New
hope for parents who had children taken away
By Sandra Laville and David Derbyshire
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/01/21/npare21.xml
Telegraph - 21st January 2004
Thousands of
parents whose children were taken away by the family courts on the basis
of contentious evidence from expert witnesses will have their cases
reviewed, the Government announced yesterday.
Harriet Harman,
the solicitor general, said the review into potential miscarriages of
justice following this week's Court of Appeal ruling in the Angela Cannings
case would extend to the civil courts. "We will make sure that
we recognise that not only injustices done in the criminal justice system
but any potential injustices in care proceedings are identified and
acted on.
The Angela Cannings case triggered the review
She added: "We should recognise that for women who have lost a
child and then have had another child taken away... prison is nothing
of a penalty compared to the terrible suffering that they have endured.
"While
we are getting on straight away to the issue of those in prison and
criminal processes, we bear in mind the absolute, utmost gravity and
seriousness of those whose injustice is not in the hands of the criminal
justice system but as a result of the family justice system."
The review will
cover cases going back many years and involving a range of problematical
diagnoses including Munchausen's syndrome by proxy and shaken baby syndrome.
Because the family courts operate in secret the number of cases to be
reviewed is not known but is expected to run into thousands and stretch
back many years.
An official
working in child protection warned of potential chaos. "They are
talking about thousands of children here," he said. "These
are extremely complicated cases.
"When it
comes to taking a child off parents the police are involved, social
services are involved and other agencies are involved. They will have
to set up a whole new department to review this number of cases and
they don't seem to have given any thought to that."
Unlike the criminal
courts, the family division uses the lower standard of proof - the balance
of probabilities - to decide whether parents are a potential risk to
their children. The different standards have led to cases in which a
mother has been acquitted in the criminal courts of harming a child
but loses rights of access to her children in the family courts on the
basis of evidence from an expert instructed by the court.
One of the most
common allegations is shaken baby syndrome - a diagnosis made 200 times
each year. According to medical textbooks, the characteristic signs
are bleeding in the eyes and beneath the membrane of the brain.
Although convictions
and family court rulings are made on the basis of these symptoms alone,
there is evidence that natural whiplash injuries can also cause the
same symptoms.
Rioch Edwards-Brown,
who set up a campaign group after successfully challenging a false allegation
of shaken baby syndrome, said: "The criminal cases are the tip
of the iceberg. In family courts parents are losing their kids based
on the balance of probabilities based entirely on the sometimes disputed
opinions of expert witnesses."
She said the
number of reports of suspected child abuse made by services had gone
from 160,000 in 1997 to more than 500,000 in 2000. "But because
cases are held in camera in family courts, we don't know the true picture."
There is dispute
over Munchausen's syndrome by proxy, the condition first described by
Prof Sir Roy Meadow in which mothers are said to harm children in order
to gain attention.
It has been
used to cover more than 100 unexplained patterns of illness and is usually
diagnosed if parents are "overly" concerned about their children's
health and make frequent visits to doctors.
The Daily Telegraph
columnist Dr James Le Fanu said: "The review will bring from under
the cloud of secrecy that has surrounded family court proceedings this
enormous number of parents who have been the victims of false medical
theories and doctors who have sought to blame parents for accidents
that have befallen their children."
After the Cannings
judgment, the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, announced a review of
258 criminal court cases where parents were convicted of killing their
babies on expert evidence alone.
The court ruled
that no parent should be prosecuted if the case relied solely on expert
evidence that was disputed by other professionals who suggested a possible
natural, if unexplained, cause of death.
Until Miss Harman's
Commons statement it was unclear where that left the thousands of families
whose children had been removed from them on the basis of expert evidence
in the family courts.
Lord Goldsmith
will meet Graham Zellick, the chairman of the Criminal Cases Review
Commission, on Friday to discuss the conduct of the review.
