22/08/04

No Man is Safe 

Chris Thompson

There is a growing fear among men that their actions towards young children may be misconstrued. Fathers are frightened to touch let alone bathe their daughters, and grandfathers are afraid to display affection towards their grandchildren. Men fear working with children professionally or voluntarily and walking alone in parks and are deterred from child-minding. False accusations of sexual abuse of children against men are everywhere and lots of men are in jail wrongly convicted on such allegations.

Older fathers are snared by recovered memory therapists. Younger fathers are viewed suspiciously by social and health workers if their children exhibit the slightest emotional disturbance. The attack on fathers and maleness is supported by the emotionally-correct, feminist establishment. In a piece entitled "who will speak for battered men?” (Sunday Times 15th November 1998), Melanie Phillips criticises Baroness Jay's proposals via the Women's Unit to have children inform on their fathers. Phillips also challenges the kind of statistics routinely trotted out by the gender inquisitors on the incidence of abuse.

An example is figures published in Zero Tolerance Campaigns run by Leeds Council Women's Committee. One states that 175,000 (50%) of Leeds adult women were abused in childhood while another says that the most dangerous place for any Leeds child is the home - with the inference that every father poses a danger (Equality Leeds, Summer 1998).

In The Observer, 5th July 1998, Erin Pizzey wrote that Women’s Minister, Joan Ruddock told her that in the area of domestic violence, men (never women) would be referred to as the perpetrators in legislation being considered by the Women's Unit. Before that Cherie Blair wrote in the Sunday Times, 7th June 1998, in support of the NSPCC's specialist teams who want to hunt for sexual abusers. MP Debra Shipley's Bill will legitimise the witchhunt.

Meanwhile some white, middle class feminists portray white, middle class males as the most likely abusers. The membership of the. British False Memory Society (BFMS) is apparently made up of white middle class men who have been accused by their daughters as a result of recovered memories. This must confirm these feminists prejudices. However working class men are in the majority among those who have been wrongly imprisoned.

The feminist mafia in Leeds and Newcastle. An example of sexual abuse hype is the well publicised report for Newcastle Council on alleged organised sexual abuse by two nursery nurses, a man and woman, in Shieldfield Children's Home. Although it is possible there has been some sexual abuse and this could have been committed within a few families, the libelous assertions in the report have been accepted without question by the media while the parents are full of rabid indignation and determined to ride the compensation gravy train.

There are those who question much of its findings. The nurses, who were released by the judge at an earlier trial because the evidence was unreliable, went into hiding and a witch hunt has gone on to find them. Their testimony is unavailable as they are too scared to come forward. Thus they are convicted and condemned in their absence.

Meanwhile former colleagues are scape-goated with suspensions and sacking threats for not seeing things that did not happen! Now the madness that was the Cleveland sexual abuse saga in 1987 is returning with the announcement that a further 1,162 Newcastle children are to be interviewed or examined and homes for the elderly where the nurses worked are to be investigated.

No sexual abuse spectacle in the North East can be allowed to pass without considering the role of the local self-righteous, feminist crusaders. It is felt that confidential notes in some cases may have found their way from sympathetic insiders in the NHS to freelance therapists and then on to ideological theorists. Since the Cleveland child abuse hiatus, the North East has remained a redoubt of those virulent feminists who exploit sexual abuse concerns (see Margaret Jervis's ‘Old Nick in the Nursery, The Fortean Times No.103 October 1997’).

The vendetta by Beatrix Campbell, the well-known Newcastle socialist and feminist, against Tania Hunter from Northumberland is still going on. Campbell has never apologised for her press attacks on Tania Hunter despite Mrs. Hunter's daughter's retraction of her sexual abuse accusations against her mother and father.

In September last year, Campbell had to be stopped from making another public attack on Mrs. Hunter at a seminar for lawyers in Durham University who were bemused by Campbell's odd behaviour. So when Campbell's partner, Judith Dawson, the social worker at the centre of the Nottingham satanic abuse fiasco in 1989 and Jacqui Saradjian, a supporter like Dawson of the anti-satanist organisation, Ritual Abuse Information Network Support (RAINS), were half of the Shieldfield enquiry team, suspicions have to be aroused. Dawson is also working in Leeds at the Metropolitan University's Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations Research Centre beside men-hating Julie Bindel, who shares many of her views. Saradjian works at Menston Hospital near Leeds, a city like Manchester with many chauvinist feminists and sexual abuse vigilantes.

