[Militant International Review, No 40, Summer 1989, p. 18-21]
Harriet Gill, a London social worker who specialises in family and child-care work, analyses the issues arising from the Butler-Sloss enquiry.
The most immediate questions that arise from the Cleveland child abuse events are: why does child sex abuse happen and how can it be prevented? The main objective of any programme of action to deal with abuse must be to protect the children, above the interests of parents, professional medical or social work staff or political vested interests.
Unfortunately, none of these questions or objectives were properly analysed by the government appointed inquiry conducted by Lord Justice Mrs Butler-Sloss in summer 1987. Debate about what happened in Cleveland will not die down, despite attempts by the government, the press, some opposition MPs and clergymen to convince us that the crisis is over and all is back to normal.
The Butler-Sloss report was very revealing about the agencies and individuals involved but it failed to answer the question: ˜how many children were actually abused?‘ This failure has allowed the press, the Tories and unscrupulous politicians to promote the myth that sexual abuse was all blown out of proportion, allowing innocent families to suffer.
But in February 1989. 11 Cleveland paediatricians spoke out publicly in support of the two paediatricians involved in the original controversy. They were unequivocal: „In our opinion the majority of the children (quite possibly 90 per cent) were abused”.
The paediatricians were forced to speak out, rather belatedly, because the main doctor involved in the Cleveland cases, Dr Marietta Higgs, is threatened with dismissal by the local health authority, despite Butler-Sloss recommending no action against the doctors. Higgs has been refused a High Court hearing to clear her name, as was granted to Wendy Savage in her case, because the judges said that the Inquiry report had cleared her!
The disciplinary action against Higgs implies that the Cleveland cases were the result of bad diagnoses from overzealous doctors and social workers, rather than based on any significant incidence of sexual abuse in Cleveland families.
This is clearly the view of the Labour MP for Middlesborough, Stuart Bell, in his quickly produced pot boiler on Cleveland, sensationally entitled When Salem came to the Boro, Bell has gained notoriety during the events by championing „the cause of the families” against the paediatricians and Cleveland Social Services Department.
Bell clearly aims to vindicate all the parents involved in the enquiry. He wants to prove that Dr. Higgs and Ms. Richardson (Child Abuse Consultant for Cleveland) deliberately entered into a conspiracy to discover sexual abuse of children where none existed as part of an ˜anti-male/father‘ attack which is ultimately an attack on families. For Bell. child sexual abuse at the level discovered in Cleveland was unthinkable and therefore was not happening.
Bell draws a ludicrous comparison between Salem in the 17th century and Cleveland in 198?, „Just as in the middle ages and beyond there were those who believed in witchcraft, so there were those in Cleveland who believed that child sex abuse existed on a hitherto unknown scale”.
But in Cleveland the only witch-hunting going on was Bell’s. He would have us believe that child sexual abuse – just as witchcraft – is the product of hysteria or mass neurosis, particularly in women, and of an ‚unnatural‘ attitude to men.
Bell believes child sex abuse, like witchcraft, is the product of female hysteria.
Bell suggests that Dr. Higgs in particular has ‚problems‘ in her attitude and relationships with men. In the best traditions of the gutter press he delves into her private life and family background. Obviously disappointed that she is in fact married and a mother, he points out the unnatural‘ state of affairs where she is the bread-winner and her husband stays at home to look after the children. Bell explains all by the revelation that Dr. Higgs was brought up by her mother who was separated from her father and therefore Dr. Higgs did not have a close relationship with him!
Because Bell cannot label Higgs as an emotional, hysterical woman who over-reacts, he concludes that her ‚professionalism‘ and objective approach to her work – qualities much admired in men – are suspect and sinister in a woman.
What Bell really reveals are his own prejudices. He has a stereotype of women, i.e. the good wife and mother supporting and standing by her husband. Anyone who differs is either bad e.g. Dr Higgs and Ms Richardson, or misguided and naive. That one of the paediatric consultants, Dr Wyatt, was a man is explained away; he was beguiled by his female colleague.
The Tory press, Stuart Bell and the ‚ministers of the cloth‘ have rallied behind the ‚families‘, demanding the head of Higgs and social workers and denying any abuse takes place within the ‚family‘.
He argues that where child sex abuse does occur, it is due to the break-up of the family. „More one-parent families, more latchkey children, more divorces, more boyfriends and strangers coming into the house, makes more likely the abuse of children unrelated by blood.” In ‚proper‘ family units it just does not happen, although Bell has to admit that „… even among blood relatives the abuse has gone on.”
But people in glass houses should not throw stones. Bell’s championing of the nuclear family and his attack on one-parent families is hypocrisy of the first order, when we find out that he has been married twice, presumably leaving a one parent family behind. He admits to having an ‚open‘ marriage with his first wife which allowed him to have a mistress, while earning his fortune as a lawyer in Paris in the 1970s. He published a novel (at his own expense presumably because no publisher would take it) which has been attacked as pornographic. In it, the lawyer hero has sex 29 times with seven different people, sometimes with violence involved. As Dr Andrew Croft of the Cleveland Campaign against Child Abuse commented: „I wonder what people would make of Marietta Higgs if it was discovered that she had written a book like this”.
