The South Ronaldsay Child Abuse Stories A Personal View
(Broadcast by BBC Radio Scotland - December 1992)
I am an ageing Londoner who has lived, by accident of family circumstances, in Sanday for the last fifteen years. To move from a house in central London to a little green island in the North Sea, inhabited by a community of about five hundred people mostly in farming families, is quite some move - and one of the best things I have ever done in a rather long and mostly very happy life.
The Sanday people are wonderful; they are quietly hospitable, they are tolerant, they soon find out all about you and treat you kindly just the same. They are always ready to help; they rarely quarrel or intrude and when you are in trouble, the quiet help you experience is like a warm tidal wave. We have no policeman; we do not often need one.
Rural Orkney generally, is an anarchist society - in the strict sense of the term - in that it is a largely self-regulating society with the minimum of overt authority but a great deal of gentle social pressure. More than one Orkney parish has, over the years, divested itself of a misfit minister by just such gentle social pressure.
Of course, your neighbours know the colour of the underwear you have on - not because we are flashers, not because they are voyeurs, but because they can work it out by elimination from the colours of the garments on your clothes line as compared with last week's display - as often as not on a fine Sunday.
South Ronaldsay is typical rural Orkney and the notion that there could be a vice ring in that community, operating in a quarry if you please, without everyone knowing about it, is very hard to credit. It is clear that, if such things were attempted, social pressure would soon marginalise them.
Nonetheless, the sexual exploitation of the vulnerable, including children, is part of the downside of human life everywhere and it has often been practised by seemingly respectable people. So when reports were made to the council's Social Work Department and to the police then investigation had to follow.
The Orkney Islands Council is small in electorate but huge in powers. It often seems to be obsesssed by illusions of its own importance. We live in a little puddle in which every splash is seen as a big one.
Perhaps in consequence of this factor, and as the Clyde report indicates, investigation got quite out of hand and a witch hunt among families of very probable innocence soon raised its echo in an angry crescendo of abuse against conscientious social workers. Frantic media coverage, both locally and nationally, made matters worse .
That favourite device of authority when it has lost its way - a public inquiry - was demanded by the parents and conceded by the state. It lasted for months and cost millions and its most constructive recommendation - that social workers' training should be of longer duration - has already been rejected by a government that seems to guess the notional cost of everything and to appreciate the real value of nothing.
As Sir Nicholas Fairbairn has pointed out, the parents will now neither be convicted nor cleared; they will have the cold comfort of a generalised presumption of innocence. Big deal! We most of us live in a presumption of innocence anyway. The very least that the parents can be content with is a full, frank and formal apology from the Orkney Islands Council. The children have been the sufferers; they have been subjected to 'system abuse' and to 'media abuse' resulting in years of their young lives being grotesquely spotlighted at the behest of erring warring adults in entrenched positions and with axes to grind.
Let there be no more resort to law in this sorry tale; that will only drag the children though it all over again.
Let the Orkney Islands Council own up and let the rest of us shut up!
(Some years after this broadcast, the OIC did indeed issue a form of apology to the aggrieved families. ES).