The Satanic Error

This Book has also been published as
The Broxtowe Illusion: Ritual Abuse, Inquiry, and the Making of a Moral Panic
The Broxtowe case is often remembered for its dramatic allegations, but its real significance lies in what it reveals about how institutions think, investigate, and fail.


THE SATANIC ERROR: How Institutions Created a Moral Panic — A Documentary History is a precise, fully documented examination of Britain’s most influential and misunderstood child-protection investigation and the chain of events that followed it across the 1980s and 1990s.
Drawing on the suppressed Joint Enquiry Team (JET) report, the official La Fontaine inquiry, contemporary records, and the professional culture of the period, G. R. Whitcombe reconstructs how a case of multigenerational familial abuse was gradually overlaid with an interpretive narrative of “ritual” and “satanic” activity—despite the absence of corroborating evidence. The book shows how interview errors, imported therapeutic theories, organisational pressures, and asymmetric information allowed an interpretive model to flourish inside institutions while the corrective findings remained out of sight.
From Nottingham to Rochdale, the Orkney Islands, and Ayr, Whitcombe traces how belief in hidden networks spread across agencies, influencing practice, training, and public perception. The book examines why the original findings were suppressed, how professional networks such as RAINS accelerated the narrative, and how the panic finally collapsed under national scrutiny. It also analyses why belief in concealed abuse persisted into the digital era, and how figures such as former detective Jon Wedger illustrate the post-panic shift from institutional evidence to personal testimony in public discourse.
This is not a sensational account. It is a documentary study of institutional vulnerability: how interviewing methods became distorted, how memory was misunderstood, how warnings were ignored, and how well-intentioned professionals helped create one of late-twentieth-century Britain’s most consequential safeguarding failures.
The Satanic Error is essential reading for safeguarding practitioners, social-work educators, legal professionals, journalists, and anyone concerned with how public institutions handle complex allegations. Its central lesson is a simple one: safeguarding requires vigilance, but vigilance must be governed by evidence. When narrative outruns method, error