This item was first published on the FACT website on the 12th December 2004
Transcribed from HANSARD Thursday 2 December 2004
The House met at half-past Eleven o'clock
PRAYERS
[Mr. Speaker in the Chair]
Oral Answers to Questions
Teachers (Malicious Allegations)
The Minister was asked
3. Tony Cunningham (Workington) (Lab) : What steps he is taking to protect teachers from malicious allegations made against them by pupils. [201229] The Minister for School Standards (Mr. David Miliband): In November my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State launched a consultation on a new process for dealing with allegations against teachers and school staff. The consultation covers the reduction of time scales, new procedures to improve the management of cases and, significantly, advice by the Association of Chief Police Officers that anyone under investigation should not be named until they are charged with an offence. Tony Cunningham: I am sure my hon. Friend would agree that there should be zero tolerance of abuse in the classroom. Equally, there must be zero tolerance of malicious complaints against teachers. Will my hon. Friend assure the House that complaints will be dealt with speedily, and that firm action will be taken against those who make malicious complaints? Mr. Miliband: As a former teacher, my hon. Friend speaks with real knowledge of the matter. He is right that the trauma of abuse of trust and of unfounded allegations need to be tackled. I am pleased that about 70 pr cent. of all cases are currently dealt with within three months, but we want to raise that figure to 95 per cent. because speed is of the essence. I remind the House that the sanctions on false and malicious allegations are extremely serious, including charges of perjury and perverting the course of justice. Sir Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire) (Con): Does the Minister agree that the most important consideration is to preserve the anonymity of those charged? He referred to that in his answer. Will he assure the House that from now onwards, any teacher who is charged will have his or her anonymity preserved until we know that that man or woman is guilty? 2 Dec 2004 : Column 764
Mr. Miliband: It is certainly our view that teachers should have their anonymity preserved until they are charged, if they are charged. I should point out that very few are charged; about 17 per cent. of all cases end in a prosecution. I am pleased that ACPO has issued new guidance to preserve anonymity. There is also the responsibility of the press in the matter. The Press Complaints Commission guidance is very clear about what those responsibilities are, and I would expect the press to follow that guidance. Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab): The Minister will know that it is not only in formal education that the poison of malicious allegations has been a terrible problem in recent years; it also occurs in informal education through the youth service. Will he ensure that the processes affecting teachers that he hopes to introduce in the
next couple of years will also apply in the youth service? Mr. Miliband: My hon. Friend raises a good point. When we speak of unfounded allegations and of anonymity, simply to speak of teachers is not sufficient, given the range of professionals who work with young people. The safeguards that we want for children and for staff should apply to all those who work with young people in and out of schools. Rev. Martin Smyth (Belfast, South) (UUP):
Significantly, in Portcullis House there is a conference dealing with false allegations of abuse and what has happened in the courts over the years. We welcome the improvements and the commitment from police officers, but will the Minister consult with his colleagues throughout Government so that legislation might be brought in to safeguard children and teachers? It is important that in the youth service at large, those who devote themselves to teaching can be protected, as well as those whom they teach. Mr. Miliband: The House knows that the hon. Gentleman has a long and distinguished record in campaigning on these issues and bringing attention to them. I am happy to say that there is proper consultation right across the United Kingdom on the issue. It is important, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has pointed out, that the Bichard inquiry referred to matters in this area, and we will respond to that shortly. I hope we will help to provide some of the reassurance that the hon. Gentleman seeks. Mr. Tim Collins (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (Con): What the Minister said about speeding up trials is welcome, and his remarks about the importance of preserving anonymity will also be welcomed by many teacher unions and their representatives. But he knows that they want more than simple guidance from ACPO and exhortations to the media from the Minister, so why will he not act on what the teacher unions have specifically requested; legislation to guarantee anonymity in those circumstances? Mr. Miliband: The teacher unions have actually said that they want to see how the new ACPO guidance works, because this is an area where there are difficult issues. My hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris 2 Dec 2004 : Column 765 Bryant) referred to adults who do not have teaching status but work with young people none the less. We want to ensure that the guidance works, and I hope that we can count on the hon. Gentleman's support in ensuring that it does. Mr. Collins: The Minister will know that we of course hope that guidance works, but he will also know that many teachers have been in extraordinary distress because their details have been published in the local media, placed there either by people in schools or by the police. He will know that a head teacher committed suicide this year in the Isle of Wight because his details were released in that way.
