"Forced Caesarian": the Mother's story, and the Judge's

This is about the superficially shocking story, brought to the world by Christopher Booker of the Sunday Telegraph, of the Italian woman subjected to a forced Caesarian section by order of a secret court, who then had the child put up for adoption despite making a good recovery. Working closely with campaigning family lawyer Brandan Fleming and maverick MP John Hemming, Booker told such a horrifying story that Shami Chakrabarti was moved to comment that it sounded like "dystopian science fiction unworthy of a democracy like ours."

The following, from a follow-up Mail article, is vintage Booker:

Throughout all my years reporting on scores of chilling examples of what social workers are allowed to do behind the closed doors of our secret family courts, the case reported yesterday... is not just the most disturbing of all. It also illustrates how far our ‘child protection’ system has now gone horrendously off the rails. The facts are so shocking they beggar belief.

But are they?

As a result of the storm of publicity, the courts have now released the text of the initial pre-adoption placement ruling by Judge Newton at Chelmsford County Court, which originally had gone unreported as it raised no major legal issues. As yet, the other significant ruling, by the Court of Protection on the "forced" Caesarian that gave the story its gothic appeal to headline writers, has not been released though there are plans to do so.

The adoption judgement clears up some points, especially concerning the seriousness of the woman's underlying medical condition, while dispelling the wilder suspicions occasioned by Booker's purple prose. It becomes clear, for example, that the court looked in some detail into the woman's family circumstances before concluding (though not with much supporting evidence) that no-one in the extended family was able to care for the child. It also sheds some light on what had been the mystery of the child's father. He turns out to be a Senegalese national who apparently offered to take care of the child. The judge decided that this was a "non-starter", however, partly it seems because of his unclear immigration status.

The ruling contains some rather puzzling elements. There is severe criticism of doctors who approved her transfer to Italy, on the grounds that the judge thought she didn't appear mentally competent, yet an acknowledgement that soon after her return to her home country the woman's condition improved markedly. The judge appears to accept that the mother has made a good recovery, that her condition is manageable so long as she continues to take her medication, and that she has strong family support. Nevertheless, he decides in favour of adoption, partly it seems because the year needed for assessing the mother's capability would be too long.

This aspect may well provide the focus for an appeal, which is now to be heard personally by the President of the Family Division, Sir James Munby - a judge who has a strong track record, both of encouraging greater openness in the family courts and of requiring higher evidential standards from social work teams requesting adoption and placement orders. In any case, it's difficult to read the judge's summary of the evidence before him as leading inevitably to the conclusion that the mother, with family support, was incapable of providing a reasonably stable environment for the child, at least in the forseeable future. On the face of it Judge Newton's assessment of the evidence would seem to fall short of that now required, following the important recent decision in Re B-S, when a court wishes to deprive a parent of his or her familial rights under Article 8 of the European Convention. But we shall see.

What has been lacking so far is the mother's own voice. It is of course against British law to name her, or to identify her in any way. Italian law is less strict, and her story has been told already in the Italian press, though without naming the child. The main account, based on an interview with the woman's lawyers, provides important context and some hitherto unavailable details, though with the caveat that it is is course told exclusively from her point of view. I therefore offer this redacted translation.

The whole truth about the London baby (and her "mad" mother)

This is the story (with original documents) of A, the woman forced to undergo a Caesarian section in London and whose baby was taken by the state

She has not seen her baby daughter, who we will call Rose, for five months. The English social services, she says, have forbidden her from seeing the baby since then. They told her that she had already been adopted. The truth, however, is that in England, in the county of Essex, the first meetings have only just begun between the baby, now sixteen months old, and her prospective adoptive parents.

Her name A and is 35 years old. The UK authorites considered her "mad" and was she subjected to a forced Caesarian section, while her baby was given to the custody of social services on the order of Chelmsford county court. Despite this, she has consistently expressed a desire to regain custody of her daughter and to return with her to Italy. A is not crazy; she suffers from bipolar disorder, an extremely variable depressive condition that manifests itself in an alternation of depressive and euphoric phases but which can be kept under control by medication.

The woman... today lives in Chiusi where, having failed to become a Ryanair hostess (at the relevant time she was in England for a training course) she earns a living as a carer for an elderly couple. She returned to Italy towards the end of 2012, having become convinced the British authorities were deaf to her concerns and that she would have a better chance of winning her legal battle from Italy. Also living with her in Chiusi are her two older daughers, aged 11 and 4, who have different American fathers. Italian social services have placed them in the custody of her mother because of A's bipolar disorder.

A is the victim of what Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, after the case exploded in the British press, called an "abuse of human rights". "It's like something from the Hitler regime", says her Italian lawyer, Stephano Oliva, upping the rhetorical ante. Oliva, along with his colleauge Luana Izzo has represented A since the beginning of 2013. He's equally scathing of the response of the Italian authorities: the foreign ministry, the London embassy and the consulate, all of whom were alerted by the lawyers back in May. "Only the Ministry of Justice has responded. They told us that they had no jurisdiction and told us to pursue legal action in the UK."

A has a complex personal history. "We were initially brought into the case in early 2013 after the aunt of her second daughter, who lives in Los Angeles and had already offered to take over custody of the two elder girls, alerted us to the existence of a third child," says Oliva. "With the consent of the American aunt, of the mother and of the grandmother we asked the Court of First Instance in Florence to seek the custody of the three children, including the baby that was in the care of British social services." A, who with her two ex-husbands had lived both in Italy and the United States, where she managed her partner's restaurant, was enthusiastic about the scheme. Her idea in fact was to go and live in Los Angeles, close to her three children and her American in-laws. The Florence court however decided that it had no jurisdiction over the third child, remitting the question to the British court. The British court rejected the request for custody because the baby had no blood tie with her American aunt.

In this tragic case, which reads like a movie script, Rose is in fact the daughter of a third father, a Senegalese immigrant resident in Italy. She was born in August 2012: A found herself in England for a few months to take a training course for potential Ryanair cabin crew at Stanstead Airport. At her hostel in July, when she was eight months pregnant, she had a panic attack probably caused by failing to take her medication. She was upset because she couldn't find the passports of her two children, who were in Italy with their grandmother. She called the police. The police, alarmed by her agitated state, telephoned her mother who informed them of her bipolar condition. A was sedated and woke up in a psychiatric hospital, effectively in a state of detention.

She remembers saying, "But I'm fine, there's no need to take me to hospital," Oliva recalls. But the situation becase more tragic in August when A was taken to an operating theatre for a C-section ordered by the court. Notwithstanding this, she continued to protest, "Where are you taking me? I want to give birth in Italy." "Apart from anything else A speaks very good English, so it can't have been a problem of communication," observes the lawyer. Anyway. The child was born and in February 2013 was put up for adoption, despite the opposition of the mother (she appealed in June, without a final decision so far) and despite medical advice that mother and child should not be separated. There was also a bureaucratic mix-up: in court papers the child was given the surname of the mother's first husband, and not that of her actual father, a Senegalese national who has also offered to take care of Rose, a request rejected by the court. "It is an inconceivable decision," says Oliva, "beccause all the European directives guarantee the integrity of the nuclear family. The only exception is where there is abandonment, which is not the case here."

Following the birth A was moved to another hospital, still detained under the Mental Health Act, and was allowed to see her daughter once a week. In October 2012 she returned to Italy, partly to gain better legal support (the court-appointed lawyer who had represented her had failed even to give her notice of hearings). From then on until five months ago she was allowed to see her daughter on a daily basis.

Two sets of legal proceedings began in Italy this March. The first to give a negative outcome was the Florence tribunal, which declared it had no jurisdiction since baby Rose was not born in Italy. It made submissions to the high court in Rome. The Rome court offered a small chink of light. While declaring that it had no jurisdiction, because A should have appealed to it immediately after the birth, it declared on October 31st that "it could not recognise the decision of the English court because it was contrary to both Italian and international public law."

The foreign minister, contacted by the lawyers, has made no comment; likewise the Italian embassy and consulate in London, which according to Oliva "has never responded to our request in May." The consul, Massimiliano Mazzanti, has instead declared that he was told of the incident by social services in England.

To resolve this nightmare A now has two options: the pending appeal in England and the Florence tribunal which, her lawyers hope, will add the name of little Rose to the instrument of custody drawn up for her two sisters by her American aunt.

Observations

While the general thrust of the Italian account agrees with the facts put forward by Booker, there are a number of points of divergence. There is also the claim, not found in Booker, that the social services lied to the mother about the progress of the adoption: a serious allegation. Booker claimed that the mother was in the UK for only two weeks; the Italian version states that it was in fact for some months. Booker claimed that social services allowed no contact between mother and child, whereas this account makes clear that there was regular contact until five months ago. Indeed, it states that the decision to separate the two and to take "Rose" (given the initial P in the released judgement) into foster care was made against medical advice.

