Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing in response to the letter published in The Herald
on Friday 17 March, by Sandra Brown of The Moira Anderson Foundation.
It is extremely tiresome that the only way professionals can deal
with genuine concerns for the safety of children and families
with regard to the unscrupulous actions of the child protection
industry, is by self-righteously proclaiming that anyone who raises
such a concern is supporting child abuse.
Measures to protect children from abusers are only truly effective
when they also protect the same children from the malicious manipulation
by police, local authorities and unregulated voluntary organisations.
As with most of those active within the CP industry, Ms Brown
fails to accept this and neglects to point out that eight children
from one of the Ayrshire cases are still desperately pursuing
legal action against the local authority for wrongful removal
from their families, with the Scottish Legal Aid board refusing
to fund such action until 2003.
The bullying and harassment used by professionals to elicit exaggerated
statements of abuse, and the extent to which this is used, is
gradually becoming known, with alleged victims of abuse in Rochdale
and the infamous McMartin case in the US, now speaking out about
their treatment by professionals. Such repetitive bullying by
a social worker was witnessed in our own case.
The other Ayrshire case to which Ms Brown refers, no doubt broke
down because the vulnerable children at the centre of the case
no longer had the strength to continue being a front for the hidden
and subversive motives of the agencies involved.
What is worse, is that often these cases involving exaggerated
allegations of Satanism, do originate with a problem family, where
there may be genuine evidence of abuse or neglect within the family.
What the professionals do, by deliberately seeking to create such
a fantastical case of abuse involving dozens of individuals, is
effectively destroy any real chance of addressing the genuine
abusers, as we saw in the Western Isles case.
In this case, police used a mentally unstable mother, protected
from prosecution, in a trawl to net as many people as possible,
despite the children having made allegations against their mother
over a number of years.
Currently, the SWIA is hiding any reference to the final two years
of therapy that these girls received at the hands of NCH, omitting
any reference to this in their report. This supports what we have
always stated in relation to that case, that yet again, the manipulation
by professionals with their own agenda was behind the allegations
of satanic abuse.
Ms Brown might also wish to know that the only people who were
“looking the other way”, when our children were distressed
by police interviews, terrified by late night meetings in the
neighbourhood regarding our family, distressed by a ban on speaking
to their father on the phone, embarrassment at returning to school
and a fear that their father had been in a car crash due to social
workers and police refusing to tell them what was happening, were
the local authority, police and NCH. They dismissed any distress
caused as “out of their control.”
Only this week, a local authority in England has been told to
pay £500,000 after maliciously taking a child into care,
the child is being returned to her parents.
Those in the CP industry have a responsibility to ensure that
their actions do not cause unnecessary suffering and distress,
this means they must stop using children to further their own
agendas. The process of interviewing children properly and recording
the interviews has still not been addressed. The new steps to
video record all interviews is all very well, but how do you stop
‘unofficial’ or ‘rapport building’ interviews
by unqualified and untrained staff? Ms Nelson’s booklet,
‘Can of Worms’ is an open invitation to those working
with children and vulnerable adults to continue this practice.
The Moira Anderson Foundation is currently supporting the proposal
to remove the requirement for corroboration in cases of alleged
sexual abuse and is still represented at meetings of the Cross
Party Group for survivors of childhood sexual abuse in the Scottish
Parliament.
Yours sincerely,
Penny Campbell
False Allegations Action Scotland
