One of the most unsettling aspects of the Cleveland Child Abuse case - the subject of several recent postings - is that Dr Marietta Higgs is still permitted to practice medicine - in spite of all of the harm her questionable diagnostic technique caused to so many innocent parents.
It is also troubling to learn that several of her colleagues took it upon themselves to attack the evidence that had been presented against her - and to rally for her reinstatement.
The Cleveland case has me wondering what Dr. Charles Smith will be doing several years from now.
He is, after all, only about 57-years old and could end up actively practicing medicine somewhere in Ontario, Saskatchewan, or elsewhere in the world where the news of the destruction he has caused has not sunk in.
(We learned from the Goudge inquiry that several of his colleagues at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto agreed to provide references for Dr. Smith on his application for a position in Saskatchewan - after his work had been severely criticized by hospital staff);
The efforts of the British professionals to cover up for their colleague was disclosed to the British House of Commons by Sir Stuart Bell, a British Labour Party politician and Member of Parliament for Middlesbrough.
Sir Stuart was so horrified by the horrors of Cleveland that he wrote a book called; "When Salem Came to the Boro, The True Story of the Cleveland Child Abuse Crisis," which was published in 1988. (I would love to get my hands on a copy!)
"This is the first occasion that the Cleveland child abuse crisis has been brought to the Floor of the House other than through parliamentary statements and questions," Sir Stuart told the House of Commons at the outset of his March 2, 1989 address.
"I have taken the opportunity of raising the matter on an Adjournment debate because of the deep concern that my constituents feel at the turn of events following the publication of the consultants' statement in The Guardian," he continued.
"It is a matter of regret to me and to my constituents that once again the consultants should feel that they ought to prove their innocence on matters which have been through the courts.
The motion arises out of the action of 11 paediatricians, who submitted a statement to The Guardian newspaper, among others, in which they stated :
"In our opinion, the majority (quite possibly 90 per cent.) of the children were abused, and the paediatricians' diagnoses were accurate to a far higher degree than the public realise."
The sequence of events that led to the submission of that statement will not be time-consuming in relation to the role of the consultants within the NHS.
Towards the end of last year, at a specialists' sub-committee of the Northern regional health authority, the future of Dr. Marietta Higgs was discussed.
It was decided that a recommendation should be made to the regional health authority that Dr. Higgs be reinstated in Cleveland.
Some of the consultant paediatricians at that meeting had come from as far away as Carlisle, let alone Cleveland.
Some of the Tyneside consultants also formed part of a support group organised in the new year under the guidance of Dr. David Scott and his wife Anne.
It transpired later that Dr. David Scott had worked with Dr. Higgs on a study of cot deaths, and that his wife Anne had been a former secretary to Dr. Higgs in that study.
That support group met early in February and a draft letter of support for Dr. Higgs was prepared and submitted by Dr. Nigel Speight, a consultant paediatrician at Dryburn hospital in Durham.
Dr. Speight has long been an avowed supporter of Dr. Higgs.
He telephoned me in her support when the crisis began, and invited himself to a television broadcast on the extent of the crisis.
However, he did not give evidence to the Butler-Sloss inquiry.
In Cleveland in January, the Communist party got into the support act when it called a meeting in Middlesbrough to discuss the Cleveland child abuse crisis, although the crisis was now fading from public memory.
After that meeting, addressed by another ardent supporter of Dr. Higgs, Ms. Bea Campbell, who subscribes to the view that one in four of the population are abused as children, it was decided to set up a support group similar to the one in Newcastle, again with the avowed purpose of reinstating Dr. Higgs in her old neonatological job at Middlesbrough general hospital.
The draft letter of Dr. Speight found its way to Middlesbrough and was discussed at a meeting of consultant paediatricians on 15 February.
Dr. Geoffrey Wyatt, who was banned from child sexual abuse cases by the regional health authority following his involvement in the Cleveland child abuse crisis, and who accepted that ban as well as a reprimand and warning as to his future conduct, presented on an overhead projector facts and figures which seemed to justify the diagnoses that he and Dr. Higgs had made at Middlesbrough general hospital.
Apparently, Dr. Wyatt proposes to publish those facts and figures in an article in The Lancet.
The meeting discussed the statement of Dr. Speight, made some deletions, principally in reference to police surgeons, and agreed its onward submission to the press.
The purpose of the letter was contained in its last paragraph:
"Following the crisis in Cleveland, Doctor Higgs has been seconded to look after babies at the Princess Mary hospital, a university teaching hospital in Newcastle. We strongly support and would welcome the return of Doctor Higgs to her former post in Cleveland where she was employed with special skills for the care of sick newborn babies."
Pressure on the Northern region health authority, as the employer of Dr. Higgs, has become urgent, in view of the allegation that her secondment to the Princess Mary hospital in Newcastle was about to end, and the fact that a paediatric post was about to be advertised for Cleveland by way of an advance appointment to cover the future retirement of Dr. Hilary Grant, the senior consultant paediatrician.
In any event, Dr. Higgs is still on the books as a consultant paediatrician at Middlesbrough, and her work has been carried on by locums.
There were also court proceedings which I do not intend to cover tonight.
The statement was supposed to be a letter signed by all 11 consultants from Tyneside and Cleveland, but such was the haste to get it out that signatures could not be gathered.
The author of the statement had already left for Khartoum.
The statement was sent out by Val Hall, who turned out to be Mrs. Dr. Geoffrey Wyatt, although Dr. Hall has since said that she was merely the secretary.
In fact, her role has been greater than that. Dr. Hall is also a member of the Cleveland support group, and she has been in touch with several members of Parliament, seeking their support for Dr. Higgs.
There is nothing reprehensible in any of those activities, except the deceit and dissimulation that has accompanied them in the failure to declare an interest.
There was, of course, an anguished reaction by parents and children who were innocently caught up in the crisis.
It might be convenient to state the number of children who were involved. About 121 children were diagnosed as allegedly having been sexually abused.
Of those 121 children, 98 were returned home by the courts.
There were eight arrests but only four successful prosecutions.
Two men hanged themselves in Durham gaol, and in two other cases in which the only evidence was the diagnostic technique of reflex anal dilatation, the charges were dropped.
It is against that tide of the court decision that the paediatricians, in their statement to The Guardian and elsewhere, seek to swim.
Hardly surprisingly, parents and children alike, settling down about 18 months after the crisis, were traumatised by the sudden appearance of the consultants' statement which was promptly picked up and relayed throughout the media.
Some children immediately asked their parents whether it meant that they had to go back to Cleveland hospitals. Mothers and children, too, had nightmares.
Children were afraid to return to school on the Monday morning after the mid-term holiday, because they feared that someone would take them away.
There was dread and horror that the cycle of repeated physical examinations and disclosure work was back again.
There is no new evidence available to the consultant paediatricians that was not in the hands of the Butler Sloss inquiry, to the medical assessor appointed to that inquiry, or to the courts that dealt with the cases.
When I called him on this specific point, the author of the letter, Dr. Nigel Speight, accepted that he had seen no medical records.
The evidence that was available to the courts in relation to the 98 children was weighed carefully by High Court judges, magistrates and registrars alike, who preferred the alternative available medical evidence which concluded that the children had not been abused.
The consultant paediatricians were not entitled to bring new grief and anguish to the innocent families of Cleveland.
The question for the Minister to weigh is this: how can they justify their conduct, ethically and professionally?
Several of the Cleveland consultants who agreed the statements under their name are still in charge of children who were caught up in the crisis.
After publication of the statement in The Guardian, many parents were encouraged to go to those consultants, and everyone who did so was assured that they were not included in the 90 per cent.
The most appropriate statement of the so-called evidence was given by Dr. Douglas Hague, the regional general manager of the health authority. On local television, he said:
"The precise figure will never be known partly because of the weakness of the medically recorded evidence."
That weakness was revealed even by the signatories to the statement that appeared in The Guardian.
Thus, Dr. Peter Morrell and Dr. Marietta Higgs examined a seven-year-old girl at Middlesbrough general hospital on 5 May 1987.
They diagnosed vaginal and anal abuse, but the minutes of a case review meeting held on Friday 5 June 1987 show that Dr. Peter Morrell pointed out that there was no conclusive medical evidence of sexual abuse.
It is to the credit of Dr. Peter Morrell that he changed his mind.
Dr. Nyint Oo, another signatory to the statement, along with his co- signatory, Dr. Diaz, examined three children aged five, seven and 10 who had been diagnosed by Dr. Higgs as having been sexually abused.
This examination took place at 10 o'clock on the evening of Wednesday 24 June.
According to the parents of the children, they were roused from their hospital beds for examination.
Both Dr. Oo and Dr. Diaz disagreed with the diagnosis of Dr. Higgs, and all three children were allowed home.
