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The spectre of poor Victoria Climbié has been invoked. Following the GMC's decision on Tuesday to strike off Professor David Southall, 38 members of an organisation called Professionals Against Child Abuse, many of them paediatricians, wrote an open letter in which they said that doctors would be unwilling to undertake child protection work for fear of reprisals. The result would be more tragic deaths of children. The same concerns were raised in 2005 when Professor Sir Roy Meadow was struck off by the GMC for serious professional misconduct - a decision overturned on appeal - in giving misleading evidence in the case of Sally Clark, who was found guilty of murdering two of her sons on the strength (or rather weakness) of Meadow's use of statistics. Yesterday morning, in a long interview on Today, Prof Southall joined the counter-attack. He was not so much defending himself, he made out in conversation with John Humphrys, as concerned for potential victims as a result of what he called a "campaign" by those who deny the existence of child abuse. He used the same arguments, couched in the same terminology, when I spoke to him three years ago, shortly after he was barred from child protection work for suggesting that Stephen Clark (husband of Sally) had murdered his sons - after watching him on a television programme. He was then, and appears still to be now, a man with a conscience untroubled by those who have suffered as a result of his actions. At the very least, errors have occurred in cases in which he has been involved, both as a researcher and as an expert witness, but he has never apologised. Families have been broken up, parents imprisoned, children irrevocably damaged by a doctor who has taken the Hippocratic oath to "First, do no harm". Yet he defends this collateral damage, talking of there being "suffering whenever a paediatrician raises a concern". Of course, paediatricians must put the child first. But is that what they are doing by rising to the defence of a second member of their profession who has been accused of having fallen short of professional standards? The focus of the reaction against the barring of Prof Southall from practising has been the case of Mrs M, whose 10-year-old son hanged himself. Prof Southall was accused of acting "inappropriately" by suggesting in an interview, witnessed by a social worker, that the mother might have been responsible. It's the muddiest part of the case against him because it boils down - in the absence of videotaped evidence - to one person's word against two others'. In that instance, it is relatively easy to feel some sympathy for a doctor just doing his job, however brusquely, and to feel - as Prof Southall makes out - that, had fellow paediatricians been sitting in judgment on him at the GMC, not lay members of a panel, they would have understood his dilemma. But the charge of inappropriate interviewing is only one of several for which he was struck off. More importantly - and tellingly - he was found guilty of having hidden notes relating to seven different cases. It is rather more difficult to see how, in those instances, he was just doing his job. A doctor who removes or destroys records cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be thought to be acting in the best interests of a child. Nor can anyone who opposes such a practice be accused of denying the existence of abuse. Of course abuse happens, and sometimes parents are responsible. I have spoken to some of those who are said to be orchestrating attacks on Prof Southall. None of them denies that children are sometimes harmed by those closest to them. It is shocking that, despite our costly child protection mechanisms, the number of children who die at the hands of their parents remains unchanged at one a week.
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