLean gathered enough "evidence" to convince her that a paedophile ring was operating in South Ronaldsay. This led to the removal of the other children, and allegations of lewd and libidinous behaviour being levelled against their parents and against the local minister, the Rev Morris MacKenzie.
May W takes part in the BBC2 film. An attractive young woman, she talks about the treatment she received at the hands of the social workers, the leading questions, the instructions to draw certain things and the way everything she said or drew was misinterpreted to fit a scenario that they already had in mind. "In order to get out of a room, after an hour or so of saying, 'No, this never happened,' you'd break down," she says. May and her siblings were kept in care for many years. She is still angry, and says that the authorities stole her childhood.
The children, away from their island homes, were subject to embarrassing medical examinations. Sam was told it was a medical to test that he was in good health: "I was told to strip from the waist down and given an examination of the genitals and an anal swab," he says. "That's when I thought they were obviously looking for signs of sexual abuse."

Janette Chisholm makes it very clear that, 15 years on, her views about the case have not changed. She still believes the nine children were abused, despite their denials as children and their denials today. She still believes it was right to allow them no contact with their families while they were in care, because they could have received coded messages designed to control them. She laughs at the parents pleading innocence and maintains their denials means they are still keeping secrets. She says the children have been let down.
What she doesn't say is that the RSSPCC eventually admitted they had got it wrong and apologised to the Orkney parents in a live broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland.
The families who were identified following the interviews with the W children were mostly people who knew the W family or had become involved with helping them in one way or another. Sandy and William, both trained teachers, had bought a farm on South Ronaldsay. They were asked by the local authority to take on the education of one of the W girls, a school refuser, and they extended their interest in the family by inviting the children to come and socialise with their own. Others in the area knew the children, or offered their skills to help. It was their children who were removed in that dawn raid.
After the children had gone, the parents were driven separately to police stations in Kirkwall and Stromness where they, as well as the minister and his wife, were interrogated for hours. One family didn't fit the picture at all: they had had no contact at all with the Ws. The uplifting of their two young children was a mistake.
There were many other mistakes. Orkney Islands Council took the rather garbled interviews from three confused young children and decided they were absolute truth. Without checking anything with teachers, doctors or anyone else, they acted. They decided that "everyone" in the community was involved, and conducted their whole operation in secrecy. It was conducted without finding out that one child suffered badly from asthma or that two came from a Jewish family and had certain dietary requirements. They knew nothing at all about the children they removed.
Medical evidence was never found. After they returned home at the end of five agonising weeks, the other children voiced their anger at not being believed by Liz McLean and her team. It didn't matter how often they said nothing had happened to them, or that their parents wouldn't hurt children; each time they were told: "Oh, but we know what happened" or "We know you know about this".
It was distressing, too, for siblings to be separated. It was thought they might exercise some sort of control over each other. Jonathan was taken to Inverness before the plane flew on to Glasgow. Sam says it was hard for them to be split up there: "We weren't allowed to say goodbye to each other when he got off in Inverness and I went on to Glasgow. We did a handshake which was like a family thing which our older brother had invented, which was very suspicious and didn't help us in the long run at all."
Jonathan recalls: "It was pretty alarming because with my brother came the sense of home, but then from there on you didn't know where you were going. I remember I cried with the foster mother and she sort of hugged me and I cried with the foster father as well and it was the same thing. They were great."
The community was left shocked and scared. Everyone worried that their children would be next. A meeting in St Margaret's Hope village hall, chaired by local paediatrician Dr Helen Martini, laid the foundations for the whole campaign that would follow. The media were beginning to arrive in Orkney in large numbers; in the main they expected to write their stories of "poor abused children" and speculate on what all these incomers had been up to on a remote Scottish island.

One parent from each of the families related what had happened at 7am two days before. Each told their story simply and with dignity. They described how the police searched their homes, examining everything, and how they took an assortment of private papers, books, video tapes, clothing and other diverse objects away with them. They realised they were looking for evidence of rituals.
