TRIAL BY MEDIA
(Published in Hospital Doctor, March 9, 2006)
THE UNTOLD story behind the unrelenting media persecution of Professor Sir Roy Meadow is how a committed group of campaigners deliberately and successfully managed to trade up the issue of his statistical evidence in the Sally Clark trial to a general acceptance that MSBP was, in the words of the Telegraph on January 19 last year, a “now discredited theory”.
A clue to the extent of the lack of objectivity in the press emerged in the wake of last month’s High Court judgment restoring Professor Meadow to the medical register and reversing the GMC’s finding last July that he had been guilty of serious professional misconduct. At the opening of the appeal Mr Justice Collins said the Sally Clark case had been “presented by the media as Professor Meadow’s evidence having caused a miscarriage of justice. That’s unfair, manifestly unfair.”
Funnily enough, that criticism failed to surface in all but the medical press and, when Justice Collins finally handed down his judgment, the response in the media was strangely muted. This, after all, was not a decision that chimed with the public perception of Meadow the monster that the media had helped to create.
Selective reporting also ensured that most readers of national newspapers did not read Justice Collins’ rebuke of the GMC’s Fitness to Practise Panel for criticising Meadow for “‘undermining of public confidence in doctors who have this pivotal role in the Criminal Justice System’.” Why? Because, the judge continued, “If the full facts are taken into account and the media campaign based on a lack of knowledge of all the circumstances is ignored, that comment is unjustified.”
The remark suggested strongly that Justice Collins felt the GMC panel had allowed itself to be influenced by biased media coverage, but this intriguing possibility was, unsurprisingly, not explored in the media. The Guardian was among the papers that ignored this part of the judgment. What it did find room for, however, was an interview with Penny Mellor, the woman who has been heavily involved in the campaign against Professor Meadow and MSBP and behind many of the complaints that have been leveled against doctors working in the difficult field of child protection.
Under the headline “Tireless voice vows to continue speaking out”, Mellor was introduced as “The mother of eight lauded and criticized in equal measure for her campaign to expose Sir Roy Meadow as an over-zealous child snatcher”. Actually, that was a touch harsh: in the press Mellor has pretty much only ever been lauded, and frequently quoted, as a self-styled “child advocate” (a curiously Orwellian job description for a sworn defender of women accused of harming their children).
Mellor told the Guardian that in the wake of Professor Meadow’s reinstatement she was helping five families to bring actions against him at the GMC. “This isn’t about a witchhunt,” she said, but added: “I can’t sit back and watch doctors put forward malevolent theory as fact.”
It’s not the first time Mellor has been lionized in the press: in the Evening Standard on February 24, 2003, she was billed as “The scourge of the child-snatchers” and, on this occasion, credited as a “child welfare campaigner”. The article repeated the common myth - which deliberately ignores the reality of the legislated collegiate approach to child protection enshrined in the Children Act 1989 and the Department of Health’s 1999 guidance “Working Together to Safeguard Children” - that up and down the country parents were battling against social services “which, she says, are armed with nothing more than an opinion by Sir Roy and are threatening to take away their children”.
The piece was by David Cohen, the same journalist responsible just under a year later for an interview with Professor Meadow’s first wife, Gillian, headlined: “He doesn’t like women, says ex-wife”. If ever there was a moment when it became clear that, for the press, Roy Meadow had become fair game, this was it. Professor Meadow, Gillian was reported as saying, was a misogynist.
So how did MSBP come to be accepted by the media as a “malevolent theory”? If the tactic was to smear the diagnosis by smearing the man behind it, it was a complete success.
By February 2002 the label was already so tainted that a besieged Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Heath deemed it necessary to declare to its members that henceforth “Fabrication or induced illness by a carer” was the preferred term. There was no doubt in the mind of the RCPCH working party that reported that month, however, that the notion that some mothers did secretly harm their children was as valid now as it was when Sir Roy first articulated it in his 1977 paper, “Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy - The Hinterland of Child Abuse”. Part of the working party’s remit was to “examine the evidence base around Fabricated Illness”, and after so doing it emerged with several recommendations. Among them was that paediatricians “need to recognise that fabrication of symptoms or signs, and sometimes the induction of illness, by carers may be the explanation for a child’s illness”.