May I press the Minister again to say why he will not legislate? My party is committed to support legislation on this matter. We will support any legislation that this Government introduce. If they continue to refuse to introduce that legislation, we will introduce it in a teacher protection Bill in the first Queen's Speech of the next Conservative Government. Mr. Miliband: It is very sad that the hon. Gentleman has sought to make a party political issue of this matter, but I cannot let it pass. His right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) said that, under a Conservative Government: "In the first hour, ministers will explain to officials that we are not in the business of passing 4,000 new laws a year."I urge the hon. Gentleman to look at what his right hon. Friend is saying. This area requires careful application of the law and due diligence in every case. I think that the trauma both of abuse of trust and of abuse of teachers needs to be dealt with in a serious way by this House, and not in a posturing way. end...
This item was first published on the F.A.C.T. website on the 6th December 2004
The following article appeared in Wales On Sunday [a UK Newspaper] on 6th December 2004. It was written by Greg Lewis.
FEAR and suspicion have become the twin perils of modern life. They are the emotions that, collectively, we slip in to most comfortably. But in the rise of paranoia, the witch-hunt thrives. Over the past decade, a hunt for perpetrators of our most loathed crime has appeared to have been supremely successful. New police procedures for investigating 20 or 30-year-old – so-called 'historic' – allegations of child abuse have seen many convictions in court, including around 30 in Wales. But are the foundations of these cases built on shaky ground? And could cases which are organised by connecting allegation to allegation, accused to accused, unravel in just the same way? A conference at Portcullis House in Westminster this week confirmed the growing sense of unease. It was attended by medical and legal experts, police officers, members of the clergy and campaigners for dozens of accused – former teachers and carers – from across the UK. Organiser Claire Curtis-Thomas, who represents a constituency on Merseyside, explained in her notes to the meeting how she became involved in the issues. Shortly after she was elected, constituents asked her to look into cases of staff accused of abuse in children's homes. The Neath-born MP investigated and became concerned when she discovered how the cases had much in common with others around the country. "There were marked similarities throughout: multiple allegations arising after 10, 20, 30 or more years and made by several complainants, almost always men with police records, lack of any corroborating evidence, widespread indication of police trawling for fresh complaints, the issue of compensation and more," she explained.
When these huge multi-million pound police investigations got under way in the 1990s, it appeared we were being forced to face a frightening reality: that thousands of vulnerable and difficult youngsters had been abused during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s while in the care of approved schools and care homes. Almost 1,300 people in Wales alone made allegations of abuse to the four Welsh police forces, and the inquiries celebrated a series of high-profile convictions, including that of former headmaster Derek Brushett, of Dinas Powys, who was jailed for abusing 17 boys between 1974 and 1980. It was a turn-around in the fortunes of these kinds of investigation. Until that time, it had been difficult to secure convictions when looking at allegations of abuse so many years earlier. There is no medical evidence after so much time and no witnesses. So the police, under huge pressure to secure convictions, developed the simple principle that if they could have enough allegations against one individual they would have a case. It was the birth of 'trawling' – the process of contacting former care home and approved school residents to ask if they were ever abused. It is a detecting method which turned traditional policing methods on their head. Instead of starting with a crime and finding a suspect, the trawls begin with a suspect and looked for a crime. According to author Richard Webster in his book The Great Children's Home Panic this had far-reaching implications. "Police forces normally spend their time collecting evidence in relation to crimes whose reality no-one doubts," he writes. "They embark on retrospective investigations, however, without knowing whether the crimes they are investigating have taken place at all." When the cases come to court, the jury's dilemma is to discover the unknowable – what actually happened. What is meant to persuade them is the 'volume' of corroboration: the numbers of people making allegations. That leaves the defendant in an unenviable position. Like the prosecution he has no medical evidence to present. Allegations that abuse took place over months or years, on vague dates, are impossible to disprove. Documentation, like staff rotas and school registers, may have been destroyed; other members of staff may have died. Child abuse is abhorrent. So too must be the irreversible action of mistakenly labelling a person a child abuser and locking them away to face the unpleasant existence of the paedophile in jail. Officers' motives in these cases are beyond doubt. Their reaction to allegations of abuse is likely to be disgust, horror, revulsion, like ours. They experience many difficulties, emotional and professional, when working on these cases. But is the danger in the procedure itself? Does the trawl assume guilt, without addressing the central question: was a crime actually committed?
