Credit: Dangerous Minds / Metropolitan Police

Is it just me, or are there some completely accepted statements that just use the most ludicrous terminology for what they’re trying to say?

The big one for me is how much I want to shake the spectral figure of Albert Einstein by the hand for coming up with an early version of the theory of quantum entanglement, and then the mad genius coming up with the term ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’ to describe it. The sheer amount of intensely subdued, intensely professional, middle-aged men in suits who’ve had to use the word that describes scary skeletons as part of their work. Spectacular stuff.

I bring this up because another candidate for the least appropriate word to ever finagle its way into serious business dropped in the mid-1980s. It’s not exactly a laugh-a-minute. Which, to be fair, is the case wth Quantum Mechanics as well. However, this is for a very different reason. This is an incongruous word choice because it involves a mass panic about children being put in peril by people claiming to be social workers, and yet the accepted terminology for this phenomenon is the Bill and Ted-tastic ‘Bogus Social Workers’.

Try and put the young Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter out of your mind because the actual details of stories involving Bogus Social Workers (or BSWs if you’re feeling nasty) are pretty horrific. They’re always rather similar. Someone, pretty much always a woman in a strange outfit or ill-fitting wig, makes a house call on a young family. They claim to be from an official child welfare service and are here to investigate any signs of child abuse and neglect.

They invariably find some, then attempt to take the child away and in some cases, succeed in doing so.

Who were these social workers?

So, obviously, this is a pretty terrifying story.

The idea of some stranger waltzing into your house with the kind of credentials that make you trust their word over your gut before they spirit your kid away, never to be seen again? It’s the kind of stuff that horror movies are made of. A fitting comparison, because despite how much of a panic this caused in the UK between the 1980s and 1990s, there was never a verified case of it actually happening.

There were several horror stories told about it. The kind that carry about as much weight as those chain emails that you used to get from your hippy uncle in the early 2000s. Yet these stories scared people so much that thousands and thousands of pounds were spent by local authorities to try and catch these BSWs, most notably with the South Yorkshire Police’s Operation Childcare in 1995. It wasn’t just that the operation didn’t catch anyone accused of stealing kids away; it actively disproved that anyone had actually had their kids spirited away by someone claiming to be a social worker.

Thus, it became the UK’s answer to the Satanic Panic across the pond. A scary story that probably stemmed from a local council misunderstanding that caused such a terminal panic that it became a national news story. But no matter who swears blind to you that their son’s friend’s uncle’s dog-sitter’s second cousin had their kid snatched by someone claiming to be a social worker, their story can be summed up with one word straight from the saviours of time itself.

Bogus.