One prominent voice amongst British feminists over several decades has been that of Beatrix Campbell, who has rarely missed an opportunity to inflame the hysteria over child sexual abuse. Campbell was born shortly after the war into a communist family in Carlisle. She herself joined the Communist Party in her teens, marrying a fellow comrade, and joined the staff of the Communist newspaper, The Morning Star. She belonged to the anti-Stalinist wing of the party that opposed the soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. During the early seventies she became heavily involved in the women's liberation movement. Campbell has continued to hold Marxist views and in recent years has stood as a Green Party candidate.
During 1987 the Cleveland child abuse furore made headline news throughout the country. This arose from the controversial diagnosis by two Middlesbrough paediatricians, through a technique known as Reflex Anal Dilation (RAD), that 121 local children had been the victims of child abuse. As a result of the enormous publicity caused by the break up of the families affected, the government ordered an inquiry into the affair chaired by Judge Elizabeth Butler-Sloss. Her report criticised both the two doctors and the local social workers for being too ready to accept that abuse had taken place, and for the belief that lack of disclosure by the children was evidence of denial. The medical profession has accepted that the RAD technique was severely flawed, and it was never again used by paediatricians as a test for child abuse. The vast majority of the children were returned to their families.
Although nearly all media commentators accepted the findings of the Cleveland report, Campbell continued to claim that the children had been abused, implicitly accepting that the RAD test must be valid. In her book Unofficial Secrets, she claimed that the children's silence was a coping strategy to deal with the abuse. In reality the reverse occurred, it was the social service interviewers who, during video-recorded sessions, were seen asking leading questions as well as threatening and attempting to bribe children in order to confirm the social workers ingrained belief that the children had been abused. Although, some of the children remained in care, they had already come to the attention of social services before the RAD technique was used. What the two paediatricians did was to extend the RAD test from exclusively social services cases, to all children who had been brought to the hospital for an unrelated medical condition. Campbell continued to support the two paediatricians long after the RAD test had become discredited, maintaining her belief that all the children had been sexually abused.
Beatrix Campbell was also involved in the Shieldfield scandal. This involved two nursery care workers who were tried and acquitted of child sexual crimes in 1994. Despite their acquittal they were both branded paedophiles in a subsequent report by Newcastle-upon-Tyne City Council. In the report the Council made several serious defamatory accusations of child sexual abuse against the two care workers, all of which were later found to be completely unfounded. One of the Council's report team was Judith Jones (aka Judith Dawson), the 'partner' of Beatrix Campbell, who was a social worker in an earlier satanic abuse case. Campbell in a newspaper article claimed that the Council's report had found 'persuasive evidence of sadistic and sexual abuse of up to 350 children'. The two care workers brought an action for libel against the City Council, and following a damning indictment against the Council by the judge, they were awarded the maximum amount of compensation available to them of £200,000. The judge made a finding of malice on the part of the Council's report team since there were "a number of fundamental claims which they must have known to be untrue and which cannot be explained on the basis of incompetence or mere carelessness.' However, Campbell continued to support the findings of the report and maintained that the care workers were guilty of child abuse despite all the findings and evidence to the contrary.
Not content with stoking up panic in the above two cases, Beatrix Campbell was one of the chief fear-mongers promoting the satanic abuse scare of the early 1990s. This was created by an unholy alliance of misandric feminists such as Campbell, joining forces with fundamentalist Christians who believe that all sexual activity outside holy wedlock is irredeemably shameful, sinful and to be suppressed. They were joined in this mendacious enterprise by the NSPCC who credulously endorsed the claims made by the supporters of the satanic abuse fantasy.
The satanic abuse panic originated in the United States, promoted originally by Christian fundamentalists, but soon accepted by feminist social workers and therapists. Predictably, in the late 1980s, this anti-satanic zeal crossed the Atlantic, with the claimed discovery of a satanic ring by social workers in Nottingham, led by the aforementioned Judith Dawson. Both Campbell and Dawson published articles in the New Statesman cataloguing the extent of satanic child abuse which their investigations had supposedly uncovered. Similar panics occurred in Rochdale and Orkney, resulting in many children being taken into care by social workers convinced by the reality of satanic abuse. The government commissioned a report by Professor Jean La Fontaine to discover the reality behind the claims and the likely extent of the problem . However, her report concluded that 'there was no evidence of satanic abuse' and this finding was accepted by the then Health Secretary Virginia Bottomley. Needless to say Campbell rejected the finding of the report, accusing the author of being ' the Freud of her generation: young survivors' stories of tyranny and torture seem so terrible that she prefers to locate their origin in fantasy rather than real events'.
Beatrix Campbell is still obsessed by what she perceives to be the widespread sexual abuse of children and the extent to which it is covered up by an supposedly acquiescent society. She recently issued a video praising the attempt of deputy Labour leader Tom Watson to publicise his belief of the existence of an alleged Westminster paedophile ring. This featured former Home Secretary Leon Brittan and was based on the claims made by the individual known as 'Nick', whose allegations also involved former MPs Harvey Proctor and Greville Janner, together with former Prime Minister Edward Heath and other establishment figures.These claims were all investigated by the Metropolitan Police under the auspices of Operation Midland which, to put it charitably, concluded that there was no evidence to back up any of the claims.
Beatrix Campbell thus has a long history of stirring up allegations of child sexual abuse based on nothing more than hearsay and without any corroborating evidence. No amount of reasoning or evidence to the contrary appears to shake her unwavering faith in the righteousness of her agenda. She appears to have no qualms about continuing to defame innocent people, or to show any sympathy for the families and lives destroyed by the unfounded claims which she peddles. It must be concluded that she most certainly meets the criteria to qualify as a malignant feminist. Despite (or maybe because of) this background she nevertheless remains a darling of the politically correct establishment and was honoured with an OBE a few years ago.
