Richard Webster's investigation into the North Wales
children's home scandal raises crucial questions about how our
society deals with allegations of child abuse.
The Secret of Bryn Estyn, the former children's
home in North Wales that became the focus of one of the biggest
child abuse scandals of recent years, is, according to Richard
Webster, the very opposite to the version of events supplied by
the police, the media, the courts and the government. In a
700-page book, the result of nine years of research, Webster
claims that, far from being members of a 'paedophile ring', staff
at the North Wales children's homes were the victims of a modern
witch hunt and grotesque miscarriages of justice.
The bare bones of the Bryn Estyn story, also
supplied on the Orwell Press website (1), are this. On 15 March
1992, 40 police officers arrested 16 men and one woman in and
around Wrexham in North Wales. All but one had worked at Bryn
Estyn, a care home for adolescent boys on the outskirts of
Wrexham, which was closed down in 1984. According to reports which
began to appear in the press in 1991, Bryn Estyn had lain at the
centre of a conspiracy which supposedly involved the extensive
homosexual abuse of adolescent boys by a paedophile ring, whose
members terrorised their victims and subjected them to a regime of
violence and brutality.
This triggered the largest child abuse
investigation in Britain, which used a novel method of police
investigation: trawling former residents of care homes for
retrospective allegations. This method means that, instead of
acting upon allegations of abuse made spontaneously by
individuals, the police contacted those who were resident at the
care home at the time of the alleged abuse.
The trawling method resulted in allegations from
650 witnesses, who accused 365 people of abusing them at homes
throughout North Wales. When only six prosecutions followed, with
only two new convictions for sexual abuse, the police and the
authorities were accused of mounting a cover-up, with police
officers said to belong to the very paedophile ring they were
supposed to be investigating.
The story became a national scandal. A senior
police officer, publicly accused of raping adolescent boys at Bryn
Estyn, sued two national newspapers, a magazine and a television
company for libel and won. However, rumours of a cover-up
persisted; and in 1996 the government set up the largest Tribunal
of Inquiry in British history, under Sir Ronald Waterhouse. In
February 2000, the Tribunal made damning findings of extensive
abuse in North Wales - although it did not find evidence of a
police cover-up. By then, the police trawling operation which had
begun there had spread to the whole of Britain. Police forces
collected allegations against 5,000 former care workers and
teachers, and hundreds were arrested.
What really happened? One purpose of Webster's
book is to conduct his own investigation into the Bryn Estyn
affair, providing a powerful counter-narrative to the officially
endorsed story of widespread institutional abuse. Webster argues
that, while there were cases of abuse at Bryn Estyn, and two
former members of staff pleaded guilty to physical and sexual
abuse respectively, many of the allegations of abuse, and
particularly those related to supposed police cover-ups and
paedophile rings, simply could not be true. Using an impressive
volume of documentation and a tight chronology of events, the book
details inconsistencies and implausibilities in many of the
allegations, and points out the flaws in official procedures that
prevented these from being identified. He concludes that the
'secret of Bryn Estyn' is that 'it was an ordinary community home
where the majority of the staff did their best to look after the
difficult adolescents in their care' (p579).
This investigation is compelling, and at times
fascinating. But it is not the most significant aspect of the
book. While Webster's writing skill makes the tome readable, what
Webster terms 'the story of the story' is ultimately bewildering.
Even when you make it through the mass of names, dates, and
places, all of which are confused by the fact that Bryn Estyn
closed in 1984 but the police investigation did not start until
1991, the gulf between the official version of events and the
version uncovered by Webster's investigation is so wide as to be
incredible. The more persuasive Webster's version seems, the
harder it is to believe that official procedures came to such
different conclusions. By page 581, when the appendices start, you
are left not really knowing what to believe.
But that, in many ways, is the point. For in
exposing the difficulties in attempting to prosecute for alleged
cases of child abuse that happened in the past, The Secret of Bryn
Estyn offers some undeniable truths. Allegations of child abuse,
solicited from damaged young men by police officers and social
workers actively seeking such allegations, should not simply be
accepted as matters of fact. Changes in the law, which have sought
to make prosecutions for child abuse more efficient and effective,
make people highly vulnerable to being convicted as a consequence
of false allegations. And these changes have taken place in a
climate of insecurity and mistrust, which provides fertile ground
for witch hunts of the most dark and dangerous kind. In these
circumstances, not knowing what to believe is far preferable to
accepting allegation as fact.
