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I wasn't surprised to hear the words “miscarriage of justice” and “Professor David Southall” mentioned in the same breath this week. What shocked me was how many in his profession wanted to paint him as the victim. Many parents will have been relieved to see Southall struck off by the General Medical Council for what it described as his “deep-seated attitudinal problems” and his “lack of insight” into his failings: parents, that is, such as Sharon Bozier, whose daughter Hannah was referred to Southall with breathing problems and taken into care after he misdiagnosed the problem as parent-inflicted; and parents such as Stephen Clark, wife of the late Sally Clark, whom Southall accused of killing his children after deciding he looked a bit shifty on television. It is about time someone in the child protection industry was brought to account for their failings. Of course we need the State to intervene when parents mistreat their children. But there is too long a history of child protection agencies pursuing obsessive campaigns against families and carers, devoid of evidence, sheltered from criticism by the secrecy of the family courts — and escaping with their jobs when their incompetence is exposed. Remember the Cleveland scandal of 1987 in which 96 children were wrongly taken into care, most as a result of Marietta Higgs and her horrible, discredited anal dilation test — after which Dr Higgs was allowed to carry on working as if nothing had happened? There was the Orkney scandal, where social services ploughed on with their fantasy of a satanic abuse ring in spite of protests by the children that they had not been abused. Then there was the case of Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed, the nursery nurses falsely accused of abusing their charges. After being acquitted in court, Newcastle City Council found them “guilty” through its own inquiry, forcing them into hiding. The authors of the report, led by a consultant paediatrician, Camille San Lazaro, were later found to have libelled the nurses, the judge ruling that their work was “unbalanced, obsessive and lacking in judgment”. Yet the GMC declined to strike off Dr San Lazaro, and she carried on working. As Charles Pragnell, who was head of research at Cleveland social services at the time of the 1987 scandal puts it, child protection agencies “are racked with too many theories for which there is little or no evidence. Social workers' training does not equip them for undertaking investigations. There is a group conditioning among social workers and paediatricians which prevents them ever accepting they are wrong.” Innocent remarks by children, he adds, are blown up into full-scale investigations because of the requirement to report immediately to their appointed “child protection officer” anything that could possibly be interpreted as a sign of abuse. Child protection workers then begin with the assumption that abuse must have taken place. The consequent deluge of investigations makes it all the harder to pick out genuine abuse. I know what he means, because I have been at the receiving end. I have a pubescent mentally handicapped daughter who, besides tantrams and uncooperative behaviour, this year started taking her trousers down at her special school and playing with herself. The school went to some lengths to reassure me and my wife that this is common behaviour when you have a two-year-old mind in an adolescent body, but would we mind if the local child development team helped? We agreed, and soon afterwards were met at home by two health workers. It soon became clear, however, that the pair did not see their remit as offering useful advice: rather, before even meeting our daughter, they had jumped straight to the conclusion of child abuse and were on a fishing expedition for evidence. There followed another visit from one of the workers, who waited until I had left the room before accosting my wife with the suggestion that our daughter “may have been interfered with”, adding: “How do you react to that, Mrs Clark?” One could almost see the cogs of the health worker's brain clunking round: men are child-abusers — must be something going on. She added menacingly that if our daughter carried on removing her clothes an investigation would follow. So that's the thanks you get from the State after ten years of bringing up a difficult child: no help, no praise, just put under suspicion of child abuse. Fortunately, in the absence of an official inquiry, I can speak and write about our experience. Many others, some of whom have had children taken away, have been silenced because of the secrecy surrounding the family courts — which allow no reporting and have no juries.
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