Attitudes changed perceptibly during these testimonies. The atmosphere was electric; there was real anger at the way the local authority had behaved. An action committee was formed and the decision was taken to use the media, and to fight against this affront to the community.
The Children's Hearing system was in something of an upheaval in Orkney at the time. It wasn't working in the way it should have been: the children were not brought back to the island to attend panel meetings. As the case went to court, the parents worried that instead of being innocent until proved otherwise, they had to prove their innocence. It seemed it would be decided on the balance of probablilities; William, the father of Sam and Jonathan, says he didn't think the law would be strong enough.
But when the case came before Sheriff David Kelbie in Kirkwall, he was delighted to be proved wrong. Sheriff Kelbie listened to the tapes of the interviews with all the children, heard their denials, heard the leading questions, and decided he could not let the case continue. It was, he said, fatally flawed. The atmosphere in the courtroom that day was highly charged, and you could have heard the proverbial pin drop.
After the sheriff stopped speaking, the quiet sobs of one of the mothers broke the silence. The children were returned to Orkney the next day. Sheriff Kelbie died in 2001; William describes him as a real law-giver.
Sandy, reflecting on the events that brutally affected the lives of her family, says that the those in authority can't admit to mistakes. "Once people get hyped up with witch-hunts, be it Salem, Orkney or terrorism, it gets exciting," she says. "And you get tyranny."
The whole family praises the community of South Ronaldsay for the wonderful job they did. Sam and Jonathan say the events altered but didn't impede their lives – although they did change for ever the way they feel about authority, and about social workers in particular. "Whatever happens," says Jonathan, "I will never, ever trust them."
Accused is on BBC2 at 9pm on Tuesday August 22. Anne Brown was the author of the 1992 book Orkney, A Place of Safety, under the pseudonym Robin Black.
It was early in the morning of February 27, 1991, that it happened. It was a dark, murky sort of day – like so many February days on Orkney – but brothers Jonathan and Sam were warm and comfortable in their beds.
It happened at 7am. Sam, 15, and 12-year-old Jonathan woke up to find a crowd of police officers and social workers pushing their way into their bedrooms. "It was a strange way to wake up," says Jonathan. "I was told to get dressed and I was watched while I dressed and told we couldn't take anything."
Sam considered trying to escape, but didn't want to leave his younger brother. Apart from anything else, he just wanted to hug his mum. "A policewoman told me I couldn't. I told her to **** off and did it anyway."
Forbidden from picking up a favourite toy or any other thing to remind them of home, the brothers were hustled out of the door and into waiting cars. Without any explanation, they were driven away into the murky morning, across the Churchill Barriers towards Kirkwall.
It was a pattern happening elsewhere on the island that morning. In all, nine children from four families were taken from their homes on South Ronaldsay that day. They were flown from Orkney to foster homes in Inverness and Glasgow. Sibling was separated from sibling, and any contact with home, family or friends was completely cut off. No letters, cards, parcels or phone calls were allowed from anybody, and the foster families were told not to allow the children to read the papers or watch the news.
Their case went on to become one of the most controversial in British child-protection history. It featured a small island community that learned how to use the press and news media to fight against the power of the state. Now, 15 years on, some of those involved – including Sam and Jonathan – have spoken for the first time about their ordeal for a new BBC documentary.
Sam was placed in secure accommodation for young offenders in Ayrshire, even though he had never offended in any way. There, he alone of the nine children had access to news reports. Speaking now, he remembers how angry he was. "It was an unbelievable situation. It's not that you've committed a crime and been caught – it's just you're at school and the next day you're at school in a borstal."
Sam knew he had to remain calm. "You try to behave in the most dignified manner you can, but internally you are completely freaking out. You have no idea what's going to happen. Nothing about anything you're doing is in your hands any more. Nothing."
Sam, now 30, and Jonathan, now 27, were initially reticent to talk about that time. It was a part of their lives they had put well behind them. Then they realised they didn't want the story to be told without them. Jonathan said that only the other side would be heard without them.