This item was first published on the F.A.C.T. website on 13th December
Responding to the debate on proposed new legislation to protect teachers accused of abuse by their pupils, the Chair of the General Teaching Council, Judy Moorhouse, said:
“The General Teaching Council is the independent, professional body for teaching with responsibility for ensuring that standards of professional conduct are upheld and the public interest safeguarded. The overwhelming imperative is to protect the safety and welfare of children and to ensure that genuine cases of harm are prevented or detected.
“We believe that allegations involving the possible abuse of pupils need to be handled as fairly and promptly as possible. The public interest does not require the naming of a teacher before they have been charged with a criminal offence. It can be extremely professionally damaging as well as personally distressing.”
The GTC is in the process of being consulted by the DfES on procedures for handling these difficult cases. The Council supports the suggestion that teachers under investigation by the police but who have not been charged with a criminal offence should not be identified to the press. This is an important safeguard to protect the position of those who may be innocent or where there is insufficient evidence to support a charge. The GTC also wants to see procedures reformed to ensure that cases are resolved as quickly as possible in the interests of all involved.
This item was first placed on the F.A.C.T website on 15th December 2004
A single false accusation can wreck an innocent teacher's life. It is time the law gave anonymity.
THIS WEEK, a boy of 12 stands accused of raping a teacher. Next week a 15-year-old appears in court on a similar charge. Quite rightly, their identities may not be revealed. They may be innocent. If the boot were on the other foot things would be different. When a teacher stands accused of molesting a child, however slightly, his or her name is all over the place. Sexual allegations, of course, are the worst. Even the flakiest accusation of brushing against a girl’s breast or resting a hand on a bare shoulder in a locker room gets that teacher in the daily papers: name and photograph, marital status, pictures of house, innuendo, the lot. Even non-sexual accusations bring down the ceiling. Throwing a bag at a recalcitrant boy had a teacher suspended for nine months, named and shamed. A piece of thrown chalk, an inadvised word, a moment of emergency restraint during a scuffle, an unforeseeable small accident on a school trip — all these expose the teacher not only to knee-jerk suspension but to hideous publicity, way beyond the neighbourhood. And the incident, remember, may be fictitious. In the case of the thrown bag, the teacher admits throwing it, though not as hard as was claimed. In thousands of other cases nothing happened: the accusation was mischievous. Ninety-nine per cent of allegations against teachers never reach court. Of those that do, three quarters end in acquittal.
Children are rarely evil, but they are often irresponsible, petulant, vengeful and silly. They’re children. Five minutes’ honest thought should tell us to be careful of believing everything they say. We should take them seriously and examine the evidence, but always remember that they are children. I sense contention here from the social work world, some of it from people I normally admire. The fashionable line is "children don’t lie about abuse". It was a necessary corrective, 20 years ago, to a convention whereby they were routinely disbelieved. But it has outgrown its zone of usefulness. The mantra "children don’t lie" may be accurate in extreme cases and among the youngest children; but it does not necessarily apply to every smirking, scheming teenager who decides to ruin Sir’s career by pretending he had his bottom touched. The Conservatives are today promising accused teachers a statutory right of anonymity until charges are brought.
