The Road to Shieldfield (Part 1)
by Margaret Jervis

"It sounds like Cleveland" commented perplexed media pundits in response to the Shieldfield libel victory. But there were key differences between the two scandals. In the 1987 Cleveland case parents grouped together to complain that they had been wrongly accused of sexual abuse on the basis of unsound medical evidence and fishy methods of "disclosure". Within days the revelations caused a national scandal of broad political dimensions. Over a hundred children were returned to their families without a single criminal prosecution. A year later a judicial inquiry report1 slammed the social worker and paediatrician involved and the term "Cleveland" became a by-word for the dangers of welfare zealotry.

On the face of it, Shieldfield was just the opposite to Cleveland. The accusers were parents, while the accused were welfare employees. Despite the pre-trial acquittal in 1994, the media and the council backed the parents still "baying for blood" uncritically. Four years later when the Review Team's report was published, the media joined the scrum without a blink of an eye. The false picture painted through the media campaigns around the case and the Newcastle Review Team report added momentum to the enacting of legislation that undermines the safeguards against wrongful conviction2.

But although the Review Team's report was, at the time, lauded as a victory for abused children and their families, in fact it endorsed the very types of suspect investigation that the Cleveland inquiry had criticised.

This was no mere co-incidence. The full story of the journey from Cleveland to Shieldfield is astonishing in revealing the disproportionate influence of a handful of dedicated ideologues - and exposes the fault lines in reforms that have undermined the probity of child protection and justice.

Two professionals were central to the Cleveland case. They were social worker Sue Richardson and paediatrician Marietta Higgs. In the aftermath, both women were blocked from statutory child protection work. Richardson lost her contract with the social services department and Higgs was barred from dealing with suspected child abuse cases. Consequently they turned their energies to building up a power base in the community. As members of a growing band of professionals and activists who believed that widespread undetected sexual abuse explained a panoply of individual and societal ills, they had a small but energetic band of supporters that included members of the local community health council.

Following the publication of the Cleveland Butler Sloss report in 1988, public meetings were held which included journalist Beatrix Campbell and the disgraced professionals. Campbell had taken a stand of supporting the professionals early on in the scandal in 1987. Rallying to their cause, she had monitored the inquiry and published the first edition of her book Unofficial Secrets on publication of the report.

As a feminist Marxist who frequently wrote for the Guardian, Campbell was an influential propagandist with a large following among left-leaning welfare professionals. Her platform throughout the Cleveland saga and beyond, was not the traditional class warfare but the new politics of gender. This became translated into a theory where men were substituted for the capitalist ruling class as the oppressors with women and children their captives. In this world vision sexual abuse was posited as a universal means of control of women and children (with boys as well as girls abused by their fathers as a method of induction into patriarchy).

This perversion of dogma was not new. It had begun in the 1970s and became closely aligned with what would come to be known as "repressed memory" theory. This methodology of abuse "disclosure" became linked with the family dysfunction model of child sexual abuse (criticised by radical feminists in the early days as being modelled on conservative patriarchal lines) that had taken root in the UK in the early 1980s at Great Ormond St Hospital, the Tavistock Clinic and the NSPCC.

Gathering together under the banner of "children's rights", the Cleveland activists formulated a political strategy to promote their concerns. They set out to create a cross-community alliance of professionals, voluntary workers and mothers whose children were thought to be sexually abused. Work with adult "survivor" groups and Rape Crisis centres was critical to the strategy, as was the promotion of criminal injuries compensation for past abuse. The idea was that instead of the professionals promoting their own cause, community pressure groups would become their voice - and in so doing gain a wider media and social acceptance.

The key tenet of the campaign was the breaking down of "denial". It was believed that abuse victims were locked into silence so that they were often unable to acknowledge it even to themselves. Consequently the abused child (ie the hypothetical "inner child" in either a child or adult) needed an adult professional advocate to become its voice and guide it into the external world. This was the view held by Sue Richardson, who was to become an "inner child" psychotherapist in Newcastle. In the 1991 book she edited, Child Sexual Abuse: Whose Problem?3, Richardson describes the theory as applied to the 161 children caught up in the Cleveland fiasco. She states that "[a] high proportion of these children had not told of the abuse before the investigation. These children were either not old enough, or in our belief, psychologically ready to tell an adult what happened to them." (italics added). Thus Richardson appears to assume that all the children jettisoned into care over two months in Cleveland were sexually abused - even though the majority eventually went home and had no further dealings with social services and no suspicion of abuse.

In 1989 the first groups were set up to support the professionals. CAUSE in Cleveland and Justice for Abused Children (JAC) both run by people who were part of a network of believers and who would promote "recovered memory claims"4. This resurgence co-incided with publicity about the Nottingham case, held to be an example of "satanic" or "ritual abuse". (see JET report - ref p. 6 of this newsletter)

The cases would bind the Cleveland and Nottingham protagonists and Beatrix Campbell together. Judith Dawson established contacts with the children's charity National Children's Homes (NCH). The respected Methodist children's charity was at the time restructuring its services moving away from residential child care into therapeutic services for sexual abuse victims. In 1992, Judith Jones, as she had become, took charge of the first of these centres in Sunderland, the Kite project. Sue Richardson would later head a similar project in Glasgow.