Both brothers now have children of their own. They are not prepared to release many personal details, but they are both back living in Orkney after spending a few years based in Edinburgh, from where they travelled and made films. They are two young men getting on with their lives – but that day 15 years ago is still a powerful memory.
The story of Jonathan and Sam, whose parents Sandy and William also take part in the documentary, had its roots in another case altogether. All the families involved were incomers to Orkney. They had chosen to make their homes in a place that offered a peaceful way of life, and were made welcome and quickly included in island life.
But another family that came to Orkney were not made so welcome. The W family, as they became known, turned up with 14 children and another on the way. Social worker Charlie Fraser happened to observe them as they disembarked from the ferry; he thought to himself that this dishevelled family could mean trouble that would land on his desk. It did. The social work department kept a close eye on them – especially the wild antics of the children – from the moment they arrived. But no-one could have foreseen how their case would blow up, or the impact it would have on so many lives.
The 1980s had seen a revolution in child protection, when people became more aware of the sexual abuse of children and began to discuss the problem openly. But this revolution had passed Orkney by, and the islands' social workers had no experience of interviewing child victims. So when allegations of cruelty and physical abuse against their father began to emerge from the W children, Orkney Islands Council engaged the services of the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (RSSPCC) to take care of the disclosure interviews.
Mr W was jailed, and the children under 16 were taken into care and moved away from Orkney. It was then that suggestions of sexual abuse within the family began to emerge.
Leading the interviews with the children, in November 1990, was social worker Liz McLean, employed by the RSSPCC. She was an adherent of American theories on how to find and identify incidents of sexual and satanic abuse, believed by certain groups to be rife.
A list of "abuse indicators" was widely used by social workers. One of these said that if children said they hadn't been abused, they had. Liz McLean was recognised as a pioneer in her field, and her team, including Orkney social workers, followed her lead, adopting her conviction that child abuse was widespread and had to be discovered by any means. She was robustly criticised by Lord Clyde in the inquiry that followed the whole sequence of events. She hasn't been seen or heard of since.
Jonathan remembers her well. "Liz McLean was there and she is a very large woman, quite intimidating in a friendly way, if you understand what I mean, so there would be a mean air about her while seeming to be nice … 'We know that something happened to you – we know this' … in a nice soft voice. But it was relentless, didn't stop.
"They were talking about things people wore and things like that and saying, 'I'm not a very good drawer, can you draw it for me please?' You want to be obliging as a child with adults … It was a ring of people with someone in the centre and you don't know why you're being asked to draw this so you don't resist. And you get an idea that you don't want to have done that and you feel foolish and sort of duped."
Another social worker, Janette Chisholm, worked with Liz McLean at the time. Together they conducted disclosure interviews with the W children, and with the nine others who were taken from their homes in February 1991. They were relentless in their search – some call it a witch-hunt – for admissions by the children that they had been abused.
The disclosure sessions lasted for hours every day. The children were asked leading questions, told what to draw and promised food if they gave the "right" answers. Some gave the answers they thought were expected just to make the interrogation stop.
It was from the interviews with three of the younger W children that Liz McLean gathered enough "evidence" to convince her that a paedophile ring was operating in South Ronaldsay. This led to the removal of the other children, and allegations of lewd and libidinous behaviour being levelled against their parents and against the local minister, the Rev Morris MacKenzie.
May W takes part in the BBC2 film. An attractive young woman, she talks about the treatment she received at the hands of the social workers, the leading questions, the instructions to draw certain things and the way everything she said or drew was misinterpreted to fit a scenario that they already had in mind. "In order to get out of a room, after an hour or so of saying, 'No, this never happened,' you'd break down," she says. May and her siblings were kept in care for many years. She is still angry, and says that the authorities stole her childhood.
The children, away from their island homes, were subject to embarrassing medical examinations. Sam was told it was a medical to test that he was in good health: "I was told to strip from the waist down and given an examination of the genitals and an anal swab," he says. "That's when I thought they were obviously looking for signs of sexual abuse."