Another signatory, Dr. Caroline McCowen, could not agree with Dr. Higgs' diagnoses after an examination which she made on 10 July 1987 on three children, all girls, aged 10, eight and two, and those three children were subsequently reunited by the courts with their parents.
Are these now the children whom the consultants say were being abused all along?
To their credit, those consultants, along with three others in Cleveland, have since offered their apologies to the families for the distress that they had caused.
It is a pity that they did not go further and retract their 90 per cent. statement, leaving that task to the regional general manager of the northern regional health authority and the Minister of State, Department of Health.
The families, however, cannot leave matters as they stand.
They cannot leave their future in the hands of irresponsible statements.
They have waited to hear what the Paediatric Association might have said about the letter.
There has been a deafening silence.
Sadly, the paediatricians--the consultants in this matter of the letter--exercised power without responsibility.
Fortunately, I have 21 letters in support of the parents and the children from other doctors and consultants throughout the country which rectify the balance, but the parents have seen the destruction of childhood innocence in their children by repeated medical examinations and disclosure sessions.
Now they are seeing the steady destruction of what is left of their children's childhood...
Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com;
Showing posts with label cleveland child abuse case. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cleveland child abuse case. Show all posts
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Part Three: After Goudge: Will There Be Lasting Change: Not necessarily; The British Experience; The Cleveland "child abuse" case; (Continued);
Two sisters named Lindsey and Paula were removed from their home in 1987 after their parents were accused of molesting them by a pediatrician using an unproven medical techniques to diagnose sexual abuse.
They have been described as the first victims of the "Cleveland Child Abuse Case" which is the subject of two previous postings in this Blog: "After Goudge: Will there be lasting change: Parts One and Two";
Twenty years later, Lindsey and Paula chose to recount their family's nightmarish experience for the first time - through a anniversary story which ran on-line in the Daily Mail, on February 23, 2007.
Their experiences reflect the collateral damage which has been suffered by children in Ontario - and their families - who were removed from their mothers (some at birth) when the parent was investigated or charged with killing a sibling as a result of a flawed opinion rendered by Dr. Charles Smith.
A word of caution: This is not an easy read. I found myself getting angrier and angrier as the story progressed.
It ran under the heading: "The women who went through an ordeal beyond belief."
"Pretty and fashionably dressed, the two young sisters look the very embodiment of confident modern womanhood. In fact, Lindsey and Paula's lives have been almost too shocking to comprehend", the story begins.
"For these are the two girls who were at the centre of the Cleveland child abuse controversy that rocked Britain exactly 20 years ago," it continues.
"Raised by a loving family, they were the first victims of the 1987 scandal when hundreds of parents in the North-East of England were wrongly accused of the worst crime imaginable: molesting their own children Lindsey and Paula Wise are speaking out today for the first time.
They want the world to know exactly what happened to them on the say-so of a maverick paediatrician called Marietta Higgs and other child doctors in the hope that their story will stop such a travesty ever being repeated.
The girls, now 23 and 22, were taken from their devoted parents, Barry and Linda Wise, and put in foster homes.
They escaped adoption by a whisker. They spent their youngest years in the hands of the state instead of their family.
Like the 119 other children ensnared in what was Britain's first and biggest abuse scandal, they were interrogated by social workers and endured a battery of the most intimate examinations by doctors.
As a toddler Lindsey was photographed or examined for signs of sexual abuse 17 times, according to her own medical records.
In fact, it may have been many more - she will never know.
For, mysteriously, the official files on the Cleveland debacle, provoked by Dr Higgs's blind faith in an unproven medical technique to prove child abuse, have since been destroyed.
Now Lindsey and Paula Wise plan to take legal action against those they allege ruined their young lives.
This week they asked police in Middlesbrough, where they both live with their parents in a neat terraced house, to investigate their cases.
They acted after the admission on Monday by the Government's Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, that mistakes were made in Cleveland.
Sir Liam, coincidentally the medical officer in charge of the Northern Regional Health Authority covering the area in 1987, confirmed that the medical technique used by Dr Higgs and her acolytes was unreliable.
By looking at and probing a child's bottom, Dr Higgs believed she could see if there was Reflex Anal Dilatation - or RAD.
She insisted that the existence of RAD - originally devised to detect homosexual abuse -showed if a child had been interfered with. Today it is known that RAD can appear in any boy or girl quite normally and spontaneously.
After a long fight through the courts, 80 per cent of children taken in Cleveland were returned to their innocent parents.
Yet the damage was done.
Many were traumatised.
For years afterwards, they would hide if there was a knock on the door.
As Lindsey, now training as a nurse in Middlesbrough, told the Mail:
"I believe I was a guinea pig of the doctors.
I lost my babyhood and nearly my family.
The state kidnapped me at two years old and I did not go home again until I was four.
"My mother and father were accused of an unspeakable offence.
It has almost destroyed their lives.
My father was never strong enough to work again.
My mother can never forget the trauma of nearly losing her children.
"Now I want answers. I want an apology. I will not be silenced."
Paula, the manager of a hairdressing salon, added:
"We were abused by the very people - the doctors and social workers - there to protect children.
We were put up for adoption.
Now we want to know why."
The story of Lindsey and Paula Wise began innocently enough exactly a year before the Cleveland crisis gained national notoriety.
On July 9, 1986, their mother noticed bruises on Lindsey's arms when she came back from the local play school.
No one realised at the time, but they had been caused by Lindsey getting scratched as she picked bilberries from bushes.
Linda recalls: "I mentioned the mysterious bruises to our health visitor, then our GP, and, astonishingly, we found ourselves being accused of harming our own children.
The whole family were driven by social workers to Middlesbrough General Hospital."
The clock was ticking.
At the hospital, a local social worker called Carol Towers presented Barry and Linda with a "place of safety order" (which meant legally, the children could not be taken from the hospital by the parents) and said the family would have to be monitored 24 hours a day.
The young couple - both aged 22 and virtually teetotal, churchgoing Methodists - were told they had to live in a special family unit 30 miles away at the Fleming Memorial Hospital, in Newcastle.
If they refused, the children would be taken from them.
There, for the first time, they came face to face with Dr Marietta Higgs.
Barry, a former hotel manager, recalls today: "She walked into the room off a main ward and just looked at us. Then she asked if she could examine Lindsey and told us to take our daughter's clothes off."
It was a fateful moment. What Barry and Linda did not know was that only
a month before, in June 1986, 38-yearold Dr Higgs had attended a medical conference in Leeds.
There the Australian-born doctor enthusiastically embraced a new method of diagnosing child abuse - RAD - directly from its pioneers, two paediatricians called Dr Christopher Hobbs and Dr Jane Wynne.
As Dr Higgs was to admit later: "This made a great impact on me."
Now at 1.30pm on July 16, 1986, at the Fleming Memorial Hospital, Dr Higgs seized her first chance of trying the technique.
"She examined Lindsey's backside and then went away and told us nothing," says Barry today.
But a week later, Dr Higgs confronted Barry and Linda with the words: "I think it is an appropriate time to inform you of my suspicions. I strongly suspect that your eldest daughter, Lindsey, has been sexually abused."
Although outwardly confident of her radical diagnosis, it is now known that Dr Higgs went home after examining Lindsey to try out RAD on the two youngest of her own five children.
When they did not show the same telltale signs as the Wise family's eldest daughter, she concluded that Barry or Linda, perhaps both, were abusers.
Two days later she asked them to bring Lindsey back to her Newcastle consulting rooms.
"She put our daughter on the bed, kneeling face down, and parted her buttocks. Then she said: "This is what I am talking about," and walked out,"remembers Barry now. "She treated Lindsey like a piece of meat."
Moments later a policeman arrested him and Linda on suspicion of assault and buggery of their own daughter.
Social workers took Lindsey and Paula away from the hospital to foster parents and the Wises were driven to nearby Gosforth Police Station to be interviewed.
Barry remembers: "We don't drink, we never went out at night and left the children with a sitter, so they said no one else could have harmed them. We were asked if I changed the nappies or bathed the girls alone."
No charges were ever brought.
Throughout the ordeal, the parents could remember Lindsey's cries ringing in their ears as they left her at the hospital. She was screaming: "I want to go home."
By her side, the 18-month old Paula was clinging to her sister.
Yet worse was to come.
Six months later, in January 1987, Dr Higgs transferred to Middlesbrough General, the hospital with which her name became intrinsically linked.
There, with another paediatrician, Dr Geoffrey Wyatt, she introduced the routine use of the anal dilatation test.
It resulted in the mass diagnosis of child abuse on a scale never seen before in the world.
Meanwhile, Barry and Linda tried to keep in touch with their daughters. Over the 17 months they were away, they sent cards for Christmas, for their birthdays and for Easter.
They were returned in a brown envelope, unopened.
After the couple had been parted from their children for 15 weeks, in November 1986, they received a letter from social worker Carol Towers.
