New Heights of Hysteria

With David Cameron getting presented yesterday with a list of names of alleged Tory paedophiles on ITV yesterday, child abuse hysteria is reaching new heights. The whole thing stinks.

The man who accused a senior Thatcher-era Tory MP of abusing him while he was a resident of a north Wales care home has apologised after admitting his claims were based on a case of mistaken identity.

I’ve said the Jimmy Savile story stinks too, and I’m even more sure after reading Anna Raccoon, who was once an inmate at Duncroft, and never saw Jimmy Savile there even once:

You can imagine how gobsmacked I was when this story first emerged. How closely I read everything that was said – and noted what was not said. Not the ‘Jimmy Savile is a paedophile’ story, the Internet is full of such tales. No, it was the Daily Mail story which caught my eye; how ‘two brave women’ had come forward and identified themselves as being the victims of this paedophile. One word lept out of the print, long before I had got to the relevant sentence. Duncroft. Not just Duncroft, but Wedgewood dormitory. 1965. I consumed every detail. My jaw was frozen to the ground for several hours.

‘There were girls in there who were quite terrified of him‘ – I read elsewhere that ‘girls were hiding behind the bedroom doors’ to escape his attentions. I was mesmerised. And puzzled. For I had never hidden behind a bedroom door to escape his attentions nor anyone else’s attention. I had simply never met the man. Period.

The mud sticks, of course. And this seems to have developed into a regular mudslinging competition. All got up, it seems, by the child-protection industry:

The Jimmy Savile scandal has been held up as proof that child abuse is rife in modern Britain. In every institution in the land, even at ‘Auntie’, as Savile’s old stomping ground the BBC was once affectionately known, children are apparently being preyed upon by warped adults. ‘Sadistic child abuse is rife across Britain’, newspaper headlines tell us. According to the deputy children’s commissioner for England, ‘There isn’t a town, village or hamlet where children are not being sexually exploited.’ And the least safe place, even worse than the Beeb and NHS hospitals, where Savile also allegedly groomed and molested girls, is the family home – it is there where the ‘scourge of abuse’ is most common, apparently.

Is it true? Are loads of children being abused, treated sadistically by people they should be able to trust? No, they are not. The most remarkable thing about the hysterical claims about child abuse being rife is how flimsy they are, how quickly they fall apart when one asks the most basic of sceptical questions. Indeed, the depiction of Britain as a hotbed of sadistic sexual and physical abuse of children has required industrial levels of fact manipulation by a child-protection industry that has a clear interest in exaggerating levels of abuse. The truth seems to be that – brace yourselves for this – generally people are good, and generally the family home and most institutions are safe, even happy places.

It’s the satanic abuse panic all over again:

Do you remember the social worker-led accusations of ‘Satanic ritual abuse’ that ripped families and communities apart in the late 1980s and early 1990s?

From Cleveland to Rochdale, Nottingham to Orkney, tens of children were taken from their parents, sometimes for several years. And why? Because officialdom, aided and abetted by organisations like the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, were all too willing to believe that normal men and women were locking children in caves, making girls pregnant so as to eat their fetuses, and generally indulging in all sorts of horrific practices. All of which was rubbish, of course, as a government report was finally to confirm in 1994. But not until it was too late – for many unfortunate families the damage was done.

Were he still alive, I’m sure Richard Webster would have taken great interest in this latest outbreak of hysteria:

As I wrote in my first article about the Casa Pia scandal seven years ago, the idea that there is a paedophile ring centred on a children’s home, which supposedly supplied young boys to prominent figures and politicians, is one which seems to have originated in Britain. It first surfaced in 1980 in relation to the Kincora working boys’ hostel in East Belfast. It then reappeared in 1991 and formed a significant strand of the Bryn Estyn scandal which would eventually lead to the North Wales Tribunal. In 2008 a similar story became the basis of the Haut de la Garenne children’s home scandal in Jersey.

In all three cases the so-called ‘children’s homes’ turned out in reality to cater mainly for adolescent boys, some of whom (in the case of Bryn Estyn) had criminal records. The allegations which emerged were not made by children but were collected retrospectively from young adults.

