“The Role of Government Edicts in False
Accusations of Child Abuse”.
Blue paragraphs
and extracts may be cut through shortage of time.
Red italic items are reference materials
not intended to be read out.
Parents have not come forward to demand reviews because they have
been silenced by the draconian restrictions of the family courts
or because they are afraid that sticking their heads over the parapet
would further erode their already fragile contact arrangements with
their stolen children. The press are frustrated by what they perceive
as a lack of parental initiative and with no available personal
interest stories of failed or refused reviews
they have been unable to exert the necessary pressure on
government.
I hope to concentrate on and illustrate the way in which two government
edicts – the SEN Assessment and Tribunal Process and the Department
of Health Guidelines on MSBP, or as they call it Fictitious and
Induced Illness in Children, create the environment in which False
Allegations proliferate and to flag up the
dangers of the post-Climbie computerisation of records.
The psychologist and author Lisa Blakemore Brown has spoken of
False Allegations growing from a “first gossamer breath”.
I haven’t got a lot of time but I think it is relevant to
give you the bones of our family story to illustrate the influence
of a GP’s “gossamer breath” and failures in the
SEN Assessment process.
I have a teaching qualification and a postgraduate diploma in child
development and once had a fairly high profile career in children’s
work. 25 years ago Woman’s Own magazine put me on its front
cover as “the girl who cares for latchkey kids”. On
behalf of the UK Association for International Year of the Child
I coordinated the National campaign for increased and improved after
school and holiday provision.
I married late and our son was born in 1989. He has Asperger’s
Syndrome but we were unable to get a proper diagnosis until he was
12 years old. He also suffers from CFS/ME. His complex educational
and medical needs never allowed me to pick up the threads of my
career and I have spent most of the last 15 and a half years as
carer as well as parent.
Our daughter, now 10, also falls into the category recently described
by Scottish Baroness Veronica Linklater as “educationally
fragile”. She was speaking of bright and talented children,
who have special educational and medical needs, which make them
unable to cope with the pressures of large mainstream schools. Mark
Haddon’s award winning novel “The Curious Incident of
the Dog in the Night Time” describes this response to busy
places as being like a an overloaded computer needing to press CTRL/ALT/DEL
to shut down programmes and reboot.
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© Jan Loxley Blount 05 11 04 London
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