Judge Newton alludes to this, and indeed makes his opinion of the doctors' advice quite plain in paragraph 8:

The District Judge at the early stage gave permission for the Local Authority to withhold contact and I raise that because the doctors appeared to be saying at an early stage in the proceedings that the plan ought to be for P to be placed with the mother potentially in hospital. I was and remain deeply concerned about that. It might have been in the mother's interests but I think the mother, today, would understand that it would not have been in P's interests for that to have occurred. It has been of course of some concern to me because having made the order I did on 12th October concerning the instruction of Dr Winton, a consultant psychiatrist.

A further disagreement between Judge Newton and the doctors treating A is set out in Paragraph 9:

By that stage it was being asserted by the treating doctors that the mother had regained capacity under the relevant test. I have to say that when the mother appeared before me at that time she did not appear to be at all well, and I am surprised that it was being claimed that she had legal capacity . I am critical of the doctors because it appears to me that she was despatched (in deed escorted ) from the UK with undue haste simply because she wished to go back to Italy. I was led to believe that the mother was in a good state and a good frame of mind but frankly nothing could have been further from the truth, because if one looks at the reports of the admitting Doctors in italy , it is clear that the mother when she arrived in Italy was in a very poor state. She should in my view have been assisted here to participate in these proceedings. I know she wanted to go to Italy but by going to Italy any realistic prospect of P returning to her care was diminished substantially. It is for that reason it seems to me that it was a most ill-advised thing to have occurred. I was critical at the time and I remain critical to this day.

The judge here seems oddly confused. The "capacity" in question was not the capacity to care for her child, but the capacity to make decisions regarding her treatment. She was not being discharged willy-nilly into the community, but rather being "escorted" (presumably by medical staff) to Italy where she was admitted, presumably (though the judgement does not specify) to hospital. The treatment she received in Italy, moreover, between October 2012 and February of this year when the adoption hearing took place, had a salutary effect, as the judge acknowledged in paragraph 10:

The good news is that as a result of the mother eventually complying with her medication which she did for some considerable time whilst out there, it is very evident that she is actually extremely well and has given evidence before me. As I said to her during the course of her evidence it seemed to me that she was as clear and articulate, indeed more so than most people I hear from the witness box where English is their first language, and English is not the mother's first language.

This contrasts with the three to four months she spent as a detained patient at psychiatric hospitals in England, at the end of which, by the judge's impression of her and the assessment of the Italian doctors, she was in a "very poor state". Perhaps her return to Italy merely coincided with the improvement in her health rather than directly produced it; but in any event it doesn't appear to have done her any harm.

One thing that the released judgement doesn't address is the plan for the family to move to the United States, with the children placed under the guardianship of A's former sister-in-law, though this would appear to have been considered, only to be rejected, at a subsequent hearing. Booker's account of this was garbled: he implied that the plan was to send the child to live with the American aunt, whereas it now seems that the suggestion is that the whole family should move there. Whether this scheme has met with the approval of the US immigration authorities is uncertain. While the two elder children of American fathers both qualify for US citizenship and A probably has residency at least, Rose's position is likely to be more complicated. But whether that played any part in the court's rejection of the scheme isn't clear.

The question of the child's father is raised, but scarcely considered, both in the released judgement and in the Italian press. The Italian report offers the bizarre detail that his name was left off the court papers because of a bureaucratic error. Although this doesn't seem to have excluded him from proceedings, it's strangely fitting, given that so little thought seems to have been given either to his rights or to his responsibilities as a parent. His offer to assume responsibility for the baby was dismissed as "not, if I may say so, a starter" by a judge who also sniffily notes that "he has failed to take any part except for the fact that he saw both the social worker and the Guardian when they visited Italy, and has written to the court today indicating that he opposes the application of the Local Authority". Newton concludes, again baldly, that there is "no-one within the wider family who today can look after P even though the father attempts to put himself forward." Beyond his unclear immigration status, no evidence is offered in the judgement as to why the judge considers the proposal a non-starter, or what is lacking in his "attempts to put himself forward" as a carer for the child. He is an inconvenient detail to be swatted aside. 

The criticism of Booker's one-sided and significantly distorted presentation of the facts is largely justified, but that doesn't mean that the case of Signora A doesn't raise significant issues. Judge Newton's ruling is a model neither of clarity nor of judicial reasoning; he contradicts himself at various points and his decision seems unsupported by any compelling weight of evidence. These will doubtless be issues for the appeal. Perhaps good reasons can be found as to why it was impossible to transfer her to Italy, despite her express desire, prior to the birth. But it seems on the face of it difficult to see any, given that she seems to have been kept heavily sedated. That would have solved most of the problems that subsequently arose.

One thing the case does clearly demonstrate is the dangers posed by secrecy in the family courts and in the Court of Protection, not just to the administration of justice but to the reputation of the legal system. Where little is known about what actually takes place behind closed courtroom doors horror stories are apt to spread and to be believed.

Nor are the problems imaginary. President Munby has repeatedly acknowledged the inadequacies of the family courts system and in particular the attitude of some social workers. In one case he noted "the slapdash, lackadaisical and on occasions almost contumelious attitude which still far too frequently characterises the response [by social workers] to orders made by family courts" and complained of "a deeply rooted culture in the family courts which, however long established, will no longer be tolerated". These are strong words indeed: so strong that, had they been voiced by Booker or Hemming a large section of respectable legal opinion would immediately have cried foul.  Indeed, an official of the British Association of Social Workers has accused Munby of, among other things, giving encouragement to the Daily Mail. "Lord Justice Munby’s pledge to ensure greater transparency in the family courts has been heralded as a triumph by those opposed to the current restrictions in reporting on care proceedings, but I was left horrified," she complains. One might almost think she had something to hide. Read the rest of this article

Invisible Girl

The case of the Girl Who Ran Off With Her Teacher (and Who Cannot Be Named For Legal Reasons) isn't over yet, despite the fact that Jeremy Forrest has been put away for a wince-inducing five and a half years.  It's now reported that the police have arrested a woman (unnamed, but assumed to be related to the teacher) on suspicion of attempting to pervert the course of justice by acting as an intermediary between teacher and pupil while he was on remand.

The suggestion is that the girl's oral evidence was influenced in some way. During sentencing, the judge pronounced that she "had clearly received assistance" - the evidence for which seems to be that her account under (unusually friendly) cross-examination was more helpful to the accused than the pre-recorded statements in the police interview that were played to the court.

But if the girl did change her story (in the direction of falsity) because she wanted to support her lover/abuser's version of events, then it's not only the woman who acted as go-between who's guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.  So is the girl.  She'd be guilty of perjury too.  It's strongly rumoured, too, that the girl was herself threatened with arrest during the course of the trial because she was reluctant to testify.  Whether or not her strong feelings for Forrest will survive his lengthy imprisonment, which will last at least until she's well over 18, no-one has tried to deny that today she still believes herself to be in love with him and that the trial was entirely against her personal wishes.  She was no more coerced to say nice things about Forrest in court than she was coerced to go to France with him in the first place.

Does this matter?  It's telling that there's no real public consensus surrounding this crime and its aftermath.  There's an official view, of course, the police/Guardian/NSPCC view according to which Forrest is an abuser (even a "paedophile") and the girl is his victim; and there's an alternative view, to be found in comment sections on social media sites, which sees it as essentially a romantic tale of doomed love in which both the girl and her "abductor" appear as victims, the villains being the law, the child protection establishment and even the girl's own family. 

I think both views are probably wrong, or at least one-dimensional, but before I try to offer a better one let me return to the matter of the latest arrest, which seems to me key.  The official version, according to which the girl is the victim, implies that the main aim of the prosecution is to protect her by jailing the man who abused and abducted her.  Thus even if she didn't desire the legal process, it was for her own good.  On this view, it must also be for her own good that mortifying details of, and claims about, the sex-life of a 15 year old girl are relayed in open court and reported breathlessly in the media ("8 times a night"), even if her name remains taboo. But if the new police investigation were to lead to the girl herself being charged with perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, could this be said to be for her protection too?  Clearly not.  It would, though, show plainly that the case isn't, and never was, about her. 

She's the invisible girl not just because she can't be named for legal reasons, but because her own wishes and personal narrative were either rejected or ignored by the justice system.  The inevitable result was her objectification.  Had she co-operated with the police, denounced her abuser and recognised (with a maturity perhaps beyond her years) the objectively abusive nature of the relationship, then she might have been the star witness.  As it was, the evidence she gave was discounted (the judge referred to the teacher's "spurious defence" and  called the girl's testimony "very different in content from her original account and designed to support it").  It's usual these days for the victim of a crime (or the family of a murder victim) to have a Victim Impact Statement read out in court before sentence is passed.  There was no statement from the girl (how could there have been?) but there was one from her mother who was thereby cast into the role of "true" victim.  Yet to configure the mother, from whom the girl "was taken" by Forrest, as the victim in the case is to redefine the girl, not as her own person, but as her mother's property.