Janette Chisholm makes it very clear that, 15 years on, her views about the case have not changed. She still believes the nine children were abused, despite their denials as children and their denials today. She still believes it was right to allow them no contact with their families while they were in care, because they could have received coded messages designed to control them. She laughs at the parents pleading innocence and maintains their denials means they are still keeping secrets. She says the children have been let down.
What she doesn't say is that the RSSPCC eventually admitted they had got it wrong and apologised to the Orkney parents in a live broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland.
The families who were identified following the interviews with the W children were mostly people who knew the W family or had become involved with helping them in one way or another. Sandy and William, both trained teachers, had bought a farm on South Ronaldsay. They were asked by the local authority to take on the education of one of the W girls, a school refuser, and they extended their interest in the family by inviting the children to come and socialise with their own. Others in the area knew the children, or offered their skills to help. It was their children who were removed in that dawn raid.
After the children had gone, the parents were driven separately to police stations in Kirkwall and Stromness where they, as well as the minister and his wife, were interrogated for hours. One family didn't fit the picture at all: they had had no contact at all with the Ws. The uplifting of their two young children was a mistake.
There were many other mistakes. Orkney Islands Council took the rather garbled interviews from three confused young children and decided they were absolute truth. Without checking anything with teachers, doctors or anyone else, they acted. They decided that "everyone" in the community was involved, and conducted their whole operation in secrecy. It was conducted without finding out that one child suffered badly from asthma or that two came from a Jewish family and had certain dietary requirements. They knew nothing at all about the children they removed.
Medical evidence was never found. After they returned home at the end of five agonising weeks, the other children voiced their anger at not being believed by Liz McLean and her team. It didn't matter how often they said nothing had happened to them, or that their parents wouldn't hurt children; each time they were told: "Oh, but we know what happened" or "We know you know about this".
It was distressing, too, for siblings to be separated. It was thought they might exercise some sort of control over each other. Jonathan was taken to Inverness before the plane flew on to Glasgow. Sam says it was hard for them to be split up there: "We weren't allowed to say goodbye to each other when he got off in Inverness and I went on to Glasgow. We did a handshake which was like a family thing which our older brother had invented, which was very suspicious and didn't help us in the long run at all."
Jonathan recalls: "It was pretty alarming because with my brother came the sense of home, but then from there on you didn't know where you were going. I remember I cried with the foster mother and she sort of hugged me and I cried with the foster father as well and it was the same thing. They were great."
The community was left shocked and scared. Everyone worried that their children would be next. A meeting in St Margaret's Hope village hall, chaired by local paediatrician Dr Helen Martini, laid the foundations for the whole campaign that would follow. The media were beginning to arrive in Orkney in large numbers; in the main they expected to write their stories of "poor abused children" and speculate on what all these incomers had been up to on a remote Scottish island.

One parent from each of the families related what had happened at 7am two days before. Each told their story simply and with dignity. They described how the police searched their homes, examining everything, and how they took an assortment of private papers, books, video tapes, clothing and other diverse objects away with them. They realised they were looking for evidence of rituals.
Attitudes changed perceptibly during these testimonies. The atmosphere was electric; there was real anger at the way the local authority had behaved. An action committee was formed and the decision was taken to use the media, and to fight against this affront to the community.
The Children's Hearing system was in something of an upheaval in Orkney at the time. It wasn't working in the way it should have been: the children were not brought back to the island to attend panel meetings. As the case went to court, the parents worried that instead of being innocent until proved otherwise, they had to prove their innocence. It seemed it would be decided on the balance of probablilities; William, the father of Sam and Jonathan, says he didn't think the law would be strong enough.
But when the case came before Sheriff David Kelbie in Kirkwall, he was delighted to be proved wrong. Sheriff Kelbie listened to the tapes of the interviews with all the children, heard their denials, heard the leading questions, and decided he could not let the case continue. It was, he said, fatally flawed. The atmosphere in the courtroom that day was highly charged, and you could have heard the proverbial pin drop.
After the sheriff stopped speaking, the quiet sobs of one of the mothers broke the silence. The children were returned to Orkney the next day. Sheriff Kelbie died in 2001; William describes him as a real law-giver.