Leaving aside Bell’s hypocrisy, the evidence of research proves his assertions wrong. Recent figures from the National Children’s Home indicate that the true extent of child sex abuse has been seriously underestimated in government surveys. They found that 15 per cent of children in its residential homes and schools had been sexually abused. They now estimate that 1,600 of the 11,000 youngsters they work with have similar histories. As Lord Romsey, one of the charity’s patrons, said: „We are horrified at what our survey brought to light. These are children known to us, and this means there may be a huge amount of hidden abuse and therefore hidden sufferings.”
Bell’s belief that child sex abuse is the product of the breakdown of the family is also challenged by a survey in Leeds where one-third of the abusers were biological fathers. Much of child sex abuse is contained within the family and shows a preponderance of fathers, then step-fathers. uncles and older brothers.
In May 1989, West Yorkshire police revealed that since they adopted improved links with social services and doctors as recommended by Butler-Sloss, that in the first three months of 1989 they were investigating 332 new cases of child sex abuse. The police chief responsible commented that „the abuse seems fairly commonplace and … could be just the tip of the iceberg.”
Behind Bell’s ‚theory‘ is the suggestion that child sex abuse is a new phenomenon, the product of the modern disintegration of moral standards, leading to an undermining of family life and the virtues embodied in it. But child sex abuse has been a feature of ‚civilised‘ society for a long time. The 1908 Incest Act was passed as a result of concern expressed about children during the 19th century.
Crimes of incest and sexual assaults upon children within the family have been a regular feature of the criminal lists of the courts for many years. Undoubtedly what is a new feature is the increasing awareness of sexual abuse, particularly in very young children and an increasing willingness on the part of doctors and social workers to look for the evidence.
Most children do not tell anybody that abuse has taken place and often there are no physical signs at all. Children feel confused, think it their own fault and are torn between loving the perpetrator and wanting the abuse to stop. They fear they will not be believed and of the consequences ~– the break-up of the family being taken into care etc. Sometimes children are threatened with violence by the abuser, and even killed.
Work with known offenders also supports the view that abuse goes on not only for years but tens of years, involving several children, and in the cases of child porn rings, sometimes whole neighbourhoods of children, before detection takes place. For the sex offender it is seldom the first offence but simply the first time they have been caught.
Abuse is more prevalent than admitted, committed mainly by relatives.
So the real evidence is: (1) abuse is much more prevalent than admitted. Studies with abusers in prison show that they committed many more offences than they were convicted for. Their victims kept quiet. (2) abuse clearly takes place predominantly in the family by people known to the children, often relatives, and carrying on apparently ordinary lives unsuspected by others. The stereotype of sex fiends and child molesters roaming the streets is the extreme exception.
Bell makes no mention of the first five cases in Cleveland that went to court. They were found to be genuine cases of abuse. One of the men accused had seven previous convictions for sexual assault on children. In order to avoid such inconvenient facts, Bell concentrates in the main on just a few families, where the paediatricians and social workers were apparently wrong.
Unscrupulously using these few cases Bell loudly claims that all the families are ˜innocent‘. He ignores those parents i.e. mothers who believed that their children had been abused. When Bell talks about ‚families‘ he really means fathers. He is not at all interested in the position of women or children within the family unit.
The doctors and social workers‘ conclusions may have been wrong in just a few cases. Beatrix Campbell has pointed out in her book on Cleveland, Unofficial Secrets that: „after many months of bitter challenge in the courts, 26 of the children from 121 were deemed by the judges to have been wrongly diagnosed. All the rest were children whose alleged abusers had left their environment or whose parents agreed to protection plans from social services or who were removed from their homes. Contrary to media myth that most cases were ‚cleared‘ up by the courts, most of the children became subjects of some form of state support or protection“.
In May 1989 there was further confirmation of the work of the paediatricians and social workers. Cleveland authorities announced that 123 children were originally involved in the Inquiry. Only 28 were sent home by the courts without some supervision, presumably because there was no evidence of abuse. But now five of these 28 children have been referred back to social services by independent agencies because abuse is suspected. Bell’s only comment on these latest referrals was to say that sometimes „children are referred because neighbours have seen them playing out in the rain, but that does not mean they are being abused”!
Bell was taken apart by the Butler-Sloss report. Virtually all his accusations against the doctors and social workers were thrown out and his conclusions dismissed. Yet he continues in parliament and in the press to deny that any accusations he made against the doctors and social services in Cleveland were refuted by Butler-Sloss! Bell accused the doctors of insisting that all children attending hospital should be screened for sexual abuse – not true. Between January and July 1987 Higgs and Wyatt saw 2306 outpatients, and only 77 were diagnosed for sexual abuse, with the remainder of the 121 cases tested because they were siblings of the 77. Bell said that doctors and social workers concluded sexual abuse had taken place solely on evidence of reflex anal dilatation (i.e. the new physical diagnostic technique). Not true – in only 18 out of 121 cases was dilatation the sole physical sign and in no case was it the sole ground for concluding sexual abuse.