The mother's statement was, indeed, all about her, and highly melodramatic: describing how she was grieving because "the daughter I knew is dead" (the two aren't on speaking terms); how she felt "like the worst mother in the world" and that she had "failed as a parent"; how she (not the girl) had been robbed of "part of her childhood" because she won't get the chance to "dress her up in a party dress for the school prom".  The uncharitably inclined might notice a certain consonance between the personality thus revealed and the complaints the girl herself made in court that her mother had been preoccupied with a new pregnancy and hadn't been paying her much attention.  And behind that one can detect signs of a family dynamic that was in trouble well before Jeremy Forrest turned up on the scene.

(Once we've agreed that Forrest's behaviour in having a sexual relationship with an underage pupil is completely unacceptable - I think we can agree on that at least - the matter of motive is still open.  Did he - does he - have a thing about emotionally vulnerable teenage girls which led him to target her for his own selfish reasons, or was his folly (as his sister has maintained) provoked by his own emotional immaturity and depression, which may have led him to feel a genuine emotional connection with a girl who was going through a rough time at home?  I don't know; I suppose only time will tell.)

In passing sentence, Judge Lawson was content to treat the girl with a mixture of condescension and annoyance, rejecting her account while portraying her as the passive object of Forrest's improper lusts, ignoring the possibility of her own agency in the events that unfolded.  (This is a different question from that of consent, which legally she couldn't give.)  While he expressed some sympathy for her predicament - having to give evidence in a high-profile court case, for example - he showed no comprehension of, or interest in, the obvious fact that seeing her (in her eyes) lover jailed for a long period for a relationship in which she considered herself a full and consensual participant was likely to be the cause for her of considerable misery, not to mention guilt.  (That she was seen sobbing and mothing the words "I'm so sorry" when the jury returned its verdict is evidence enough of that.)  But then, to reiterate, it's not about her.

Hadley Freeman had a piece in the Guardian that I almost agree with, and which comes close to getting the point.  It's not a romantic love-story, she argues, but nor is Forrest another Jimmy Savile.  Rather he's "an emotionally immature, selfish and foolish man who couldn't cope with the adult responsibilities of marriage and sought out a young girl with approximately the same level of maturity as him."

Language is important. Just as describing Forrest's tale as a love story is unhelpful, so is dismissing it as yet another Savile-esque shame. Both takes are extreme and possibly only harden his and the schoolgirl's resolve to be with one another in the face of incomprehension. This was an abuse of power, and I'd be willing to bet that similar versions happen more often than we know, in situations where men – some of whom will be weak and immature – work with emotionally vulnerable woman. Dismissing Forrest as an aberration and a monster is easy; acknowledging just how common he might be is far scarier.

Close, but it doesn't quite reconcile the conflict between the official narrative of abuse and (her) victimhood and the popular narratives of star cross'd lovers - which, as Freeman notes, some of the media coverage might almost be designed to reinforce.  Both are in their way misleading attempts to shoehorn real-world events into a pre-packaged narrative, whether a legal/child protection account of predatory sexual behaviour or a Romeo and Juliet-style romance.  (The girl herself made the smartest comment on this in a Tweet reported in the Mail: "Of course it's not Romeo and Juliet.  That's a fucking tragedy.  They both died".)  But forcing facts to fit a stereotype isn't just misleading; it's also inevitable.  It's how the law makes sense of the messiness of the world, and it's how people make sense of the messiness of their lives.  Stereotypes are the lenses through which we view the world.  And they construct society.

So to ask, "Is Jeremy Forrest a foolish lover or a dangerous abuser?" may be the wrong question, because he's both.  Just as the girl is both the victim of a predatory older man and the victim of an oppressive and soulless legal process.  Objectively, the official narrative is true: society needs to be protected from teachers who overstep the proper boundaries of a professional relationship with their charges.  Objectively, the girl is a victim of abuse.  Subjectively, it is a story of mutual attraction and support.  Subjectively, the villains are the police, the judge and the girl's mother. 

Subjectively, the sentence was far too harsh because Forrest lacked the malicious intention which would justify a long term of imprisonment; and because from the girl's point of view this "abusive" relationship was the most thrilling and emotionally enriching thing that ever happened to her.  Subjectively, one might predict (and I very much hope I'm wrong about this) the severity of the sentence will have a more deleterious long-term effect on her than on him, especially if feelings of guilt and thwarted love lead her to waste years of her young life loyally waiting for him and for the resumption of a relationship whose long-term prognosis is not good (here's what happened in an uncannily similar case ten years ago).   Objectively, it was about right.  He knew what he was doing was wrong, he knew that it was illegal, and a strong deterrent message must be sent out to others who might be tempted to overstep the boundaries.

The law is objective.  The law, even in the era of victim impact statements and much rhetoric about putting victims first, must pursue the wider interests of society rather than those of either the victims or the perpetrators of crime.  Protecting society ranks higher than doing justice, even, which is why people accidentally caught up in riots can be sent down for years for walking off with a bottle of fizz.  Jeremy Forrest threatens the social order and the prevailing official consensus, based as it is on an expert (and objective) view of child protection.  The girl in her passionate attachment to a teenage crush is no less of a threat, which is why she must be the Invisible Girl. Read the rest of this article

Satanic Savile

Today's Sunday Express offered a free paedometer to every reader. It's a remarkable device: just wave it in the general direction of some passing priest, scoutmaster or retired Seventies DJ, and if he's a pervert it'll start beeping loudly enough to warn off any children within earshot. No family should be without one.

Oh no, sorry, it's a pedometer, which is some sort of fitness device, apparently. My mistake. I must have been distracted by the main headline: "Savile was part of Satanic ring".  Jimmy Savile, we're told, "beat and raped" a 12 year old girl during a Black Mass-style ceremony held in a "candle-lit basement" at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in 1975. That's right: Stoke Mandeville Hospital had (has?) a Satanic temple in the basement, and no-one knows. It's like something out of Buffy. Wearing a "hooded robe and mask", we learn, Savile "chanted Hail Satan in Latin as other paedophile devil worshippers joined in and assaulted the girl." The tale "shines a sinister new light on the former DJ’s 54-year reign of terror," according to the Express. It certainly shines a sinister light onto something.

If you remember anything about the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of the late 80s and early 90s, during which children in Rochdale, Orkney and other places were taken from their families amid hair-raising accounts of diabolical rituals, you may recognise the name of the Express's principal - indeed only - source. Valerie Sinason, who describes herself as "a poet, writer, child psychotherapist and adult psychoanalyst", was, indeed still is, the leading proponent of the view that SRA is widespread in Britain. The 1994 book Treating Survivors of Satanist Abuse, which she edited, marked the apogee of the UK's Satanic panic. It was not universally well-received, however. In a largely hostile review Ralph Underwager, Institute for Psychological Therapies, Minnesota, wrote that it was

Useful for anyone who needs a startling, clear demonstration of the amazing ability of 20th century human beings to persuade themselves to believe firmly in utter claptrap and nonsense. Every contributor... is solidly committed to affirming, supporting, describing and explaining the reality of satanic ritualistic abuse and the actual existence of large numbers of people who engage in the most bizarre, weird, impossible and incredible behaviors. The only problem is they are never really found.

Sinason's claims were seriously undermined in a Department of Health report written by Professor Jean Lafontaine, also released in 1994. Lafontaine argued to the satisfaction of most observers that SRA was not so much a crime as a construct of the therapeutic process, as well as an example of modern urban folklore. Thereafter the claims of widespread organised Satanism largely vanished from the front pages and into the more feverish parts of the Internet - the David Icke Forum, for example, where it has long been a favourite topic of conversation. (Indeed, Icke himself exposed Jimmy Savile as a Satan-worshipping paedophile months before the information filtered into the wider public domain.) For her part Sinason has continued to promote her beliefs and has some prominent backers, including the journalist Beatrix Campbell and the Cross-bench peer Lord Alton, who in 2002 a hosted meeting in Parliament at which campaigners including Sinason presented their evidence. She has also been a regular guest on Woman's Hour.

A good impression of Valerie Sinason's approach can be gained from this exchange in the Observer from December 2011:

Sinason insists she doesn't use recovered-memory techniques. "I'm an analytic therapist," she says. "The idea of that is someone showing, through their behaviour, that all sorts of things might have happened to them." Signs that a patient has suffered satanically include flinching at green or purple objects, the colours of the high priest and priestess's robes. "And if someone shudders when they enter a room, you know it's not ordinary incest."

