END OF THE WITCH HUNT

END OF THE WITCH HUNT People attacked Take a Break for defending parents accused of abuse. We have been proven right. Finally it looks as if the senseless persecution of Britain’s mums is going to stop. At long last the British justice system has come to understand some of the simple truths about bringing up kids. Sometimes children have accidents and it’s nobody’s fault. Sometimes parents make mistakes but that doesn’t mean they are evil and child abusers. And sometimes when children get sick, doctors haven’t a clue what’s wrong with them. For the past year Take a Break has been campaigning on behalf of all the perfectly good parents robbed of their families or even jailed after being wrongly accused of hurting or killing their children. Our investigation exposed a national scandal. No parent was safe. We discovered that, in their eagerness to protect children, some doctors, social workers and police officers are quick to point the finger of blame. Instead of examining the facts and keeping an open mind, some instantly resort to pseudo-medical conditions for an explanation, such as shaken baby syndrome, or Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy (MSP), where parents are believed to hurt their children to draw attention to themselves. But many critics do not believe that these conditions exist and would like the terms to be removed from use. We featured the case of 23-year old Sarah Debattista, whose baby on James accidentally rolled off the bed and bumped his head. When he later became ill, she took him to hospital and was stunned to learn that he’d suffered a brain haemorrhage. A social worker seemed to think the most logical explanation was that Sarah had shaken her baby. But fortunately asked for a second opinion. Scans then revealed that James’s skull was, unusually, much larger than his brain and that even a minor fall was enough to start a bleed. We also made mention of solicitor Sally Clark, who was accused of the murder of her two baby sons. She was eventually acquitted after spending three years in prison. Their cases were echoed by o many of you. Now the Government has announced that thousands of parents whose children have been snatched away by the family courts on the basis of questionable evidence from expert witnesses will have their cases re-examined. This move follows a long-overdue review into potential miscarriages of justice, ordered by Britain’s Law Lords. Their momentous decision came after a Court of Appeal ruling in the case of 40-year old Angela Cannings-the mum wrongly convicted of killing her babies, seven-week-old Jason and three-month-old Matthew. One child protection expert who has spent several years studying the cases of children and families who have had the label of MSP attached to them is Charles Pragnell. He says; ‘I am firmly of the view that MSP has no scientifically proven basis and is used as a convenient cover-up for medical errors, incompetence, misconduct and negligence.’ MSP was a term first used by Professor Sir Roy Meadow- who is at the heart of the current legal upheaval. Sir Roy, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatricians, was a key witness in the trials of Angela Cannings and of two other women, which resulted in innocent grieving mothers going to jail. But this creation – Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy – has never been subject to any trial period under clinical conditions. Pragnell says: ‘It is quite incredible therefore that the several professions involved in the detection, investigation and prosecution of child abuse have so readily accepted MSP as a form of child abuse with no basis in scientific study. ‘In the records of the cases I have studied, there is evidence that the children have suffered various illnesses prior to the MSP diagnosis, but these appear to have been ignored or disregarded by the paediatricians.’ Similar arguments can be made about cases in which babies suffer cot death but mums are accused of killing them. It has been claimed that one cot death is a tragedy, two suspicious and three murder. But so little information exists about the possible causes of cot death that it is impossible to know whether this is true. If there is, for example, a genetic reason for cot death, it is obviously possible, and even likely, that it will strike a family more than once. And Law Lords have finally come to the same conclusion. The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, has ordered a review of all 258 convictions over the past 10 years of parents who have been found guilty of murder, manslaughter or infanticide. Priority is being given to the 54 cases in which a parent is still serving a prison sentence. At the same time the Crown Prosecution Service has been ordered to review 15 ongoing investigations into infant deaths. Lord Goldsmith is also examining a further 250 criminal cases involving MSP to see if more mums have been wrongly convicted. And the office of the minister for children has been looking at an estimated 5000 children who have been taken into care over the past 15 years on suspicion that their mums were suffering from MSP. It is tragically late for some. But at least it seems that justice will prevail. Article wrote by Elaine Pearson Article in Take a Break / Issue 9 / 4th March 2004.