Sandy, reflecting on the events that brutally affected the lives of her family, says that the those in authority can't admit to mistakes. "Once people get hyped up with witch-hunts, be it Salem, Orkney or terrorism, it gets exciting," she says. "And you get tyranny."
The whole family praises the community of South Ronaldsay for the wonderful job they did. Sam and Jonathan say the events altered but didn't impede their lives – although they did change for ever the way they feel about authority, and about social workers in particular. "Whatever happens," says Jonathan, "I will never, ever trust them."
Accused is on BBC2 at 9pm on Tuesday August 22. Anne Brown was the author of the 1992 book Orkney, A Place of Safety, under the pseudonym Robin Black.
It was early in the morning of February 27, 1991, that it happened. It was a dark, murky sort of day – like so many February days on Orkney – but brothers Jonathan and Sam were warm and comfortable in their beds.
It happened at 7am. Sam, 15, and 12-year-old Jonathan woke up to find a crowd of police officers and social workers pushing their way into their bedrooms. "It was a strange way to wake up," says Jonathan. "I was told to get dressed and I was watched while I dressed and told we couldn't take anything."
Sam considered trying to escape, but didn't want to leave his younger brother. Apart from anything else, he just wanted to hug his mum. "A policewoman told me I couldn't. I told her to **** off and did it anyway."
Forbidden from picking up a favourite toy or any other thing to remind them of home, the brothers were hustled out of the door and into waiting cars. Without any explanation, they were driven away into the murky morning, across the Churchill Barriers towards Kirkwall.
It was a pattern happening elsewhere on the island that morning. In all, nine children from four families were taken from their homes on South Ronaldsay that day. They were flown from Orkney to foster homes in Inverness and Glasgow. Sibling was separated from sibling, and any contact with home, family or friends was completely cut off. No letters, cards, parcels or phone calls were allowed from anybody, and the foster families were told not to allow the children to read the papers or watch the news.
Their case went on to become one of the most controversial in British child-protection history. It featured a small island community that learned how to use the press and news media to fight against the power of the state. Now, 15 years on, some of those involved – including Sam and Jonathan – have spoken for the first time about their ordeal for a new BBC documentary.
Sam was placed in secure accommodation for young offenders in Ayrshire, even though he had never offended in any way. There, he alone of the nine children had access to news reports. Speaking now, he remembers how angry he was. "It was an unbelievable situation. It's not that you've committed a crime and been caught – it's just you're at school and the next day you're at school in a borstal."
Sam knew he had to remain calm. "You try to behave in the most dignified manner you can, but internally you are completely freaking out. You have no idea what's going to happen. Nothing about anything you're doing is in your hands any more. Nothing."
Sam, now 30, and Jonathan, now 27, were initially reticent to talk about that time. It was a part of their lives they had put well behind them. Then they realised they didn't want the story to be told without them. Jonathan said that only the other side would be heard without them.
Both brothers now have children of their own. They are not prepared to release many personal details, but they are both back living in Orkney after spending a few years based in Edinburgh, from where they travelled and made films. They are two young men getting on with their lives – but that day 15 years ago is still a powerful memory.
The story of Jonathan and Sam, whose parents Sandy and William also take part in the documentary, had its roots in another case altogether. All the families involved were incomers to Orkney. They had chosen to make their homes in a place that offered a peaceful way of life, and were made welcome and quickly included in island life.
But another family that came to Orkney were not made so welcome. The W family, as they became known, turned up with 14 children and another on the way. Social worker Charlie Fraser happened to observe them as they disembarked from the ferry; he thought to himself that this dishevelled family could mean trouble that would land on his desk. It did. The social work department kept a close eye on them – especially the wild antics of the children – from the moment they arrived. But no-one could have foreseen how their case would blow up, or the impact it would have on so many lives.
The 1980s had seen a revolution in child protection, when people became more aware of the sexual abuse of children and began to discuss the problem openly. But this revolution had passed Orkney by, and the islands' social workers had no experience of interviewing child victims. So when allegations of cruelty and physical abuse against their father began to emerge from the W children, Orkney Islands Council engaged the services of the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (RSSPCC) to take care of the disclosure interviews.
