GUILTY WHEN PROVED INNOCENT

Alasdair Palmer reports on

the refusal of social workers to allow a blameless man to live with and care for his children

Dr Kellogg's list, with its comically solemn reliance on a series of utterly meaningless 'indi- cators', seems to belong to another world. But it does not. The most remarkable fact about Dr Kellogg's mastur- bation index is that it has, to all intents and purposes, reappeared. It now has all the force that the profession of social work can Invest in it, which includes being upheld and sanctioned by law. The language has been updated — `unchastity of speech' has become 'inappropriate sexualised lan- guage', and 'unnatural boldness' is now engaging in sexualised play and gestures'. But essentially the list is the same. There is only one difference. Dr Kellogg's indicators are now taken to show not childhood mas- turbation but child sexual abuse. The results of a diagnosis based on the list are scarcely any less terrible than when chil- dren were chained and mutilated as a con- sequence.

Brian Keys, a mild, middle-class, well- educated electrical engineer, was in many ways a model father. He certainly did everything a 'new man' should, shouldering full responsibility for the upbringing of his children. His wife has a recurring psychi- atric disorder, and did not take to their first child, Louise. So Mr Keys looked after her, and took on the role which usually falls to the mother. 'He did everything for Louise,' recalls his mother-in-law, 'far, far more than most men ever do.' Mr and Mrs Keys had a second child, Christy, and Brian was heavily involved in her care, too — though less so than with Louise because Mrs Keys seemed to take to Christy more.

Brian Keys thought he was doing very well. It was therefore something of a sur- prise for him to arrive home from work one day 18 months ago to discover that his chil- dren had been removed under an emergen- cy protection order and placed with foster parents. His wife had left him, and the police wanted to charge him with the sexu- al abuse of his children. He was immediate- ly summoned to the police station. The police told him that Louise, then aged seven, had accused him of sexual abuse. `And there's been a medical examination,' one policeman added. 'She has a form of VD which she could only have got from you. We're going to have to do a test on you for proof.'

Mr Keys thought he was going mad. He told himself, 'Keep calm, co-operate, and the crisis will pass. I have nothing to hide. I am innocent, so nothing can happen to me. This is Britain. I can trust the institutions.' It was the biggest mistake he could have made.

The police suggested they keep him in overnight. They took his denials as a refusal to recognise his guilt. They told him to confess. 'Look, it's not so bad . . If you confess, you won't go to prison. You'll be able to see your kids again. On the other hand, if you don't, in all probability you rule yourself out of fur- ther contact. You've got to recognise your guilt before it can be treated. Think about it overnight.'

Three months later, criminal proceedings were brought against Mr Keys for sexual abuse of his daughter Louise. The prosecu- tion offered no evidence. The medical reports conclusively showed that Louise was `virgo intacta', and that the 'venereal disease' the police claimed Mr Keys had given her was a vaginal infection common in girls of her age. The video-taped inter- view in which Louise was supposed to have alleged sexual abuse by her father was seen by two psychiatrists, both of whom denied it provided evidence of sexual abuse. Mr Keys felt that a very confusing and incon- sistent scenario was being created by the

interrogators. Mr Keys was told that the relationship between father and daughter was too close and dependent, and that counselling would help, but there was no suggestion of sexual abuse.

At this point, Brian Keys was entitled to think his nightmare was over. The criminal case against him had been dropped. There was no medical evidence whatever of sexu- al abuse. The interview in which his daugh- ter was supposed to have incriminated him had been shown to do no such thing. (It also broke guidelines laid down by Mrs Jus- tice Butler-Sloss in the wake of the Cleve- land affair.) But Mr Keys's nightmare was actually only just beginning.

The social workers were armed with Dr Kellogg's list. They were convinced Louise had been abused by her father. The list confirmed that belief at every turn. Louise's behaviour, they felt, was full of Dr Kellogg's 'unnatural boldness with adults'. She was liable to `unchastity of language'. Interestingly, this was not something any- one else apart from social workers noticed. Louise's school reports talk of a well-bal- anced, normal girl. Not one of her teachers thinks there is anything particularly unusu- al about her. The head teacher of her school has even written twice to the council to confirm that.

It has had no effect whatever. Since Mr Keys's children were taken from him, he has only seen them in one-hour bursts under her ever-watchful eye. After each visit, there had been criticism of the way Mr Keys treats his daughters, particularly Louise. On one visit last year, as soon as Louise saw her father she demanded to be picked up. He held her whilst she ran her fingers through his hair and kissed him repeatedly on the face. Mr Keys had not curtailed this behaviour. Obviously, that is as clear evidence of abuse as you could ask for. Obviously, the idea that this might be normal and expected behaviour from a daughter who had not seen her father for two weeks is ridiculous — particularly in a case where her father has also assumed the role of her mother for as long as she can remember.

One criticism of Mr Keys was that he did not accept that Louise's behaviour and his lack of reaction to it was in any way inap- propriate. In fact, His refusal to help define a new and more appropriate rela- tionship with his daughter was construed as being abusive in itself . The social worker recommended that Mr Keys's visits should be reduced to one every six weeks.

What is being done here is so breathtak- ingly outrageous it takes time to sink in. A father is to have his contact with his daugh- ter reduced to an hour every six weeks because he lets the child hug and kiss him. Some social workers place so much faith in Dr Kellogg's index that they think a hug and a kiss is 'sexualised behaviour' which can only be the result of abuse.

The obsession with sexual abuse cuts out everything else. No one seems to have paid any attention to the traumatic effects on a seven-year-old of being ripped from her home, subjected to a painful and frighten- ing medical examination, constantly told about sex in interviews with people whom she did not know, and, above all, being denied contact with her father.

