Mick Hartley

Richard Webster, author of “The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt“, has a lengthy piece (part one of two) at his website on the panic over the Haut de la Garenne children’s home in Jersey, with press tales of skeleton fragments, shackles in the basement, and a small community gripped with fear, and warns that we’ve been here before:

One of the reasons for treating the story with caution is that a great many of the elements in it have appeared before in earlier children’s home scandals and, on investigation, have proved to be unfounded. The idea that there is a paedophile ring centred on a children’s home which supposedly supplied young boys to prominent politicians first surfaced in 1980 in relation to the Kincora working boys’ hostel in East Belfast. The same idea reappeared again in 1991 in order to form a very significant strand of the North Wales scandal, which would eventually lead to the North Wales Tribunal. Paedophile rings were also associated with at least a dozen other children’s homes investigations over the next fifteen years.

In some of these cases there was a core of reality to the stories which emerged; both at Kincora and at Bryn Estyn, boys were sexually abused by one or two members of staff. But the idea that a paedophile ring might actually be based in a children’s home has, thus far, always proved to be a fantasy.

It’s worth reading in full. As Webster notes, it’s particularly disturbing to find the police still relying on trawling methods discredited long ago.