Leeds Council, like Manchester, has around 1200 children in care per 10,000 children under 18, two to four times more than similar metropolitan areas (Dept. of Health, 1997 figures). Given the child snatching by social services at St. James's Hospital, the number of over-enthusiastic paediatricians in Leeds Health Trusts, the politically correct abuse sleuths (pc plods) in the West Yorkshire police, the jaundiced feminist sociologists and psychologists linked to teaching hospitals via the city's universities, the freelance newsletters obsessed with satanic ritual abuse and the Council's Zero Tolerance campaigns, perhaps these figures are not surprising.

The inquisition. Foster carers, adoptive parents and staff in childrens homes dread investigations by gullible police officers under the influence of the sexual abuse inquisitors. No wonder there is a crisis in foster care as prospective foster parents decline to come forward and existing ones give up. They could be fingered by those lawyers who prepare freelance lists of suspected paedophiles from a plethora of prejudiced sources which they publish as if the accused are proven abusers. Are they after litigation bounty?

Innocent care home workers are terrified as ill-intentioned police forces trawl the country for the former residents of childrens homes offering financial compensation if they can come up with accusations of sexual abuse against their former carers (see ‘The Great Childrens Home Panic’ by Richard Webster).

Serious childhood delinquency and living by deceit was often what put these people in the homes in the first place, so not surprisingly the prospect of considerable cash, especially given their often impoverished and sad existence, leads to false accusations. In the childrens homes' cases, corroboration takes on a dangerous new meaning. Each accusation is verified not by another witness of the assault, but by having someone else make a similar accusation against the accused. Multiple accusations rather than corroborations is how convictions are achieved.

Given that regular resorting to lying can be part of these accusers way of life, it is not surprising that innocent staff from the childrens homes are in jail with the guilty ones. A disturbing feature of trials, legal enquiries and TV documentaries is the regular appearance of the same vindictive expert witnesses. Prejudices are cloaked in a quasi-judicial language and pseudo-medical opinion substitutes for compelling forensic evidence.

Some of them believe any form of mental illness or disturbance, points to sexual abuse having occurred. Others think certain modes of child discipline such as bottom smacking, or lifestyles with a lax attitude to domestic nudity are also a form of sexual abuse. Whilst those who are anti-satanists take the complete absence of evidence of abuse, as evidence that it must have taken place under the control of the wily devil! In seeking out sexual abuse among young children, forcing disclosure is the method used. A mixture of gentle threats and inducements, including money to older ones, are made to encourage them to disclose abuse which the inquisitors are predisposed to finding.

Some consultants and social workers pressurise very young children to simulate the suspected abuse on dolls, imagining that this bizarre method of disclosure is reliable proof. Little allowance is made for their fantasies. In some trials, the lack of scepticism among the professional experts towards children's testimony is astounding. Prudence suggests a cautious rather than a liberal approach when youngsters are sought as witnesses. Yet caution is ditched amidst demands that we must "believe the children" (and the adults who prompt them), although experience teaches that they are extremely unreliable.

The therapy travesty. In the seventies eccentric therapists had their patients rage at their parents by thumping pillows. In the nineties misguided therapists help create fantasy beliefs for clients so that they can accuse men of sexual abuse and women of complicity in it. The promotion of American survivor memoirs in books such as ‘The Courage to Heal’, ‘The Flock’, ‘The Obsidian Mirror’ and ‘My Fathers House’ with their pornographic fantasies of child-adult love and lesbian erotica, by therapists full of horrified, puritan indignation at sexual abuse, points to a prurient, vicarious titillation at work. Elsewhere, due to the sexualisation of childhood for commercial reasons, publications on sex matters available to children and parents have contributed to the coming of the language and imaginings of sexual abuse which the feminazzi have politicised for their own ends.