Another warning, she says, is the patient saying: "I don't know." "What they really mean is: 'I can't bear to say.'" A patient who "overpraises" their family is also suspicious. "The more insecure you are, the more you praise. 'Oh my family was wonderful! I can't remember any of it!'"

But what do these Satanic rituals actually involve? Not just sexual abuse, it turns out:

Sinason talks of a popular ritual in which a child is stitched inside the belly of a dying animal before being 'reborn to Satan'. During other celebrations, "people eat faeces, menstrual blood, semen, urine. There's cannibalism." Some groups have doctors performing abortions. "They give the foetus to the mother and she's made to kill the baby."
"And the cannibalism – that's foetuses?" I clarify.
"Foetuses and bits of bodies."
"Raw or cooked?"
"The foetuses are raw."

It's significant, I think, that many accounts of Satanic Abuse uncovered by Sinason and similarly-inclined therapists, including today's story about Jimmy Savile, relate to events that allegedly took place during the 1970s, a time when Devil-worshipping orgies and ritual murder in suburban locations were a common theme of popular horror films. The memories are real enough, in many cases, but they are memories of things seen on TV rather than of experiences actually undergone.

As for the Savile story, Sinason claims to have been told it by one of her patients in 1992. A second alleged victim approached her a year later and described an Eyes Wide Shut-style orgy at a house in a wealthy part of London which she had attended as a 21 year old "supposedly consenting" prostitute.

Along with other young women, the victim was shepherded to wait in another room before being brought back to find Savile in a master of ceremonies kind of role with a group wearing robes and masks. She too heard Latin chanting and instantly recognised satanist regalia.

From films, presumably. Although the two stories are made to seem similar, they actually differ significantly, the first being a "classic" case of SRA and the second more along the lines of a kinky party. Interestingly, the other papers haven't picked up on the Express report. Perhaps they sense that it's a Savile story too far. It's very much Express territory, of a piece with the title's long-running promotion of conspiracy theories involving Diana and Madeleine McCann.

One place the Express splash has been greeted warmly is on the David Icke Forum. "What we had all hoped for," said one regular on the site's gargantuan (2000 pages and counting) Savile thread. For the lizard-spotters, the news that Savile's links with organised Satanism has finally broken into the mainstream media is a welcome development after the disappointment of Friday's official Police/NSPCC report. One forum member described the latter as

Utterly insufficient and denying 'clear' evidence of a paedophile ring. It is what they have had to do because Savile was a procurer for the rich and powerful but ALSO I am increasingly certain to say working for British Intelligence. He had to be, he was afforded, and still is after death, such enveloping protection spanning all those years and hospital, prison, royal, foreign access and close interaction with the highest of the 'high'. He possessed links to links to links and used those links to forge further ones with the help and advocacy of the British establishment and the power of blackmail.

That's the Savile conspiracy theory in a nutshell. And to be fair, if Savile was indeed as prolific and monstrous an offender as the consensus now holds him to be, some such explanation of how he managed to evade detection is not wholly implausible.

Most of the press, as yet unwilling to pursue the Satanism angle (or other Ickean themes, for example Savile's strangely close relationship with members of the royal family and senior politicians) have contented themselves with hyperbole. They're helped in this by the wholly uncritical nature of the NSPCC-backed report (pdf), which is based on the dangerous principle that any claim made by a self-identified victim must perforce be true, and by the headline-grabbing comments made by its authors. While most newspapers virtually ignored the much more substantial and balanced report prepared for the CPS by Alison Levitt QC, all gave prominence to the plainly absurd statement by Commander Peter Spindler that Savile had "spent every minute of every waking day thinking about". On the basis of such authoritative pronouncements, The Sun can call Savile "Britain's worst ever sex-beast" without fear of contradiction (who now remembers Fred West?) while the once-serious Times is reduced to breathless tabloidese:

Savile even turned his long-running Jim'll Fix It television show into a vehicle for depravity when he pored through his fan letters to pick out victims.

Amid all this media groupthink, Charles Moore has been a lone dissenting voice. The press, which turned a blind eye to allegations against the old creep while he was alive, so invested was it in the narrative of St Jimmy the tireless charity-worker and quintessential Yorkshire "character", is now equally wedded to the idea that anyone he so much as breathed upon must have been the victim of horrendous abuse. The only serious analysis I've seen is by Anna Raccoon, who apart from her formidable forensic talents has personal knowledge of Duncroft Approved School, which was the source of the highest-profile allegations. There are some highly enlightening comments there, too.

Such voices of balance and rationality are fighting an uphill struggle, though. As far as the British media are concerned, Evil now has a new face, complete straggly blonde hair and a cigar. Whether or not Jimmy Savile worshipped Satan is largely beside the point. He was Satan. Read the rest of this article

Newsnight's two victims

Pity poor Steven Messham, horribly abused for years as a child at the notorious Bryn Estyn childrens' home in North Wales, horribly abused again over the past week at the hands of the media.

The Mail on Sunday was wrong yesterday to pursue him with unfeeling spite (though it was not wrong to point out the inconsistencies in his evidence; they matter, because truth and justice matter, especially where a crime as emotive as child abuse is concerned). It was disgraceful of David Mellor to brand him a "weirdo" on a politics TV show yesterday. But the Newsnight team who disinterred his ancient stories, forced him to relive his nightmares, showed his face and name on camera, failed to do the basic journalistic work of checking his story against the mountain of publicly-available information (or even to show him a photograph of his alleged abuser) and then abandoned him after the claims imploded, did him worse damage than either. They used him. He is as much the victim of the BBC's journalistic collapse as is Lord McAlpine.

As for the idea that concentrating on the crisis at the BBC distracts attention from the real and serious matter of child abuse: so, too, does sensationalism of the type exemplified by the Newsnight report. Seeking out highly-placed paedophile rings and top Tory abusers makes for good horror-show entertainment; but it bears very little relationship to the mundane reality of institutional abuse, such as was laid out in exhaustive detail by Mr Justice Waterhouse in his unfairly maligned report. It's well worth reading if you want the facts, rather than the fantasy, about Bryn Estyn. Far from being any sort of whitewash, it is detailed and damning about the failures of oversight and culture of neglect that allowed the terrible abuse there to continue and go unpunished for many years.

Pity, too, Lord McAlpine. As Boris Johnson rightly says, to accuse someone of being a paedophile "is to consign them to the lowest circle of hell – and while they are still alive." McAlpine has lived with this horrendous smear for years, at least since he was named by the defunct gossip magazine Scallywag around twenty years ago. (Scallywag, sued out of existence after it accused a blameless woman of having an affair with John Major, was the pre-internet equivalent of certain well-known websites.) The allegations, based (as the Guardian demonstrated convincingly on Friday) at best on a case of mistaken identity, have been disproved several times before. But they have never gone away. They have continued to circulate on the internet, besides being contained in David Icke's classic of conspiratorial literature, The Biggest Secret, which remains in print.

It was not new evidence that led to Newsnight disinterring this old, long discredited slur. Indeed, the BBC broadcast questionable claims about Bryn Estyn way back in 1999. Rather, it was the media and political feeding frenzy that, having sucked dry the malodorous corpse of Jimmy Savile was looking round for a new object of its righteous indignation. Tom Watson's histrionic claims in the House of Commons of a paedophile network at the heart of the Thatcher government gave permission (at the very least) for this new inquisition. Inspiration presumably came from the bowels of the Internet. Members of David Icke's Forum, for example, had been naming McAlpine and other alleged Tory paedophiles for weeks before Newsnight broke the story not-quite-naming him. So had various conspiracy-minded blogs. These people were crowing in vindication and expectation before the claims began to unravel, since when they have been bemoaning yet another establishment cover-up.

From David Icke to the right-on Twitter crowd falling gleefully on claims of Tory paedophile rings may not be such a long road. I'm struck, for example, by the tone of George Monbiot's abject apology to Lord McAlpine for having, perhaps libellously, named him on Twitter. Monbiot describes his tweet, as well he might, as "the worst mistake of my life."

The tweets I sent which hinted – as I assumed to be the case – that Lord McAlpine was the person the child abuse victim Steve Messham was talking about were so idiotic that, looking back on them today, I cannot believe that I wrote them.

So what possessed him? Why did he "assume it to be the case" that McAlpine was a paedophile, which was always a frankly preposterous notion?

I knew that Steve Messham had been treated appallingly, and I believed that the terrible things done to him had been compounded by a denial of recognition and a denial of the recourse to the law which was his due. When I saw his interview on Newsnight I was very upset. I trusted his account unquestioningly. I was horrified by what he said, and by the fact that the identity of the man he was talking about appeared to have been kept secret for so long.

