David Southall looks surprisingly calm for a man who has lost his job, his
income and his reputation. The paediatrician and child protection expert was
struck off by the General Medical Council last week for inappropriately
accusing a mother, Mandy Morris, referred to in the hearing as Mrs M, of
drugging and hanging her ten-year-old son, Lee.
The ruling crowns a decade in which Southall, 59, has been targeted
remorselessly by campaigners, mostly parents who believe that he has wronged
them. In 2004 the GMC found him guilty of serious professional misconduct
for accusing Sally Clark’s husband of murdering the couple’s two sons.
Southall based his opinion on a TV interview with Mr Clark. He was suspended
from child protection work.
In last week’s ruling, the GMC’s fitness-to-practise panel criticised Southall
for “deep-seated attitudinal problems”, illustrated by his refusal to
apologise to the parents involved in the two hearings. Southall calls it “a
massive miscarriage of justice” and says that he will appeal.
Meanwhile, he remains unrepentant: “How can I say sorry for something I didn’t
do? I did not accuse Mrs M, and my denial [of having made an accusation] was
backed up by the experienced social worker who was there. I can understand
how this last GMC panel – three lay people and an orthopaedic surgeon –
could have empathy with Mrs M and find what they found. But that doesn’t
make it the truth.”
As for the Clark case, Southall still believes that he behaved appropriately.
“If I say sorry for something I didn’t do just because a panel has found
that I did it, even though I didn’t, all that does is compound the injustice
and wrong of the situation. It would be intellectually dishonest to do so.”
He likens it to saying sorry for a murder that he didn’t commit.
Is it not high-handed to refuse to apologise? “I can see why people think
that. But I’m not going to be dishonest about something just to make people
believe I’m a nicer person.”
It’s a good job that Southall doesn’t care greatly about making enemies. This
is his analysis of why he has become so reviled by campaigners and the
media: he has been hounded by “obsessive, distressed, disordered and
vengeful” parents and campaigners who have fed a complicit media
emotion-filled stories of families torn apart by overzealous doctors and
social workers; he is legally unable to respond because child abuse is dealt
with by family courts and the officials involved, including him, must
observe confidentiality; postShipman, the GMC wants to look tough and has
become a slave to public opinion; the GMC panels that have judged his
competence were insufficiently qualified to do so because they included no
specialists in child protection work.
Not only have his judgments in child protection come under fire, but also his
research on children with breathing difficulties. One newspaper suggested
that he was implicated in the deaths of 28 babies. Southall says that he has
been the target of “vexatious complainants”, who, by keeping him under
investigation by both his hospital trust and the GMC, have ensured that he
cannot speak out for fear of prejudicing his hearings. He was also advised
to keep quiet by the Medical Defence Union, which has funded his legal
representation.
Now, he feels, it is time to break the silence: “I have been unable to defend
myself for ten years. I am regarded in the public domain as somebody who
researches unethically on babies – I have even been compared to Josef
Mengele – and who falsely accuses parents of abuse, splits up families, and
so on. That's not how I’m seen by patients and colleagues but it is how I’m
seen by the campaigners. Because they have the ear of the media and because
the GMC follows the public perception of people, that’s how and why I was
described like that by the panel. Sir Roy Meadow and myself were made into
hate figures in this country by the campaign and media coverage.
“When you have predominantly lay panels [at the GMC] who cannot possibly be
immune from public opinion, faced with me as a doctor, I don’t see how I
could have obtained a fair hearing.”
His remarks would seem a monstrous exercise in self-justification were it not
for the unflagging support that he has attracted inside the profession.
During the hearing, the GMC received scores of letters from past and current
colleagues attesting to Southall’s clinical judgment and dedication. Many
wrote admiringly of his work with his charity Child Advocacy International,
which earned Southall an OBE.
When he was struck off, doctors responded with dismay. Patricia Hamilton,
President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said that
the college was saddened and disappointed" by the judgment.
“David Southall has made a major contribution to child health both nationally
and internationally . . . we are very concerned that paediatricians and
social workers will be deterred from undertaking child protection work, and
that children and young people may come to harm.”
Thirty-nine members of the organisation Professionals Against Child Abuse,
mostly paediatricians, expressed their concern in a letter to The
Guardian: “. . . paediatricians appear to have no defence against
complaints from aggrieved parents who may have abused their children”.
And those looking for an element of malice in the campaign against Southall
and Meadow may well find it in an e-mail exchange between campaigning
parents, revealed last week in The Times.The correspondents,
jubilant at having claimed Southall’s scalp, discuss which paediatrician
they should go after next.
I meet David Southall in Padding-ton station, West London, on a rainy
Friday morning. Tall, silver-haired and with an authoritative air, he has
travelled from his home in Wales to meet his brother, who is anxious to see
him after recent events. Southall says that he has been inundated with
messages of support since the GMC struck him off.
