The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt [Hardcover]

— Arthur Schopenhauer

But one person's axiom is another's heresy; and the intensity of the emotions is often inversely related to the availability of facts. Richard Webster's 722 pages is the iceberg upon which the Titanic of Waterhouse will founder, along with the hitherto perceived unsinkability of the SS Child Protection Value Statements. Your emotions can hardly fail to be triggered by this book; if you have been professionally involved in statutory child protection you will scream “heresy”, trash the book and demand that the author be burned at the stake; if you have been falsely accused of child abuse you will sob “at last” and demand that Webster be fêted as the ultimate whistleblower.

For, although the core of this book is the total demolition of the Waterhouse findings into the allegations of organised child abuse and paedophile rings in the child care homes of England, what gives it authority is the extraordinary lengths Webster has gone to place the whole Waterhouse episode into the context of the child protection industry, mass delusion and paedo-hysteria. You have only to read McLean and Elkind's exposé of the Enron corporate bankruptcy fiasco to see a striking comparison. Enron managed to persuade their auditors to re-write the rules of financial investigation so as to make massive debts appear to be massive assets; North Wales Social Services managed to persuade their police to re-write the rules of police investigation so as to make what, at worst, were rare isolated instances of child abuse, appear to be child abuse on a massive scale. Yet, in both the Enron boardroom and the Waterhouse hearing room, in both the Enron rank-and-file offices and the grim social services case meeting rooms, the actors in these dramas were behaving in what they thought were entirely reasonable, indeed praiseworthy, manner. Groupthink rules, OK?

Webster has of course the advantage over Waterhouse in that he could devote several years to poring over the evidence and ruthlessly testing it, going back to the original source material, without a hard newspaper or tribunal deadline, and working in a private and academic environment without a boss; Waterhouse had a few weeks to glance over thousands of pages, giving witnesses an audience rather than a cross-examination, assuming as accurate social workers' impressionistic reports, with the press and politicians baying for answers right now, and working in a highly public setting under instructions, whether covert or not, from his bosses. In the end, the conclusions we should now draw from Waterhouse are self-evident: some children from care homes will, as adults, accept cash in exchange for making up stories of abuse; but the Waterhouse inquiry managed to construct on these foundations a magnificent castle-in-the-air which Webster demolishes brick by brick. Additionally, Webster is able to present us with the history of comparable episodes in the past: mediaeval witchhunts and the Waugh & Stead media-led child abuse hysteria of the 1880s. These witchhunts are reported as being run by the educated and literate of that age and not by the middle-ages equivalent of Portsmouth anti-paedophile vigilante groups or the lynch mobs of the North of England.

Or is it history? Webster's historical account takes us to the feminist MacKinnon/Rush manifesto of 17th April 1971, which he presents as the spring from which much of the river of present day child protection culture flows. This culture — ‘children do not lie’, ‘all men are potential abusers’, ‘children who deny abuse are psychologically blocking and will disclose given time’ — is still active in the minds of NSPCC staff, paediatric psychologists, expert witnesses, and even some Divorce Court judges, despite the Butler-Sloss recommendations and her report on the Cleveland non-abuse scandal. Webster's book is the most significant objective narrative of how the child protection system has become corrupted by the very people who, though perhaps initially sincerely motivated out of care for children, have come to share in the same mass delusion, leading them to incarcerate the innocent and split up functioning families: it should be required reading for every senior manager in Social Services, teacher vetting panels and Custody Evaluation.