It said there were plans for Lindsey and Paula to "be provided with a permanent alternative family with the intention that adoption will be the outcome".
The consequences of the letter were tragic.
When Linda became pregnant with a third child, in March, 1987, she was so traumatised and terrified that her new baby would be taken by social workers that she went to South Cleveland Hospital for an abortion.
"I don't know if I was expecting a boy or a girl," she said this week, emotionally, "but it was a much-wanted child."
The demonic fervour of Dr Higgs was soon to prove her undoing.
Between February and July of 1987, 121 Cleveland children were diagnosed by her and Dr Wyatt as sexually abused.
The numbers were impossible to ignore.
An entire primary school of children was asked by Dr Wyatt to attend the hospital for the RAD test because he said all the pupils were anally abused.
The local MP, Stuart Bell, demanded a judicial inquiry into why so many children were suddenly being vilely hurt by their loved ones.
The Cleveland crisis was grabbing national headlines and parents began consulting lawyers.
For the Wises, something extraordinary was about to happen.
Unknown to Barry and Linda, their daughters had been growing up with good foster parents, with three girls of their own.
The "Allan" family (we have changed the name, as they have asked the Mail to protect their privacy) took the Wise girls to Middlesbrough Hospital in April 1987 for a final medical check-up with Marietta Higgs before being adopted.
There, astonishingly, the doctor diagnosed that both had been sexually abused while in foster care.
Immediately, the natural children of the Allans - Selina, aged ten, Rebecca, eight, and two yearold Eleanor - were admitted to hospital.
Dr Higgs deemed that all three had "signs" consistent with sexual abuse.
The girls' father, Michael, a civil servant, was arrested.
"It was like being hit by a prizefighter. Marietta Higgs and the others were like religious zealots on a mission," he said this week.
As for his daughter, Selina, she managed to smuggle a letter to her parents out of the Middlesbrough General Hospital where she was being kept with the Wise girls and her own sisters.
It said:
"Dear Mum and Dad.
I miss you very much.
In the hospital very early on Saturday morning, Dr Higgs woke me up to take photographs of our bottoms.
And about Saturday too, in the afternoon, she took Eleanor, Lindsey and Paula for photographs with June the nurse. The man who took the photographs was Ken and he was horrid."
By the summer of 1987, wards nine and ten of Middlesbrough General were overflowing with children taken from their parents after alleged sexual abuse.
Such an extraordinary number of cases prompted high-level concern. How could there be so many abuse victims?
Surely the doctors must be wrong?
Barry Wise said this week: "When the Allans were accused too, we realised we were not alone. It gave us strength to fight.
"Lindsey and Paula were sent to yet another foster home.
But we got legal aid, and in February the following year, 1988, the children were officially given back to us in a ruling by a judge at Middlesbrough Court."
A few weeks prior to this final decision, the family had been reunited in a a tearful and desperately poignant scene.
When Lindsey, then aged four, caught sight of her father for the first time since being ripped away from the family, she slapped him on the leg.
"I used to live with you a long time ago,' she said accusingly. "Where have you been?"
The parents hugged their two daughters as though they would never let go.
The ordeal was over. Or was it?
Lindsey, an elegant girl who has already won two prizes for nursing and will qualify later this year, believes that her and Paula's childhood was fractured by the Cleveland doctors.
It was only this week, after the Chief Medical Officer's pronouncement, that the two Wise girls have been told by their parents the entire truth.
The family have a plastic bag of newspaper cuttings about the Cleveland crisis and they have read them through together.
Tragically, they have looked at the colourful birthday cards they never received with the desperate messages from their parents telling them they were loved and missed.
Lindsey says now:
"Of course, I cannot remember everything because I was so young.
But I do recall the smell of Middlesbrough General Hospital at the time. I associated it with fear.
"In my last year at primary school, I was first told by other children I had been in care.
At my secondary school, a boy said my dad was a "paedophile".
"I came home and asked Mum and Dad about it.
They tried to protect me; they only said they had been wrongly accused of hurting me and Paula when we were little.
"Only now I realise the harm done to our family.
I was away from my parents for 17 months and only came back by chance.
I was placed naked on all fours and peered at by doctors again
and again.
What does that do to a child?'
Her sister Paula adds: "We were kidnapped and then nearly adopted.
My mother was blackmailed into having an abortion so we do not have a younger brother or sister.
'My father now says he did not dare even put a towel around me at the public swimming pool for years.
He was afraid of cuddling us in public. My parents lives have been shattered."
So what of Marietta Higgs?
Today she is working as a paediatrician in Kent.
In 1988, a public inquiry headed by Lord Justice Butler-Sloss (now in charge of the inquiry into Princess Diana's death) criticised her and Dr Wyatt for being over-confident in their diagnoses.
Northern Regional Health Authority barred Dr Higgs from child abuse work in their region.
She has never apologised.
"I reached my clinical diagnosis after very careful thought and I would do the same today," is what she said then.
Although this week she refused to comment further, Dr Higgs made it clear she has not changed her views.
No wonder Lindsey and Paula Wise shake their heads in horror."
There is a disturbing analogy between Dr. Higgs and and Dr. Charles Smith.
An independent panel of specialists found that in some cases Dr. Smith reached damning conclusions of non-accidental death based on unproven scientific techniques.
He, too, caused heads to shake in horror.
Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com;
They have been described as the first victims of the "Cleveland Child Abuse Case" which is the subject of two previous postings in this Blog: "After Goudge: Will there be lasting change: Parts One and Two";
Twenty years later, Lindsey and Paula chose to recount their family's nightmarish experience for the first time - through a anniversary story which ran on-line in the Daily Mail, on February 23, 2007.
Their experiences reflect the collateral damage which has been suffered by children in Ontario - and their families - who were removed from their mothers (some at birth) when the parent was investigated or charged with killing a sibling as a result of a flawed opinion rendered by Dr. Charles Smith.
A word of caution: This is not an easy read. I found myself getting angrier and angrier as the story progressed.
It ran under the heading: "The women who went through an ordeal beyond belief."
"Pretty and fashionably dressed, the two young sisters look the very embodiment of confident modern womanhood. In fact, Lindsey and Paula's lives have been almost too shocking to comprehend", the story begins.
"For these are the two girls who were at the centre of the Cleveland child abuse controversy that rocked Britain exactly 20 years ago," it continues.
"Raised by a loving family, they were the first victims of the 1987 scandal when hundreds of parents in the North-East of England were wrongly accused of the worst crime imaginable: molesting their own children Lindsey and Paula Wise are speaking out today for the first time.
They want the world to know exactly what happened to them on the say-so of a maverick paediatrician called Marietta Higgs and other child doctors in the hope that their story will stop such a travesty ever being repeated.
The girls, now 23 and 22, were taken from their devoted parents, Barry and Linda Wise, and put in foster homes.
They escaped adoption by a whisker. They spent their youngest years in the hands of the state instead of their family.
Like the 119 other children ensnared in what was Britain's first and biggest abuse scandal, they were interrogated by social workers and endured a battery of the most intimate examinations by doctors.
As a toddler Lindsey was photographed or examined for signs of sexual abuse 17 times, according to her own medical records.
In fact, it may have been many more - she will never know.
For, mysteriously, the official files on the Cleveland debacle, provoked by Dr Higgs's blind faith in an unproven medical technique to prove child abuse, have since been destroyed.
Now Lindsey and Paula Wise plan to take legal action against those they allege ruined their young lives.
This week they asked police in Middlesbrough, where they both live with their parents in a neat terraced house, to investigate their cases.
They acted after the admission on Monday by the Government's Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, that mistakes were made in Cleveland.
Sir Liam, coincidentally the medical officer in charge of the Northern Regional Health Authority covering the area in 1987, confirmed that the medical technique used by Dr Higgs and her acolytes was unreliable.
By looking at and probing a child's bottom, Dr Higgs believed she could see if there was Reflex Anal Dilatation - or RAD.
She insisted that the existence of RAD - originally devised to detect homosexual abuse -showed if a child had been interfered with. Today it is known that RAD can appear in any boy or girl quite normally and spontaneously.
After a long fight through the courts, 80 per cent of children taken in Cleveland were returned to their innocent parents.
Yet the damage was done.
Many were traumatised.
For years afterwards, they would hide if there was a knock on the door.
As Lindsey, now training as a nurse in Middlesbrough, told the Mail:
"I believe I was a guinea pig of the doctors.
I lost my babyhood and nearly my family.
The state kidnapped me at two years old and I did not go home again until I was four.
"My mother and father were accused of an unspeakable offence.
It has almost destroyed their lives.
My father was never strong enough to work again.
My mother can never forget the trauma of nearly losing her children.
"Now I want answers. I want an apology. I will not be silenced."
Paula, the manager of a hairdressing salon, added:
"We were abused by the very people - the doctors and social workers - there to protect children.
We were put up for adoption.
Now we want to know why."