The Butler-Sloss report criticised Bell for his „intemperate and inflammatory remarks made on TV or to newspaper reporters which had a part in exacerbating an already very difficult and sensitive situation“. Butler-Sloss said that “he did not have all the facts” and „he was unable, in the light of the further knowledge that he clearly had, to withdraw or modify allegations which could not be substantiated.”
The real truth is that right from the start, Bell jumped on the band-wagon of reaction to the horror of child sexual abuse and used it quite cynically to promote his own career.
But whether or not the professionals made some mistakes or not in certain cases, the real issue is: what is the extent of child sexual abuse and what should be done about it?
Bell has no interest in why it occurs and what might be done about it. While he rails against the doctors and social workers, Bell ignores the lack of resources in his area. From 1980 to 1987, Middlesborough General lost almost two-thirds of its paediatric beds – 150 to 52. He has nothing to say about the high incidence of failure to thrive in children in his area and the links between this and social deprivation.
He is not interested in the rotten social conditions and lack of support for families in Cleveland and the responsibility of the Tories for this. All he wants to make sure that Dr Higgs in particular carries the responsibility for what went on and to align himself with: ‚a coalition of men of the cloth, members of parliament, the legal profession, the media and the police‘ to get to grips with what was really happening to ‚family life‘. Bell is not on his own in the Labour Party in wishing to take this line. His evidence to the judicial enquiry had a supporting covering note from Roy Hattersley. When leading Labour politicians choose to see the events as the ‚tragedy of innocent parents wronged‘ they do children a grave injustice by covering up the scale of the actual crisis, not just in Cleveland but national.
Campbell has shown that there was already bad blood between the paediatricians and the NHS management in Cleveland. Both Wyatt and Higgs had prominently campaigned against the NHS cuts and the ‚asset stripping‘ of paediatrics. „In the words of one colleague they had become ‚a thorn in the management’s side‘: he (Wyatt) never stopped campaigning to increase services to children. Dr Higgs was the same. So … when the crisis blew up and the administration saw all those children piling up in the wards, it was a golden opportunity for management to get them. The establishment – hospital management and the police – closed ranks against the doctors and the social workers for a variety of personal and political reasons.”
The role of the police was one of the most scandalous aspects of the whole affair. Bell has been very silent about them. In spring 1987 the police unilaterally refused to cooperate with the paediatricians and social services. Their action had a critical effect on events. Previously an investigation into possible child sex abuse was instigated either by a disclosure of abuse or through professional recommendation. The police refusal to cooperate left social services in the unenviable position of having no proper investigation evidence to base their conclusions on.
Also the paediatricians, acting true to form for consultants, failed to carry the nursing staff with them. The nurses were dealing with the children in sometimes nightmare conditions, with the doctors simply telling them to take more – no explanations, no joint approach. As one nurse said: „I think she (Higgs) shouldn’t have started something until she had the support. I believe what she is doing is right, but she didn’t prepare the ground.“
Any proper scientific analysis of the causes of child abuse cannot just look to the ‚moral‘ failings of individuals or see the problem purely in ‚personal‘ terms. Abuse is a social phenomena and requires action by society.
Abuse is a social phenomena and requires action by society.
We can expect no action from the Tories. Tory ministers have lined up full square with Stuart Bell and the health authorities in denying that there is a serious problem and looking for scapegoats in Higgs and the social workers.
The Tories provided a measly £7m towards better training for social workers in abuse cases in 1987 – when most professionals in the field called for a minimum of £40m to extend social worker training to three years to increase skills in these extremely difficult cases. Now in London alone there are 400 vacant social worker posts and over 600 unallocated cases where there is evidence of some form of abuse against children.
Without properly staffed and trained social work departments, including staff who can spend time with families, centres for support for mothers and children and treatment centres for victims and abusers, no progress can be made.
After all, our main concern should not be to defend the good name of the ‚family‘ as a social institution: or to defend the reputations of doctors or social and health workers. The main objective must be to protect children from abuse and prevent such abuse taking place.
There must be better procedures for place of safety orders, where the rights of parents are balanced against the need to protect the child. Campbell rightly calls for the removal of the perpetrator from the home rather than the victim. In the USA 70 per cent of abusing fathers leave; and therapy in the home is an alternative to taking children into care.
The dilemma between the rights of the child and parents is partly created by the bureaucratic nature of our welfare agencies: the health services, local authorities, the courts, the police, who are largely unaccountable to ordinary working people. The heart of the solution lies in more resources and training alongside the democratisation of all these bodies with elected and accountable administrators.
When Salem Came To The Boro by Stuart Bell MP. Pan Books £3.99.
Unofficial Secrets by Beatrix Campbell. Virago £4.50.
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