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- WHY
WE MUST NOW START LISTENING
- TO
THE CHILDREN
The
Sunday Times (London) July 10 1988
By
Brian Deer
LOOK
SPECIAL: THE CLEVELAND INQUIRY
ON September 17 last year, it was the turn of two
of the Cleveland children to peer nervously round the
great wooden doors of the Middlesbrough town hall
council chamber and then proceed with small, cautious
paces out across the floor. Here at last they were at
the centre of the greatest assembly of civil power
apart from parliament itself.
But
at the time of their appearance, the public inquiry
into child abuse had broken up for lunch. Acting with
the full judicial authority of a High Court, Lord
Justice Butler-Sloss, the assessors who sat beside
her, the 11 teams of barristers and solicitors, the
witnesses, the press, the parents and the nosy
onlookers, had vacated their seats for 90 minutes,
and now the ornate Victorian debating room was merely
an empty shell.
As
the children - two boys aged 11 and 12 - picked their
way among the lawyers' benches and the hundredweights
of paper, however, both of them suddenly laughed.
What a joke, they thought, that all these important
people were spending so much of their daytimes taking
about them. Fear gave way to excitement, and
they ran around the room to try out peoples' chairs.
"It
was the one time when there was any physical presence
of a child in the chamber," says David Venables,
official solicitor to the Supreme Court and the man
in charge of presenting the children's' case.
"They approached us themselves and said that
they would like to see where the inquiry was going
on, so they were taken in by my staff."
For
the boys, the visit was a welcome relief from the
troubles they had been through. Throughout the
morning, they had been in an office elsewhere in the
Middlesbrough municipal buildings recounting their
tale to lawyers. They had spoken of the abuse that
they had been experiencing at school, and had
recalled their dealings with Dr Geoffrey Wyatt.
"To
tell a child about the proceedings is one thing, but
for them to see what was happening is something
else," says a member of Venables's staff, who
was present when the boys went in. "They felt a
lot better about it all afterwards and they were
certainly less frightened. With the older boy it led
to further disclosures about the abuse that was going
on."
*****
Whether
they would have liked to have taken part in an
inquiry session was not a matter that could be
raised. At the outset of the hearings, in August last
year, Butler-Sloss and her colleagues ruled that it
was "unthinkable" for even the older ones
to be heard in public- and, with Venables's
agreement, they thought even an appearance in private
"was an unacceptable additional stress".
With
the benefit of hindsight, many observers believe that
this was a mistake and that some means should have
been found by the inquiry to have involved the
children more. Some pointed to the precedent last
year when a sexually abused child gave evidence at
the Old Bailey, protected from her abusers by a
specially-arranged wooden screen.
"If
that was the only time a child was allowed into the
room, then it's a real sign of what sort of society
we are," says Michele Elliott, director of the
Kidscape project and a home office adviser on abuse.
"If the child is old enough to understand what
is happening, is it not possible that it would have
been a healing experience for some of them to hear
what was going on?"
It
was not, after all, Lord Justice Butler-Sloss and the
assembled ranks around her who were being sexually
abused. Nor were they the victims of Dr Marrietta
Higgs's and Dr Wyatt's approach. They had not been
taken from their mothers by social workers at a time
of their greatest need of support. And they were not
imprisoned and then besieged in a hospital ward by
the world's television and press.
In an
attempt to redress this imbalance, Venables's team
was ordered to seek detailed interviews with as many
of the children as they could. Of the 165 examined by
the paediatricians at Middlesbrough General Hospital
between January and July last year, 51 were over the
age of eight, and 32 of these took this small chance
to have their say in the affair.
"The
remaining 19 were thought likely to be badly affected
by further discussions, or their parents did not want
them to be troubled further, or they proved in some
way difficult to trace," Butler-Sloss noted.
"The official solicitor reported to the inquiry
that the children's stories reflected variously
'misunderstanding, mistrust, discomfort, anger, fear,
praise, gratitude and sheer relief'."