The DoH wasn’t far behind. Six months later, in August 2002, it issued a supplementary guidance document, “Safeguarding children in whom illness is Fabricated or Induced”. It ought to have left nobody in any doubt that MSBP – whatever one chose to call it – was a real problem, and that “all agencies and professionals should be alert to potential indicators of illness being fabricated or induced in a child”.
It is difficult to see how the media myth that MSBP was thoroughly “discredited” could have persisted after such a resounding vote of confidence but, again thanks again to selective reporting, it did. It also didn’t help when, in February 2003, Earl Howe, Opposition spokesman on health in the Lords, accused Meadow of inventing a “theory without science ... one of the most pernicious and ill-founded theories to have gained currency in childcare and social services over the past 10 to 15 years”.
The lord’s quotes were used widely in the media and still have pride of place on the website Mothers Against Munchausen Accusations (MAMA), which serves a virtual HQ for Mrs Mellor and her fellow activists. They also offered evidence that Mrs Mellor has the ear of senior politicians, as well as journalists. As postings on the MAMA site have made clear, Earl Howe and Mrs Mellor had been in direct contact with each other for more than a year before his public condemnation of Professor Meadow.
By January 2004, when Angela Cannings successfully appealed against her convictions for murder, the entirely separate issues of Professor Meadow’s use of statistics and the very credibility of MSBP had been inextricably conflated by the media. With hindsight, it appears as though even the Government, caught in the headlights of the hue and cry, was stampeded into inappropriate action.
A story in the Sunday Telegraph on January 19, 2004, was typical, reporting the suggestion that in the wake of Cannings the Government was to review 5,000 family court cases supposedly tainted by “Professor Meadow’s now discredited theory of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy”. To the horror of paediatricians and child protection workers across the country, a comment by Margaret Hodge, the minister for children, poured fuel on the fire: “The theory that some mothers harm their children to draw attention to themselves has been largely discredited as a result of a series of high-profile court cases.”
In vain did the Crown Prosecution Service try to stem the mounting post-Cannings hysteria by pointing out that Clark’s convictions had not hinged on Meadow’s evidence. Newspapers, feeding on the Government's suggestion that up to 5,000 civil and 300 criminal cases might have to be re-evaluated in the light of the failure of the Clark and Cannings convictions, and the acquittal of Trupti Patel, tore Meadow to shreds.
“The scale of the injustice he contributed to makes the false convictions of the Guildford Four look like trivial technical problems,” wrote the Observer on January 25, 2004. The Daily Telegraph went further: “He and his friends may be immune from prosecution for the consequence of the opinions they have so sedulously expressed in court, but that does not mean they cannot be charged with wasting police time”. The Times contented itself with condemning Meadow’s “crazed theories”.
All the national papers, however, missed one interesting story that spring of 2004, which did appear in The Auditor, the monthly journal of the Scientology movement in the UK. It reported that on April 24 the Citizens Commission on Human Rights – an arm of the Scientology movement dedicated to “investigating and exposing psychiatric human rights abuse” – had staged a ceremony in East Grinstead, Sussex, at which awards were presented to individuals who had “worked to expose human rights abuses in the mental health field”. “Penny Mellor,” reported the journal, “was honoured for her vigorous campaigning to expose the psychiatric label Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy”. This, according to the CCHR, was “a national scandal that involved widespread oppression by healthcare professionals … Such has been the pace of the MSBP bandwagon in the UK, thousands of children have been taken from their parents and placed in care homes, put up for adoption or placed in psychiatric facilities.”
