Songs of Innocence (29 page)

The case would have far-reaching implications. Victoria Gillick was a campaigner for old-fashioned moral standards, certainly, but she was much more than that. She was a campaigner for the
rights of the parent; a campaigner for the notion that the child was, essentially, the property of its parents until it reached adulthood. The House of Lords had ruled, in effect, that parents did
not have the right to a say over their daughters’ lives, even if they were still children. The Children’s Legal Centre was quick to point out that as of now, children had the right to
make their own decisions. Writing in the
Sunday Times
, Polly Toynbee concurred: ‘The Law Lords concluded that parents may not always know best.’
¹⁷
And there was a corollary to this – if children had the right under the law to determine their own lives, then where should it all stop? Was it practicable or even
desirable for the state to prosecute parents who allowed their children to drink, smoke, read porn or watch violent films? Evidently not, if they had no legal right to prevent their children from
doing so.

Toynbee had been a member of a committee set up to look into obscenity and film censorship, which had concluded that ultimately children had to be allowed to make their own mistakes: ‘When
my own daughter was twelve, she and her friends went through a craze for huddling together in a screaming bundle, watching horror X
movies in one or other of their houses.
Much as we disapproved, were we to ban her from visiting friends?’

But while liberal parents welcomed the outcome of the Gillick case – and had probably always given their children a degree of freedom anyway – concern was still growing on a number
of fronts about children’s vulnerability. Gitta Sereny, who had written eloquently and sympathetically about Mary Bell’s crimes against two little boys, had now written a book about
runaway children. As the Thatcher era wore to a close, growing numbers of young people were living on the streets of major cities, having fled from unemployment, abuse or family strife.
Sereny’s book
¹⁸
would document how some, both girls and boys, were working as prostitutes in order to stay alive. Some children could not
live with their parents, she said, and some parents could not live with their children – the feeling that family life was in its very nature less than perfect was increasingly entering the
fabric of social discourse. But these children still needed places of sanctuary. Children like thirteen-year-old Alan, picked up in Mayfair by a man with an upper-class accent and a
‘super’ car: ‘He gave me this ten pound note and told me to wank him off. Well, it was sort of good fun, getting paid doing just that. Half an hour later I got someone else and I
asked him for £15.’ Sereny had a stark analysis of who was responsible: ‘The blame lies squarely on me and you. I, who am writing, and you, old or young, who are reading. It is we
who in this last quarter of our rich twentieth century, in our enlightened Western world, have unthinkingly, recklessly and greedily created and supported an atmosphere of life which, it would
appear, is intolerable to many of our children.’

The feeling that the world at large, the adult world, was to blame for a malaise in the world of the child was growing apace. During the late 1980s, this was accentuated by an ongoing debate
about plans for a United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child – a debate writ large on the international stage, and in smaller print
across issues such as
Victoria Gillick’s campaign. Now children were not only believed to have some autonomy within the home – once the convention was passed in 1989 and ratified by the various UN member
states, they would have their rights spelled out in detail and underpinned by statute. Running to more than 7,000 words and fifty-four separate articles, it would ‘give’ children the
right to know and be cared for by their parents, the right not to be discriminated against, the right to express their views, the right to associate freely. Perhaps most significantly, it said that
their interests must be foremost in any transaction concerning them. Henceforth, parents’ rights would be very firmly relegated to second place.

And yet this unease persisted: this feeling that all was not well in the world of the child, this nagging sense of guilt. As the 1980s progressed, new evidence was emerging all the time of the
levels of abuse to which children were subjected. And it was increasingly being recognized that this abuse was not just confined to beating and starving children, as it had been in most of the
high-profile cases up to this time. For the first time, it was being said aloud that children were sexually abused, too – not by strangers, but by their own parents. Caroline Coon, writing on
the subject in the
Guardian
, suggested that until this point it had simply been impossible for anyone to talk about it: ‘Looking back it seems to me that the fierce debates about
abortion, birth control, battered women, rape, have all been a rehearsal for incest – as if to tackle incest before we were expertly practised in sexual controversy generally, as if this most
disturbing issue had to wait until now because it was finally the most important to the individual, the family and society as a whole.’

A whole body of literature was appearing, underlining the feeling that sexual abuse within families was much more common than had previously been thought. One academic, Jean Renvoize, had
estimated that one woman in ten had been a victim of incest – and yet the number of convictions stood at not much more than 100
per year.
¹⁹
Numerous stories were beginning to emerge from children’s homes, too – it was, as Coon implied, almost as if once the floodgates had been opened, a huge,
untold story had come flooding out. This was a problem which had been largely hidden up until now. Until the mid-1980s, the government did not even have a policy or guidelines for dealing with
child sexual abuse within families. Now, suddenly, it seemed to be everywhere. The first national survey on the issue, conducted in 1984 for a television documentary,
²⁰
suggested that thousands of children were being abused in this way every year. Children were being abused, too, it now emerged, by adults who were being paid to
protect and care for them – in 1985, the Association of County Councils produced examples: a man with convictions for sexual offences against children employed in a local authority hostel and
abusing children again; a teacher dismissed for sexual malpractices moving to a private school; a driver convicted of acts of gross indecency with mentally handicapped children continuing to
offend; people with convictions for sexual offences volunteering to work with children.
²¹