Horror
stories are plentiful in what the children said.
Although Butler-Sloss and her team didn't feel able
to determine how many of the children diagnosed by
Higgs and Wyatt last year were actually abused, there
is considerable evidence of suffering. Most worrying
were cases where children experienced what the
inquiry report dubbed "the plight of the double
victim".
The
double victims of Cleveland were the most abused of
all. In harrowing accounts, recorded in private by
the official solicitor's staff and submitted to
Butler-Sloss, these children told how, having already
been sexually assaulted, they were subjected to
further distressing treatment by the doctors and
social workers.
One
case, recorded in the ponderous language of lawyers,
involved a family with five children who were
referred to Higgs. The second-oldest daughter, who
was then aged 13, had volunteered to her mother that
she had been abused by her father and, as a result of
this disclosure, the children were taken into care
and the man prosecuted for indecent assault.
The
abuses in the family were of the most serious kind. A
12-year-old girl told of how the father was having
full sexual intercourse with her and had threatened
her with a knife. Three more of the children spoke of
similar experiences and, probably as a result of the
home situation, the oldest of the children had become
disturbed.
After
the daughter's disclosure, the children were then on
the receiving end of ill-treatment of a different
kind. "Dr Higgs did not introduce herself, nor
her colleagues," the official solicitor's staff
noted from two of the girls. "She told them to
strip - she inserted a stick and cotton wool into
their 'privates' and it hurt a little. They were
rolled over for their bottoms to be examined and this
did not hurt.
"The
doctor did not call them by name. They were told to
dress and tell the next one to go in. They returned
to the community home but were not spoken to or told
what was going on. They did not see their mother for
28 days while the Place of Safety order was in force
and had recently seen their younger brother and
sister for the first time in five weeks."
Not
surprisingly, the bewildered children were not happy
with the events they had set in train. The oldest
daughter, aged 15, had begged her mother not to tell
social workers about the abuse, but had been assured
that she would not be taken into care. Instead, when
the authorities were told, she was brought in to see
Higgs and, in tears, was taken away. "She felt
very bitter towards the social workers who deceived
her before the medical examination," the
lawyers' report continues.
There
are cases, too, of children experiencing this kind of
treatment when they had not already been abused. One
girl, aged nine, was seen by Wyatt after her
seven-year-old brother had told him that the children
used to sleep in their "uncle's" bed. They
had not been hurt and there was no evidence of
wrongdoing, but they were made to suffer
nevertheless.
"According
to the girl, Dr Wyatt had turned her over and wanted
to 'go into her front'," the lawyers recorded
after interviewing the child. "She said Dr Wyatt
was 'talking not very nice'. He was shouting, she was
afraid. Dr Higgs, she said, had a 'nasty face', but
she did not say anything nasty. It was Dr Wyatt who
was speaking nastily."
The
children were examined by Wyatt several times and
said that his approach was different from that of
police surgeons who were later brought in.
"Those doctors did not shout or force them, and
their examination did not hurt," the girl was
recorded as saying. "Looking back, the girl
thought it all disgusting."
*****
Whether
young children should be treated like this is not a
matter for serious debate. Some of the bad management
of the cases occurred as Higgs, Wyatt and social
workers were being overwhelmed by the logic of their
own commitments. Children were being processed so
quickly that there was little time for kindness.
"In
many cases, the result of her diagnosis caused
unnecessary distress to children and their
families," Butler-Sloss said about Higgs in her
report. "This leads us to the reflection that
some of the children suffered harm after they were
removed from home whatever may have happened to them
previously."
A
report from an expert committee on how to diagnose
abuse, issued by the government at the same time as
the inquiry findings last week, went further on this
point. It said that medical aspects are only one part
of the diagnostic process, that the emergency removal
of a child "is in the majority of cases not
necessary," and that extreme caution must be
used.
"Hurried
intervention may cause more harm to the child and the
family," the report states. "There is
rarely a need for immediate detailed clinical
examination. In the majority of cases this can be
organised with deliberation so that the emotional
trauma to the child is minimal... Repeated
examinations at this initial stage should be
avoided."
