LONDON, 23 January 2004 — Gradually, as the enormity of the consequences of Prof. Sir Roy Meadow’s discredited expert evidence in cot death cases emerges, an appalling truth is coming to light. The dawning revelation is that Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and some of the other women now in prison in Britain, wrongly convicted of murdering their children, may not even be among the people who have been the most unfairly treated by the fast-dissolving theories of Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy.
These women at least were allowed to go to trial, to protest their innocence, to go on protesting it, and, in the event of successful appeal, clear their names and be reunited with their surviving children. Thanks to their efforts, and the efforts of their lawyers, 258 other criminal cases will now be examined, to see how many of these convictions also rested only on the word of Sir Roy.
But for what may turn out to have been thousands of other parents, fundamental decisions about their lives and the lives of their children, were not heard in open court by a judge and jury, but in a secret court by a judge alone, a judge who did not even have to concern herself with “reasonable doubt”, but who simply have to weigh up “the balance of probabilities”.
One barrister, Barbara Hewson, reckons that, in family courts, there is “a culture of believing medical experts as a matter of course”. Jean Robinson, another professional whose work has brought her into the orbit of the family courts, says that “the same small group of experts go round the family courts. The social workers know the experts. The judges know them all.” Estimates suggest that Sir Roy himself testified in about 40 cases a year, at around 1,600 pounds sterling a day, for many years. He also trained up to 250 judges in dealing with witnesses in children’s cases, so it becomes clear that his stranglehold on the progress of the cases he specialized in was fairly complete.
The people who fell foul of Sir Roy’s belief that one cot death in a family is a tragedy, the second suspicious and the third murder, had no chance. Even if the evidence was so slim that no criminal court would convict them of murder, the family court could still take the rest of their children, even the children as yet unborn, away. One mother tells of having six children taken, the final two in New Zealand, where the British authorities had tracked her down after she had emigrated to start a new life.
This whole situation is such an unbelievable mess that it is hard to see how it can ever be put right. Harriet Harman, the solicitor general, is right to decide that all of the cases have to be looked at again. But what a mammoth task this is going to be.
And when it is done? Margaret Hodge is right too when she points out that it will not be in the interests of many of the children who have been successfully adopted to be returned to their parents again. Yet at the same time it is important that the children who were taken against their parents’ will, because of suspected actions that turned out never to have taken place, can at some time learn the truth about what happened to them. For everyone concerned, this path will mean more pain and trauma. But as we have seen again and again in the continuing history of forced adoption, confronting the truth is the only way forward.
It is easy to point out that the child protection agencies have a difficult job, and are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. But in fact there is a pattern to the kind of injustice that these families have suffered. The “Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy” theory that has destroyed so many families comes hot on the heels of the shaken baby syndrome theories, which did much the same thing.
The latter theory led to the assumption that all babies with a broadly similar damage to their retinas were shaken babies, and it was not for some years that medical convention loosened up enough to understand that other injuries could also cause such damage.
The lesson here is not that child protection workers cannot do their jobs, but that they’d be better off being left to do their jobs — of assessing real people in real situations — without crude “ready-reckoners” cooked up by experts who are allowed to dictate the parameters under which decisions should be made.