Monbiot says that he allowed himself "to be carried away by a sense of moral outrage." But what he was actually carried away by was his own cognitive biases. I don't just mean that some people find the idea of a Tory paedophile ring at the heart of the Thatcher government plausible and even appealing. (Terrible crimes, yes, and one feels for the victims, but it just goes to show what those bastards were capable of.) It's also that people of Monbiot's predisposition (and Watson's) are drawn to the idea of establishment cover-ups, of rich and powerful manipulators denying justice to little people they have betrayed. Because Messham was an abuse victim (which no-one denies) Monbiot will believe "unquestioningly" anything he says; because McAlpine was a wealthy Thatcherite Monbiot will assume the worst of him, even that he raped children, without evidence.

Jimmy Savile exploited the "halo effect" he gained from being a popular entertainer and charity fundraiser to bat away the rumours about his abuse of under-age girls, rumours that we now know were well-founded. He also exploited the halo effect that surrounded the institutions which employed him and with which he was associated: the BBC, Stoke Mandeville hospital, the royal family and the Catholic Church (that last being especially ironic, or rather telling). But Lord McAlpine, and the other former politicians still being smeared all over the internet, have no such cover. Tories and Thatcherites don't get the benefit of the doubt. Not from the likes of George Monbiot, anyway. Read the rest of this article

Tom Watson and child abuse: the return of the Paedoph Isles?

"Why is it that we can no longer think of the British Isles, without the word 'paedoph' in front of them?" - Chris Morris, Brass Eye

The scandals arising out of the revelations about Jimmy Savile are now well into their second month and getting frankly ridiculous.  On the day that Theresa May announced new inquiries into previous inquiries about a Welsh children's home that was the centre of an abuse scandal more than twenty years ago, the Sun speculated openly that Savile was not just a paedophile and/or necrophile but possibly a murderer as well. 

After "exclusively" revealing that the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe (whom Savile visited in Broadmoor, rather as the late Lord Longford used to visit Myra Hindley) had described some of the allegations against Savile as "a load of crap", the paper drew attention to the fact that one of Sutcliffe's victims was found murdered "yards" from the DJ's flat in Leeds.  They then spoke to two of Savile's victims, one of whom suggested that "the police now need to seriously investigate the possibility that Jimmy Savile was a child killer."  The other was "seriously wondering now if Savile could also have been a killer," on the grounds that "if he didn’t get what he wanted who’s to say he wouldn’t have killed to get it?" The Sun also roped in a forensic psychologist, Dr Ian Stephen, who said (or was induced to say) that Savile might have been capable of murder: "It is possible that he upped the game."

I suppose anything is possible.  He liked under-age girls, so why shouldn't he have been a serial killer as well?  But there are many people who lived in the vicinity of at least one of Sutcliffe's murders; and if the mere fact that Savile spoke to Sutcliffe in Broadmoor suggests that he was the Ripper's accomplice or fellow murderer, maybe we should start worrying about Lord Longford as well.  As for the comments by Savile's victims, it reads to me as though the Sun has been feeding them lines.  Savile's reputation is so thoroughly trashed (as it deserves to be, of course) that almost anything that can be said or believed about him, from necrophilia to murder.  The merest hint of an accusation is enough.  Evidence is not required, and anything that a victim, or an alleged victim, says will be automatically believed. 

The same seems to be true about events in North Wales.  Ever since Tom Watson stood up in the House of Commons and spoke darkly about a "paedophile ring in Downing Street", implicating a senior political figure with a link to the Thatcher government, a torrent of claims and speculations has ensued.  This morning a former inmate of Bryn Estyn children's home in Wrexham went on Five Live to tell Nicky Campbell how abusers, including "two MPs, judges, senior serving police officers, market traders and business people from all over Britain" would select children to abuse at a nearby motel.  Their names were taken off statements given to the earlier inquiry presided over by Mr Justice Waterhouse, said Keith Gregory, adding for good measure that most of them were Freemasons. 

Tom Watson's latest intervention in the House of Commons was almost as baroque.  He stressed, of course, that his concern was only for the victims, "thousands and thousands of children, whose lives have been ground into nothing, who prefer to kill themselves than carry on, who have nowhere to turn, to whom nobody listens, whom nobody helps."  But he seemed just a little too keen to rub the government's nose in it, suggesting that the type of inquiry now being set up - an inquiry into the actual allegations that have been made, that is, rather than a no-holds barred witch-hunt - would constitute the "basic building block of a cover-up" and be a" dereliction of the Home Secretary's duty".  He didn't abuse Parliamentary Privilege to name the Tory at the centre of the Wrexham allegations.  He did something possibly even worse, talking of "the spectre of a paedophile cabinet minster" that had apparently "transfixed" the media. 

Let's just say that the name most often rumoured to be the Downing Street aide associated with Wrexham - which may turn out to be the wrong name, if it ever comes to be officially confirmed - is not and never was a cabinet minister.  So Watson is presumably alluding to other, even wilder rumours that have indeed been flying around the loopier corners of the Internet (the David Icke Forum, for example). 

To what end?  Watson says that limiting the inquiries to North Wales and Savile "would guarantee that many sickening crimes will remain uninvestigated and some of the most despicable paedophiles will remain protected by the establishment that has shielded them for 30 years."  Which sounds fine and compassionate but in fact suggests that he is in the grip of a profoundly dangerous obsession.   The cases of Savile and the North Wales childrens' home are prominent because victims have come forward to tell their stories.  They have, in other words, some evidential basis that can be investigated.  Watson seems to want a virtually unlimited inquiry into alleged establishment paedophile networks that he has already decided must exist, and into a shadowy establishment cover-up that he is also presupposing.

If such an inquiry were to be set up, premised on the assumption of some vast paedophile conspiracy at the heart of the British state and establishment, who knows where it might lead.  The very fact that it had been established would give credence to what are, as yet, unsubstantiated and somewhat overwrought claims.  If it eventually concluded that there was no basis to the broader claims, this would itself be seen as evidence that the cover-up continued.  Alternatively, dozens or even hundreds of people might find themselves under police investigation or else be seen as guilty by association.  A broad-based inquiry process could well lead to a full-blown moral panic, as the battier claims of conspiracy theorists received a polite hearing from Lord Justice Cocklecarrot.

You may remember the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of around twenty years ago.  In Rochdale and Orkney, families were broken up on the say-so of social workers advised by cultish self-appointed "experts".  Innocent people were convicted in what in retrospect seem like show-trials.  Meanwhile, respected media outlets gave air-time to claims of child-sacrifice and highly-placed Satanic networks.  Here we go again, it seems.  (One of the things David Icke's followers insist upon is that the establishment paedophiles are also Satanists, and quite possibly blood-drinking pan-dimensional lizards as well.)  On the pretext of listening to victims, the most bizarre claims and allegations will be treated as Gospel, and the net will be cast ever-wider.  With his "thousands and thousands" of victims of elite paedophile rings, Tom Watson is already sailing into deep Ickean waters, where Jimmy Savile and the Kray twins rub shoulders with Ted Heath and members of the royal family in a great big Satanist/secret service/necrophile vortex.

One Jimmy Savile is bad enough.  That he was able to get away for so long with a string sex offences against vulnerable girls is reason enough - and work enough - for an inquiry.  If serious, credible allegations have been made against a known, politically-prominent individual, then they too need to be investigated thoroughly.  But beyond that, what are most needed are caution and a sense of perspective.  Tom Watson, and his fellow Witch-Finders, have shown too little of either. Read the rest of this article

Do parents drive their children to drink?

The Today programme this morning was excitedly trumpeting the headline finding from a Rowntree survey on teenage drinking. Children who see their parents drunk, we were told, "are twice as likely to get drunk themselves."

The audience was invited to conclude that there was a causal relationship between these two facts: teenagers drinking heavily because they see their parents drinking heavily. But there are at least three reasons why this might not be so.

1) There is a strong genetic component in alcoholism. An alcoholic is likely to have had at least one alcoholic parent, whether or not the parent got drunk in front of them as a child. There is nothing to suggest that the survey compensated for heredity. In fact, the words "genetic" and "heredity" occur not once in the full report.

2) Another factor in teenage drinking claimed by Rowntree was "poor parental supervision" - allowing children to stay out all night, not knowing where or with whom they are hanging out, not exerting discipline. This is plausible, not because of the parenting itself, but because inadequately supervised teenagers are more likely to be hanging out with the wrong crowd. Then again, they might be hanging out with a good crowd, in which place the lack of parental supervision would be less damaging.

Studies tend to show that peer pressure at least as significant as parental influence when it comes to drinking. But such research very rarely takes genetic factors into account. So while it is known that peer groups do influence teenage behaviour very strongly, what proportion of parental influence is down to their example rather than their genes has yet to be adequately determined.