There was no doubt that Mrs Mellor had certainly paid a price for her “vigorous campaigning”. The journalists quick to call her for a quote are never quite so quick to remind readers that in March 2002 the “child advocate” was jailed for two years at Newcastle Crown Court for conspiring in January 1999 to abduct a child, after doctors suspected it might be a victim of MSBP. The judge decided Mellor had been “the Svengali of the whole plan” to keep the child out of the hands of social workers. Mrs Mellor denied the charge but the judge told her: “What you are guilty of is orchestrating the abduction of a child for your own propaganda purposes.” She served eight months in prison.
Despite the over-excited propaganda that filled the newspapers throughout the early part of 2004 (“Thousands of wrongly convicted parents”, a typical headline wrongly predicted), the much-heralded review of cases carried out at the instigation of the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, far from overturning hundreds of supposedly unjust judgments, in fact yielded almost no cases worthy of reconsideration. Yet when this news broke, the media preferred to present it as it has now presented Professor Meadow’s successful appeal against the GMC – not as a vindication of an unfairly hounded doctor but as a blow to campaigning parents. On December 28 last year, the Mail contorted itself to produce this headline: “Review ordered following disgrace of expert leaves hundreds in prison.”
Meadow has experienced similar vilification to that endured by David Southall and Martin Samuels, paediatricians at University Hospital North Staffordshire in Stoke, after they became the targets of campaigners in 1999 for their child-protection work. Mrs Mellor, incidentally, was also behind the charges levelled against them, the most extraordinary of which was that Southall “instigates care proceedings in order to appear as an expert witness for which he is paid a phenomenal amount of money”. He was also accused of accusing mothers of MSBP in order to procure babies for experimentation and – in a reference to his work for the charity Child Advocacy International – of baby racketeering in Bosnia.
The charges were deemed so serious by the trust that both men were suspended for almost two years while two separate inquiries unraveled the truth – that all the allegations were utterly without foundation.
In November 1999, Harvey Marcovitch, then consultant paediatrician at Horton Hospital, Banbury and Editor of Archives of Disease in Childhood, wrote in the BMJ of his horror at what he had found on the MAMA website: “It was full of attacks on named paediatricians and child psychiatrists, and diatribes against two judges, a member of parliament and various social workers. The accusations included perjury, conspiracy to defraud, attempted blackmail and child abuse.”
Marcovitch reported that another message, signed “Penny”, had read: “Why I compared David Southall to Joseph Mengele: Joseph Mengele experimented on Jewish children in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. Gloria's two children were named Joshua and Aaron. Need I say more?"
Southall and Meadow were two of the 18 doctors, mainly paediatricians, who signed a letter to the BMJ in January 2002, headed “GMC must recognise and deal with vexatious complaints fast”, in which they made clear they had been specifically targeted by campaigners who had resorted to a campaign of vexatious complaints to destroy their careers. The letter pointed out that all 18 signatories had, according to postings on the MAMA website, been reported to the GMC by “the same small group of people”.
Attempts to clarify the situation with the GMC had been unsuccessful, but when one of the doctors used the Data Protection Act to obtain material held on file by the council they were “disturbed to find that members of the council's staff and a regular complainant were on first-name terms”.
In February 2003, a finally exonerated Samuels wrote to the BMJ highlighting the way in which abusers and their supporters were “increasingly adept at using complaints procedures and the media to attack professionals”. The media, he said, “with only one side of the story, parade parents who claim to be falsely accused. On the other hand, they heavily criticise frontline workers who make mistakes.”
Samuels was in no doubt that the cause of this bias was a “highly complex campaign that is attempting to discredit paediatricians involved in the detection of complex child abuse, particularly fabricated and induced illness”, and that it sent out a “clear message that these individuals and alleged perpetrators wish to see the diagnosis of fabricated and induced illness abolished”.
Exchanges on the MAMA website appear to make clear that at the same time as she was busy accusing Southall and Samuels in 1999, Mrs Mellor – although neither a patient nor the parent of a patient of any of the doctors concerned - was also complaining to the GMC about Professor Meadow. So far, only the Clarks’ complaint against him has been heard by the GMC, but postings by someone calling herself “Penny Mellor” in the days following Professor Meadow’s High Court exoneration make plain a determination to pursue the campaign against him.
