FAA Scotland - Nelson exposed private eye2

Satanic Panic

First published in Private Eye, No. 1153

A booklet called A Can of Worms: Yes, You Can! Working with Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse has sparked controversy among professionals and academics who specialise in this sensitive field.

As revealed in Eye 1150 (Satanic Panic), the 74-page document, published by the Scottish Executive in December 2005, lists useful contacts including organisations dealing with survivors of so-called ritual abuse (formerly known as Satanic abuse) – a notion long ago exposed as a myth.

The dangers of this nonsense still being peddled by a network of believers across the UK are not lost on people who have been falsely accused of being devil-worshipping, animal-sacrificing paedophiles, as recently as 2004 on the Scottish island of Lewis (see Letters, Eye 1152). But potentially even more widespread harm could be caused by A Can of Worms being distributed to “healthcare, social work professionals and other frontline workers” across Scotland.

A group of eminent psychologists and psychiatrists has written a devastating critique of the booklet and called for it to be withdrawn, or substantially rewritten.

In a scathing seven-page letter to the Lothian Health Board, the distributors, copied to ministers and officials from the Scottish Executive and the UK Department of Health, the critics question the author’s apparent lack of knowledge of the academic literature. And they attack the advice they give to practitioners that they should “always” look for childhood sexual abuse as the root cause of a range of mental health problems from eating disorders and depression to drug and alcohol addiction and personality disorders. “There is almost no condition that the authors do not consider a sign of past abuse,” they wrote.

The booklet’s recommended reading list includes a library of discredited “self help” books which suggest the reader should try to recover supposedly repressed memories of abuse. These include a much pilloried American book, The Courage to Heal, which encourages readers to believe they were sexually abused, if they think they were, or have “body memories”, even if they can’t actually remember it. The Can of Worms booklet also refers to body memories as if they were recognised scientific symptoms.

The letter says: “This document demonstrates an almost total lack of awareness of the necessary information and relevant literature. Consequently, it is at best, a long way from fulfilling its stated aims of providing ‘good practice guidelines for working with male and female survivors’. At worst it is propagating pseudo-scientific and widely discredited beliefs about the effects of childhood sexual abuse.

“If the guidance set out in this booklet is followed, then many vulnerable people could be damaged… Some people who have not been sexually abused, but who have the ‘symptoms’ will be led into a false belief that they were, and may experience false memories; their mental health will also be severely damaged.”

The authors of A Can of Worms are Dr Sarah Nelson, a research fellow in the sociology department at Edinburgh University (see Letters, Eye 1151) and Sue Hampson, a “person centred counsellor” with a social work background in the NHS and mental health. They both work for Health in Mind, formerly the Edinburgh Association for Mental Health, which published research by Dr Nelson on 22 adult survivors of sexual abuse in another booklet, Beyond Trauma, in 2001.

That study was approved only after the group’s ethics committee considered concerns from a project advisor, a consultant psychiatrist, that Nelson had no clinical training to qualify her to conduct such interviews.

Approval was suspended and reinstated only after Dr Nelson reluctantly agreed to notify the participants’ GPs of their involvement.

Dr Nelson, a former journalist, has published many articles on child abuse, and chapters in books on ritual abuse including the notorious Orkney case. They have generally been carefully worded and measured. But the Eye has obtained a paper she delivered at a conference at Warwick University in 1996 organised by a group called Ritual Abuse Information Network and Support (RAINS), set up for child care workers and therapists who believed in satanic ritual abuse despite a government inquiry concluding in 1994 it didn’t exist.

Admitting it was “not an academic paper” and not based on any formal research, and that she did not have the expertise in mental health which others might have, Dr Nelson argued that it was not surprising that many victims of satanic abuse suffered from mental health problems such as eating disorders after being forced to eat and drink such things as “human and animal flesh, blood, urine, excrement, vomit, maggoty meat and drugged drinks”. She confidently estimated more than 1,650 people in Edinburgh had been involved in satanic ritual abuse.

Dr Nelson is a member of the Scottish parliament’s cross-party group on Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse which launched the Can of Worms booklet as part of the £2m government-funded national strategy to improve services for abuse survivors.

On her university website she writes: “My major research interest is in childhood sexual abuse. Particular interests include mental health and sexual abuse.” However, her PhD, from the University of Strathclyde, in 1979, was not about child abuse or mental health but loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. In a later book she explained she worked as an “unqualified social worker” to do the research.