3) Most importantly, the survey implies that it is the sight of a parent drinking that encourages the child to drink. There is no evidence for this whatever. Even factoring out the genetic influence, it's obvious (or should be) that if a parent is in the habit of getting drunk in front of the kids there are likely to be other problems in the family: inadequate parenting (see above), abuse, a chaotic private life, depression or simple misery. All things that might well lead a child to seek solace with a group of similarly disaffected peers who will probably end up drinking (and smoking, having sex, committing criminal damage and all the rest of it).

The Rowntree survey made no attempt whatever to consider these other factors, preferring to draw a simplistic causal link between seeing and doing. And of course the media, with its predictable "blame the parents" agenda, lapped it up. Read the rest of this article

Complaints procedure

Among the key recommendations of Reg Bailey's review into the "sexualisation and commercialisation of childhood" is that it should be easier for parents to complain about things they deem inappropriate for their children to see or hear.

Broadcasters and companies "need to be more proactive in encouraging feedback and complaints." Industry and regulators should work together "to promote parental awareness... of complaints procedures." There should be a website where regulators such as Ofcom and the Advertising Standards Authority provide a "one-stop shop" aimed at parents who want to complain. Company websites should have user-friendly complaint buttons.

It's all part of "empowering parents". Instead of muttering to themselves or neighbours about the inappropriate thing that they've seen, or merely switching the TV off when something upsets them, they should be doing something more decisive. Bailey seems disturbed, even puzzled, by what he sees as "the low level of complaint" - and convinced that a complicated complaints process must be to blame:

Despite some good practice, notably from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the consumer complaints landscape is complex, confusing and inconsistent and certainly does not encourage parents to voice their concerns or make complaints. Our omnibus survey showed that the majority of parents (92 per cent) have never complained about things (for example, products and adverts) whether in public places, on television, on the internet, in a newspaper or magazine that they felt were inappropriate for children because of sexual content. This was because they have never needed to (43 per cent), they didn’t think anything would be done (22 per cent), didn’t know who to complain to (15 per cent) or didn’t get round to it (13 per cent).

The most relevant figure here is the 15% who didn't know who to complain to - but it's unlikely that ignorance alone frustrated their complaint. If they had been motivated, it's likely that they would have found out. In any case, it's a low proportion of the total. Most people are aware of who they might complain to, but either have nothing to complain about or do not see it as much of a priority. Perhaps they just weren't angry enough.

Bailey suggests that "the true extent of parental concern is not currently reflected in complaints statistics". But is this really a problem? Only if no-one is complaining about genuinely offensive material would there be a good case for encouraging more complaints, but the report provides no evidence that that is the case.

At present, the Review states, "the numbers of complaints to the ASA regarding children and advertising are relatively low." About 5% of ads complained of involved children. This might well reflect that advertisers generally obey the rules. Yet these same ads attracted 10% of the complaints. A questionable advert relating to a children's product or involving a child is already, it seems, twice as likely to be complained about as "complaint-worthy" adverts in general. That would suggest that parents are already well-motivated (perhaps over-motivated) when it comes to making complaints.

What would be the effect, then, of making it even easier for parents to complain? Most obviously, perhaps, more complaints - something that Bailey seems to approve off even if the complaints themselves are groundless:

We understand that complainants are going to be disappointed if their complaint is rejected. But a timely and personalised response will make such disappointment easier to accept, and provide reassurance that someone has listened to one’s views.

Last week at the Cambridge Skeptics, Simon Perry was talking about his ongoing campaign against the dubious claims made by some alternative medicine practitioners. Basically, it involves making multiple complaints to the ASA, Trading Standards and other regulators whenever he or his comrades in arms spotted anything unscientific. The campaign's biggest triumph came in the wake of the British Chiropractic Association's misconceived (© David Allen Green) libel claim against Simon Singh. Since then, Perry has developed a plug-in for Google Chrome to make submitting a formal complaint as easy as clicking on a few links.

Perry recently met representatives from the ASA, who expressed some slight misgivings about the sheer quantity of complaints they were now receiving about alternative therapists. There were, after all, other complaints that had to be dealt with. More importantly, the ASA stressed that all complaints were investigated. It was the substance of the complaint that mattered, not the volume of complaints about any particular issue. A complaint might be upheld if only one person had complained, or rejected if a thousand had done so.

Yet Bailey implies that volume matters; that it is not enough that some people complain - everyone who sees something they disagree with has a duty to go straight to the ASA or Ofcom. This suggests both a woeful misunderstanding of how these bodies operate and some lack of consideration for their overburdened staff.

Won't somebody think of the regulators?
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Cracking the Cracker Code

A festive tale tonight, ladies and gentlemen, although the themes we shall be exploring would be familiar at any time of the year.

Yesterday in Parliament Michael Ellis MP stood up and complained about the "absurd health and safety legislation, which has reached such dizzy heights in this country that the chief executive of Sainsbury's told me last week that Christmas crackers are now category 1 fireworks, and cannot be sold to anyone under the age of 16." He invited the Prime Minister to "put a firework up the Health and Safety Executive" - something which David Cameron would said would give him "enormous pleasure". Indeed, he was looking forward to it. The PM didn't quite commit himself to putting this particular provision on the bonfire of regulatory inanities that the coalition is always promising but never quite manages to assemble. But he was happy to give the impression that classifying crackers as fireworks, and banning children from buying them, was self-evidently silly.

Most people would no doubt agree. I certainly would. I can remember, as a small and inquisitive boy, tugging carefully at the ends of Christmas crackers, extracting the explosive bit and seeing what happened if I let it off next to my skin. It never did me any harm. It wouldn't have done me any more harm if I'd bought the things myself. But the law and commonsense are not always perfectly aligned, and the latest Pyrotechnic Safety Regulations - promulgated earlier this year - do indeed ban the sale of crackers and other "indoor fireworks" to anyone under the age of sixteen. On the other hand, Ellis was wrong to blame the Health and Safety Executive. The HSE didn't write the regulations, and has no role in enforcing them. From what I can tell, the HSE spends most of its time these days trying to discourage the over-implementation of regulations and directives rather than thinking up new types of barminess.

I'm not sure if Ellis was acting on his own initiative, but his question coincided with a press release from the British Retail Consortium also lamenting the crackpot crackers ban and warning that "trading standards officers will now be monitoring how retailers enforce the law." The statement went on to urge customers to show "understanding" as stores (taking no chances) applied the full rigour of the Challenge 25 policy to demand photo ID from anyone under pensionable age who might want to buy a box of crackers. At the same time, the BRC called for "a sensible attitude to enforcement" - presumably that is aimed at trading standards officers, rather than the shops who will, customers are assured, be enforcing it rigorously - and for the rules to be urgently reconsidered, pointing out that the EU directive which the new regulations are supposed to implement had "a more sensible age limit of 12." The directive "should never have been gold-plated to become 16 in the UK" BRC spokeswoman Jane Bevis is quoted as saying. It is a "ludicrous restriction" that had "slipped through the net" despite government promises to rein in "health and safety" madness.

The Express, meanwhile, had a story about a six year old girl distressed by a cashier's refusal to let her hand over a box of crackers from her mother's shopping trolley. The cashier apparently believed that by taking the box from the child's outstretched arms she would would be breaking the rules and would end up going to prison for six months. Or something.

You'd be forgiven, then, for thinking that this is a new story. But like most cracker jokes it's actually an old one. Two years ago, the Sun brought us the tale of twenty-two year old Heather Welsh from York, unable to buy crackers in her local M&S because she couldn't produce any ID. A local newspaper elaborated. The store, it reported, had signs put up everywhere referencing the Fireworks Safety Regulations 1997 and even the Victorian Explosives Act of 1875 in support of the ban. A York trading standards officer, meanwhile, quoted the regulations of 2004 to the same effect. The problem, apparently, was that christmas crackers contain gunpowder. This led into a tangential story about a cracker exporter who complained that "Some carriers refuse to transport crackers – because they are ‘too dangerous’. Airlines won’t touch them. I have to send them by road." He blamed that other usual suspect (along with the EU and the HSE) in such stories - the increasingly pervasive fear of being sued.

Go back a further two years to 2006 and the Sun, again, had a story about 18 year old Hannah Thomas being turned away from WH Smith in Weymouth. I won't bore you with the details, except to note the Smiths spokesman who defended the policy as "responsible retailing" because of all that dangerous gunpowder. It's one thing to stoically implement a daft law because one must obey the law to the letter (and this country has never lacked an heroic cadre of petty officials who take special delight - or see especial virtue - in enforcing the most pettifogging of regulations.) It's quite another, I think, to convince yourself that such a rule might actually be sensible.