Professionals working with children were beginning to come alive to the issue. Increasingly, they felt exposed, uncertain whether they were missing cases of abuse. It was in the midst of this
anxiety-ridden atmosphere that a new paediatrician named Marietta Higgs arrived, in early 1987, to take up a post at the South Tees health district, in Cleveland. The previous year, she had learned
from a consultant in Leeds about a new technique for detecting child sexual abuse – it was called Reflex Relaxation and Anal Dilation. Using this technique, Dr Higgs began testing children
who came into her care to check for signs of abuse. And the cases began mounting up at an alarming rate. In response, the local authority, which had recently appointed its own child abuse
consultant, began removing the children from their homes. By April that year, the local police were beginning to question the use of the technique. By May, Cleveland’s
new sexual abuse consultant was calling for more resources to deal with what had fast become a crisis. In just five months, Dr Higgs and a fellow paediatrician diagnosed no fewer than
121 cases of child abuse. By June, the case had reached the ears of the local MPs, who were demanding to know what was going on. Because there were no more foster-families with which to place the
children, a special ward had to be set up at the hospital. Outside, the children’s furious parents gave interviews to journalists who flocked to the industrial town to cover the story. The
situation was reaching fever pitch. Children were being dragged from their beds at two in the morning, one local MP alleged.
²²
Why? Suddenly
social workers, hitherto seen mainly as an over-stretched workforce which sometimes missed cases of abuse, were in the frame for pursuing a witch hunt against innocent parents.

Twenty-five years on, the Cleveland case continues to divide public opinion. Dr Higgs continued to practise, despite the finding of a 1988 official report that she and her colleagues had failed
adequately to consider whether they were acting in the best interests of the children concerned, and of their parents. In 2007, one of the victims would describe her experience in an interview with
the BBC. Even after twenty years her stark description would speak volumes about a six-year-old’s bafflement at being removed from her home without explanation.
²³
She had been at school, she said, painting a vase of red flowers, when her mother had arrived with a social worker and a policeman.

‘When we got to the hospital Dr Higgs took me into a room. Mum had to wait outside. I was told to take my clothes off, she looked at my bottom and my front, I got dressed and went into the
playroom while the doctor talked to my mum. Some social workers gave me two dolls to play with; the dolls had no clothes on. They asked me if I knew what private places were, and could I show them
the dolls’ private places? They asked me if I knew what a secret was, and did
I have any secrets? I said yes to both questions, they wanted to know my secret. I looked
at Mum. I told them how my dad was in prison, and had been since I was a baby – that was my secret. I was taken away.’ Kerry did not say how long she was on the ward, but she did say
she still suffered from the nightmares she had had while she was there: ‘Dr Higgs made a mistake – a huge mistake. I was safe at home.’

Increasingly, confusion and anger rained down on the field of humanity in which children sat. For most children, the details of cases like this one were supremely irrelevant. And yet the sense
of fear, of uncertainty that surrounded childhood continued to grow. It was to get worse yet. In February 1989, in the aftermath of the official report into what had happened in Cleveland, the
Guardian
ran a letter from a Judith Dawson, a child abuse consultant in Nottingham. She had recently investigated a case in which no fewer than twenty-three children from a single family had
been abused, and in which eleven adults had been convicted, she said: ‘Torture and ritualistic sex was a daily occurrence for some of these children. These children within this family were
only ever able to tell of their abuse after they had come into care.’

Who to believe? Were there abusers in every street, threatening children with violence if they told of their experiences? How common were these networks of abusers, working together? Was there
ritual, even satanic, worship involved? The public imagination began working overtime. Dozens of ‘victims’ came forward to disclose that they had been subjected to satanic rituals in
which sexual and other types of abuse were perpetrated. In Rochdale, Lancashire, a grim joke was told: ‘What’s the difference between a rottweiler and a social worker? Answer:
there’s an outside chance you might get your children back from a rottweiler.’
²⁴
By now it was 1990, and no fewer than twenty
children from the Lancashire town were in care. Police investigating allegations that satanism had been involved
found no evidence; the local authority said later it had
never made the allegation. In Orkney, the following year, nine children were taken into care in similar circumstances. Two months later, all were allowed to go home.

Why did all this arise when it did? Certainly there were claims, coming from the United States, that satanic abuse was going to be the next big thing. And the trauma of the discovery that
widespread sexual abuse of children by male relatives had been going on for years, barely even detected, was heightening everyone’s awareness. Several factors came together in a sort of
unholy confluence, maybe: there was a vogue for the occult at the time, and the suggestion that countless children were being swept up by Satanic circles was an easy one to make. Evangelical
Christians were hotly pursuing the issue, too. One such group, named Reachout, had collected hundreds of occult books and magazines, all widely available, according to the
Sunday
Times
,
²⁵
and was presenting them as evidence that there was a network of Satanic groups operating in Britain. ‘They prey on the minds
of teenagers, especially those craving power and control, or those lacking self-esteem. I’m not saying everyone in witchcraft is molesting children, but there are groups who do,’ the
group’s founder, Maureen Davies, told the newspaper.

In the end, the phenomenon went away more quietly than it had arisen. But not before an inquiry had been commissioned by the Department of Health to examine the evidence. It was conducted by
Professor Jean La Fontaine from the London School of Economics, and after examining eighty-four cases in detail she pronounced all but three unsubstantiated – and those three free from any
evidence of actual Satanism. ‘My own view is that it is a modern phenomenon which is comparable to the witch-hunts of early modern Europe,’ Professor La Fontaine said.
²⁶

Yet witch-hunts happened for a reason – because there was a perceived threat. And the threat around children and childhood
seemed very real indeed at that time. It
was a threat born of uncertainty, and guilt. What were adults’ responsibilities towards children? To protect and nurture them, or to set them free to make their own decisions, their own
mistakes? To shelter them from the harsh realities of the adult world, or to initiate them so that they might be stronger? And – what were they here for? What were they to be in the future?
Why did their parents even want them? More than ever before, as the 1990s began, these questions hung heavy in the air.