Not that he craves any external endorsement of his judgment. He is at ease
with his conscience, convinced that he has never falsely accused parents of
child abuse: “I have admitted that I got it wrong many times in terms of failing
to recognise abuse, and believing that something was a medical problem
instead of abuse. But have I ever got it wrong by falsely accusing parents?
I don’t think so. Because I know how terrible that is for the parents, but
mostly for the children.”
What about when a child is returned to the family? “Quite often, the parents
have attacked me. They’ ll say, ‘It’s a false accusation because we got our
child back’, leaving out all the information involved in the family court
which they know I can’t talk about because of patient confidentiality.
“To say that the child has been returned because there was never abuse is too
big a jump. [While the child is in care] lots of work is done with these
families to ensure that they are safe to receive back their child. That
doesn’t mean the original abuse didn’t happen; it means that there is no
longer a risk. But if you’re a parent and you’ve had childcare proceedings,
it’s very traumatic. People lash out with their grief over that.”
Then, he says, a small coterie of his enemies is standing by to exploit them.
Southall names as his primary foes Penny Mellor, who has made more than 20
complaints against him and is associated with the website MAMA (Mothers
Against Munchausen), and John Hemming, MP, who compared him to Mengele in
the House. Mellor, he says, is motivated by “attention and revenge” for his
involvement in her 2002 conviction for conspiracy to abduct a child.
They, not the parents, are responsible for his persecution, he claims. “I
think most of them [the parents] are very distressed people. I don’t feel in
any way angry at them. Personally, I consider them to be disordered in their
behaviour towards their child
or children, but I don’t feel that these are horrible people.”
Does he feel like a martyr? After a long pause, he replies: “I’m not answering
fully, head-on, with a yes, but I identify with the question because of the
serious consequences that these GMC findings have had, and this campaign has
had, on my life and family. It has also affected my international
humanitarian work [with Child Advocacy International] in terms of my
credibility and my ability to raise funds.”
Now that he has left the NHS – he took early retirement in 2004 – he cannot
call himself professor any more. He could have kept the title if Keele
University, where he was formerly professor of paediatrics, had granted him
a standard-issue emeritus professorship, but it did not. The decision
rankles: Southall sought, using the Freedom of Information Act, the basis on
which Keele had made its decision, which he calls “thoroughly corrupt”.
But it’s just a title, I say. Doesn’t your pursuit of this comparatively
trivial matter, while the GMC rains allegation after allegation on your
head, point to an obsessive, perhaps paranoid, character who attributes poor
judgment to all but himself?
Southall agrees that it appears trivial, but points to the importance of the
title for fundraising. “Obsessive? No. Determined? Yes. I think the
obsession is on the other side, in campaigners and parents. Remember, I’ve
been involved with about 120 families and I’m not obsessing over any one of
them.”
If not an obsessive, then a crusad-er? “Yes, that could be said about me,” he
agrees. “The more exposed you are to the terrible things that people do to
their children – and I was exposed to the worst of it for a long time in the
covert surveillance work [using hidden cameras, he found that some babies in
hospitals were being suffocated by their mothers] – you can become, first,
depressed and, secondly, determined to protect the next child. I see illness
in children all day, including cancer, but there is nothing, nothing,
that compares to being a child who is targeted in your home by the one
person who is supposed to look after you, and you have no way out.”
I put it to him that, if his clinical judgments are indeed correct, there must
be some reason why he attracts such opprobrium. Is there something about him
– a personality flaw, perhaps – that has helped to bring his world crashing
down?
Southall, who says that the campaign against him contributed to the breakdown
of his second marriage (he has since remarried, and says that all his wives
and four children stand by him), denies having a personality disorder but
admits: “I do tend to be fairly direct and to say what I think no matter
what the circumstances. But I’d hate to be thought unkind.”
His charity work sent him to Bos-nia and Afghanistan, where, he says, he saw
horrific abuse in refugee camps and orphanages. Does he think that he
suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder?
“It would be crazy to assume that I didn’t have PTSD,” he says. “I couldn’t
sleep, I was having flash-backs.” However, he rejects my suggestion that
PTSD might be associated with impaired judgment: “Is it? Maybe it’s enhanced
judgment. What I’m not prepared to accept is that my judgment has been
impaired in a way that could justify criticisms from the GMC panel or
campaigners.”
Southall finds the GMC ruling “completely unacceptable on every level – for
abused children, and for doctors trying their best to protect them. They are
watching with horror at what has happened to Roy Meadow and myself. They are
thinking, ‘How can I carry on doing child protection work if there’s a
possibility of a complaint to the GMC, of me ending up in front of a panel
that doesn’t understand child protection and is willing to believe a parent
rather than me plus an experienced independent social worker, and the
possibility of losing my job?’
“That’s where the danger lies. There has been enormous publicity over those
cases where convictions have been overturned. Against that is the almost
monthly occurrence of a child being tortured to death.
“People have not wanted to accuse someone of abuse because, once you cross
that line, you are regarded as a zealot and someone who has a problem. But
if you are to protect children, someone has to cross that line.”