So how old is the rule banning 16 year olds from buying Christmas crackers? It first appeared, I find, in the Explosives (Age of Purchase etc.) Act 1976 - which didn't explicitly categorise Christmas crackers as indoor fireworks but rather related to all products containing gunpowder, as did the 1875 Act that it updated. In 1875 the age for buying gunpowder had been set at thirteen. That the age limit did apply was made explicit in the 1997 Fireworks (Safety) Regulations, which raised the age for buying most fireworks to 18 but exempted "any cap, cracker snap, novelty match, party popper, serpent or throwdown." The accompanying guidance (pdf) specified that these items "remain subject to the prohibition on sale to persons under the age of 16".

What do I conclude from all this? A number of things.

First, like Christmas itself, the crackers crackers ban comes round almost every year; and each time it is presented as something new and unexpected, to be blamed afresh on Elf n' Safety, Brussels or whoever happens to be in power.

Second, pace the BRC the 2010 regulations are not a case of British officials taking the opportunity sneakily to gold-plate an EU directive. Civil servants merely re-issued the old regulations with a few changes in wording to take account of the new directive. The most that can be said is that they failed to take the opportunity to make the existing regulations more sensible. This is more likely due to inertia than any deep belief in the necessity for an age-limit of 16. But it also shows that our government doesn't merely rubber-stamp EU directives - rather, where possible, it combines them with existing British rules. And that this practice often results in more stringent rules than would otherwise have been the case.

Third, although the rule is an old one it is probable that it is now being more strictly enforced. But then many things - and especially age limits - are much more strictly enforced these days than they once were. It may be that until relatively recently few retailers or local authorities knew or cared that Christmas crackers were covered by the Explosives Act; or if they did regarded it as legal curiosity rather than as something that that should literally be implemented. I haven't been able to track down any cracker-ban stories earlier than the middle of the last decade. The cracker-ban, then, is a symptom of an increasingly rigid, conformist, rule-obsessed society in which initiative and common sense are both objects of suspicion. A culture in which officials treat christmas crackers as fireworks is also one in which a light-hearted Tweet about blowing an airport "sky-high" is categorised as a security threat.

Finally, the age limit itself. It's striking that the Victorians were quite happy for thirteen year old to buy and handle quite considerable quantities of gunpowder (the Explosives Act only covered "indoor fireworks" by implication). But then that era of imagined childhood innocence also allowed children of that age to work, while the age of consent - inasmuch as it existed - was twelve. David Cameron used to accuse the previous government of "treating children like adults and adults like children", but only the second of these was actually true. I've lost count of the number of things I was able to do as a child that are now illegal, from taking a penknife into school to buying a goldfish. We even used to be allowed to buy glue. And if it was technically illegal to purchase Christmas crackers, no-one seems to have been aware of the fact. I'm not that ancient.

Are children more irresponsible than they used to be? They are certainly more protected, from themselves as much as from others; and of course forty years ago most sixteen year olds would have been in work (thirty years ago they would have been unemployed). Yet the prevailing narrative about childhood is that it is under threat - that under the pressure of commercialisation and a pervasively "sexualising" media children are being forced to "grow up to soon", to look and act like mini-adults. The response - more protection, more legislations, more restrictions on what they can and cannot do. The age of puberty may have dropped, but the age of responsibility just keeps on getting higher. And the same press that points out the absurdity of the cracker sales ban has fuelled a moral panic about teenage drinking even as the number of teenagers who consume alcohol has steadily fallen. Because, after all, youngsters really can't be trusted. Better keep them away from those crackers, just in case.
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If that is the sentence, why was there ever a trial?

Sentence has finally been passed on the two ten year old boys convicted in May at the Old Bailey for the "attempted rape" of an even younger girl. The judge, Mr Justice Saunders, decided that a three-year supervision order was the most appropriate way of dealing with them. A custodial sentence would be "counterproductive". Instead he was giving them "the assistance of trained social workers to help, guide and educate you. This will also help your family come to terms with what happened." He was talking about the boys' actions; but he might equally have been talking about the legal process itself.

In effect, this was the minimum possible sentence. The judge even told the boys that he accepted "that you did not realise how serious what you were doing was.'' If that is so (and I'm sure that it is) they would seem to have lacked the mental state necessary for the crime of rape (or attemped rape). Why, then, were they ever put on trial? The judge's words here fatally undermine the rationale for the prosecution. I wrote at the time that "it is hard to conceive of a more striking instance of the inappropriate sexualisation of children than the spectacle of two boys of primary school age put on trial at the Old Bailey for rape." The characterisation of what went on as "sexual", I argued, was an inappropriate imposition of adult concepts onto prepubescent children. This would now seem to be the judge's view too. It makes his decision - later backed by the Court of Appeal - to put the evidence before a jury even more puzzling than it was before.

By passing a non-punitive sentence, the judge has managed to undo at least some of the damage he caused by not halting the trial when he had an opportunity to do so. But no-one and nothing can undo the damage caused by the CPS's decision to prosecute in this case. Given that all sides appear to agree that a non-custodial sentence is the correct one - indeed, it now turns out that a custodial sentence was never even contemplated - it is plain that the decision to prosecute in the Crown Court, subjecting both the accused and, even more importantly, the victim, to the rigmarole of a full Old Bailey hearing was not only wrong but entirely unnecessary. In fact criminal proceedings of any kind were never the appropriate response to the events described in this case, and were not a necessary precondition to an intervention by social services on the boys' lives. It could, and should, have been dealt with informally.

Indeed, the judge seemed to acknowledge that the trial had constituted at least as serious an act of abuse of the victim as the attack. "Everyone will sympathise with her for what she has gone through" he said. "Not only what happened to her as the victim of these offences, but also to have to give evidence about them. "

Not only for what two ten year-old boys, too young to understand the issues of sex and consent on which the crime of rape is supposed to turn, did to her, in other words. But also for what the Crown Prosecution Service, whose officials should have understood the implications and which is supposed to act in the public interest, did to her. In my view, their offence against the child victim was by far the worse. It is certainly much harder to forgive.

As I've written before and no doubt will again, Keir Starmer's CPS is an organisation in need of urgent reform. Read the rest of this article

Some useful advice on fathers' day

This fathers' day, I thought I would share with readers some thoughts on the raising of boys from that bastion of traditional religious values, Bishop Richard "I believe there were no gas chambers" Williamson.

As woman has gifts of heart to look after home and children, so man has gifts of reason to lead them and provide for them by, ever since original sin, "the sweat of his brow" (Gen. III, 19). Therefore while a girl's formation must centre around what will serve husband and children inside the home, a boy's formation should train him for (1) work and (2) responsibility outside the home, which will usually mean, in the big bad world. There he is going to need (3) judgment, (4) self-discipline and (5) manliness. We already have quite a programme !

WORK outside in nature is the best. Let a boy swing an axe, cut down a tree, plant a garden, ride a horse, build a shed. Sport at best is manly recreation, but it is not meant to be any more than recreation. A genuine need of the family best teaches RESPONSIBILITY, also taught by a boy's suffering from the consequences of his own mistakes, instead of being protected from them. JUDGMENT he will learn by being encouraged to use his mind, by discussions at the family table, by the company and instruction of his father whom he naturally hero-worships and follows, but who must take time to listen to his boy and counsel him, especially in adolescence. DISCIPLINE he will learn by getting up early in the morning, by a daily routine to which he sticks, by getting early to bed, and by not dating until, more or less, he is looking to marry. The less he gives to girls he will not marry, the more he will have to give to the girl he will marry. MANLINESS will be the reward for following out such a programme.

Finally, parents, notice how electronics as a rule make a boy 1 idle, 2 irresponsible, 3 silly, 4 soft and 5 frustrated.


Cast out of the home electronics' spell,
If your boys are not to drop into Hell !

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Perverted Paediatrics?

A decade ago, for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, a Wales-based paediatrician came home to find that someone had sprayed the word "paedo" on her front door. At the time, the country was caught up in one of its periodic moral panics about child abuse, encouraged by a name-and-shame campaign in the News of the World. Since no-one was ever arrested, it cannot be known whether (as was widely assumed) the defacing of Dr Yvette Cloete's house was the result of some idiot's inability to tell the difference between a child-doctor and a child-abuser. Nevertheless, the incident soon came to be seen as emblematic of a spreading witch-hunt mentality. Every time paedo-panic reappears, the story is retold, not always accurately. Many versions have a howling mob turning up at the paediatrician's door to shout abuse or even hurling stones, and the unfortunate doctor left in fear of her, or his, life.

Might we, ten years later, be seeing this urban myth coming to life, fuelled this time not by illiteracy but by misinterpretation of a real, if controversial, medical procedure, and with the howling mob spontaneously forming itself among the educated, young and liberal denizens of blogs and facebook groups?