The postings bear repeating here because of the insight they offer into a world dominated by a curious blend of conspiracy and conspiracy theory which has nonetheless managed to capture the attention of the nation’s journalists and, according to the RCPCH, threaten child protection by making doctors reluctant to report suspected child abuse. It also reveals the depth of a contempt that extends beyond the individual doctors who have incurred Mrs Mellor’s wrath to embrace both the law and, remarkably, the GMC – the very body she still hopes will continue to pursue Roy Meadow.
“Penny Mellor” joined a MAMA forum discussion on Professor Meadow’s successful appeal at 5.48pm on Friday February 17, the same day Justice Collins handed down his judgment. Replying to another member’s post, she wrote (all spellings, etc, unchanged): “Yes Andrew what are the GMC going to do... I know what I'm doing and for the record the next wave of complaints have nothing to do with evidence given in court and are not ‘priveleged’ [sic] Thanks Justice Collins the GMC did us no favours when they struck him off - bunch of incompetents.”
A few minutes later, at 5.52pm, she opened a new thread, “Anyone interested in the Meadow decision please watch/listen”, containing what appeared to be a message for Professor Alan Craft, President of the RCPCH: “Watch this space Crafty et al - because you have no idea what's coming.”
By 8.19pm she was suggesting that “I am more than a little sure that today's judgement had very little to do with Roy per se and everything to do with the AG's [Attorney General’s] perceived interference in matters of law - this was [Justice] Collins at his best - reknowned [sic] for sticking two fingers up at the government - it's no coincidence that the judgement was handed down three days after the AG's announcements about expert witnesses and what they must now do.”
The posting continues “So may I remind our lurkers [a reference to the doctors and others whom she believes monitor the site] of a couple of things - evidence given at expert witness conferences is NOT privileged”, and then goes on to make two specific allegations against Professor Meadow which, for legal reasons, Hospital Doctor is unable to repeat.
The posting ends with another promise of more action to follow: “Nobody on this board could be surprised I predicted this would happen given the legal arguments in court and because we knew, the preparations for the next phase are well under way.”
By the following morning, the day the Guardian ran its “Tireless voice” profile on her, Mellor had obviously had second thoughts about Justice Collins’s role. Following her earlier suggestion that his judgment had been motivated by a desire to “stick two fingers up at the government”, at 10.44am she opened a new thread with the potentially contemptuous subject line: “Was Justice Collins nobled [sic] – a question for parliament I think”.
Although Mellor had insisted in the Guardian that morning that “I have already had confirmation from the GMC that these cases will proceed”, the GMC told Hospital Doctor that no such decision had yet been made, not least because the organisation was still considering whether to appeal the Meadow judgment. The GMC is considering a Freedom of Information application to disclose how many complaints it has received from Mrs Mellor, how many doctors have been the subjects of those complaints and – because he has granted permission for the details to be disclosed - how many have been against Professor Southall in particular.
Paul Phillip, the GMC’s Director of Fitness to Practise, said “The whole situation relating to serial and vexatious complaints is a difficult one”, but added that the GMC was introducing a new IT system this year which would make it easier to flag up and identify patterns.
One thing that is certain, however, is that Mrs Mellor is, indeed, tireless: in addition to the GHC and assorted NHS Trusts, over the past six or seven years she has complained to everyone from the RCPCH, the Central Council for Nursing, social services and the police to the NHS Executive, Chief Medical Officer, Health Minister and Prime Minister. Another certainty is that the media seems never to tire of being easily persuaded that inside every eminent doctor is a Harold Shipman waiting to be exposed.
Although an incalculable amount of time and money has been spent investigating Mrs Mellor’s allegations – to say nothing of the stress caused to the people she has accused and the damage to their valuable work - not one has led to disciplinary action against any professional. It remains to be seen whether the authorities – including the GMC, Mrs Mellor’s despised “bunch of incompetents” - will ever allow itself to tire of Mrs Mellor, “The scourge of the child snatchers”. Child protection professionals everywhere can only hope so.