In all of the cases there was a core of reality to the stories which emerged; at Kincora, at Bryn Estyn and at Haut de la Garenne, a few young teenage boys were sexually abused by one or two members of staff. But this reality was then overlaid by the fantasy that large numbers of innocent young people had been preyed upon by an evil conspiracy.

In the Bryn Estyn scandal in North Wales this fantasy rapidly became the basis for a righteous crusade to convict the alleged perpetrators. Journalists in particular were prominent in driving the crusade forwards. Whenever investigations concluded that such ideas were groundless, the authorities were accused of engaging in a cover-up. In order to make these accusations credible it was claimed that politicians themselves, or even police officers, were a part of the ‘ring’ they were supposed to be investigating and therefore had an interest in concealing its existence. Similar claims were made frequently during the series of satanic abuse cases which began in California and swept through North America and Britain during the closing decades of the twentieth century.

I don’t spend much time thinking about this sort of thing, but to me it seems that more or less all these claims of child abuse are most likely the product of public hysteria, and a hysteria which is very closely related to the hysteria surrounding tobacco smoke.

When will it end?

About Frank Davis


29 Responses to New Heights of Hysteria

  1. junican says:

    It really is weird how politicians fall for it every time, isn’t it? How does that happen? Why cannot the PM say, “If anything actually happened, then it can only be that SPECIFIC PERSONS were involved. It is extremely unlikely that thousands of people who looked after young people in these places were anything other that decent people. As a Government, we shall not waste enormous amount of taxpayers’ money investigating allegations. Persons who believe that they were attacked need to sue person(s) that they accuse. Provided that their accusations can be substantiated, we shall finance the legal process for them”

    Almost certainly, all the allegations will disappear. That does not mean that they were not true – it simply means that there is no point in wasting time and vast amount of money pursuing something which has rotted away to nothing.

  2. Lou2 says:

    And another one for your list – Gerd Sommerhoff of Sevenoaks School, knighted by Her Majesty for services to education, accused of paedophilia –

  3. nisakiman says:

    Yes, it reminds me of the “recovered memory” malarkey some years ago, where child psychologists were basically planting all sorts of ideas in the minds of vulnerable kids about how they’d been sexually abused at home. Of course, when they finally got to the bottom of these accusations, they were found to be groundless; but not, as you point out, before most of the families involved had been destroyed. The MSM were again culpable, but as usual just walked away unscathed from the carnage they had created.

  4. harleyrider1978 says:

    Smoking in the presence of a child will soon be considered child abuse if trends continue.
    Too many times Ive read Smoking near a childs playground is banned because children shouldnt see adults smoking. Then its equally being applied to smoking in a car with children present. Its not but a short walk for these Nazis to claim smoking represents sucking upon a phallus and is hereby considered an act of pedophillia when done near a child.

  5. margo says:

    Yes, something definitely stinks with all these child-abuse allegations that are going on. The trouble is, there’s a risk of polarising: ‘it’s rife’/’it doesn’t happen at all’. Obviously, it does sometimes happen, probably mostly within the family, but equally obviously it’s unlikely to be what we’d call commonplace.
    Polarising – going in either direction – doesn’t leave the kids it does happen to in a good place.
    Same with the ‘false memory’ thing (which, if false memory existed at all, wasn’t always the case when someone remembered in therapy, and was a useful let-out for the accused).
    Did anyone see ‘Unreported World’ on the telly last night, about smoking in Indonesia? It was a propaganda exercise for Tobacco Control. The whole thrust was ‘evil tobacco companies targeting children’. They showed some tobacco ad billboards, a child smoking a cigarette, a man with lung cancer (harangued on his sick bed by the journalist) and some children picking tobacco leaves. That was their ‘evidence’.
    Nobody said whether the shirt the journalist was wearing was made by small children in a factory.

    • beobrigitte says:


      A very good point!