Yesterday, on Twitter, I came across claims that a leading American doctor had been sexually stimulating the genitals of small girls, under the guise of medical research, after first performing invasive and unnecessary surgical procedures to reduce the size of their clitoris. Like most who read it (initially in this version) I was horrified. It sounded - and still does - scarcely credible. So it's not surprising that the reaction has been extreme. The doctor and the institution that employs him have been bombarded with angry emails. A facebook group set up to "End Female Genital Mutilation at Cornell University" now has around 1500 members. Elsewhere I've seen calls for the doctor to be struck off, locked up, even castrated. Many of the comments are plainly libellous. Someone on Jezebel described him as "nothing more than a child molester practicing under the guise of doctor." To others, he was "a sick fuckazoid", "a QUACK", "that perv". Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's sister, only marginally more restrained, described his work as a "human rights violation".

Is any of this justified?

Dr Dix Poppas is by all accounts (and despite a somewhat unfortunate name) a surgeon with an exemplary reputation, Professor of Pediatric Urology and of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Weill Medical College - attached to New York's prestigious Cornell University - as well as being head of the Institute for Pediatric Urology at the Komansky Center for Children's Health. He is the winner of numerous awards and professional distinctions and has featured in lists of America's top doctors. He also has an impressive research pedigree, with 88 academic papers to his name, and is a pioneer of minimally-invasive surgical techniques. I've tracked down patient reviews offering high praise for his manner as well as for his expertise.

Among his specialisms, however, is the treatment of intersex conditions by surgery, for example reducing the "abnormal" enlarged clitoris in girls born with genetic or hormonal conditions. While it has long been regular medical practice to resolve the ambiguities sometimes thrown up by nature, the field has become increasingly contested in recent years. Intersex activists accuse doctors of interfering with nature, of making arbitrary judgements based on aesthetics or to fit cultural norms, of calling it wrong (in some cases, surgically-corrected "girls" grow up to identify as male, or vice versa) and of indulging in practices equivalent to the genital mutilation widely condemned when performed for religious or tribal reasons. Supporters of these procedures respond by pointing out that the stigma of abnormality can cause deep psychological scars, and that every child has a right to be normal.

It's a fraught area, but Professor Poppas is unlikely to have anticipated the storm that has broken over his head when an intersex campaigner and professor of bioethics, Dr Alice Dreger, unearthed a research paper Poppas has co-authored in 2007 (pdf). In it, Poppas described how using various techniques, including a device characterised by Dreger as a "vibrator", to ascertain the success of his "nerve-sparing" surgery on patients as young as six. Basically, he was trying to find out if what was left of the child's clitoris after he had finished chopping it up retained sufficient sensitivity to enable it, in due time, to do its job. The experiments - if that is what they were - were carried out in the presence of the children's parents. Nevertheless, Dreger and her colleague Ellen Feder were concerned both at the ethics of the procedure and of its likely long-term psychological impact. They write:

In the course of our inquiries, made in preparation for this publication, nearly all clinicians to whom we described Poppas’s “clitoral sensory testing and vibratory sensory testing” practices thought them so outrageous that they told us we must have the facts wrong. When we showed them the 2007 article, their disbelief ceased, but they then seemed to become as agitated as we were. At an international conference two weeks ago, when Dreger told Ken Zucker, a psychologist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and member of the clinical establishment, about this, Zucker said that we could quote him as saying this: "Applying a vibrator to a six-year-old girl’s surgically feminized clitoris is developmentally inappropriate." We couldn’t find a clinician who disagreed with Zucker.

Dreger and Feder compare Poppas' post-operative tests to the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Project, in which black patients were deprived of life-saving treatment so that doctors could watch them die. Here, they write, was another example of "how the dehumanizing, scientized language of modern medicine 'can obscure and de-emphasize any ethical, non-scientific perspective'." In a follow-up post, Dreger describes one of his tests - using a cotton-bud - as "creepy". She doesn't explicitly accuse him of child-abuse, or of being a pervert. Then again, she doesn't need to. The implication is enough.

So far, there has been no response either from Cornell university or from Dix Poppas himself*. The latter would appear to be in hiding. Now, clearly, there are are important questions raised both by the operations and by Poppas' follow-up tests. I can't help suspecting, though, that the facts have been somewhat distorted even in Dreger's original account of them.

For one thing, she is somewhat vague about the conditions Poppas was treating, leaving the casual reader to infer that the operations were cosmetic, based on little more than his subjective opinion that some girls' genitals were "too big". On the question of whether or not the tests required ethical approval, for example, there seems to be some confusion. The 2007 paper received approval from the appropriate review board - but, as Dreger points out, the 2007 study was a statistical analysis of Poppas' results stretching over a number of years. He had had no ethical approval for "experimenting" on the patients as part of a study into the effectiveness of his surgical technique. Dreger writes:

This may sound like a technicality. It isn't. If he had sought IRB approval for the "sensory testing," the ethics staff might have sat up and asked him what the heck he thought he was doing to these girls, and they would have tried to make sure the parents were informed about the unknowns and risks, and the girls could have refused to participate.

Perhaps. But was Poppas was engaged in an experiment at all? What he was doing was ascertaining the success of each particular procedure and writing up the results. "It isn’t clear to us" write Dreger and Feder, "how this kind of genital touching post-operatively is in individual patients' best interests. If the testing shows a girl has lost sensation through the surgery, her lost clitoral tissue cannot be put back." Indeed not. But - leaving aside the question of genital reconstruction surgery, which is a much larger topic - the tests would have been beneficial for Poppas' professional development, and thus for all his future patients.

His main aim, plainly, was to see if his technique really did preserve nerve-endings that traditional procedures destroyed. This was in no sense a scientific trial - if it had been, the follow-up tests would have been carried out by a different doctor to discount bias. There would also have been control groups - one of girls who had been operated on without Poppas' revolutionary "nerve-sparing", and another of girls who had not been operated on at all. I cannot imagine ethical approval being given to any such project. The 2007 paper acknowledges the limitations of the study. It does, indeed, envisage comparison with "an age matched normal cohort" after the patients have achieved sexual maturity.

None of this means that Poppas' precise technique was socially appropriate, especially in today's heightened and sexually self-conscious climate. Even the dry, technical language of the 2007 paper is more than a little disturbing:

Patients older than 5 years were considered candidates for CST. CST was performed using a cotton tip applicator. Using a scale of 0—no sensation to 5—maximum sensation, the patient was asked to report the degree of sensation at various points of the inner thigh and genitalia (labia majora, labia minora, vaginal introitus and clitoris). Inner thigh stimulation was set at level 3 for each patient and used as a baseline to compare other areas tested. In addition, these patients also had vibratory sensory testing performed using a biothesiometer designed to quantify the ability of patients to detect vibratory stimuli... The device generates a vibratory stimulus of varying amplitudes that can be gradually increased until the sensation is perceived by patients.

Yes. I can see why this has set alarm bells ringing. But without being present in the consultation room one can't really judge it. At the very least it's a big assumption that the procedure would have been perceived as in any sense sexual by pre-pubescent patients, or that it is likely to have a long-term impact on their psychological development. I think we may be dealing with the all-too-common phenomenon in our society of sexualisation - imposing adult concepts of sex onto children, reading sexual motivations where they do not exist, imagining that anything that could be about sex, is about sex. I wouldn't want to prejudge any inquiry, but it seems to me unlikely that there was anything improper about the atmosphere in Dr Poppas' consulting room. There certainly isn't any evidence that there was.

There remains the interesting question of Alice Dreger's involvement in the story. There was a Tweet yesterday from Dr Petra Boynton that "the last time Dreger got involved in something like this (on trans issues) it got very messy". A quick Google reveals the existence of websites dedicated to discrediting her, mainly run by intersex activists who object to her previous championing of the term "disorders of sex development" to describe intersex conditions. Another accuses her of being "part of a long history of transsexual imperialists, cissexual persons who have appropriated trans identity to control the flow of discourses that determine our lives." It gets a bit complicated. Suffice it to say she seems to be someone of strong opinions who is always up for a fight.

Her objection to the surgical correction of ambiguous genitalia is deeply felt. It seems to me that she would not be above misconstruing Dr Poppas' patient examinations in order to discredit his and others' surgical work. She writes: "We're glad Poppas cares about function. But if he really cared about maximizing these girls' function, he would not be doing surgery on their healthy clitorises." By contrast, many members of the public may sympathise with the view that Poppas' surgery is concerned with correcting congenital abnormalities and enabling children to fit into a society that still has a binary view of gender. The case for intersex identity and rights has not yet entered mainstream discourse. But anyone can get angry about a doctor apparently touching up little girls.

Paedophile. Paediatrician. What's the difference?

*UPDATE: a response from Cornell University posted on the facebook group:

While it is too early to provide a meaningful response to your comments, please be assured that we take your concerns seriously and are looking into the matter thoroughly.
Cornell University and its Weill Cornell Medical College are committed to providing the highest quality education, research and clinical care.
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