Working through the northeast branch of the British Association for the Study and Prevention of Child Abuse Network (BASPCAN), links were established between the emerging pressure groups, voluntary organisations and the statutory services. For example, a child abuse helpline Child Abuse Listening Line (CALL) was set up by Sharon Gray who ran the Ashington Women's Therapy Centre. Gray also teamed up with Jane Tait at the Newcastle NCH to put together a voluntary group training resource leaflet on sexual abuse to distribute to the statutory agencies. Gray would also begin to work as a therapist with Sue Richardson using "recovered memory" and "multiple personality disorder" theories.

One of Gray's "recovered memory" clients was a woman called Lynne Richardson (no relation to Sue). In 1992 her child attended the nursery school where a male nursery nurse, Jason Dabbs, had been suspended following allegations of sexual abuse. At first it seemed only a small number of children were implicated. But anxiety spread and with Sharon Gray's help, Lynne Richardson set up a parents' pressure group, Parents Against Child Sexual Abuse (PACSA).

The children were examined by Dr Camille San Lazaro, the paediatrician who would play a central role in the Shieldfield case. Dr Lazaro, who had trained in Newcastle with Cleveland's Dr Higgs, (who had also returned to Newcastle) took an obsessive interest in diagnosing sexual abuse and had styled herself as a "forensic paediatrician" (though curiously she claimed in the libel trial she was unable to use a colposcope to take photographs for forensic purposes). Dr Lazaro was an eccentric figure with an unshakeable confidence in her own diagnostic powers in sexual abuse. Described by one observer as "a legend in her own imagination" her characteristic speculative bias can be seen in a letter she wrote to the medical journal, the Archives of the Diseases of Childhood in 1990. In the letter she argues that a rare skin disease, lichen sclerosis, can be caused by sexual abuse5. In fact signs of the disease can be confused with, but are distinct from sexual abuse damage. It was a gross misdiagnosis of the disease by Dr Higgs in Cleveland in 1987 that laid the foundations of distrust in the police6. Dr Higgs examined a six year old child four times over a period of four months - each time she diagnosed sexual abuse and each time a new perpetrator was indicated, including a foster carer. In the meantime, the painful skin condition itself was left untreated. It was a cautionary tale that ought to have given pause to the enthusiasts. Dr Lazaro however, was clearly of a mind to fit the square peg in a round hole by claiming - without any evidence - that the disease could be caused by sexual abuse. It is a clear indication that Dr Lazaro was determined to uphold the Richardson thesis of all the children involved in the Cleveland case being sexually abused7.

In 1991 Dr Lazaro had become a member of the Newcastle Area Child Protection Committee. This is the body responsible for interagency child protection training in the investigation of abuse. As a "forensic paediatrician" Dr Lazaro was able to wield enormous power. Dr Lazaro's examinations, together with the networking of information through PACSA, resulted in the numbers in the Dabbs case rising to include children at a nursery he had worked in previously. Eventually over 60 children were said to have been abused. The parents, angry that abuse had been allowed to take place under the noses of the nursery staff, were mobilised by PACSA into a powerful force able to shape the course of the social services investigation. Consequently both CALL and the Newcastle branch of the NCH were given priority in providing therapeutic "disclosure services" for the children.

On 6th April 1993 Dabbs pleaded guilty to indecently assaulting nine children. It was a plea bargain. Three other charges were taken into consideration and charges against a further eight were withdrawn. Later, in an enquiry report, Peter Hunt QC declined to speculate as to whether he was guilty of the remaining charges or whether he had abused other children. However, Mr Hunt noted, with dismay, that he was not provided with the full prosecution bundle by the police but only a summary. This was written by WPC Julie Kinghorn who worked closely with Dr Lazaro and took charge of the entire police investigation interviewing both the children and Dabbs. Mr Hunt commented that the resulting videos were so poor they would have been inadmissible as evidence had the case gone to trial8.

Dr Lazaro and Sharon Gray's comments about the Dabbs case reported in the local press indicate how allegations might be unwittingly but systematically inflated through suggestion. Sharon Gray told the The Journal in Newcastle that CALL had helped around 30 of the families affected in the Dabbs case, adding "For some, listening to their children's plight brought back memories of abuse which had long been buried." While according to Beatrix Campbell, "a paediatrician" in the Dabbs case (Dr Lazaro), "vindicated the power of medical evidence, which took such a beating during the 1987 Cleveland case". Campbell continued: "Medical signs of 'penetrative trauma' fortified the children's testimony. Children had refused to speak altogether and broke their silence only when a paediatrician murmured: 'something has hurt you up there, hasn't it.'"

The Dabbs case would consolidate the power base of Dr Lazaro and her acolytes, setting off the train of extraordinary events which would lead to the Shieldfield prosecution and, finally, the "malicious" Review Team report. (Ring a bell)