This is strangely at odds with the past innocent world of older fathers accused after their daughters, encouraged by certain therapists, have created memories of sexual abuse supposedly committed on them decades before. These men show their past innocence when saying that they simply did not know what sexual abuse was when they were young fathers. But their tormentors seem to think it is better for droves of these men to go to jail if there is just one guilty paedophile among them and as they are old-fashioned, patriarchal sexists, much better to remove them from grand parenting todays youngsters. In a disastrous way this is being achieved as the men we have spoken to are petrified of ever going near children again but the self-confessed, recidivist paedophiles they encounter in prison often cannot wait to get back among children!

False accusations put men in jail. The AAFAA have investigated several questionable sexual abuse cases, interviewing men currently in jail, several now released and some who escaped imprisonment. A disturbing array of dubious testimonies put them on trial, male and female ex-spouses or their children's desire for revenge is often at the root of the false accusations.

There is a deep cause for concern over what appear to be multiple miscarriages of justice. The indictment counts are loaded against the accused with sample or specimen charges which need not give definite dates (only general time span) thus preventing the defendant providing alibis. If it can be proved that the accusing witness is lying on one of the counts, the action just moves on to another count to try and make that stick, instead of the witness being discredited as a liar.

Similarly the defendant can be disadvantaged by similar fact evidence which means an accusation does not have to be corroborated by another witness, or proven by convincing circumstantial evidence, but is corroborated by a separate and similar accusation from another person. In every case, there are surrounding circumstances which create a strong suspicion of innocence because unreliable witnesses abound, motivated by grudges or influenced by malign feminists.

In many instances an individual in the background seems to have had a sinister role in manipulating the accusers. Very often the prospect of compensation is a strong motivating factor in promoting false accusations. None of those imprisoned were prepared to take remedial treatment to cure them as this means admitting to something they did not do and to being paedophiles. Unlike real paedophiles there is no indication that these men's sexual drives and impulses are locked on to children.

Are these men guilty? (The names have been changed.)

Case 1. Alan Jones is serving 14 years for rape and indecent assault of his two daughters. The accusations surfaced years after the abuse was supposed to have occurred and after his marriage had ended.

The most disturbing factor is that his eldest daughter, his main accuser, possibly has links with the local feminist activists who may have used her testimony on television and in the press to promote their beliefs. The suspicion is that they may have coached her in her evidence for the trial. This daughter, who is known to over-fantasise, made accusations after she was involved with a deliverance church cult (seeking out satanism sexual abuse) some of whose members were at his trial. If there are links between radical feminists and anti-satanists this could be a weird mix of anti-family and pro-family fundamentalism.

The more mainstream religious convictions of Alan are a possible provocation to the fundamentalist deliverers. His religious faith and commitment contrasted with his ex-wife's and may now be a factor in her hostility towards him when combined with her flirtation with lesbianism. Recently his son has said that his mother and sisters stitched up his father.

Case 2. Harold Hart was told by his legal advisers that he could receive a life sentence if he was found guilty after having pleaded not guilty. It is not just the police who extract false confessions! Terrified, he pleaded guilty to things he had not done and received twelve years for rape and indecent assault. One accuser was the daughter of a woman who had started living with his brother. Harold knows the girl lied and there are signed witness statements that he never met her until 1993 although the charges related to 1991.

This fact was never put as evidence at the trial as he pleaded guilty. Accusations against Harold and his brother started when the girl began a lesbian relationship with Harold's wife which is still going on. His wife suddenly made accusations against him, going back many years. Their four children are now in care.

Case 3. Dan Foster received a sentence of twelve years after being found guilty on one count of rape and three counts of indecent assault of the daughter who accused him. The charges were spread over non-specific dates in a ten year period making it impossible for him to establish any alibis. His other daughter and two sons made no accusations against him.

The family believe the accuser's husband is manipulating her. The accusations come from many years ago and suspicions of recovered memory therapy and compensation motives are strong. His daughter alleged her mother had been complicit in what was going on.

Case 4. Alec Thompson's troubles began when he was charged with thirteen counts of indecent assault and child cruelty committed over a three year period against a girl he had not seen for 12 years. He had a relationship in the eighties with the girl's alcoholic mother when he was twenty four and she was forty. She had left the girl's violent father and had been in a battered women's refuge.