The story of Lindsey and Paula Wise began innocently enough exactly a year before the Cleveland crisis gained national notoriety.
On July 9, 1986, their mother noticed bruises on Lindsey's arms when she came back from the local play school.
No one realised at the time, but they had been caused by Lindsey getting scratched as she picked bilberries from bushes.
Linda recalls: "I mentioned the mysterious bruises to our health visitor, then our GP, and, astonishingly, we found ourselves being accused of harming our own children.
The whole family were driven by social workers to Middlesbrough General Hospital."
The clock was ticking.
At the hospital, a local social worker called Carol Towers presented Barry and Linda with a "place of safety order" (which meant legally, the children could not be taken from the hospital by the parents) and said the family would have to be monitored 24 hours a day.
The young couple - both aged 22 and virtually teetotal, churchgoing Methodists - were told they had to live in a special family unit 30 miles away at the Fleming Memorial Hospital, in Newcastle.
If they refused, the children would be taken from them.
There, for the first time, they came face to face with Dr Marietta Higgs.
Barry, a former hotel manager, recalls today: "She walked into the room off a main ward and just looked at us. Then she asked if she could examine Lindsey and told us to take our daughter's clothes off."
It was a fateful moment. What Barry and Linda did not know was that only
a month before, in June 1986, 38-yearold Dr Higgs had attended a medical conference in Leeds.
There the Australian-born doctor enthusiastically embraced a new method of diagnosing child abuse - RAD - directly from its pioneers, two paediatricians called Dr Christopher Hobbs and Dr Jane Wynne.
As Dr Higgs was to admit later: "This made a great impact on me."
Now at 1.30pm on July 16, 1986, at the Fleming Memorial Hospital, Dr Higgs seized her first chance of trying the technique.
"She examined Lindsey's backside and then went away and told us nothing," says Barry today.
But a week later, Dr Higgs confronted Barry and Linda with the words: "I think it is an appropriate time to inform you of my suspicions. I strongly suspect that your eldest daughter, Lindsey, has been sexually abused."
Although outwardly confident of her radical diagnosis, it is now known that Dr Higgs went home after examining Lindsey to try out RAD on the two youngest of her own five children.
When they did not show the same telltale signs as the Wise family's eldest daughter, she concluded that Barry or Linda, perhaps both, were abusers.
Two days later she asked them to bring Lindsey back to her Newcastle consulting rooms.
"She put our daughter on the bed, kneeling face down, and parted her buttocks. Then she said: "This is what I am talking about," and walked out,"remembers Barry now. "She treated Lindsey like a piece of meat."
Moments later a policeman arrested him and Linda on suspicion of assault and buggery of their own daughter.
Social workers took Lindsey and Paula away from the hospital to foster parents and the Wises were driven to nearby Gosforth Police Station to be interviewed.
Barry remembers: "We don't drink, we never went out at night and left the children with a sitter, so they said no one else could have harmed them. We were asked if I changed the nappies or bathed the girls alone."
No charges were ever brought.
Throughout the ordeal, the parents could remember Lindsey's cries ringing in their ears as they left her at the hospital. She was screaming: "I want to go home."
By her side, the 18-month old Paula was clinging to her sister.
Yet worse was to come.
Six months later, in January 1987, Dr Higgs transferred to Middlesbrough General, the hospital with which her name became intrinsically linked.
There, with another paediatrician, Dr Geoffrey Wyatt, she introduced the routine use of the anal dilatation test.
It resulted in the mass diagnosis of child abuse on a scale never seen before in the world.
Meanwhile, Barry and Linda tried to keep in touch with their daughters. Over the 17 months they were away, they sent cards for Christmas, for their birthdays and for Easter.
They were returned in a brown envelope, unopened.
After the couple had been parted from their children for 15 weeks, in November 1986, they received a letter from social worker Carol Towers.
It said there were plans for Lindsey and Paula to "be provided with a permanent alternative family with the intention that adoption will be the outcome".
The consequences of the letter were tragic.
When Linda became pregnant with a third child, in March, 1987, she was so traumatised and terrified that her new baby would be taken by social workers that she went to South Cleveland Hospital for an abortion.
"I don't know if I was expecting a boy or a girl," she said this week, emotionally, "but it was a much-wanted child."
The demonic fervour of Dr Higgs was soon to prove her undoing.
Between February and July of 1987, 121 Cleveland children were diagnosed by her and Dr Wyatt as sexually abused.
The numbers were impossible to ignore.
An entire primary school of children was asked by Dr Wyatt to attend the hospital for the RAD test because he said all the pupils were anally abused.
The local MP, Stuart Bell, demanded a judicial inquiry into why so many children were suddenly being vilely hurt by their loved ones.
The Cleveland crisis was grabbing national headlines and parents began consulting lawyers.
For the Wises, something extraordinary was about to happen.
Unknown to Barry and Linda, their daughters had been growing up with good foster parents, with three girls of their own.
The "Allan" family (we have changed the name, as they have asked the Mail to protect their privacy) took the Wise girls to Middlesbrough Hospital in April 1987 for a final medical check-up with Marietta Higgs before being adopted.
There, astonishingly, the doctor diagnosed that both had been sexually abused while in foster care.
Immediately, the natural children of the Allans - Selina, aged ten, Rebecca, eight, and two yearold Eleanor - were admitted to hospital.
Dr Higgs deemed that all three had "signs" consistent with sexual abuse.
The girls' father, Michael, a civil servant, was arrested.
"It was like being hit by a prizefighter. Marietta Higgs and the others were like religious zealots on a mission," he said this week.
As for his daughter, Selina, she managed to smuggle a letter to her parents out of the Middlesbrough General Hospital where she was being kept with the Wise girls and her own sisters.
It said:
"Dear Mum and Dad.
I miss you very much.
In the hospital very early on Saturday morning, Dr Higgs woke me up to take photographs of our bottoms.
And about Saturday too, in the afternoon, she took Eleanor, Lindsey and Paula for photographs with June the nurse. The man who took the photographs was Ken and he was horrid."
By the summer of 1987, wards nine and ten of Middlesbrough General were overflowing with children taken from their parents after alleged sexual abuse.
Such an extraordinary number of cases prompted high-level concern. How could there be so many abuse victims?
Surely the doctors must be wrong?
Barry Wise said this week: "When the Allans were accused too, we realised we were not alone. It gave us strength to fight.
"Lindsey and Paula were sent to yet another foster home.
But we got legal aid, and in February the following year, 1988, the children were officially given back to us in a ruling by a judge at Middlesbrough Court."
A few weeks prior to this final decision, the family had been reunited in a a tearful and desperately poignant scene.
When Lindsey, then aged four, caught sight of her father for the first time since being ripped away from the family, she slapped him on the leg.
"I used to live with you a long time ago,' she said accusingly. "Where have you been?"
The parents hugged their two daughters as though they would never let go.
The ordeal was over. Or was it?
Lindsey, an elegant girl who has already won two prizes for nursing and will qualify later this year, believes that her and Paula's childhood was fractured by the Cleveland doctors.
It was only this week, after the Chief Medical Officer's pronouncement, that the two Wise girls have been told by their parents the entire truth.
The family have a plastic bag of newspaper cuttings about the Cleveland crisis and they have read them through together.
Tragically, they have looked at the colourful birthday cards they never received with the desperate messages from their parents telling them they were loved and missed.
Lindsey says now:
"Of course, I cannot remember everything because I was so young.
But I do recall the smell of Middlesbrough General Hospital at the time. I associated it with fear.
"In my last year at primary school, I was first told by other children I had been in care.
At my secondary school, a boy said my dad was a "paedophile".
"I came home and asked Mum and Dad about it.
They tried to protect me; they only said they had been wrongly accused of hurting me and Paula when we were little.
"Only now I realise the harm done to our family.
I was away from my parents for 17 months and only came back by chance.
I was placed naked on all fours and peered at by doctors again
and again.
What does that do to a child?'
Her sister Paula adds: "We were kidnapped and then nearly adopted.
My mother was blackmailed into having an abortion so we do not have a younger brother or sister.
'My father now says he did not dare even put a towel around me at the public swimming pool for years.
He was afraid of cuddling us in public. My parents lives have been shattered."
So what of Marietta Higgs?
Today she is working as a paediatrician in Kent.
In 1988, a public inquiry headed by Lord Justice Butler-Sloss (now in charge of the inquiry into Princess Diana's death) criticised her and Dr Wyatt for being over-confident in their diagnoses.
Northern Regional Health Authority barred Dr Higgs from child abuse work in their region.
She has never apologised.
"I reached my clinical diagnosis after very careful thought and I would do the same today," is what she said then.
Although this week she refused to comment further, Dr Higgs made it clear she has not changed her views.
No wonder Lindsey and Paula Wise shake their heads in horror."
There is a disturbing analogy between Dr. Higgs and and Dr. Charles Smith.
