RAD - the Return of a Nightmare

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http://www.stopinjusticenow.com/News_0530.htm
By Charles Pragnell 3 November 2007
An increasing number of parents are reporting that paediatricians at a teaching hospital in a particular city in the North of England are again using the Reflex Anal Dilatation test as a means of examining their children for sexual abuse. RAD gained notoriety when it was used by two paediatricians in Cleveland, also in the north of England, in 1987 and led to a nightmare of pain and suffering for 121 children and their families. Organised gangs of social workers and police have again descended on families and removed children solely on the basis of a medical report and without carrying out a full assessment of the families and their circumstances, a practice that was deeply deplored by the Report by the Public Inquiry into events in Cleveland and conducted by Justice Butler-Sloss. The Butler-Sloss Report did not make any pronouncement regarding the use of RAD in those cases but it became known that RAD is not a reliable method of identifying sexual abuse of children as it can also indicate other illnesses in children such as severe diarrhoea or constipation, and is extremely painful, degrading, and distressing for the children involved. There is no scientifically conducted research to support the use of RAD, there are no clinically conducted trials to confirm its validity, and no record of its use to obtain statistics of the numbers of false positives. It is therefore a matter of serious dispute in the medical profession as to whether RAD has any validity or utility.One of the children involved in the Cleveland Child Abuse Scandal recently described her ordeal as follows. She was only four years old at the time.We were taken to a foster family overnight and taken to hospital the following morning. It was here that I first met Dr Marietta Higgs. She was the first person there I remember seeing. My clothes were forcefully removed and I was told to kneel naked on the bed with my bottom in the air and my head down on the bed. I felt Dr. Higgs pressing my buttocks apart and she looked for what seemed like forever. Even at such a young age I felt very uncomfortable, and embarrassed, and wondered why anyone would want to be looking at my bottom. It actually hurt too. Dr. Higgs made no attempt to be gentle, and for those few moments I felt like a piece of meat! I felt violated! When Dr. Higgs moved on to examine my brother I could hear him screaming and screaming and when Dr. Higgs had finished my little brother ran off down the ward screaming, still with no clothes on, and had diarrhoea all down the ward. I could see my parents in deep distress, their hearts breaking, watching my brother suffering like that. He was only eighteen months old..Parents are left to comfort their children afterward and to try to explain to their hysterical children why they did not protect them from such horrendous examinations.So how and why do doctors inflict such abuse and suffering on children and subject them to such inhumane and degrading treatment, which is of course a serious violation of their human rights ?.