Alec only knew the girl for 8 to 12 months of the longer time he was with her mother yet the charges of "attempting to put his finger up her anus every night" covered three years. The daughter admitted in court that she had made a criminal compensation claim before she had made the accusations. It turned out she received the claim form from a tutor on her child care course where she was being taught about child sexual abuse and told the court that she had been made aware that accusations were likely to be believed in the present climate.

She remembered, as though tutored, what had happened all those years before when she was only five but, as she received counselling, this could be the explanation. More misery may be in store for Alec as the social workers have given his wife dire warning of the difficulties to come when he is released, because of their young child, whether his appeal is successful or not.

Case 5. Gordon Johns has been released after a ten year sentence. He appears to be the casualty of a conspiracy by his second wife's twin daughters and son and their father, her former husband. Gordon was not around when she divorced her husband and kept her children around thirty years ago but her ex-husband has often attempted to get back with her.

Indeed within two weeks of Gordon going to jail her ex-husband phoned her suggesting they get back together. The accusers backed off from claiming financial compensation when it was stated that this was the motive for their allegations.This would have emphasised the perjury they are thought to have committed. Money was nevertheless involved as they thought that with Gordon out of the way their mother's money and the sale proceeds of her house might come to them.

Her son by Gordon never accused his father of abusing him. The charges of rape and indecent assault on which he was convicted were trawled out of the past probably when the main accusing daughter was receiving psychiatric help. The evidence against him is felt to be a concoction of false memories and wilful malicious lies.

Case 6. James Willis also had a counsel who tried to scare him with the threat of a very long sentence if he continued to plead not guilty and was found guilty. He refused to put his hands up to something he had not done. He received three years for each of four counts of indecent assault of the teenage daughter of his second wife's son. This step-granddaughter said he had abused her one night a week for two years, even though it was proven he had been with her only eight times in that period and then mostly with his wife.

Under police questioning the girl created and recovered memories of the abuse. Nothing was made of the fact that she was a disturbed child, routinely bullied because of her fatness who regularly reported the misdemeanours of fellow pupils to gain affection and approval from teachers. It was not mentioned in court that she had recreational involvement with a suspected paedophile who has received cautions from the police and courts and who, at the time, was currently under police investigation following allegations by the girl.

James has been released but as a convicted person this allows spiteful social workers and health professionals to hound him and his wife mercilessly and make the fall-out from the original miscarriage of justice a life-long hell for the couple. As his wife's daughter is now going through a divorce, her husband sees James' conviction as a lever to get the children and get at his wife. This has been the opportunity for social workers to declare that the couple's children are at risk from James. Yet, for his own protection, he only ever visits them with his wife and is scared of being left alone with them.

He has told social services he will stop seeing the children. However, they say this is not good enough as his wife and her daughter cannot be trusted with this arrangement. One of the children has been examined for sexual abuse by a zealous doctor with links to the feminist supremacists usually involved in the local sexual abuse scares. To ensure the persecution of this couple continues, the doctor has said that although there is no evidence of sexual abuse that does not mean that it has not happened!

Case 7. Barry Mawson left his wife for another woman. They had been married for twenty six years and had a large family. His wife and children, his new partner's husband, brothers and sisters all condemned them. Within several month's several of his offspring had remembered instances of sexual abuse and made accusations against their father.

At his trial Barry was put on probation and ordered not to go near his new partner's own children, thus forcing them to live apart most of the time. Despite police warnings, Barry Mawson's ex-wife harasses him in the street by tailing him in her car while her friends put up derogatory posters round the community denouncing him.

Case 8. Robert Logan has fought determinedly to prevent his incarceration in prison and succeeded. At the age of thirty, his eldest daughter was extremely depressed and suicidal. She was subjected to NHS counselling and drug therapy and delusions of long-past sexual abuse soon surfaced. Sceptics would treat this as drug induced paranoia and hallucinations but the NHS psychiatrist involved, according to his colleagues, is always determined to find abuse even when all the evidence points in the opposite direction.

Later Robert's other daughter, who had originally stated that she had not been abused and did not believe her sister was abused either, was to say that she had been raped 300 to 400 times by him between. the age of eight and sixteen. She remembered this with out recovered memory therapy. Robert subsequently went on trial charged on several counts of rape and indecent assault. His eldest daughter's allegations were held back presumably as her testimony was seen to be totally unsafe. Unfortunately this prevented mention of the likelihood of their collusion leading to the youngest daughter's allegations.