An independent panel of specialists found that in some cases Dr. Smith reached damning conclusions of non-accidental death based on unproven scientific techniques.
He, too, caused heads to shake in horror.
Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com;
Friday, March 14, 2008
Part Two: After Goudge: Will There Be Lasting Change? Not Necessarily; The British Experience: The Cleveland "Child Abuse" Case;
I am grateful to a reader for posting the following message to Part One: "After Goudge? Will there be lasting change: Not necessarily; The British Experience;"
The reader wrote the following comment:
"There will not be change based on the British experience. Look up the Cleveland Child Abuse Scandal where children were removed because of a medical opinion that Sir Stuart Bell, a priest and the Evening Gazette worked hard to stop happening. Nothing has changed nor will it until there is accountability for the professionals who are able to distort the truth because simply of who and what they are - doctors, coroners, social workers, prosecutors etc."
Our reader is most perceptive.
Professors Kathryn Campbell (University of Ottawa) and Clive Walker (University of Leeds) suggest in an article prepared fro the Goudge Inquiry entitled "Medical mistakes and miscarriages of justice: Perspectives on the experiences in England and Wales, that the Cleveland case is relevant in a Canadian context because it exemplifies, "the difficulties for individuals and the community when medical practitioners are not subjected to strict standards of legal due process."
A fascinating account of the nightmarish experience which struck a community when forensic science went horribly wrong is found in an article by Charles Pragnell entitled, "Abuse and Misuse of Professional Power."
The article notes that in 1987, the year the case unfolded, Pragnell was the Head of Research and Management Information Systems with Cleveland Social Services Department and was involved in the collection and collation of the data and statistics concerning the events which took place.
"In early summer 1987, the United Kingdom and the world were rocked by allegations of child sexual abuse occurring in Cleveland, a major industrial conurbation in the North-East of England," Pragnell's article begins.
"The Cleveland area was mainly comprised of three major towns, Middlesbrough, Stockton-on-Tees, and Hartlepool, and was administered at that time by a single local authority, Cleveland County Council, which had been formed in 1974," it continues.
"The area has since been divided into four local authorities and the name Cleveland only forms part of one of those councils.
Historically, Middlesbrough only came into existence at the beginning of the 19th century when iron ore was found in the nearby hills and it became a steel-making area, attracting workers from Ireland, Scotland and many other areas of the U.K. and from Eastern European countries such as Poland. Being at the mouth of a major river, the River Tees, the area then began to develop as a shipbuilding centre, and in the early part of the 20th century, petro-chemical industries were introduced and it became one of the largest centres in Europe for chemical and plastic production.
In the 1970s the steel-making, ship-building, and chemical industries went into rapid decline leading to high levels of unemployment which still persist among the mainly working-class population.
In the years leading up to 1987, the incidence of allegations of child sexual abuse for Cleveland was no greater than other parts of the U.K. but in January 1987 the numbers began to escalate rapidly, reaching a peak in May, June, and July. The total referrals to Cleveland Social Services for all forms of child abuse during the period January to July 1987 were 505 referrals compared with only 288 referrals in the equivalent period in the previous year.
Increasing numbers of allegations of child sexual abuse were being made by two consultant paediatricians at a Middlesbrough hospital and were based on an unproven medical diagnosis termed the anal dilatation test. Once these allegations had been made, social workers were removing the children from their families on Place of Safety Orders, often in midnight and dawn raids on the family home where children were taken from their beds and placed in foster homes and residential homes.
The initial crisis came when there were no more foster homes or residential home placements to accommodate the numbers of children involved and a special ward had to be set up at the hospital to accommodate the children who continued to be diagnosed as having been sexually abused.
Increasingly the diagnosis using the anal dilation test was being challenged by the police surgeon, who questioned the validity of such a test, and the police gradually withdrew their co-operation in the cases referred by the consultant paediatricians. Relationships between the police, social workers, and the paediatricians broke down as the dispute in medical opinions escalated.
It is alarming to note that there is no requirement for paediatric diagnoses to be scientifically-based, despite the present emphasis on `evidence-based' social work and medicine, and there is no system of verifying and validating paediatric diagnoses on which child abuse allegations may be based, before they can be used in clinical practice. This was acknowledged by John Forfar, the then President of the British Paediatric Association, who wrote to one of the paediatricians involved, Dr. Marietta Higgs, in July 1987 and gave an admonishment in regard to the use of the anal dilatation test :
"The regulation of medical practice is achieved best when it is accomplished within the medical profession. New stances based on a new awareness of clinical signs, or new significances being attached to them, require first to be established within the profession. This takes some time and requires persuasion and scientific evidence of validity, based on the accepted method of communication to professional journals or scientific meetings."
In the early months of the crisis, the allegations involved working-class families, who were confused, bewildered, and angry at being accused of sexually abusing their children, but they were powerless against middle-class professionals with the authority, power, and legal sanctions to support their actions. Gradually, however, the allegations began to involve middle-class families who were highly educated, employed in professional occupations, and with access to legal and political advice and to the media. They were to use such powerful allies to considerable effect. From a sociological perspective, therefore, the events in Cleveland could be seen as a punitive form of middle-class oppression of working-class families by middle-class professionals and an imposition of middle-class values on the working classes. Some aspects of the Cleveland Child Sexual Abuse Scandal have been likened to a mediaeval witch-hunt by at least one author (`When Salem came to the Boro' - Rt. Hon. Stuart Bell, Member of Parliament for Middlesbrough - 1988).
In the initial months of the crisis, public sympathy and concern was strongly in support of the social workers and paediatricians and the media, pursuing their simplistic analysis of all situations as having `goodies' and `baddies', also supported the social workers. Several social workers and managers within the Social Services had serious doubts about what was happening, but although they voiced their concerns to senior managers, they too were powerless to change events.
Public concern centred on the removal of children from their beds at all hours of the night and fear spread among the local population, as these were painful reminders of events which occurred in Germany between 1933 and 1945, when there were similar misuses of state power by police and government officials.
The turning point of events came in late May on the day that the parents decided to march from the hospital where their children were being held to the offices of the local newspaper, and they began telling their versions of events, which of course varied considerably from the narrative constructions of the paediatricians and social workers. Gradually, the media turned to support the parents, and the social workers came under intense public and political scrutiny, which eventually led to the setting up of a Public Inquiry led by Justice Butler-Sloss.
The Inquiry examined the cases involving 121 children where sexual abuse was alleged to have been identified using the anal dilation test and the actions of the paediatricians and social workers involved. Of these 121 cases where sexual abuse of the children was alleged, the Courts subsequently dismissed the proceedings involving 96 of the children, i.e. over 80% were found to be false accusations. There are some social workers and medical professionals who have found difficulty in accepting the findings of the Courts and are `in denial' that they were wrong in their allegations. They have sought to use the findings of a medical panel which claimed that, on the basis of an examination of cases involving 29 of the children, 75% of the children had been sexually abused. Medical opinion is not, of course, proven fact, whereas opinions and supportive evidence given in courts can be challenged and tested under cross-examination as to their validity and veracity.
One of the major findings of the Butler-Sloss Inquiry was that children had been removed precipitately by social workers who had failed to seek corroborative evidence to support the allegations of the paediatricians and had failed to carry out comprehensive assessments of the children and their families. Consequently a requirement was introduced that social workers should not act solely on the basis of medical opinion.
Concerns were also expressed at the Inquiry regarding the use of video-recording equipment for surveillance of interviews with children and the use of anatomically-correct dolls in the questioning of children where sexual abuse was alleged. During such video-recorded sessions, social workers were seen to threaten and attempt to bribe children in order to bring pressure on the children to confirm the social worker's views that they had been abused and leading questions were asked of the children which would not have been permitted in courts. The interviews of the children by the social workers also confused the investigatory nature of such interviews with a therapeutic purpose. Where interviews containing a therapeutic element with children where abuse is alleged are conducted before trial, courts could take the view that such interviews contaminated and corrupted the children's evidence.
Anatomically correct dolls can now only be used by professionals who have undertaken intensive training in their use, and serious doubts have been raised by some psychologists regarding the use of such dolls, citing the difficulties of interpretations of children's behaviours which can be made and how readily false assumptions can be made.
One of the key issues in the Cleveland Child Sex Abuse Scandal was the power of professional groups in U.K. society, and how those powers can be misused and abused in the absence of accountability in law and for professional practice. Social workers are not personally liable in law for their actions in child protection matters, as they can be in mental health work and it could be argued that this is a necessary development. It is only recently that a General Social Care Council (G.S.C.C.) has been introduced in the U.K. under which social workers will now be registered and can be held responsible for their professional practice. However there is little public confidence in the General Medical Council to which medical practitioners are accountable for malpractice and misconduct, and it remains to be seen whether the G.S.C.C. is effective in its role and is thereby able to command public confidence.
