Evidence submitted by John Sweeney, BBC
Reporter
FAMILY JUSTICE:
THE FAMILY
COURTS
Since 2001 the BBC has investigated the possibility
that the state has abused children by locking up their mothers
or taking them away from their mothers on the basis of flawed
evidence. The features of the Sally Clark case—she was freed
in 2003 by the Appeal Court, at her second attempt—are typical:
no hard evidence of abuse, no broken bones, no bruises, no history
of abuse; no clear diagnosis of what went wrong; an assumption
by an expert witness that it must have been foul play.
But what if the expert got it wrong?
In 2003 Sally Clark, Trupti Patel and Angela
Cannings were all cleared of murdering their babies. The landmark
judgment was made in December 2003, when Angela Cannings was freed
by the Appeal Court thanks, in part, to fresh evidence provided
by my colleagues Sarah Mole, Jim Booth and I. The criminal law
was changed by Lord Justice Judge and others, so that no-one should
go to prison again on the basis of expert witness evidence alone.
No such changes have taken place within the
Family Court system.
I believe that the Family Court system is systemically
unfair to parents accused of child abuse. This is because, firstly,
the system is closed and takes places very much behind closed
doors. Secondly, because the "primacy of the child"
effectively over-rides and indeed reverses the presumption of
innocence. Thirdly, because "expert" evidence outweighs
that of lay people who know the family.
As a result of these three failures, my colleagues
and I have been horrified to discover a series of what we believe
have been a whole category of miscarriages of justice in the Family
Courts.
1. Secret courts are bad courts. In rape
cases, the media is not allowed to name the victim and sometimes
the accused. But we are allowed to report in full the evidence.
In exactly the same way the media should be allowed to write and
report the evidence in a Family Court—so long as we don't
identify the child. In the Family Courts, if the only evidence
against a parent comes from an "expert" then the parent
suffers a grievous disadvantage if that evidence can never be
brought to the public eye. In the case of Child U, the mother
was accused by an expert witness, Dr X, of trying to kill her
child four times. He did not meet the family, the mother or the
child nor did he take a family history—"could this
be genetic?"—before coming to his conclusion. This
appears to be a breach of guidance by the Royal College of Paediatrics.
However, thanks to a Court Order by Mrs Justice Butler-Sloss we
are prevented, "to protect the identity of the child",
from naming the doctor, his hospital, the city name of the social
services department or the region in England where it lies. This
has nothing to do with protecting the child but everything to
do with protecting an "expert" and a social services
department from public scrutiny.
2. "The primacy of the child"
over-rides and reverses the presumption of innocence. Parents
are placed in the appalling position of having to prove their
innocence; if they do not know why their child is sick, they cannot
and therefore they must be guilty.
3. "Experts" who don't know the
family count double over inarticulate relatives who do. The most
dangerous kinds of experts are those who trumpet criminalising
diagnoses without giving the benefit of the doubt to innocent
explanations. Shaken Baby Syndrome and Munchausens Syndrome By
Proxy are two such diagnoses. Munchausens is a criminalising diagnosis
with no scientific validity. It is not in either the World Health
Organisation or the US standard diagnostic bibles. The man who
first identified it, Professor Sir Roy Meadow, comes before the
General Medical Council next year for ramping evidence against
cot death mothers like Sally Clark and seven cases in the Family
Courts.
I would be more than happy to expand on these
points in person if the committee thought that might be useful.
John Sweeney
8 November 2004
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