Before anyone can do great evil, they must first believe they will do great good. So convinced are the social workers that Louise has terrible problems that she has now been placed in a special residential unit 100 miles away for children who really have been abused. She will be subjected to

1 expect we've been locked up because we're living in sin.'

`treatment' for something that has not hap- pened to her. The first stage of the 'treat- ment' is to ensure that there is no family contact at all for eight weeks. The letter from the manager of the residential care unit graciously grants that it might be `helpful for Louise to have her favourite soft toys . If Louise wishes, she may write to her family.'

For the council, residential care is the first stage on the way to permanent foster- ing. Louise's younger sister Christy has been devastated by being separated, first from her father, then from her sister. She has developed a stammer. She has lost con- fidence and become shy. Because her father has not seen her in private for the past 18 months, the social workers can't blame him for that — though if they could they would, because according to the Kel- logg list shyness and stammering are classic indicators of sexual abuse.

Brian Keys is going to court to try to ensure that his children cannot be taken away from him forever. It is by no means certain that he will succeed. His wife, still suffering from mental problems, is going to divorce him. But if he should consider mar- rying again, the shadow of the accusation of abuse will fall on him. Social workers are entitled to tell his new wife or girlfriend that he is a suspected child abuser; and, if she has children, they will offer her a sim- ple choice: to kick him out, or to have her children placed under an emergency pro- tection order.

That may sound too totalitarian to be true. But there is a court case upholding a social worker's right to do exactly that. In 1990, a Divisional Court heard the case of a man suspected by Devon County Council social workers of sexually abusing his ex- partner's four-year-old child. The man had not been charged because there was no evi- dence. But lack of evidence was not enough to persuade social workers of the man's innocence. They were convinced he was guilty. The child had been placed on the child protection register. So a year later, when the suspect started living with another woman and they had a child together, Devon social workers appeared. They told her that the father of her child was a child abuser: if she wanted to keep her child, she had better stop seeing the child's father. She ended all relations with him. The same pattern was repeated when the man moved in with friends who had young children. It happened again when he went to live in the house of a woman who had a grandchild of seven living with her. In desperation, he applied to the court to grant a judicial review to force Devon Council to give him an assurance that it would not spread unsubstantiated rumours about him.

The court dismissed the application for review on technical grounds. But it also added that the social workers 'were under a duty to inform the women concerned that the man was an abuser if they honestly believed on reasonable grounds that he was an abuser'. The court did not specify what reasonable grounds were. It did not contradict the validity of the Kellogg list.

The Divisional Court has handed immense powers to social workers. They now have judicial sanction to destroy a man's life on the basis of a suspicion — a suspicion that cannot be sustained in court, and which is not even well-founded enough to start a prosecution. They can ensure that he can never again be part of a family, that he can never again care for his children. They can condemn him to a life of rootless wandering in which, if he should father children, he will be forced to abandon them. Yet what is the reliability of the sus- picions that can unleash such a terrible punishment? Study after study has demon- strated that the updated Kellogg list has a rate of error which, if it was applied to any method of diagnosing disease, would instantly lead to the diagnosis being dis- missed as fraudulent. In an experiment, three trained child psychiatrists were asked to interview 12 children and decide whether or not they had been abused. The researchers conducting the experiment knew that three of the children had in fact been sexually abused. The rest were known to be completely normal. The results were astonishing. Two of the psychiatrists were wrong in a third of the cases they assessed. The third psychiatrist was wrong in nearly half of them. The one psychiatrist who cor- rectly identified two out of three abused children also categorised three of the abso-

lutely normal children as victims of sexual abuse. You can imagine the fate that would have befallen both them and their fathers if the experimenters had not known the truth.

Social workers are not trained child psy- chologists. Their rate of accuracy is unlike- ly to be higher than their medically trained brethren. But our courts have ruled that their suspicions — liable to be unfounded in at least one in three cases — can con- demn a man to the status of a social leper. The punishment is worse than a prison sen- tence because it has no end. The stain is indelible. Failure to admit guilt is simply taken as a sure proof of it. As one victim of the process told me, 'Once you are suspect- ed, you're guilty until you prove yourself innocent. And proving your innocence is impossible. What can you do or say to con- vince these people you've never molested your daughter? Nothing.'

That straightforward inversion of the fundamental principle of justice is justified on the grounds of protecting children. In the deceptively anodyne language of the court: 'The interests of adults may have to take second place to the needs of children.' That argument might have some weight if social worker intervention were a reliable way of identifying what the needs of chil- dren are. But it isn't. And wrongful accusa- tion harms not just the father, but the child. Separating a child from her family and friends, and subjecting her to endless interviews and constant probing, is not obviously the best way of helping her to pursue happiness.

Louise and Christy's maternal grand- mother now sees two confused and grieving girls where once there were two happy and carefree children. She is willing, and able, to look after them. But the council prefers to break up the family and place Louise, at enormous expense, in residential care. The authorities displayed their ignorance of the case when recommending Louise be taken into care by claiming that if there was a fully involved grandmother things might be different. There is a fully involved grand- mother, but she is deemed unsuitable, part- ly because she is thought to be too old, partly because she does not believe in her son-in-law's guilt. (`To disbelieve in witchcraft is the greatest of heresies,' pro- claimed the title page of Malleus Malefi- carum, 'Hammer of Witches', the handbook of the 16th-century witch-craze.) Yet her grandchildren want to be with her. Their mother's psychological condition has deteriorated since her daughter was taken away. She has kept everything in the house exactly as Louise left it — including a half- complete jigsaw on the table.

The destruction of Brian Keys's family is only one example of the consequences of the powers that courts and the law have handed to social workers. There are dozens of others. Is it not time that someone in government thought about what is being done to our children — and to their fathers — by people armed with not much more than Dr Kellogg's absurd list of indicators for masturbation?