Mr W was jailed, and the children under 16 were taken into care and moved away from Orkney. It was then that suggestions of sexual abuse within the family began to emerge.
Leading the interviews with the children, in November 1990, was social worker Liz McLean, employed by the RSSPCC. She was an adherent of American theories on how to find and identify incidents of sexual and satanic abuse, believed by certain groups to be rife.
A list of "abuse indicators" was widely used by social workers. One of these said that if children said they hadn't been abused, they had. Liz McLean was recognised as a pioneer in her field, and her team, including Orkney social workers, followed her lead, adopting her conviction that child abuse was widespread and had to be discovered by any means. She was robustly criticised by Lord Clyde in the inquiry that followed the whole sequence of events. She hasn't been seen or heard of since.
Jonathan remembers her well. "Liz McLean was there and she is a very large woman, quite intimidating in a friendly way, if you understand what I mean, so there would be a mean air about her while seeming to be nice … 'We know that something happened to you – we know this' … in a nice soft voice. But it was relentless, didn't stop.
"They were talking about things people wore and things like that and saying, 'I'm not a very good drawer, can you draw it for me please?' You want to be obliging as a child with adults … It was a ring of people with someone in the centre and you don't know why you're being asked to draw this so you don't resist. And you get an idea that you don't want to have done that and you feel foolish and sort of duped."
Another social worker, Janette Chisholm, worked with Liz McLean at the time. Together they conducted disclosure interviews with the W children, and with the nine others who were taken from their homes in February 1991. They were relentless in their search – some call it a witch-hunt – for admissions by the children that they had been abused.
The disclosure sessions lasted for hours every day. The children were asked leading questions, told what to draw and promised food if they gave the "right" answers. Some gave the answers they thought were expected just to make the interrogation stop.
It was from the interviews with three of the younger W children that Liz McLean gathered enough "evidence" to convince her that a paedophile ring was operating in South Ronaldsay. This led to the removal of the other children, and allegations of lewd and libidinous behaviour being levelled against their parents and against the local minister, the Rev Morris MacKenzie.
May W takes part in the BBC2 film. An attractive young woman, she talks about the treatment she received at the hands of the social workers, the leading questions, the instructions to draw certain things and the way everything she said or drew was misinterpreted to fit a scenario that they already had in mind. "In order to get out of a room, after an hour or so of saying, 'No, this never happened,' you'd break down," she says. May and her siblings were kept in care for many years. She is still angry, and says that the authorities stole her childhood.
The children, away from their island homes, were subject to embarrassing medical examinations. Sam was told it was a medical to test that he was in good health: "I was told to strip from the waist down and given an examination of the genitals and an anal swab," he says. "That's when I thought they were obviously looking for signs of sexual abuse."

Janette Chisholm makes it very clear that, 15 years on, her views about the case have not changed. She still believes the nine children were abused, despite their denials as children and their denials today. She still believes it was right to allow them no contact with their families while they were in care, because they could have received coded messages designed to control them. She laughs at the parents pleading innocence and maintains their denials means they are still keeping secrets. She says the children have been let down.
What she doesn't say is that the RSSPCC eventually admitted they had got it wrong and apologised to the Orkney parents in a live broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland.
The families who were identified following the interviews with the W children were mostly people who knew the W family or had become involved with helping them in one way or another. Sandy and William, both trained teachers, had bought a farm on South Ronaldsay. They were asked by the local authority to take on the education of one of the W girls, a school refuser, and they extended their interest in the family by inviting the children to come and socialise with their own. Others in the area knew the children, or offered their skills to help. It was their children who were removed in that dawn raid.
After the children had gone, the parents were driven separately to police stations in Kirkwall and Stromness where they, as well as the minister and his wife, were interrogated for hours. One family didn't fit the picture at all: they had had no contact at all with the Ws. The uplifting of their two young children was a mistake.
There were many other mistakes. Orkney Islands Council took the rather garbled interviews from three confused young children and decided they we