The government reply is that anonymity is not the issue, and that the key is to deal more quickly with these cases. I am not sure that is enough. Even if suspension and public contumely last only months, rather than years, the shame of exposure is enough to unhinge almost anyone. Suspension, and the school community’s knowledge, are bad enough without letting the media have a go. I do not understand why David Miliband, the Schools Minister, can’t see that. Some will say, of course, that publicity encourages former victims to step forward; but there is time for that once actual charges are brought. If the initial accusation does not warrant a charge (99 per cent, remember, do not) it is unlikely that others will have much to add. No: it is in that delicate initial period, while police and school weigh up the accusations and interview the child, that publicity does its damage. And if you think about it, a dearth of reporting would be advantageous to some accusers. If a silly child has lied, he or she needs a chance to recant quietly. I used the situation in a novel once, based on a real case: the girl’s classmates gathered round her and told her to knock it off, because they knew she was lying and they missed their teacher. But by that time the newspapers had the man’s name, and there was a general corrosive hiss of "no smoke without fire" and "his wife’s pregnant, she used to look really young, perhaps he likes them young, perhaps he’s disgusted by her being pregnant . . ."
I talked yesterday with a real teacher who survived such an accusation in the 1990s. It was a boarding school: two boys swore vengeance after being suspended for drugs. They were cunning: they crept up on an unsuspecting boy in the night and touched his leg under his duvet, running off before he saw them. Next, one of them claimed that the teacher had groped him similarly; the crafty bit was that the duped boy was innocently able to say that it had happened to him too. When the case crawled to court a year later, the judge threw it out on the first day. The teacher had witnesses that he was nowhere near the house. The school could have cleared him quickly and internally, but under the Children Act it was mandatory to bring in the police and CPS. This innocent man spent a dreadful year. He is unmarried; innuendo flourished. Matter-of-factly, he described the intense depression, the resort to Prozac, the thoughts of suicide. The school community knew, pupils and parents and teachers; but in a way that was all right. They knew him and supported him. "Every single member of staff knew it was a fabrication." It was the wider public exposure that tormented him. Anonymity, he says, would have been a blessing. Even before the charges, "the local paper ran it, the nationals ran it. Friends living miles away read about it. I had been offered a headship and this was withdrawn when my picture was in the newspapers. My reputation was gone. There will always be accusations and suspension — but the extra strain of newspaper articles — oh, that is the final straw! It is absolutely intolerable!"
He came back to work. Trust was restored. The brother of the accuser happily stayed on. But this is unusual. Many accused teachers never come back even when cleared. Many others, looking on, decide that the profession is too risky. It is losing us good men.
I suppose government ministers, hardened to perpetual insult and unflattering images in the press, simply fail to understand how devastating it is to modest people. They say it does not matter, and that the only issue is speed. I think they are wrong.
This item was first published on the F.A.C.T. website on the 13th December 2004
There was a debate in the House of Commons yesterday (13 Dec 2004) on anonymity for teachers accused of abuse. You can read what was said here
F.A.C.T. Prison Vigils
Posted by News Editor
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
This item was first published on the F.A.C.T. website on the 20th December 2004
Our thanks to all those who supported our prison vigils. Despite the bad weather there was an excellent turnout. The feedback we have had from those who took part and from some of those on the 'other side' has been very touching. Not only have we been able to demonstrate our solidarity with all those wrongly accused but also get our message across to the general public. Thankyou.
This item was first published on the FACT website on 18th December 2004
Just to let you know. We have received several Christmas cards from F.A.C.T. members and supporters throughout the UK as well as seasonal greetings from Australia, Canada and Ireland.
Almost without exception a little note has been added to each one saying how much the work we do is appreciated. In addition we have also heard from several serving prisoners thanking every one who has done so for sending them Christmas Cards. They really have made a difference. On behalf of the Committee I am delighted to pass these thanks to you.