The Satanic Panic was never a thing in the UK anyway
It was, actually, but it was limited to basically just police officers and social workers - a really bad group to get into it, and they caused some serious harm, but the overall impact was vastly smaller than in the US. As to why police and social workers, it's because they're more religious on average than UK people (both groups, or were then), and imported US Satanic Panic nonsense, and even paid US lunatics to come over and "teach" them about Satanic Panic drivel (this also happened in the US - one of the main vectors of the Satanic Panic was cops paying lunatics to "teach" them about it, since before the actual "panic" happened).
It also happened a little later here, more in the very early 1990s than 1980s, and that was when it started to fall apart in the US, which kind of put a wet blanket on it here. Still, there will be thousands if not tens of thousands of people out there in the UK, who in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, suffered because police officers and social workers pushed demented theories at them. Particularly in the Midlands, it seemed to center there - you can see how it was basically a mind virus that people with certain beliefs and weak minds* were predisposed to contract.
Back on topic, I was not abused for liking D&D - quite the contrary.
When I was eight, my copy of The Riddling Reaver, given to me by my uncle, was confiscated by my mother, but not on moral grounds, but on the grounds it was "too scary" in terms of the gory/violent images. This is why she also stopped us from buying 2000 AD until I was 10 (at which point it was apparently fine for my 8 y/o brother to read it with me but whatever man! Childhood annoyance remembered!). And honestly I think that's a bit silly but also kind of fair, and it wasn't abusive. She didn't throw it away. She gave it back about a year later, maybe less.
But when we got into D&D aged 11 and 9 respectively, my parents could tell it was enlarging our vocabularies, making us think in a more rules-based way, and making me a bit more interested in maths, all of which were good things. And it later became clear it was helpful in teaching us to more social and better at compromising and discussing things, too. My dad now often sends me articles about the benefits of D&D, and even back then he thought it was better than videogames/watching TV/etc.
We were a very book-centric household too, and learning and playing older RPGs involves reading a lot of books, so that was automatically approved-of. Plus it didn't lead to minis being scattered across the tables and floors like wargames did, another point in its favour!
At school, no-one ever came for me for being a nerd, because that wasn't really
a thing in most of the UK in that era. I was alway slightly mystified by how much of a thing it seemed to be in the US. There were people who were outcasts or bullied, but it wasn't because they were into nerdy hobbies, it was because they were wannabe nazis, or had personality problems or were painfully shy or the like. The bullying was less extreme too - the only real violence or nastiness at my school was between groups of kids, neither of whom were outcasts - who had interpersonal beefs. (I note the oldest kids when I joined did do bullying/hazing stuff, but they got stomped on so hard by the administration that it went away and never came back - that culture just got deleted and left with them as they aged out).
In fact the only hostility I had over D&D was:
A) Being told off at length for buying "the wrong edition" of D&D when I bought 2E in 1989. As such I was part of one of the earliest edition wars lol, because I didn't take that laying down.
B) The "other" major D&D group of kids a year older than us trying to convince us we weren't playing right and we shouldn't go around telling people about D&D because it was "their" thing. Again, I wasn't having this, and I told them so, and there was just a lot of harrumphing and sulking on both sides. Also they were a bunch of bloody Monty Haul Munchkins and I knew because I'd talked to two of them at length at one lunchbreak and all they could bloody talk about was boasting about how many magic items they had (basically all of them) and how they levelled up multiple times per session and killed all the NPCs regardless of whether they were good or bad and so on.
* = I feel extremely comfortable in characterising everyone who fell for the Satanic Panic as weak-minded, frankly. I've seen and read countless interviews with people who believed it, because I used to be fascinated by it, and not a bloody single one of them sounded like they two brain cells to rub together even outside of the panic. Except for some of the people who directly financially benefited from it, but their reason for "believing" was obvious.
