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Meadow:
the unseen victims This woman, let's call her Mumtaz, had a look of terror on
her face. Her baby girl has been taken away by the state and in the new
year she may be adopted for good. Mumtaz had been damned as a possible
sufferer of Munchausen's syndrome by proxy - a highly contentious label
suggesting that mothers harm their children to gain attention.
Inside the court a few minutes earlier, the creator of
Munchausen's syndrome by proxy, Professor Sir Roy Meadow, had been deemed
to be 'simply wrong'; his evidence a 'travesty'. Yet courts in the Family
Division, operating behind closed doors, can take away children and have
done so in dozens of cases on the basis of Meadow's evidence and his
Munchausen's theory.
Even to report what Mumtaz told me is to risk contempt of
court. Carma - let's call Mumtaz's baby that - suffered four serious
breathing attacks in the first four weeks of life and doctors couldn't
figure out what was happening. Munchausen's was the probable diagnosis of
paediatrician Dr Paul Davis from Cardiff, co-incidentally a co-author with
Meadow of a Munchausen paper.
Mumtaz, it was claimed, had been deliberately harming
Carma to gain attention. On the basis of this diagnosis - and Davis made
it without seeing Mumtaz or her baby, declaring he did 'not consider it
necessary to do so' - Mumtaz can no longer look after her child.
There is another, somewhat different, diagnosis: that
Munchausen's does not exist or, if it does, it presumes guilt, admits no
defence and, because it is not verifiable, has the scientific validity of
a flat earth.
But Birmingham Social Services believes in Munchausen's.
As withCannings, because Mumtaz cannot prove why her baby was ill, the
courts - in this case, Mrs Justice Bracewell - concluded there was a risk
she was harming it. Rather late in the day, the Appeal Court realised that
was barbaric in Angela's case, but Mumtaz has to endure her agony in
state-enforced anonymity.
Genetics and Munchausen's don't get on. Irritatingly for
supporters of Munchausen's, genes exist: they create a predisposition for
some diseases that we are only beginning to understand. Little or no hard
evidence supports Munchausen's: it's a behaviouralist label you cannot see
down a microscope.
On the one hand, Dr David Drucker at Manchester University
has isolated a gene which, if you've got it, makes you more liable to
suffer cot deaths - research you can read on the internet. On the other
hand, Meadow has issued a paper asserting that many cot deaths were in
fact murders: it is hard to check this because Meadow has shredded the raw
data on which this claim was based.
Voluminous evidence that points to Carma suffering from a
genetic problem does exist: over four generations, her family has suffered
24 deaths of infants under a year old; her husband's family have suffered
five infant deaths under a month; her husband's brother had a series of
breath ing attacks when he was an infant, as did one of his daughters. Yet
none of this evidence was thoroughly investigated before Dr Davis made his
diagnosis that Mumtaz probably suffered from Munchausen's.
With three criminal cases in one year - those of Sally
Clark, Trupti Patel and now Angela Cannings - all gone horribly wrong, the
courts throwing out Meadow's finding of serial baby-killing, the fightback
by the medical establishment has not been long in coming.
He is a hero, according to a letter in yesterday's Daily
Telegraph by Professor A. W. Craft, President of the Royal College of
Paediatrics, saluting Meadow's 'courage', assuring us that his portrait
will not be taken down and calling on the press and public to appreciate
the importance of child protection work, citing the Victoria Climbié
case.
A simple point is that if Craft cannot understand the
difference between the appalling evidence of child battery in the Climbié
case and the complete absence of evidence of abuse in the cases of Sally,
Trupti and Angela then I would be wary of asking him for a sticking
plaster for a cut finger, lest he amputate both my arms.
The facts are that some mothers do abuse, even kill their
children; and that some mothers who have done no such thing have been
jailed or lost their babies in the Family Courts on highly contentious
evidence provided by Meadow and his label.
Could meadow be a great and courageous doctor who has just
been a little unlucky lately? A fax arrived from him the other day,
replying to a list of questions. Number one was about Meadow's Law, that
'one cot death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, until
proven otherwise'.
'It is not my rule of thumb' he asserted. In fact the rule
of thumb was devised by a Texas pathologist but adopted by Meadow without
specific attribution. I commend to readers page 29 of The ABC of Child
Abuse , edited by a Roy Meadow, in a chapter written by a Roy Meadow,
setting out the sensible working rule of one, two, three.
On the infamous '73 million to one' statistic he used
against Sally Clark (one of the judges who turned down her first appeal
was, co-incidentally, Mrs Justice Bracewell, the same judge who found
against Mumtaz), Meadow wrote: 'Your account of the Appeal Court finding
is incorrect. I have copies of the full judgments of the first and second
appeals. Neither of them said that any part of the evidence was
"grossly misleading" and "manifestly wrong".'
That's astonishing. Observe closely what he's done: he's
selected the written findings only, ignoring what was said by Lord Justice
Kay in open court when the second appeal was granted. Memory can play
tricks, so I checked my notebook, and double-checked with my producer, Jim
Booth, and triple-checked with John Batt of Sally Clark's team: one, two,
three of us heard the learned judge say 'grossly misleading' and
'manifestly wrong'.
Knowing how he treats evidence, his third assertion gave
me a pricking in my thumbs: that 'the 73 million to one statistic is not
mine'. Evidentially, that is right. Yet he lifted '73 million to one' from
a draft copy of a cot death study report before it was published. One of
the authors of that report, Professor Peter Fleming, said of his use of
'73 million to one' in the Sally Clark case: 'one should never use
population statistics for an individual - it's fundamentally not correct;'
two: Peter Donnelly, professor of statistics at Oxford, said: 'it's just
plain wrong', as did, three, Ray Hill, professor of maths at Salford.
Understanding the mind of Professor Sir Roy Meadow has
taken me two years, since I first made a Five Live Report on '73 million
to one' in July 2001. Long before Angela Cannings went before the jury
that convicted her, we established that Professor Meadow was wrong about
statistics and genetics and that he had shredded his database.
Officially, nothing happened and the witch-hunt against
Angela ground on. Very few scientists and doctors would say boo about
Professor Meadow, a shining exception being Jean Golding, professor of
epidemiology at Bristol.
Even though the tide in the criminal courts has turned,
the suffering caused in the Family Courts continues. One thinks of Karen
Haynes, her first baby dying in hospital, her second taken away at 25
minutes old, for good, on the evidence of Sir Roy - the judge,
coincidentally, being Mrs Justice Bracewell.
Until the
Government unlocks the doors on the closed world of the Family Courts, the
damage caused by Professor Sir Roy Meadow and his Munchausen's label
cannot be assessed. But one look into Mumtaz's eyes tells you that
the suffering is real and terrible and has no place in a civilised
society.
One is left with a different rule of thumb - you could
call it Sweeney's Law - that unless proven otherwise, one miscarriage of
justice is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three means there is something
wrong - not with the accused - but the accuser.
· John Sweeney reports for the BBC's Real Story
with Fiona Bruce
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