The police method of trawling for allegations of
abuse that happened is based, it would seem, on a humane and
commonsense notion: that children who are abused often do not
report the abuse, with the result that their abusers can get away
with it. If an adult later reports that they were abused as a
child, it is even more difficult to prove the abuse, and convict
the abuser. But by trawling the alleged victims' peers, who would
have also been in contact with the alleged abuser, it is deemed
possible to ascertain whether the accused is likely to have
committed those crimes, or whether the individual complainant is
making a false allegation. In short, the idea seems to be that if
a lot of people claim to have been abused by the same person, they
probably were.
Logically, this process seems to make sense.
However, it is fraught with dangers. The fact that
allegations of abuse collected by trawling are not made
spontaneously immediately introduces the power of
suggestion into the proceedings. This can be compounded by
certain psychological theories to do with the denial of
abuse by its victims and the need for 'disclosure'. This
assumes that victims of abuse often initially deny they
are abused, and therefore need to be prompted, or
questioned several times, in order to disclose the 'truth'
that they were in fact abused. It is not hard to imagine
that individual police officers, working to build a case,
can sometimes inadvertently steer their witnesses in a
particular direction.
Major press coverage, with lurid stories of
unimaginable horrors allegedly suffered by former care home
residents, appeared at the time of the North Wales investigation.
The offers of financial compensation to those who had been abused
during their time in care could, one would think, easily sway
young men with little money at their disposal towards making
allegations when they might not otherwise - and how much more so
when law firms realise the potential rewards of seeking
compensation on behalf of those who could be victims.
All of this creates a situation ripe for false
allegations of abuse - which, it should be stressed, often does
not mean stories that are consciously or systematically made up.
False allegations are fundamentally untrue. However, in a climate
where individuals are continually confronted with the possibility
they may have been abused and the awareness that their peers were
allegedly abused, and when they are offered rewards for saying
they were abused, they become highly suggestible, to the point
where it is possible for them to believe that they were abused by
a particular person in a particular way, even if it never happened
in reality.
This is especially the case when dealing with
such a vulnerable group as the former care home residents in North
Wales. For the most part, these were young men with troubled
backgrounds, who often ended up in care because of their brushes
with the law and gained criminal records when leaving care. The
significance of finding oneself suddenly on the other side,
treated with respect by the police officers who would normally be
arresting you, and hailed as a victim/hero, should not be
underestimated.
As Webster writes: 'People who have previously
felt overlooked and insignificant may suddenly find themselves the
centre of attention, concern and sympathy. At the same time the
idea that they are now engaged in a battle against evil, in which
many other people, including counsellors and social workers, are
fighting alongside them, can be a source of great emotional
energy. It may give people both a raison d'etre and a feeling of
strength and solidarity which they did not previously have.'
(pp131-132)
This is not to say that police trawling
operations, such as the one in North Wales, will solicit nothing
but false allegations. Some allegations will be true. The
difficulty lies in sorting which cases of abuse actually happened
from which did not. But this is where Webster's criticisms of the
legal process used to prosecute child abuse cases comes into play.
As Webster notes, different alleged offences are
normally tried separately in order to protect innocent defendants
against the presumption of guilt. However, in certain
circumstances, if crimes are sufficiently similar they can be
tried together under the rules governing 'similar fact' evidence -
meaning that testimony about one crime can be offered as
corroboration of another. Again, this makes a certain logical
sense - and it is easy to see how, if somebody stands accused of
indecently assaulting several children in a similar way a long
time ago, to try the crimes together appears to be both an
efficient use of resources and the only possible way to secure a
conviction.
But what if the allegations are false? Focusing
on the sheer volume of allegations of depravity against an
individual must surely sway a jury in a particular direction, and
when many allegations are being dealt with, the quality of the
specific allegations comes under less scrutiny. A crime that,
because of the lapse of time between the alleged abuse and the
allegation, is necessarily a case of the defendant's word against
the complainant's, is tried on the basis of a defendant's word
against that of several presumed victims. At worst, this invites
the possibility that false allegations are collected against
individuals who are not guilty of the charges they face, and these
false allegations are used as corroborative evidence that other
false allegations are true. How can somebody hope to defend
himself against that?
A report by the House of Commons Home Affairs
select committee in 2002, titled The Conduct of Investigations
into Past Cases of Abuse in Children's Homes, included in its
conclusions a caution against the increased use of the 'similar
fact' principle, for precisely these reasons:
'Whilst we accept that the criminal justice
system needs to be more sensitive to the needs of victims and
witnesses, we are concerned that the proposed removal of
safeguards for the defendant…may further prejudice the defendant
in historical child abuse trials. We are particularly concerned
about the proposed relaxation of the rules of evidence, which may
allow for greater admission of "similar fact" evidence. In our
view, given the sensitive and difficult nature of investigating
allegations of historical child abuse, there is a strong case for
establishing special or additional safeguards for the exclusion of
prejudicial evidence and/or severance of multiple abuse charges.'