There was a hung jury and a retrial was ordered. In the intervening period Robert investigated his younger daughter's past. One person told him that she hoped to get compensation as a result of her accusations against him. Her ex-husband told him she received compensation after she falsely accused him of violent assault. An acquaintance of his daughter said she had been involved in photographing false bruising using make-up to enable one woman to accuse another.

His solicitor presented these statements to the court. His retrial was stopped and he walked free - but at a dreadful price. He has lost his family, home, mental equilibrium and savings (used in his struggle to keep out of jail) because of a chain of events begun by a psychiatrist practising the reprehensible recovered memory therapy tolerated by the NHS.

Case 9. A foster care scandal. This is about a man whose trial has not been reported because the child accusers cannot be named. He was a defendant who, with his wife, was both a foster carer and adoptive parent as well as the natural parent of older children. He was acquitted on ten counts of rape and indecent assault (including forcing children to commit sexual acts with each other) involving two of their three adopted children and one of two foster children.

The jury plainly did not believe the accusers' video testimony, not because they were children but because they were lying, inconsistent and colluding and influenced, before the trial, by contact with their alcoholic, unstable, natural mothers and their unsavoury, violent male partners. The jury also ignored the prejudiced summing-up comments by the judge and were plainly put off by the menacing approach of the prosecuting counsel towards the defendant and the very credible, defence witnesses.

Over 15 years the defendant and his wife had fostered between 25 and 30 children many from violent and abusive backgrounds. Such was their awareness of the possibility of false sexual abuse allegations from such children that they had a home regime where neither the defendant nor his natural adult sons were ever left in the house with the children unless an adult female - mother, wives, girlfriends - was there as well. The case created considerable problems for the council's fostering and adoption services as other fosterers feared for themselves when news spread that one of the most respected fostering-adoption families was in desperate trouble with the police and a social services department which held the defendant and his wife in such high regard that they were care assessors for them.

Many foster carers were trapped in a bind - frightened of also being accused of child sexual abuse, they considered giving up the children only to be deterred by the fear that this would lead to them being investigated. Due to their dreadful experiences the defendant's and his wife's lives as foster carers and adoptive parents had to end. There was no question of trying to keep the adopted children given the nightmare they had gone through. However social services would not admit to being wrong. To justify themselves they decided, despite the acquittal, that the defendant was guilty and threatened to stop his natural grandchildren visiting his home through a Family Court ruling.

They eventually gave in. The final bizarre twist is that the accusing children want to come home to their adoptive parents - rather odd for abused children! The naivete and innocence that their testimony could have sent their adoptive father to jail for twenty years was exploited by vindictive police officers and scheming social workers to create this tragedy. (In five other cases investigated it would appear that the men are not guilty. Everyone spoke of fellow inmates in the same predicament.)

In defence of truth. In the time of capital punishment it was often said that a liar was worse than a murderer because he or she could get you hanged. On the Richard and Judy TV show on 13th April 1998 when Jim Fairlie related the story of how his daughter had retracted false accusations of sexual abuse against him and other men, planted in her mind by NHS staff, a record 20,000 callers rang in. Stories of false accusations was the overwhelming message with accusations of sexual abuse increasingly being used as a weapon. Commitment to honesty and truth, is often lacking in a world where recrimination and vengeance is rife.

Finding someone to blame for one's troubles is the order of the day and if there is financial compensation to be had, the motivation to find scapegoats increases. Many abuse chasers say that family and close acquaintances do not really know their accused loved one or friend - that the accused are secret sexual abusers living a lie and putting on fronts. Therefore family and friend's experience of them is worthless as they are in denial of the accused's terrible deeds. As abuse searchers believe that sexual abuse is everywhere, for them much human interaction must comprise individuals deliberately deluding each other!

But if no-one approximates to what they are taken to be, then authenticity and trust disappear. The value of anonymity and the precious -privacy in public- it brings, comes from a reliable assumption of shared values between people not known to each other from which the trust necessary for society to function properly derives.

Action Against False Allegations of Abuse (AAFAA) P0 Box 84, Leeds LS5 3XZ. Spring 1999.