There is a belief in some quarters that the events in Cleveland in 1987 led to the Children Act 1989 but this is incorrect. The need for the reform of child care legislation, both public and private law relating to children, had been identified several years earlier by the House of Commons Social Services Select Committee of 1984 (Children In Care) which described the then situation as "complex, confusing, and unsatisfactory". A Review of Child Care Law followed and led to a White Paper, "The Law on Child Care and Family Services", which was published before the findings of the Butler-Sloss Inquiry were known. The Law Commission was also examining the reform of private law relating to children and published its findings in July 1988.
There had been numerous Public Inquiries during the 1970s and 1980s into the deaths of children whilst under the care and supervision of social workers e.g. Maria Colwell, Kimberley Carlisle, Jasmine Beckford, Stephen Meurs, Tyra Henry, etc, and these cases had a major impact on the preparation of the Bill which led to the Children Act 1989. The other major influence on the Children Act was the need to encompass the provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child which was finally signed by the U.K. government in 1991.
There was some delay in publishing the Act during the Inquiry into the Cleveland Child Abuse Scandal and the effects on the Act were the introduction of the Emergency Protection Order lasting only seven days and which could be challenged in the courts by the parents after 72 hours. The previous Place of Safety Orders used extensively in Cleveland could not be challenged for 28 days. The guidance to the Act also required that in Care Proceedings, courts should seek to reach decisions as quickly as possible, as in many of the cases concerning children involved in the Cleveland Scandal, they were left in the limbo of Interim Care Orders, lasting in some cases up to two years. Wardship proceedings had also been used in Cleveland where difficulties would have been experienced by social workers in bringing Care Proceedings and so changes were made to Wardship Proceedings restricting such uses and may now only be used in specific circumstances.
Since 1987, the people of Cleveland have sought to move on from this unsavoury episode in the area's history and to gradually remove the slurs and scars to the reputation of what has always been a vibrant industrial and commercial community.
Perhaps the most lasting effect has been the climate of fear which was created and engendered in the parents of young children by events in Cleveland in 1987, not only in Cleveland but the rest of the U.K. In the 1980s male parents were becoming more accepting of their role as direct carers of their children and to share roles with their female partners, commonly referred to as the `Sensitive New Age Guys' [SNAGs]. This involved the male parent in bathing and dressing their children and performing other acts of personal care. Following Cleveland, many male parents withdrew from these activities from fear that their actions might be seen as unhealthy by social workers and might be misinterpreted by social workers as having an unnatural interest in their children, and they feared allegations of child abuse could be made against them."
Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com;
The reader wrote the following comment:
"There will not be change based on the British experience. Look up the Cleveland Child Abuse Scandal where children were removed because of a medical opinion that Sir Stuart Bell, a priest and the Evening Gazette worked hard to stop happening. Nothing has changed nor will it until there is accountability for the professionals who are able to distort the truth because simply of who and what they are - doctors, coroners, social workers, prosecutors etc."
Our reader is most perceptive.
Professors Kathryn Campbell (University of Ottawa) and Clive Walker (University of Leeds) suggest in an article prepared fro the Goudge Inquiry entitled "Medical mistakes and miscarriages of justice: Perspectives on the experiences in England and Wales, that the Cleveland case is relevant in a Canadian context because it exemplifies, "the difficulties for individuals and the community when medical practitioners are not subjected to strict standards of legal due process."
A fascinating account of the nightmarish experience which struck a community when forensic science went horribly wrong is found in an article by Charles Pragnell entitled, "Abuse and Misuse of Professional Power."
The article notes that in 1987, the year the case unfolded, Pragnell was the Head of Research and Management Information Systems with Cleveland Social Services Department and was involved in the collection and collation of the data and statistics concerning the events which took place.
"In early summer 1987, the United Kingdom and the world were rocked by allegations of child sexual abuse occurring in Cleveland, a major industrial conurbation in the North-East of England," Pragnell's article begins.
"The Cleveland area was mainly comprised of three major towns, Middlesbrough, Stockton-on-Tees, and Hartlepool, and was administered at that time by a single local authority, Cleveland County Council, which had been formed in 1974," it continues.
"The area has since been divided into four local authorities and the name Cleveland only forms part of one of those councils.
Historically, Middlesbrough only came into existence at the beginning of the 19th century when iron ore was found in the nearby hills and it became a steel-making area, attracting workers from Ireland, Scotland and many other areas of the U.K. and from Eastern European countries such as Poland. Being at the mouth of a major river, the River Tees, the area then began to develop as a shipbuilding centre, and in the early part of the 20th century, petro-chemical industries were introduced and it became one of the largest centres in Europe for chemical and plastic production.
In the 1970s the steel-making, ship-building, and chemical industries went into rapid decline leading to high levels of unemployment which still persist among the mainly working-class population.
In the years leading up to 1987, the incidence of allegations of child sexual abuse for Cleveland was no greater than other parts of the U.K. but in January 1987 the numbers began to escalate rapidly, reaching a peak in May, June, and July. The total referrals to Cleveland Social Services for all forms of child abuse during the period January to July 1987 were 505 referrals compared with only 288 referrals in the equivalent period in the previous year.
Increasing numbers of allegations of child sexual abuse were being made by two consultant paediatricians at a Middlesbrough hospital and were based on an unproven medical diagnosis termed the anal dilatation test. Once these allegations had been made, social workers were removing the children from their families on Place of Safety Orders, often in midnight and dawn raids on the family home where children were taken from their beds and placed in foster homes and residential homes.
The initial crisis came when there were no more foster homes or residential home placements to accommodate the numbers of children involved and a special ward had to be set up at the hospital to accommodate the children who continued to be diagnosed as having been sexually abused.
Increasingly the diagnosis using the anal dilation test was being challenged by the police surgeon, who questioned the validity of such a test, and the police gradually withdrew their co-operation in the cases referred by the consultant paediatricians. Relationships between the police, social workers, and the paediatricians broke down as the dispute in medical opinions escalated.
It is alarming to note that there is no requirement for paediatric diagnoses to be scientifically-based, despite the present emphasis on `evidence-based' social work and medicine, and there is no system of verifying and validating paediatric diagnoses on which child abuse allegations may be based, before they can be used in clinical practice. This was acknowledged by John Forfar, the then President of the British Paediatric Association, who wrote to one of the paediatricians involved, Dr. Marietta Higgs, in July 1987 and gave an admonishment in regard to the use of the anal dilatation test :
"The regulation of medical practice is achieved best when it is accomplished within the medical profession. New stances based on a new awareness of clinical signs, or new significances being attached to them, require first to be established within the profession. This takes some time and requires persuasion and scientific evidence of validity, based on the accepted method of communication to professional journals or scientific meetings."
In the early months of the crisis, the allegations involved working-class families, who were confused, bewildered, and angry at being accused of sexually abusing their children, but they were powerless against middle-class professionals with the authority, power, and legal sanctions to support their actions. Gradually, however, the allegations began to involve middle-class families who were highly educated, employed in professional occupations, and with access to legal and political advice and to the media. They were to use such powerful allies to considerable effect. From a sociological perspective, therefore, the events in Cleveland could be seen as a punitive form of middle-class oppression of working-class families by middle-class professionals and an imposition of middle-class values on the working classes. Some aspects of the Cleveland Child Sexual Abuse Scandal have been likened to a mediaeval witch-hunt by at least one author (`When Salem came to the Boro' - Rt. Hon. Stuart Bell, Member of Parliament for Middlesbrough - 1988).
In the initial months of the crisis, public sympathy and concern was strongly in support of the social workers and paediatricians and the media, pursuing their simplistic analysis of all situations as having `goodies' and `baddies', also supported the social workers. Several social workers and managers within the Social Services had serious doubts about what was happening, but although they voiced their concerns to senior managers, they too were powerless to change events.
Public concern centred on the removal of children from their beds at all hours of the night and fear spread among the local population, as these were painful reminders of events which occurred in Germany between 1933 and 1945, when there were similar misuses of state power by police and government officials.
The turning point of events came in late May on the day that the parents decided to march from the hospital where their children were being held to the offices of the local newspaper, and they began telling their versions of events, which of course varied considerably from the narrative constructions of the paediatricians and social workers. Gradually, the media turned to support the parents, and the social workers came under intense public and political scrutiny, which eventually led to the setting up of a Public Inquiry led by Justice Butler-Sloss.
The Inquiry examined the cases involving 121 children where sexual abuse was alleged to have been identified using the anal dilation test and the actions of the paediatricians and social workers involved. Of these 121 cases where sexual abuse of the children was alleged, the Courts subsequently dismissed the proceedings involving 96 of the children, i.e. over 80% were found to be false accusations. There are some social workers and medical professionals who have found difficulty in accepting the findings of the Courts and are `in denial' that they were wrong in their allegations. They have sought to use the findings of a medical panel which claimed that, on the basis of an examination of cases involving 29 of the children, 75% of the children had been sexually abused. Medical opinion is not, of course, proven fact, whereas opinions and supportive evidence given in courts can be challenged and tested under cross-examination as to their validity and veracity.