Dr
Stephen Wolkind, a consultant child psychiatrist who
was a member of the team which prepared the report,
is one of many experts who believes that the
discovery and handling of abuse cases can in some
cases actually do emotional harm to a child when the
sexual contact has not. He believes that usually no
action should be taken by doctors and social workers
until the whole family has been evaluated.
"You
have got to see how a child is functioning and its
relationship with its parents," Wolkind says.
"If it is getting on well at school, isn't
depressed, isn't suffering from problems, you have to
be very careful about rushing in with investigations.
You can do as much damage in the inquiries as the
abuse did in the first place."
In
the opinion of Higgs and Wyatt, however, abuse cases
were rarely like this. Using their controversial
reflex anal dilatation test, they came to the
conclusion that enormous numbers of children were not
only being sexually abused, but that it involved the
most extreme acts - buggery - and was going on within
the home.
But
many experts believe that the Higgs/Wyatt assessment
of anal penetration is worthless - and research in
the United States suggests that more than half of
unabused children will show "positive" in
this test. The conclusion - borne out by the courts
and the parents campaign in Cleveland - is that there
were many cases where children were taken into care
who had never been abused at all.
Just
as worrying is that most cases of genuine sexual
abuse would not be detected by the test. The real
damage of incest and other sexual relationships
between adults and children is usually in the
emotional confusion it causes, the loss of trust
within the family and the effect it can have on the
abused person's long-term ability to form
relationships.
"A
lot of the process of growing up is being able to
name, contain and use feelings," says David
Pithers, a therapist working with the National
Children's' Home. "Children who are abused are
overwhelmed by the intensity of the feelings that
they encounter and they have no conceptual framework
within which they can place them."
Often,
a sexually abusive relationship is highly coercive,
even when physical force or violence is not used. As
a result, psychiatrists and therapists such as
Pithers who are studying the problem are increasingly
finding patients - both as adults and children -
whose feelings of affection, fear, love, violence and
intimacy have become hopelessly confused.
To
uncover these problems requires professionals to
listen carefully to children, rather than make quick
medical diagnoses. But, far from showing Higgs's and
Wyatt's estimate of the incidence of abuse to be
exaggerated, many of their critics believe that this
listening approach would lead current estimates of
one in 10 to be upwardly revised.
At
the same time, hearing and respecting the views of
children would inevitably lead to a different
response when abuse has occurred. Professionals
working with children all report the consistent
finding that many children love the person who is
abusing them and would prefer it to continue rather
than to lose the relationship.
"The
real problem about listening to children is that we
then have to do something about what they say,"
says Michele Elliott of the Kidscape project.
"It means not only recognising the scale of the
problem, but also giving children choices about
things like whether they go into a foster home or
whether they stay with their mum or their dad, under
supervision."
Such
new thinking about child abuse is now increasingly
being voiced by experts. Another is Jean La Fontaine,
professor emeritus at the London School of Economics,
who specialises in the study of sexual abuse. She
believes that many people, and especially men, find
it too difficult and painful to even accept that
child abuse is happening.
She
fears that, as a result, the backlash against Higgs's
and Wyatt's naive crusade could leave children worse
off than before. The campaign by Cleveland parents
against false accusations of abuse and the public
humiliation of the doctors could lead to a renewed
denial that children are being abused and that many
are being harmed.
"Whenever
we come to consider this issue the children seem to
get lost in the system," says Professor La
Fontaine. "In the public inquiry, and before it,
we heard a lot about parents' rights. Perhaps it's
one of the tragedies of Cleveland that the children's
voices have not been heard."
Copyright,
Times Newspapers Ltd. All rights reserved. No portion
of this article on the Cleveland child sexual abuse
scandal may be copied, retransmitted, reposted,
duplicated or otherwise used without the express
written approval of the copyright owner. Responses,
information and other feedback are appreciated - via
Brian Deer's homepage.
