Mick Hartley

That's just what we need. Beatrix Campbell, discredited campaigner against so-called satanic ritual abuse, returns to the fray with a piece in (of course) the Guardian – The scale of historical sexual abuse in the UK is a catastrophe. We need catharsis.

As a reminder of her record, here's a useful summary of Campbell's unsavoury history on the subject of ritual abuse. Included is this, from Private Eye No.1240, July 2009:

Followers of the career of Marxist feminist Green party candidate and republican journalist Beatrix Campbell were astonished when she was awarded an OBE for services to equal opportunities in the Queen's birthday honours last month (Eye 1239). Campbell was one.of the first proponents of a belief in the Satanic ritual abuse myth in the early 1990s and remained resolutely vocal in support, together with a network of believers, long after government commissioned research by Professor Jean La Fontaine, concluded in 1994 there was no evidence to support the claims. Before and even since that report, dozens of families were devastated by false allegations that they were devil worshipping paedophiles sexually abusing children in Satanic rituals that included drinking blood and urine and sacrificing animals and babies.

In the 1990s Campbell also wrote in defence of the now discredited 'recovered memory" therapy after which adult patients alleged they had been sexually abused in childhood. Professional regulatory bodies have since warned practitioners such recovered memory techniques could implant false memories.

Campbell and her partner Judith Jones (formerly Dawson), a social worker involved in the notorious Nottingham case in which social workers came to believe a genuine and vile case of incest was "Satanic", wrote a book, Stolen Voices: An exposure of the Campaign to Discredit Childhood Testimony, due to be published in November 1999. In fact it was a diatribe against anyone who dared question the existence of ritual abuse and whether some allegations of abuse might be false and it had to be withdrawn on the eve of publication following extensive complaints of inaccuracies and threats of legal action for libel.

Two pre-publication reviews give a flavour. The Independent described it as "a polemic, salted with emotive language and sarcastic commentary". It concluded: "Its authors are so blinded by ideology that they do a disservice to the people they claim to represent." And in a scathing review in the Evening Standard, La Fontaine, who had debunked ritual abuse, wrote: "The authors use personal attack to advance their view. .. The use of innuendo is distasteful and, where I can judge them, the 'facts' are.not true."

Earlier, at the height of the Satanic panic, in October 1990, Campbell had also produced a much panned documentary for Channel4's Dispatches programme, in which she claimed to reveal evidence of Satanic child abuse in Nottingham. . The Nottinghamshire chief constable, Dan Compton, whose officers had exhaustively investigated the allegations of ritual abuse and murder made by social workers (including Campbell's partner Judith Dawson lJones), sent a dossier to the home secretary "to kill off once and for all" the claims of ritual abuse. He accused Campbell's film of "sensationalising unsubstantiated stories". At least the OBE will look better on the Campbell CV than the pulped book and derided documentary.

It's a sad sign of the times that we seem to have learned nothing from those early witch hunts in the 1980s and 1990s - or we've forgotten what we did learn. Just ask Harvey Proctor, Paul Gambaccini, Cliff Richard, or the shades of Edward Heath, Leon Brittan, etc. etc..