Shayari Bazar

It is worth — given the passage of time — recalling the basic architecture of the Crisis: 121 children from many different and largely unrelated families had been taken into the care of Cleveland County Council in the three short months of the summer of 1987. (p18)Behind these headline statistics were decades of neglect and/or misunderstanding of the issue of child sexual abuse, a long-running dispute between police and paediatricians over who should have primacy in the investigation of such cases and the presence of two dedicated paediatricians at Middlesbrough General Hospital. Dr Marietta Higgs and Dr Geoffrey Wyatt had both understanding of, and training in, recognising the physical signs that a child’s body had been abused. One of these signs was — and still is reflex anal dilatation (RAD): a simple clue which is suggestive of anal penetration from outside. It had been recognised as a valuable weapon in the armoury of doctors examining children for many decades and was endorsed by both the British Medical Association and the Association of Police Surgeons. Yet by July 1987, the paediatricians were at the centre of a national storm of outrage — denounced by politicians, press, television and public opinion. The parents of the 121 children taken into care were lionised for their courage or portrayed as the victims of a monstrous witch-hunt. Their voices — sometimes their faces — dominated newsstands and television bulletins. When the courts seemed to be returning all their children to them, the nation seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, while simultaneously demanding the scalps of the paediatricians and social workers. When I began researching the documentary film about Cleveland, what struck me instantly was the one-sided nature of almost all the Cleveland story as presented to the public — whether by press or politicians — in the print or broadcast media. Cleveland had entered the English language as shorthand for irresponsible and over-zealous child protection workers (be they doctors or social workers) who broke up happy families in their pursuit of what appeared to be an almost mythical creature — child sexual abuse. I had trouble with this one-dimensional coverage for two very simple reasons. The first was that I had interviewed Marietta Higgs for Independent Television News back in 1988. The second was that I had read the entire report (Butler-Sloss 1988) of the official judicial Inquiry into Cleveland. Neither the interview nor the report — for all its elliptical language — supported the public image of Cleveland. And so two colleagues and I set out to re-examine the facts of Cleveland rather than the rhetoric or the myth. (p19)