(2)
As the Select Committee's report indicates,
since the North Wales children's home scandal the law has
been gradually moving further in the direction of relaxing
the legal safeguards that presume defendants to be
innocent, in order to secure convictions of sexual abusers
whom it would otherwise be very difficult to convict. The
trouble is that the extent to which these developments
rightly punish sexual offenders for heinous crimes, and
the extent to which they imprison innocent people on the
basis of false allegations, we will probably never know.
The Secret of Bryn Estyn is invaluable in
reminding us of these legal trends, and the dangers they can pose
to people wrongly accused of abuse. It is also a timely commentary
on cultural trends, and the dangers that the contemporary
obsession with child abuse pose to the fabric of our society.
Towards the end of the book, Richard Webster
details the numerous investigations into alleged abuses at
children's homes that were triggered by the investigations in
North Wales, again involving massive trawling operations. As a
consequence, residential care home workers - whether they find
themselves accused of abuse or not - have become demonised. Such
is the suspicion that now surrounds anybody working with children
in such a setting, and so nervous have these workers become that
they might face an allegation of abuse, that it is hard to imagine
why anybody would choose to work in this low-pay, high-risk
sector. Indeed, it is now assumed that the only reason why
somebody would choose such a job is because they have a base
motive for living in close quarters with children.
What this reveals, Webster argues, is 'one of
the most terrible instances of collective ingratitude' towards
people prepared to help the minority of troubled, abandoned young
people our society produces (p574). And we have to ask what the
general suspicion of care workers does to the young people in
their charge. How does it affect young adults, having left care to
gain jobs and families of their own, to be the subject of trawling
operations that tacitly encourage them to think about their
childhood in terms of abuse? Five minutes of fame and some small
financial reward cannot compensate for the emotional pressure this
must bring to bear: indeed, in the five years following the North
Wales police investigation, three former residents committed
suicide.
Moreover, the more false allegations of abuse
that are solicited by police trawling tactics, the more this leads
to what Webster describes as an 'inflationary spiral of
disbelief', which sheds doubt upon any allegation of abuse. As
Webster argues: '[O]ne of the greatest failings of the modern
child protection movement is that, in its zeal to believe all
allegations, it has betrayed the very children it seeks to protect
and ushered in the return of the climate of disbelief that it
sought to banish for ever.' (p552)
Residential care workers are not the only group
to find themselves vulnerable in this climate. An excellent review
in the Times Educational Supplement encourages teachers to read
Webster's discussion of 'similar fact evidence' with care, as
teachers too are 'potentially vulnerable to allegations' (3).
Daycare workers, too, have found themselves accused of the most
depraved acts, and been unable for several years to clear their
names, despite acquittal early on by the criminal courts (see
Child protection questions: Issues raised by the Lillie and Reed
case, by Jennie Bristow). Where can this lead, except to a
situation where we do not trust anybody to care for children
without abusing them? Is this the kind of society that we want to
create?
Introducing his book, Webster argues that 'of
all of the misconceptions about historical witch hunts, perhaps
the most important is the notion that they were driven forward by
the common people - that they were based on the untutored
instincts of the mob. This is the very opposite of the truth …[The
witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries] were sent
in motion not by ordinary people but by an educated elite
consisting of bishops, ministers, magistrates and judges…
Historically, indeed, witch hunts have always relied upon judges
and magistrates, and on official inquiries, in order to maintain
their power and authority' (pp9-10).
Occasionally, our society does worry that it is
in the grip of a 'paedophile panic', and points to illiterate mobs
on housing estates running intimidation campaigns against the
local paediatrician. The Secret of Bryn Estyn reminds us that the
real danger comes, not from the passionate mob, but from the
higher echelons of the British state. However the North Wales
children's home scandal started, in the end the protagonists were
politicians, the police, and the law courts.
In the name of protecting children and punishing
perverts, the state was able to embark on a crusade to cleanse
society of an unspeakable evil, overturning core principles of
truth and justice as it went, regardless of the wider damage this
could cause to care workers around the country and those who had
grown up in children's homes. And now, it takes a book like
Webster's to force us to think what has become the unthinkable:
that not every residential care worker is a paeodophile just
waiting to get caught.
The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern
Witch Hunt by Richard Webster is published by the Orwell Press.
Buy this book from
Amazon (UK).
