by
Charles Pragnell
A
Paper presented to an International Conference in Sydney, Australia,
on 4/5 February 2004 to examine problems in child protection systems
and procedures internationally, and to discuss the need for reforms.
What
I have to say today is a commentary on the child protection system
as it is in Britain. I confess to knowing very little about the
system in Australia but I shall leave it to you to draw any parallels
which you may think apply from your own experiences.
I
would first like to talk a little bit about the British character.
It is not widely recognised but in many ways the British culture
is punitive and oppressive toward children. The British will always
state that they love their children and most probably do, but
they are not openly loving and affectionate with them.
These
punitive and oppressive attitudes are particularly apparent in
the juvenile justice system, in the strongly held beliefs regarding
corporal punishment of children, and in the child protection system.
There are many hundreds of children under the age of sixteen who
are being held in secure facilities for committing what are seen
as serious offences – but they receive very little in the
way of therapy, counselling, or support in rehabilitation and
are separated from their families for several years. An international
study in the early 1980s among schools around the world found
that it was only in Britain and its former colonies that corporal
punishment was still used – most European countries had
abandoned the practice over a century before and some had never
permitted its use.
But
what the British are very good at is importing and exporting children.
During the infamous years of the slave trade, the British imported
many small black children from Africa as fashion accessories for
the ladies of Bristol and Liverpool, to complement their crinoline
dresses and parasols. Then from the late 1800s, the British began
to export children and this continued until the late 1960s. Children
who were being looked after in large children’s homes were
collected together and taken off to Liverpool where they were
put on specially chartered ships and transported to the new world
of Australia and Canada, where they had been told, a wonderful
new life with great opportunities awaited them. We now know differently.
More
recently, the British have again begun to import children. From
1970 onwards, the numbers of unwanted children available for adoption
began to decline very rapidly following a relaxation in the laws
on abortion and new developments in contraception. However, the
numbers of childless couples wanting to adopt children continued
to increase. So in order to provide the supply to meet this demand,
the British began to import children from Eastern European countries
when the Soviet Union began to break up in the early 1990s and
children were taken from their families and their ethnic and cultural
backgrounds from such countries as Rumania, Bosnia, Kosovo etc.
This was later extended to children from China and the Far East.
Of course, this was all done for the best of intentions and as
being “in the best interests of the children”.
But
then, far greater harm is often done by those with good intentions
towards others than is ever done by those with bad intent.
There
can be little debate that the child protection system in the United
Kingdom is deeply flawed, erratic, and grossly dysfunctional.
In
the last thirty years there have been over forty instances where
children have died while under the care or supervision of child
protection workers. Many of these have led to public inquiries
and it is significant that almost all of these inquiries have
had two things in common in their findings: first, there was a
lack of communication between the various agency workers involved,
and secondly, they have blamed `the system’ for the errors
which have been made rather than find fault with the individual
actions of any of the child protection workers.
Accordingly,
the system has been changed every time, with increased powers
and resources for the child abuse industry, but the changes have
resulted in it becoming even more oppressive and punitive. But
the problem is not in the system, the problem lies in the attitudes
and beliefs of the workers.
One
of the claims of child protection social workers is that the amount
of reported child abuse is only the tip of an iceberg and there
is far more abuse of children going on than is being reported.
They regularly try to create a moral panic and to overstate the
situation in order to attract public and political sympathy -
and of course more resources, to expand the child abuse industry.
There
is no evidence to support these assertions - in fact quite the
opposite. Child abuse is not a major problem in Britain, or at
least nowhere near as large a problem as the child abuse industry
would want the public and politicians to believe.
England
and Wales have a child population of approximately 11 million
children and in 1997 there were reports of child abuse involving
160,000 children but over 85% of those reports were found to have
no substantive basis. That is, they had been made for mistaken,
mischievous, malicious, or monetary reasons. However, the child
abuse industry persuaded the Government to introduce mandatory
reporting, whereby if a child arrived at a school, a hospital,
or a doctor’s surgery with cuts and bruises, this had to
be reported to the child protection services.
Consequently,
by 2002 the figure for reports of child abuse rose to 570,000.
However, following investigation of these reports, the names of
only 11,500 children were added to the Child Protection Registers
as being `At Risk’ of abuse, and it must be emphasised that
these are not proven cases. These are decisions that children
are at risk. They are based only on the opinions of social workers
and on very little evidence, and are taken in situations where
social workers are terrified to risk being wrong.
So
just as social workers have failed to intervene when they should
have done, they also have an appalling record of intervening when
they should not have done. The most glaring examples of this were
in Cleveland in 1987, Orkney in 1990, in Nottingham and Rochdale
and many, many other instances.
The
events in Cleveland involved the use of an unproven medical diagnosis
termed the anal dilatation test which resulted in 121 children
being removed from their families - some in midnight and dawn
raids when the children were pulled from their beds and taken
away to residential and foster homes.
