From the Middleton Guardian:
MIDDLETON Guardian journalist, Jeni Harvey, rubbed shoulders with the great and the good during a high profile awards ceremony on Monday night.
The 24-year-old journalist, who has been with the Middleton & North Manchester Guardian for 18 months, was shortlisted for the prestigious Paul Foot Award for her work in exposing the financial and emotional costs of the satanic child abuse scandal which rocked Langley.
Private Eye magazine (1170) has further details:
Fighting against the full weight of the law and the determination of the local council to prevent the appalling injustice of the Rochdale satanic child abuse affair being exposed to public scrutiny, Harvey challenged court order and used the Freedom of Information Act to reveal the highly dubious practices of Rochdale Council’s social services department. Refusing to let the scandal rest, Harvey used both her own paper and a BBC documentary to, as the judges put it, “expose the full horror of a despicable affair the council was determined to keep secret”.
The award-winning series itself can be seen here. The “despicable affair”, of course, was the removal of children from their homes on bogus grounds of “Satanic abuse” in 1990, as part of a panic that had spread all the way from California (where the McMartin Preschool case has also unravelled). We would like to think that such panics are now a thing of the past; but the hysteria shows sporadic signs of making a comeback – see my Talk to Action article here.
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