One of the major findings of the Butler-Sloss Inquiry was that children had been removed precipitately by social workers who had failed to seek corroborative evidence to support the allegations of the paediatricians and had failed to carry out comprehensive assessments of the children and their families. Consequently a requirement was introduced that social workers should not act solely on the basis of medical opinion.
Concerns were also expressed at the Inquiry regarding the use of video-recording equipment for surveillance of interviews with children and the use of anatomically-correct dolls in the questioning of children where sexual abuse was alleged. During such video-recorded sessions, social workers were seen to threaten and attempt to bribe children in order to bring pressure on the children to confirm the social worker's views that they had been abused and leading questions were asked of the children which would not have been permitted in courts. The interviews of the children by the social workers also confused the investigatory nature of such interviews with a therapeutic purpose. Where interviews containing a therapeutic element with children where abuse is alleged are conducted before trial, courts could take the view that such interviews contaminated and corrupted the children's evidence.
Anatomically correct dolls can now only be used by professionals who have undertaken intensive training in their use, and serious doubts have been raised by some psychologists regarding the use of such dolls, citing the difficulties of interpretations of children's behaviours which can be made and how readily false assumptions can be made.
One of the key issues in the Cleveland Child Sex Abuse Scandal was the power of professional groups in U.K. society, and how those powers can be misused and abused in the absence of accountability in law and for professional practice. Social workers are not personally liable in law for their actions in child protection matters, as they can be in mental health work and it could be argued that this is a necessary development. It is only recently that a General Social Care Council (G.S.C.C.) has been introduced in the U.K. under which social workers will now be registered and can be held responsible for their professional practice. However there is little public confidence in the General Medical Council to which medical practitioners are accountable for malpractice and misconduct, and it remains to be seen whether the G.S.C.C. is effective in its role and is thereby able to command public confidence.
There is a belief in some quarters that the events in Cleveland in 1987 led to the Children Act 1989 but this is incorrect. The need for the reform of child care legislation, both public and private law relating to children, had been identified several years earlier by the House of Commons Social Services Select Committee of 1984 (Children In Care) which described the then situation as "complex, confusing, and unsatisfactory". A Review of Child Care Law followed and led to a White Paper, "The Law on Child Care and Family Services", which was published before the findings of the Butler-Sloss Inquiry were known. The Law Commission was also examining the reform of private law relating to children and published its findings in July 1988.
There had been numerous Public Inquiries during the 1970s and 1980s into the deaths of children whilst under the care and supervision of social workers e.g. Maria Colwell, Kimberley Carlisle, Jasmine Beckford, Stephen Meurs, Tyra Henry, etc, and these cases had a major impact on the preparation of the Bill which led to the Children Act 1989. The other major influence on the Children Act was the need to encompass the provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child which was finally signed by the U.K. government in 1991.
There was some delay in publishing the Act during the Inquiry into the Cleveland Child Abuse Scandal and the effects on the Act were the introduction of the Emergency Protection Order lasting only seven days and which could be challenged in the courts by the parents after 72 hours. The previous Place of Safety Orders used extensively in Cleveland could not be challenged for 28 days. The guidance to the Act also required that in Care Proceedings, courts should seek to reach decisions as quickly as possible, as in many of the cases concerning children involved in the Cleveland Scandal, they were left in the limbo of Interim Care Orders, lasting in some cases up to two years. Wardship proceedings had also been used in Cleveland where difficulties would have been experienced by social workers in bringing Care Proceedings and so changes were made to Wardship Proceedings restricting such uses and may now only be used in specific circumstances.
Since 1987, the people of Cleveland have sought to move on from this unsavoury episode in the area's history and to gradually remove the slurs and scars to the reputation of what has always been a vibrant industrial and commercial community.
Perhaps the most lasting effect has been the climate of fear which was created and engendered in the parents of young children by events in Cleveland in 1987, not only in Cleveland but the rest of the U.K. In the 1980s male parents were becoming more accepting of their role as direct carers of their children and to share roles with their female partners, commonly referred to as the `Sensitive New Age Guys' [SNAGs]. This involved the male parent in bathing and dressing their children and performing other acts of personal care. Following Cleveland, many male parents withdrew from these activities from fear that their actions might be seen as unhealthy by social workers and might be misinterpreted by social workers as having an unnatural interest in their children, and they feared allegations of child abuse could be made against them."
Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com;
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
A Stunning Revelation From Dr. Smith's Very Own Lips: He Was A Member Of The Prosecution Team And Was Committed To Helping It Win.
"AND I WAS A -- A LITTLE CONCERNED ABOUT BEING AN ADVOCATE, BECAUSE BY THAT POINT IN THE 1990's, I KNEW AT LEAST IN THEORY, IF NOT PRACTICE, THAT I SHOULD NOT BE AN ADVOCATE".
DR. CHARLES SMITH TO COMMISSION COUNSEL LINDA ROTHSTEIN;
During the many years that I have been reporting on Dr. Charles Smith I strongly suspected that he regarded himself as a member of the prosecution team - instead of as an independent witness for the Crown.
Of, course, Dr. Smith did not declare his bias to the jury.
To the contrary, he appeared to be a sincere, objective and conscientious scientist who was there to help the judge and jurors decide the case.
So I almost fell off my chair yesterday when Dr. Smith candidly admitted to Justice Steven Goudge that for many years he saw himself as a member of the prosecution team and believed his job was to help the Crown win the case - and that it was all part of the war against the sexual abuse of children.
Dr. Smith made this stunning admission after Commission Counsel Linda Rothstein asked him to expand on his earlier testimony that, "I Fell victim to my tendency to become dogmatic, adversarial, too defensive, speak in black and white terms."
Here, without editorial comment, is a portion of the transcript from yesterday's hearing in which Dr. Smith makes his stunning admission:
"DR. CHARLES SMITH: in the very beginning when I went to court in the -- on the few occasions in the 1980s, I -- I honestly believed it was my role to support the Crown attorney. I was there to make a case look good.
That's being very blunt but that was the why I felt and I know when I talked with some of my other colleagues especially those who were junior, we -- we
shared the same -- the same kind of an attitude.
And -- and I think it -- it took me a long time, years, to acknowledge that my role was really not to make the Crown's case, or to make the case of whoever wanted me in court, but really to be much more impartial.
And though into the 1990s I would have told you that that was what my role was, I -- I think I was pretty lousy at executing it. I'm sorry for that -- for that language. I think I was poor at executing it.
Though I knew what to do, I didn't do it and so my -- my understanding or my book knowledge was not -- was not borne out by my execution in court.
MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN: And did your desire to make a case for the Crown lead as well to its converse? A feeling that you were there to refute the defence case?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: I -- I certainly felt tat pressure at times when I walked into court; that pressure from a Crown attorney, yeah.
COMMISSIONER STEPHEN GOUDGE: Where did you get the sense originally that that was the role?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: I -- I think this is an expression of ignorance. The first time I went into a court case, you know, I had a -- I had a diagnosis of
head injury, of non-accidental head injury.
My colleagues had come to a similar thing and I think as we discussed the case in the hospital, it was our -- our view that this was a non-accidental head
injury and we were going out there to make sure that a
judge and jury understood it.
And as I spoke to my colleagues from, you know, radiology or -- or what was, I think, the forerunner to the to SCAN Team, that was the sense that I had.
As I think back on it now, I wonder to what degree the -- the -- sometimes the advocacy role that was used by some at the hospital coloured my thinking.
I certainly didn't understand sort of that concept of advocacy in the -- in the early '80s but I believe that I was giving an opinion as part of a group
that was supposed to -- to make -- make it very clear to everyone what the right diagnosis was.
COMMISSIONER STEPHEN GOUDGE: And who at the hospital had an advocacy role then?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: Oh, there -- there -- before the SCAN Team was kind of redesigned under Dr. Mian, which would have been -- I'm -- I'm sorry I can't
remember the year, it would have been mid or late '80s perhaps, there was prior to that others who were involved in those cases, and -- and they were -- they were
proactive in -- in their investigation.
As well, one (1) of the radiologists who I leaned heavily on, a -- a very senior gentleman, also was very clear cut in black and white and -- and that -- and...
CONTINUED BY MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN:
MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN: Who was that, Dr. Smith?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: Dr. Reilly, R-E-I-L-L-Y. Bernard, Bernie Reilly, who I presume he's deceased now because I was junior and he was towards the end of his career and --
COMMISSIONER STEPHEN GOUDGE: And this was a general atmosphere of advocacy against child abuse?
Is that --
DR. CHARLES SMITH: Yes. I think -- I think that's a fair way of doing it.