The social workers video-recorded their interviews with some of
the children and it showed them asking leading questions, threatening
the children, and even attempting to bribe them into saying they
had been abused.
At
the time the social workers had a mantra - “always believe
the child” – yet when the children told them they
had not been abused, the social workers refused to believe them.
The courts however, dismissed the cases involving 96 of the children,
i.e. over 80% were false accusations.
In
Orkney, Nottingham, and Rochdale a theory was used of Satanic
Ritual Abuse and after those scandals the government appointed
a researcher, Professor Jean la Fontaine to undertake a study
of such alleged abuse. The research found no evidence of the existence
of Satanic Ritual Abuse.
What
this shows is that there is a readiness among social workers to
uncritically accept any new but unproven theory of child abuse
and to incorporate it immediately into their practice without
a thought for the consequences.
There
is now growing anecdotal evidence from many parents in Britain
who have children with special needs that they are being targeted
for referral to child protection procedures if they apply for
statutory assessment for their children under the Education Acts.
In particular this is affecting families with children with ADD/
ADHD/ Asperger’s Syndrome/ high functioning Autism/ moderate
to severe Dyslexia and Dyspraxia/ and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
or any combinations of these conditions. There are many families
who are daily reporting to organizations such as the Autism Society
that, instead of education workers carrying out statutory assessments
of their children, they are referring them into the child protection
system.
In
short, social workers are intervening where they should not have
done and are not intervening where they should have done. As a
consequence, many children have lost their lives while many hundreds
of thousands of others have been, and are, caused unnecessary
harm by unwarranted intrusions into their lives and the stigma
of child abuse accusations which stay with them forever.
I
am not of course the first person to draw attention to the idiosyncrasies
and dysfunctions of the child protection system.
In
1990, in a book titled Wounded Innocents, Richard Wexler
stated, “The war against child abuse has become a war
against children. The child abuse system is hurting children that
it is attempting to help”.
This
was further confirmed in 1995 by other American researchers, Wakefield
and Underwager, who stated, “We have built a system
that, while intended to protect children, often does more harm
than good. From 1979 to the present every social scientist who
has investigated the level and type of error committed by the
child protection system has concluded there is an unconscionable
level of false positives, that is, saying there is abuse when
there is not”.
However,
there are many child protection workers who will not accept that
there are false accusations of child abuse, only that they cannot
find the evidence to prove it. And even those who accept there
are false accusations, take the view that, and I quote, “Who
cares if nine innocents suffer, as long as we get the guilty one?”
Again,
American researchers state that, “The Child Protection
System responds to abuse allegations with much reinforcement for
making an accusation but has no accountability. An allegation
produces large and immediate pay-offs and has no cost to the system
nor the accuser. This makes the child protection system very vulnerable
to manipulation and distortion by troubled and distressed persons
pursuing their own private purpose.”
There
also seems to be little appreciation or understanding among social
workers of the harm caused to children and their families by unnecessary
and unwarranted interventions.
But
investigation of false accusations show that such investigations
cause immense harm to children and their families. American researchers
in 1995 found that, “Although the damage to a falsely
accused person is obvious, it is not fully realised that a child
is also damaged by a false accusation and a mistaken decision.
If a child is involved in allegations of abuse that are ill-founded
and erroneous, it is not an innocuous, neutral, or benign experience.
A child involved in a false accusation of abuse is subjected to
highly destructive emotional abuse. The harm done to children
when adults make mistakes ... is severe and long-lasting.”
So
what mistakes do social workers make in the course of their investigations?.
In
1991 and 1995 research carried out by two English researchers
Prosser and Lewis showed that there were major faults in child
protection investigations and these were :
On
very rare occasions, social workers have acknowledged to families
that they got it wrong or that the accusations against the family
were completely false. These families report, however, that they
never received so much as an apology nor recognition of the devastation
caused to their lives and were told, “Just forget about
it and get on with your life!”
The
British Government have their own ideas about changes to the child
protection system and last October issued a discussion Paper (Green
Paper) setting out their thinking and proposals. It is not a reform
of the system, however, but merely a reorganisation and extension
of what already exists.
The major proposals include :
1. Moving Child Protection Workers from Social Services Departments
into Education Authorities i.e. basing them in schools;
2. Creating a national computerised database of all children in
the country and their families;
3. Extending the assessment procedures for children and families.
Take
the first of these, re-organising the system. The major finding
and recommendation of most, if not all, of those child abuse inquiries
has been to `Blame the System’ and the system has always
responded with, “We have learned important lessons and we
will make appropriate changes to our procedures”. However,
the facts shown by subsequent events are that they have learnt
nothing and despite changes to the system, they continue to get
it wrong. It has been patently obvious of course to anyone with
a capability for rational thought that in every one of those occasions
where children have died or false accusations have been made the
problems have been in the attitudes, erratic behaviours, incompetence,
and negligence of individual workers.
