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When hospital staff pulled the curtains around her son’s bed and asked: “Poor
little baby. What have you been doing?”, Victoria Ward knew something was
suddenly very wrong.
A week earlier the Ward family, who live in Cambridge, had been at the height
of their happiness. According to Victoria, they both had “good jobs, a
secure marriage, a wonderful house and a three-month-old baby we had been
planning, hoping for, wanting. Life was lovely”.
With little William’s arrival, Victoria, now a baby-yoga teacher, threw
herself into all the activities middle-class mothers love: swimming,
massage, baby cinema. And when William had a restless night, Victoria, ever
the careful mum, took him to the GP, not once but on three consecutive days
until a doctor agreed that his leg looked swollen and sent the family to
hospital for an explanation.
Victoria, 34, and Jake, 35, sensible, professional people from supportive and
stable families, are the last couple you could imagine being accused of
child abuse. But in 2005, after William’s leg was x-rayed in hospital and
found to have an unexplained fracture, that’s exactly what they were
suspected of.
Out of the blue, they faced a police investigation and the terrifying threat
of their son being taken into care. Victoria’s parents had to move from
Devon to live with them round the clock before they were allowed to take
William home from hospital. Then began an 18-month nightmare encompassing
parental assessments, endless reports from social workers and doctors and
finally a court case.
In cases of child abuse, the fate of families can turn on the evidence of
doctors prepared to stand up as “expert witnesses” (often charging hundreds
of pounds an hour) and give their opinion on whether or not a parent has
harmed a child. In the criminal courts the evidence can lead to a mother or
father being jailed. In the family courts – held in secret – a child can be
taken away from its parents and fostered or adopted.
Child protection is a controversial area, and in recent years some of the
worst miscarriages of British justice have followed the testimony of
so-called expert witnesses in the field, a number of whom have been accused
of being zealots or just plain wrong in their willingness to blame parents –
even those who protest their innocence – for children’s injuries.
The conviction of the solicitor Sally Clark, jailed in 1999 after being
wrongly convicted of murdering two of her children, was based on the
evidence of Professor Sir Roy Meadow, who famously and – it later turned out
– inaccurately testified that the chance of two of her babies having
suffered cot death was one in 73m.
Clark, 42, was freed on appeal in 2003 but never recovered, and died of acute
alcohol intoxication at her home in March. Angela Cannings was another
innocent mother wrongly convicted of murdering her child during a trial at
which Meadow also gave evidence. She too was cleared by the Court of Appeal.
Last week Professor David Southall, who has been described both as Meadow’s
pro-tégé and as a pioneer in the detection of child abuse, was struck off
the medical register by the General Medical Council (GMC). It ruled that he
had abused his position by suggesting to Mandy Morris that she had drugged
and murdered her 10-year-old son Lee. The child, who had been bullied at
school, had in fact hanged himself from the curtain rail.
The GMC said Southall had “deep-seated attitudinal problems”. Yet, far from
apologising to those whose lives have been wrecked, the paediatrician struck
a defiant note when he appeared on Radio 4’s Today programme.
He was, he said, “an expert in life-threatening child abuse” and a victim of a
vindictive campaign against doctors trying to protect children. “I am the
expert and I know what I am talking about,” he insisted.
Compared with Clark and Cannings, Victoria and Jake Ward were “lucky”. After a
seven-hour wait in a police cell and interview room, where they were
interrogated on suspicion of GBH and child cruelty, the police dropped the
case.
The county council, however, carried on with childcare proceedings. By the
time the hearings started, Victoria – then pregnant with her daughter
Hattie, who is now nine months old – knew her second child was also at risk
of being taken away if the court found, “on the balance of probabilities”,
that the couple had harmed their son.
But, rack their brains as they might, their only explanation for how William
could have fractured his leg was that he might have trapped it at night
between the cot bars and caused the injury in trying to wriggle free.
Over 10 months, Victoria, Jake and William visited no fewer than three expert
witnesses – the judge wanted to hear a range of opinion. Finally, after a
two-week hearing involving conflicting evidence from the experts, the couple
were exonerated. “There is no cogent evidence that these parents injured
their son,” the judge concluded.
Now Victoria, who kept a video diary of the experience, is pressing ahead with
a legal battle to be allowed to name the experts who gave evidence. Like
many parents caught up in the trauma of trying to prove they have not harmed
their children, she and Jake have found the secrecy of the family courts
deeply disturbing. They believe it makes it difficult to right miscarriages
of justice and hinders research into real medical conditions that may
explain fractures and other injuries in babies.
“I thought there had been a trend towards greater openness in the family
courts after the miscarriages of justice of Sally Clark and Angela Cannings,
and that I would be able to speak out and tell my story. But it is
incredibly difficult,” she says.
During the hearing, she attended a support group for parents of children with
unexplained fractures and discovered that although parents are not allowed
to discuss cases in the family courts many of the same names came up again
and again.
“There seems to be a small group of expert witnesses who often condemn
parents,” she says. In fact she had been told by the support group that she
would lose the case, “because families always lose”.
“One family we knew of did lose their child,” she says. “It was a similar
case, a child under six months with a broken arm, but it went the other way.
Their daughter was adopted a couple of weeks ago.”
The Wards feel social workers and doctors should never assume that if a child
has broken bones and the parents don’t know why, that it is inevitably
because of child abuse.
“Social workers told me that most broken bones in children under one are
caused by child abuse,” Victoria says. “I feel very strongly that just
because you cannot explain how something happened, someone cannot just say:
‘Oh well, the parents must have done it.’ That assumption has to change. We
are very keen to speak up against that crazy [idea].
“One of the expert witnesses in our case was very helpful in terms of
supporting an alternative view of how this fracture was caused. I want him
to be able to be named. Research needs to go on into children with
unexplained fractures.
“We are not saying the doctors in our case have done anything wrong, yet they
are seeking anonymity. There is a risk there could be hundreds of Dr
Southalls out there giving evidence in the family courts, and no one will
know anything about it.”
The solicitor Sarah Harman, sister of the deputy prime minister, Harriet
Harman, agrees. She dismisses the objection raised by the Royal College of
Paediatrics and Child Health last week that doctors will be deterred from
undertaking child protection work and that “children may come to harm”
as a result.
“When the chief medical officer did research into expert witnesses, he found
that many doctors had simply not been asked to do this work. There is a
small group of people who do expert-witness work. They earn a large amount
of money. We need to widen the pool.
“There is no western democracy that has such family-court secrecy as we do,”
adds Harman, who says she is giving up child protection work because the
secrecy compromises parents. “The Wards are my last [such] case,” she says.
Next May, in front of a High Court judge, the Wards will argue for the right
to name names. Victoria and Jake’s lives have changed a lot in the past two
years. Neither she nor her husband still works in the job they had when
William was injured, they are pursuing a case for compensation and their
faith in the justice system has been severely tested.
Even now, they worry about what would happen if either of their children hurt
themselves again. “We have had to force ourselves to let William climb and
play outside and take risks like normal children,” says Victoria. “What
happened is still on his record.”
But at least if Mr Justice Munby gives them the go-ahead next year they will
be able to draw some comfort from the fact that their case may stand as a
landmark ruling, prising open the secrecy of the family courts and perhaps
helping families who find themselves caught up in a similar predicament.
In the meantime, Southall says he may appeal against the GMC’s decision.
Inquiries by the police and the attorney-general into his work are
continuing.