And -- and please understand, sir, that his is a period of time where the whole area of child abuse is just kind of coming into being and so there was a sense that this is a new area, we need to pay attention to it.
And -- and it was almost wanting to educate and kind of bringing attention to this, and I think that might have been part of that advocacy community, or environment, or culture that -- that was exist -- in existence at that time.
COMMISSIONER STEPHEN GOUDGE: Thank you.
CONTINUED BY MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN:
MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN: So just to follow up on that point before the break, Dr. Smith, you would share the view of those who've already told us that in
the mid '80s there as a concern that child abuse was under reported?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: Yes. Yes, I agree with that.
MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN: That child abuse was under detected by health care professionals across the board?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: I believe that's accurate.
MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN: That child abuse was under prosecuted by the State?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: I think that -- I -- I think at that time, I would have agreed with that, yes.
MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN: And that there had to be changes made in order to reverse those trends?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: Yes. I agree with that, yes.
MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN: And you saw it, in part, as your job to try and reverse those trends?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: I -- I think if you'd asked me that then I would have said no, but -- but I think I -- I did feel that way.
It was many years later when -- when mention was made of the possibility of me being part of the SCAN Team, and by that point in time -- but this is many years later -- I recognized that the SCAN Team could be more of an advocate that I could be.
And -- and I believe that was by definition their role, and I was reluctant to -- to be painted with that brush. I wasn't part of the SCAN Team; I didn't see live patients.
And I was a -- a little concerned about being an advocate, because by that point in the 1990s, I knew at least in theory, if not practice, that I should not be an advocate.
But if you set the clock back five (5) or ten (10) years earlier, I believe I was in -- I was part of that advocacy culture, though I don't think I would have recognized it or stated it at that time.
MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN: And by the mid '90s, how would you have characterized your approach?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: Well, I'd like -- I'd like to think, or I thought that I was sort of down the middle of the road, but obviously in -- in situations, I
was not, and I veered to the left or to the right at times."
As I heard these word coming out of the mouth of Dr. Charles Smith, I wondered how they were sounding to Sherry Sherret, Brenda Waudby, Lianne Thibeault, Bill Mullins-Johnson and the others present in the hearing room who were so sorely affected by his opinions over the years.
Apart from losing their children, the involvement of Dr. Charles Smith must have been the worst possible nightmare that could have entered their lives.
Now they learn that he saw himself as part of the prosecution team.
How far would he go to help the prosecution win?
That's question surely goes to the heart of this Inquiry.
Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com
DR. CHARLES SMITH TO COMMISSION COUNSEL LINDA ROTHSTEIN;
During the many years that I have been reporting on Dr. Charles Smith I strongly suspected that he regarded himself as a member of the prosecution team - instead of as an independent witness for the Crown.
Of, course, Dr. Smith did not declare his bias to the jury.
To the contrary, he appeared to be a sincere, objective and conscientious scientist who was there to help the judge and jurors decide the case.
So I almost fell off my chair yesterday when Dr. Smith candidly admitted to Justice Steven Goudge that for many years he saw himself as a member of the prosecution team and believed his job was to help the Crown win the case - and that it was all part of the war against the sexual abuse of children.
Dr. Smith made this stunning admission after Commission Counsel Linda Rothstein asked him to expand on his earlier testimony that, "I Fell victim to my tendency to become dogmatic, adversarial, too defensive, speak in black and white terms."
Here, without editorial comment, is a portion of the transcript from yesterday's hearing in which Dr. Smith makes his stunning admission:
"DR. CHARLES SMITH: in the very beginning when I went to court in the -- on the few occasions in the 1980s, I -- I honestly believed it was my role to support the Crown attorney. I was there to make a case look good.
That's being very blunt but that was the why I felt and I know when I talked with some of my other colleagues especially those who were junior, we -- we
shared the same -- the same kind of an attitude.
And -- and I think it -- it took me a long time, years, to acknowledge that my role was really not to make the Crown's case, or to make the case of whoever wanted me in court, but really to be much more impartial.
And though into the 1990s I would have told you that that was what my role was, I -- I think I was pretty lousy at executing it. I'm sorry for that -- for that language. I think I was poor at executing it.
Though I knew what to do, I didn't do it and so my -- my understanding or my book knowledge was not -- was not borne out by my execution in court.
MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN: And did your desire to make a case for the Crown lead as well to its converse? A feeling that you were there to refute the defence case?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: I -- I certainly felt tat pressure at times when I walked into court; that pressure from a Crown attorney, yeah.
COMMISSIONER STEPHEN GOUDGE: Where did you get the sense originally that that was the role?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: I -- I think this is an expression of ignorance. The first time I went into a court case, you know, I had a -- I had a diagnosis of
head injury, of non-accidental head injury.
My colleagues had come to a similar thing and I think as we discussed the case in the hospital, it was our -- our view that this was a non-accidental head
injury and we were going out there to make sure that a
judge and jury understood it.
And as I spoke to my colleagues from, you know, radiology or -- or what was, I think, the forerunner to the to SCAN Team, that was the sense that I had.
As I think back on it now, I wonder to what degree the -- the -- sometimes the advocacy role that was used by some at the hospital coloured my thinking.
I certainly didn't understand sort of that concept of advocacy in the -- in the early '80s but I believe that I was giving an opinion as part of a group
that was supposed to -- to make -- make it very clear to everyone what the right diagnosis was.
COMMISSIONER STEPHEN GOUDGE: And who at the hospital had an advocacy role then?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: Oh, there -- there -- before the SCAN Team was kind of redesigned under Dr. Mian, which would have been -- I'm -- I'm sorry I can't
remember the year, it would have been mid or late '80s perhaps, there was prior to that others who were involved in those cases, and -- and they were -- they were
proactive in -- in their investigation.
As well, one (1) of the radiologists who I leaned heavily on, a -- a very senior gentleman, also was very clear cut in black and white and -- and that -- and...
CONTINUED BY MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN:
MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN: Who was that, Dr. Smith?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: Dr. Reilly, R-E-I-L-L-Y. Bernard, Bernie Reilly, who I presume he's deceased now because I was junior and he was towards the end of his career and --
COMMISSIONER STEPHEN GOUDGE: And this was a general atmosphere of advocacy against child abuse?
Is that --
DR. CHARLES SMITH: Yes. I think -- I think that's a fair way of doing it.
And -- and please understand, sir, that his is a period of time where the whole area of child abuse is just kind of coming into being and so there was a sense that this is a new area, we need to pay attention to it.
And -- and it was almost wanting to educate and kind of bringing attention to this, and I think that might have been part of that advocacy community, or environment, or culture that -- that was exist -- in existence at that time.
COMMISSIONER STEPHEN GOUDGE: Thank you.
CONTINUED BY MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN:
MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN: So just to follow up on that point before the break, Dr. Smith, you would share the view of those who've already told us that in
the mid '80s there as a concern that child abuse was under reported?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: Yes. Yes, I agree with that.
MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN: That child abuse was under detected by health care professionals across the board?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: I believe that's accurate.
MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN: That child abuse was under prosecuted by the State?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: I think that -- I -- I think at that time, I would have agreed with that, yes.
MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN: And that there had to be changes made in order to reverse those trends?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: Yes. I agree with that, yes.
MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN: And you saw it, in part, as your job to try and reverse those trends?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: I -- I think if you'd asked me that then I would have said no, but -- but I think I -- I did feel that way.
It was many years later when -- when mention was made of the possibility of me being part of the SCAN Team, and by that point in time -- but this is many years later -- I recognized that the SCAN Team could be more of an advocate that I could be.
And -- and I believe that was by definition their role, and I was reluctant to -- to be painted with that brush. I wasn't part of the SCAN Team; I didn't see live patients.
And I was a -- a little concerned about being an advocate, because by that point in the 1990s, I knew at least in theory, if not practice, that I should not be an advocate.
But if you set the clock back five (5) or ten (10) years earlier, I believe I was in -- I was part of that advocacy culture, though I don't think I would have recognized it or stated it at that time.
MS. LINDA ROTHSTEIN: And by the mid '90s, how would you have characterized your approach?
DR. CHARLES SMITH: Well, I'd like -- I'd like to think, or I thought that I was sort of down the middle of the road, but obviously in -- in situations, I
was not, and I veered to the left or to the right at times."
As I heard these word coming out of the mouth of Dr. Charles Smith, I wondered how they were sounding to Sherry Sherret, Brenda Waudby, Lianne Thibeault, Bill Mullins-Johnson and the others present in the hearing room who were so sorely affected by his opinions over the years.
Apart from losing their children, the involvement of Dr. Charles Smith must have been the worst possible nightmare that could have entered their lives.
Now they learn that he saw himself as part of the prosecution team.
How far would he go to help the prosecution win?
That's question surely goes to the heart of this Inquiry.
Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com
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