There
is a saying by an unknown author that, “Pursuing structural
change as a means of solving organisational problems is as vain
as the search for the philosopher’s stone … If you
change attitudes, structures will look after themselves, and if
you can’t, then no structure will do the job for you.”
On
the second point - of setting up a national database - this will
include the names and personal details of over 40 million people
and will be open to countrywide access by every school, doctor’s
surgery, police station, hospital, as well as staff in the statutory
child protection agencies, who will all be able to add information
such as incidents of domestic violence, offending behaviours,
drug-taking, alcoholism, prostitution etc. without definitive
proof of such events and no matter how accurate or inaccurate
such information may be. Frankly, I find this frightening, for
obvious reasons. Such a database will also be extremely vulnerable
to paedophile hackers and misuse of the information by disgruntled
employees.
Also,
over many years, children and families have complained that despite
the provisions of the Data Protection legislation, they face enormous
difficulties in obtaining access to what has been written about
them and even more difficulty getting wrong information erased
or amended.
Families
also complain that even when they are completely exonerated, information
remains on the system forever. Even if the allegations are clearly
shown to be false, they are unable to get the records expunged
and in consequence they often meet with hostility and animosity
if they take their child to a doctor, hospital, or school thereafter,
because that information, without an exonerating statement, often
precedes them.
Thirdly,
regarding the assessment procedures. Children and families report
that they have undergone numerous assessments in the hope of receiving
services but afterwards have realised that the assessment procedure
is an end in itself. Nothing happens afterwards, because agencies
do not allocate sufficient resources to meet the demand for those
services. The question must be raised as to just how much of agency
resources given to assessment processes could be better used to
provide services.
In
child protection procedures, children and families frequently
complain that the information in such assessment reports is often
inaccurate, distorted, embellished, and even fabricated.
1.
INQUISITORIAL Child Protection investigations and civil proceedings
should be inquisitorial and not adversarial. The present adversarial
system immediately throws the parents and family into an accused
role and in conflict with the system, when all parties involved
should be working together in a spirit of cooperation as far as
this is possible. Parents often complain that their rights in
such procedures are denied or violated and they are immediately
cast into the role of culprits without an opportunity to explain
what has occurred and matters reach the courts before they can
defend themselves. The Government guidelines on child protection
place great emphasis on `Working Together’ but this does
not apparently include working together with parents and other
concerned family members.
2.
NEW THEORIES OF CHILD ABUSE We have seen the harm caused to innocent
families over several decades by allegations of abuse based on
unproven theories such as the Anal Dilatation Test, Repressed
Memory Syndrome, Satanic Ritual Abuse and Munchausen Syndrome
By Proxy. There should be an independent national body with the
responsibility to thoroughly research any new theory which may
be proposed and to verify and validate such theories before they
are introduced into child protection processes.
3.
DESTRUCTION OF RECORDS In situations where no substantive evidence
is found after investigation of an allegation of child abuse,
the parents should be provided with a documentary statement stating
that there is no foundation to the allegation. The parents should
then have the right to have all records regarding the event destroyed.
4.
IMPROVED TRAINING There needs to be an intensive form of training
introduced to train social workers in investigatory skills and
in particular, to ensure that child protection investigations
are approached in an objective, impartial, and even-handed manner.
5.
FALSE ACCUSATIONS – A CRIMINAL AND CIVIL OFFENCE It should
be made a criminal offence to make a false accusation of child
abuse, as it is in Ireland and some States in America, and there
should also be the right of individuals to take action in civil
courts for damages where such false accusations have caused them
harm.
Charles
Pragnell is an independent social care management consultant,
a Child/Family Advocate, and an Expert Defence Witness –
Child Protection, and has given evidence to Courts in cases in
England, Scotland, and New Zealand. Charles has over forty years
of experience in working directly with children and young people
as a social worker, a senior manager of social services, and Director
of an independent organization providing services for children
and families. He has undertaken research for the National Children’s
Bureau and several local authority Social Services and Education
Departments and for Health Authorities. He has also made presentations
at national and international conferences on child care issues
(including child protection) and social policy issues, and has
presented occasional lectures at Universities in England and Australia.
For
over eleven years Charles was an External Examiner to social work
qualifying courses at the Universities of Sunderland, Central
Lancashire, and the John Moore University in Liverpool. He has
had numerous articles on child care and social policy published
in journals in the U.K. and South Africa. He was a member of an
international working party of social workers in child and family
services which was set up by the Federation Internationale de
Communautes Educatives to produce an international Code of Ethical
Conduct and Practice Principles for social workers worldwide.
Charles has also been a member and a Director of the U.K. Institute
of Child Care and Social Education. He currently lives in Melbourne,
Victoria, Australia.
