In the early 1990s, reports emerged in the UK media concerning the purported conduct of persons claiming to be social workers.
Most witnesses reported being visited by one or two women in their late twenties to early thirties who were dressed professionally.
[1] In some versions of the story, the visits included a woman accompanied by a man who seemed to be acting in a supervisory role.
[2] Police in South Yorkshire launched a major investigation into the phantom social worker phenomenon in 1990, known as "Operation Childcare."
[4] It is thought that reports of unidentified "social workers" attempting to take children away from their parents were merely scare stories or urban legends fuelled by the story of Marietta Higgs, a paediatrician from Cleveland, England who diagnosed 121 children as being victims of sexual abuse from their parents without any evidence or reason.