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After being suspected of child abuse, the Ward family are out to change the family justice system What do you think? Leave your comments in the box at the bottom of this page When hospital staff pulled the curtains around her son’s bed and asked: “Poor little baby. What have you been doing?”, Victoria Ward knew something was suddenly very wrong. A week earlier the Ward family, who live in Cambridge, had been at the height of their happiness. According to Victoria, they both had “good jobs, a secure marriage, a wonderful house and a three-month-old baby we had been planning, hoping for, wanting. Life was lovely”. With little William’s arrival, Victoria, now a baby-yoga teacher, threw herself into all the activities middle-class mothers love: swimming, massage, baby cinema. And when William had a restless night, Victoria, ever the careful mum, took him to the GP, not once but on three consecutive days until a doctor agreed that his leg looked swollen and sent the family to hospital for an explanation. Victoria, 34, and Jake, 35, sensible, professional people from supportive and stable families, are the last couple you could imagine being accused of child abuse. But in 2005, after William’s leg was x-rayed in hospital and found to have an unexplained fracture, that’s exactly what they were suspected of. Out of the blue, they faced a police investigation and the terrifying threat of their son being taken into care. Victoria’s parents had to move from Devon to live with them round the clock before they were allowed to take William home from hospital. Then began an 18-month nightmare encompassing parental assessments, endless reports from social workers and doctors and finally a court case. In cases of child abuse, the fate of families can turn on the evidence of doctors prepared to stand up as “expert witnesses” (often charging hundreds of pounds an hour) and give their opinion on whether or not a parent has harmed a child. In the criminal courts the evidence can lead to a mother or father being jailed. In the family courts – held in secret – a child can be taken away from its parents and fostered or adopted. Child protection is a controversial area, and in recent years some of the worst miscarriages of British justice have followed the testimony of so-called expert witnesses in the field, a number of whom have been accused of being zealots or just plain wrong in their willingness to blame parents – even those who protest their innocence – for children’s injuries. The conviction of the solicitor Sally Clark, jailed in 1999 after being wrongly convicted of murdering two of her children, was based on the evidence of Professor Sir Roy Meadow, who famously and – it later turned out – inaccurately testified that the chance of two of her babies having suffered cot death was one in 73m. Clark, 42, was freed on appeal in 2003 but never recovered, and died of acute alcohol intoxication at her home in March. Angela Cannings was another innocent mother wrongly convicted of murdering her child during a trial at which Meadow also gave evidence. She too was cleared by the Court of Appeal. Last week Professor David Southall, who has been described both as Meadow’s pro-tégé and as a pioneer in the detection of child abuse, was struck off the medical register by the General Medical Council (GMC). It ruled that he had abused his position by suggesting to Mandy Morris that she had drugged and murdered her 10-year-old son Lee. The child, who had been bullied at school, had in fact hanged himself from the curtain rail. The GMC said Southall had “deep-seated attitudinal problems”. Yet, far from apologising to those whose lives have been wrecked, the paediatrician struck a defiant note when he appeared on Radio 4’s Today programme. He was, he said, “an expert in life-threatening child abuse” and a victim of a vindictive campaign against doctors trying to protect children. “I am the expert and I know what I am talking about,” he insisted. Compared with Clark and Cannings, Victoria and Jake Ward were “lucky”. After a seven-hour wait in a police cell and interview room, where they were interrogated on suspicion of GBH and child cruelty, the police dropped the case. The county council, however, carried on with childcare proceedings. By the time the hearings started, Victoria – then pregnant with her daughter Hattie, who is now nine months old – knew her second child was also at risk of being taken away if the court found, “on the balance of probabilities”, that the couple had harmed their son. But, rack their brains as they might, their only explanation for how William could have fractured his leg was that he might have trapped it at night between the cot bars and caused the injury in trying to wriggle free. Over 10 months, Victoria, Jake and William visited no fewer than three expert witnesses – the judge wanted to hear a range of opinion. Finally, after a two-week hearing involving conflicting evidence from the experts, the couple were exonerated. “There is no cogent evidence that these parents injured their son,” the judge concluded. Now Victoria, who kept a video diary of the experience, is pressing ahead with a legal battle to be allowed to name the experts who gave evidence. Like many parents caught up in the trauma of trying to prove they have not harmed their children, she and Jake have found the secrecy of the family courts deeply disturbing. They believe it makes it difficult to right miscarriages of justice and hinders research into real medical conditions that may explain fractures and other injuries in babies. “I thought there had been a trend towards greater openness in the family courts after the miscarriages of justice of Sally Clark and Angela Cannings, and that I would be able to speak out and tell my story. But it is incredibly difficult,” she says. During the hearing, she attended a support group for parents of children with unexplained fractures and discovered that although parents are not allowed to discuss cases in the family courts many of the same names came up again and again.
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