      And, yes, this ‘recovered memory’ malarkey is at best questionable. Why would anyone try to recover memories that best stay where they are? To the Jimmy Saville case; why wait 40 years or so to accuse the man of molesting them? What are they trying to gain?
      Quite frankly, this media driven hysteria harms the children who are being abused as they just simply to want it to stop. Nothing more.

      Pity I missed that – but then, I’d have done what everyone does when tobacco control propaganda is being broadcast – switch channel. But it shoes the next country tobacco control is homing in on. Tidak apa apa, yang indonesia akan mengirimkan mereka ke neraka! (Hope I remembered this right!!!! The last time I had the opportunity to speak Indonesian was in 1976….)

  6. margo says:

    Love the monkey dust videos, Frank.

  7. Marvin says:

    I don’t think it is paedo-hysteria as such, at least not among ordinary people,
    but intense anger that those in high places have been getting away with it for ages.
    Never investigated, never charged, names never revealed, victims threatened and silenced etc.
    The corruption is becoming more and more obvious by the day.
    Sure they throw a few celebrities to the wolves, but for those in high places it’s business as usual.
    This is what angers people.

    I think what has made this different is the power of the Internet, they cannot control it,
    the names and connections have been out there for ages and they are terrified of them reaching a wider audience. It is THEIR frightened hysteria we are witnessing, not ours.

    The Icke forum has had over one million hits since the Savile thing broke and recently suffered a DDos attack, if what they are discovering is complete bolloxs, then why try and bring the website down?
    Again, it is those in high places that are shitting their pants, they have control of the MSM and compliant courts, but these are old ineffective weapons against the Internet, no wonder they hate it and want it curtailed.

  8. garyk30 says:

    Funny thing about these scare-mongering statistics, they never examine how often these events do not happen.

    Nor is it ever examined to what extent the media hoopla causes ‘false’ memories.

    There are about 75 million young kids in America.

    If only 1/10,000 were abused, there would be about 7,500 charges of abuse per year.This never happens.

    Yet, 9,999/10,000 would not be abused.
    Any given child has a 99.99% probability of not being abused.

    There are 310 million people in America and about 30,000 highway deaths per year.
    That is a death rate of 1/10,000 and 9,999/10,000 will not be killed(99.99%).
    Yet, people are scared of driving and the MSM encourages this paranoria.

    Lung Cancer death rate due to SHS/ETS is 1/20,000.

    There 3,400 deaths are proclaimed; but, the fact that 19,999/20,000, per year, do not die is ignored.
    A never-smoker exposed to SHS/ETS has, in any given year, a 99.995% probability of not dying from lung cancer caused by that exposure.

    A normal person would not be concerned about something that has a 99.995% probability of not killing them.

    You would hope that the MSM might notice.

  9. harleyrider1978 says:










  10. harleyrider1978 says:

    RYUN: Obama suppressing the military vote
    Overseas service members unable to access the polls





    The Pentagon has utterly failed to meet these standards.

    As of September, the Department of Defense inspector general’s office found that the Obama administration had “not established all the [assistance offices] as intended by the Move Act.”

    Frankly, that’s an understatement. Only 116 of the 229 mandated offices were constructed, and of the 116, many were set up after their projected deadline and in places not often visited on military facilities.


    The same Obama administration that funded Solyndra, Obamacare and Cash for Clunkers couldn’t spare any change to help ensure that our nation’s heroes can exercise the right to vote.

    We can afford to send $2 billion to the Egyptian government, run by the radical Muslim Brotherhood — whose president has recently called for the destruction of Israel — but we can’t fund efforts allowing our own soldiers to vote?


    While selectively choosing not to fund this law, Mr. Obama and his Department of Justice have at the same time been on a crusade suing states with voter-identification laws, accusing them of “voter suppression.”

    Where is the Justice Department when it comes to our military voters? Where’s the American Civil Liberties Union? Where is the commander in chief?

    The Obama administration should be prosecuted for knowingly and willingly violating the Move Act, as well as the Voting Rights Act.

