Cleveland Enquiry - Lessons not learned
Hi,
Whilst surfing the ‘tinterweb’ thing, found this oldie but goodie from the witch trials that were Cleveland, I had forgottenthat 2 people had killed themselves in jail…now ask how many people were brought to account for their deaths….you won’t need to count too much.
Anyway few comments in the next article I thought you may like…
This shameful episode in mass hysteria, as we now know, became known as the ‘Cleveland Scandal’; the president of the British Paediatric Association, John Forfar, condemned Dr Higgs’ technique, carefully stating what every qualified doctor should have known anyway: that new diagnostic methods had to become carefully established within the profession before being routinely used, an inevitably cautious and lengthy process requiring the presentation of scientific evidence, publication in peer-reviewed professional journals and critical discussion in scientific meetings (26). Interestingly, and barely imaginably from today’s perspective, amongst the first to express scepticism about the sheer deluge of child sexual abuse incidents supposedly being ‘uncovered’ in Cleveland were the police. This was, of course, before they had set up new organisations – police forces within police forces, with highly arcane (and deeply questionable) ‘specialist’ knowledge-bases and media-savvy self-promotional ambitions - to launch child porn/paedo-slaying witch-hunts.
Britain’s most senior female judge, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, concluded her government-appointed inquiry with severe condemnation of the social workers’ techniques. Of the 121 cases identified by Dr Higgs as obvious examples of sexual abuse, only four resulted in successful prosecution. 80 per cent were dismissed by the courts on the grounds that the accusations were plainly false. Two defendants hanged themselves in Durham gaol.
Chillingly, the award-winning investigative journalist Richard Webster suggests that Butler-Sloss’s conclusions have actively paved the way for further abuses rather than curtailed them. Her report criticised naïve, over-zealous and under-qualified individual professionals, not the ideology of ‘disclosure’ or the use of ‘disclosure therapy’ as such, with the result that the inquiry censured merely the most egregious abuses (such as the most flagrantly intimidating leading questions and the grossly inept use of anatomically correct dolls). She advocated more inter-agency ‘working together.’ But working together on a fundamentally flawed premise is likely to multiply injustice and abuse, not limit it.
Butler-Sloss did not have at her disposal the work of the ground-breaking research into children’s suggestibility by psychologists such as Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck (their work was the winner of the prestigious William James Book Award in 2000) (27), nor was she to know that subsequent scientific assessment of the reflex anal dilatation test would show it to be without any empirical foundation: 121 families were irretrievably shattered on the basis of groundless bull*bleep*. But most disturbingly of all, as Webster brings out in his article, “The unintended outcome has been that the very people responsible for the Cleveland affair have been able to perpetuate their practices and are now established in universities and at the centre of the child protection system as experts, policy advisers and trainers.” (28)
In repudiating disclosure therapy, we do not have to suppose that every traumatic memory is false. Clearly, the children dragged from their beds in the Cleveland scandal were cruelly abused by professionals acting in the grip of a fanatical delusion and it is most important that the viciousness facilitated by such catastrophic paranoia is not forgotten
I haven’t forgotten and will do what I can to make sure those that need to be reminded are reminded!
Iain