• A woman who claims that her childhood was destroyed by social workers who removed her from her family during the Orkney child abuse scandal is to sue the council for £100,000 damages.

  May Willsher, now 24, was 7 when she was taken from her family in November 1990. She was not allowed to return home for six years.

  She alleges that social workers told her she had been abused, and ignored her repeated denials, and as a result she was put into care. She claims that she was then sexually abused in one foster home.

  She now wants the officials who separated her from her mother to answer for their actions. “I’m mounting this case for justice. Other families got an apology, but I got no apology and no reason for being in care,” she said.

  A year after she was taken, a further nine children from four families in Orkney were removed by social workers in dawn raids amid claims that they were the victims of ritual satanic abuse practised by a paedophile ring on the islands.

  However, a judge rejected the social workers’ claims and allowed the children home.

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