    Team Obama is establishing a record of behavior regarding military voters that should call into question the validity of the process. The Obama campaign recently sued the state of Ohio for extending military voting by three days. It didn’t want to give our armed forces special treatment, stating in the lawsuit that the extension was “arbitrary” and had “no discernible rational basis.”

    Read more: RYUN: Obama suppressing the military vote – Washington Times
    Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

  11. garyk30 says:

    Yaaaa, and to all you vets in America, ‘Happy Veterans Day’!!!!!!

  12. garyk30 says:

    Hope all have a decent “Remembrance Day”!!!!!

  13. DanielB says:

    BBC Pension Trust – Top equity investments at 31 March 2012

    Investment Holding £m
    British American Tobacco 63.65
    BP 55.71
    Royal Dutch Shell 52.83
    Imperial Tobacco 48.09
    Oao Gazprom 16.77
    Occidental 11.53
    Hyundai Motor 9.14
    Chevron Corp 8.71

  14. lleweton says:

    Re ‘Recovered’ False Memory, mentioned in this thread, sadly it is not a thing of the past, as a glance at the current Newsletter of the British False Memory Society would show Families are sundered and innocent people accused. See also the society’s website . For such people theirs is a hidden tragedy and there are few who know of it. And those who suffer have scant opportunities of either healing or a hearing for their plight.

  15. harleyrider1978 says:

    Finally someone who gets it and names the GUILTY!

    Finally someone in the House of Commons has woken up to the fact legislation on tobacco tax (and indeed plans for plain packaging) have serious drawbacks.

    The main reason that people resort to buying tobacco on the black market is the excessively high rate of taxation. 85% taxation is extremely excessive by anyone’s standards and openly encourages tax avoidance.

    The lesson was hard learned in the 18th century. As a result of the Napoleonic wars alcohol, textiles, and tobacco imports were embargoed by the Government. This resulted in a very lucrative smuggling trade, and in the establishment of what is now HM Customs and Excise. Some of the wealthiest families in the country gained their wealth through smuggling during this period.

    This was also the reason for the levying of taxation on embargoed goods , initially at very high rates. Even with the Revenuers working flat out, sufficient contraband got through to meet demand, making a small number of families very rich. Eventually the only way the government could make any headway with the smuggling problem was to reduce taxation on goods.

    This is the situation we are in today. Over taxation of tobacco products has created this problem. HM Government has just two options. They can continue to listen to ASH and the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and increase taxation and increase smuggling. Or they can use their predecessors’ solution and lower taxation and price the smugglers out of the market. They may discover that they can actually make more revenue with a lower tax rate, helping to alleviate the country’s economic problems. Smokers would be less inclined to source often harmful illicit tobacco, and the cost burden on Customs and Excise and the Border Control Force would be reduced. For the party that implements such cuts it may even ensure sole tenure as the Government du jour!

  16. harleyrider1978 says:

    What kills any prohibition movement

    Enforcement costs
    high profits to blackmarketeers
    Lost revenues to the taxman
    Financial catastrophe from government overspending and lost revenues
    The fire dies out for the movement

    The dye is cast and the movement collapses
    So the same went with alcohol prohibition in 1933 America.

    • beobrigitte says:

      What kills any prohibition movement?

      Recession usually does it nicely, it’s the road to hell for them.

    • Frank Davis says:







      The Texas petition reads as follows:


      • mikef317 says:

        The article’s use of the word “state” is highly misleading. Within 15 states a small number of individuals have signed petitions. They have the right to do so.

        The population of New York state is a bit over 19 million. (About 10% are children.)

        169 New Yorkers signed a petition.

        Secession is NOT on the agenda.

  17. lleweton says:

    Trouble is it took more years than I’ve probably got left.

  18. Johnson says:

    Gerd Sommerhoff, named above, back in the papers earlier this week, now with a whole stable of abused children:

    Sevenoaks School teacher had ‘six more victims’ of sex abuse, claims accuser
    By Sean-Paul Doran
    Monday, November 18, 2013

    AN ex-Sevenoaks School pupil who says he was sexually abused by a former teacher claims there are at least six more victims yet to come forward.

  19. Pingback: Raccoon About | Frank Davis

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