Roy Meadows has won his appeal

[Caligula]

story here

Does this mean that the women who wanted their cases against him to be heard by the GMC can now do so?

But caligula, I think you were maybe partly alienated because

1. you have a bad (ly trained?) health visitor
2. you projected "OMG, they are checking whether I'm an abuser" onto the phone call at a time you were stressed anyway My kids have had the usual childhood accidents over the years (nothing serious luckily) and we've consequently had a good few phone calls along these lines. My first health visitor was a sweetie and I never felt like she was checking up on me. More, she genuinely sounded like she wanted to check we were all ok after our ordeal. My second one was a bit of a witch and I felt she was ticking boxes, as you say. I don't know that the system was was at fault per se for me feeling that way about her. I knew she didn't think I was an abuser though- health vivitors aren't usually drafted in for telephone support duties if child abuse is seriously suspected. You'd probably need to be more worried if you didn't get a phone call...

No, I think the reason that I am alienated is because the phone call really is a pointless arse-covering exercise. I understand that it's their job and they have to do it, but my beef is that it does 2 things:

1. It treats all parents as if they are potential abusers, which is an insult and
2. It doesn't actually prevent abuse. If it were effective, then I wouldn't be so irritated by it. But it really is just a paper exercise, which is a waste of the HV's time and NHS resources.

Also, it's not just pointless phone calls which alienate me - it's the whole feeling of going into a hospital or GP surgery or clinic and automatically feeling as if this is a place where I am not an equal, I am at best a supplicant and at worst, someone under suspicion. I just don't think that previous generations of parents have felt like this, and it's very very wrong that our generation of parents are being made to feel like this. It doesn't make me want to "work with" my GP or my HV - it makes me want to avoid them like the plague.

I always thought about that one in 70 million statistic, that even if it were correct and he'd done the maths properly, there's less of a chance of winning the lottery than that, but someone still wins nearly every week.
Agreed, again it's stats, but one that most people without a broad education (like the jury) won't know.
If I throw a dice 10 times and get the sequence
6154345261
Then the odds of that before i threw them, was about 60 million to 1. However, afterwards it is certain.

I think it's a clear example of those in power and authority protecting their own. Particularly men in power reacting against powerless women - the victims here - who dare to question them.
To be fair it's not.
Recall that the General Medical council which is mostly men struck the jerk off.
The law is quite clear and mostly sensible on this point, so the judge acted correctly. All honest testimony is protected.
Feminism (as usual) tells us very little about the reality of this situation.
Fact is that people are very poor at understanding statistical information. A friend of mine was an expert witness on behalf of guy who had kiddie porn on his PC, and reckoned there was about an 80% chance that he hadn't downloaded it.
Guy was convicted, even though objectively it was far from "beyond reasonable doubt".

In the US they've done experiments on juries and this sort of result is pretty typical.
Here's one for you to guess.
The evidence boils down to the chances of two people in the same room "just happening" to have the same birthday. There were two dozen people in the room at the time. Would you convict ?

Yes, can def see how it could come across as arse covering.

But @ you feeling that bad when you need to see GP or HV. Why do you think it's so bad? Mine are past the HV stage but I don't remember feeling like that at all. And while I don't feel that my GP and I have an overtly supportive relationship as we don't see each other very often when we do meet i don't feel like I'm supplicating or being judged by her on my mothering skills. I feel equal enough to be going on with in her company. Do you think I'm just lucky in having an ok GP?

Yes, Scummy, you are very lucky. Mine are about as useful as a chocolate teakettle. One of them is a total numpty and the other really can't be arsed w/FA and I have no idea why he's there. They're so dismissive it's pitiful. They fobbed BOTH my ILs off when they came in presenting w/symptoms of Type II diabetes rather than referring them for tests. FIL was only diagnosed when he collapsed at work w/a diabetic seizure and they called an ambulance. MIL only after she fainted in a shopping centre.

The HV tries scaremongering and bullying tactics.

As a team they're a complete waste of time and when hte kids are poorly I usually wait till evening and phone NHS24 and get an after hour appointment.

I looked at switching surgeries, but at the other one it's impossible to get an appointment at all.

I can only conclude that HV services where I am (central liverpool) are in complete chaos - I have had 7 HVs in 23 months. My first two (second especially) were an absolute nightmare - very critical and prescriptive. And apparently the local HVs believe that depressed mums shouldn't be complimented on their mothering skills; as that means they wouldn't listen to what they suggested. (My friend actually phoned her own HV, as I was so upset by my HVs' attitude, of grudging compliments and very sweeping criticism, and was told this). I seriously believe that my greatest risk at relapsing into depression was my HV visits. Having been undeservedley constructed as a "bad mother/mother that wasn't coping" by my HV, I have every sympathy with those falsely accused of MSBP - as I think "there but for the grace of god go I".

That's terrible, mts and expat. I see that I am lucky.

to be fair, a lot of mums with depression "issues" find their HV very supportive and helpful. Just unfortunately I appear to have had a complete personality clash with mine, and have seen the less positive side of that sort of "support"

She sounds like a total nightmare, mts.

i hear ya, mts! MUCH of the reason i avoid our HV like the plague and stick w/the charity at Boswall House. she's already got my hackles up w/the way she responded to our decision to delay vaccinating DD2.

I think it is the luck of the draw as well. When I lived in Lewisham, both my HV and my doctors were marvellous. Now I live outside London, they're all rubbish.

I don't know if that's geography, area, postcode, whatever - are health professionals who choose to live and work in busy multi-cultural inner-city areas more progressive and educated than those in provincial backwaters? Or did I just happen to be attached to the only good surgery in South East London? Who knows?

Back to Meadows and his statistics.
He wrote in his book - long before the Sally Clarke case - 'ABC of Child Abuse', Meadow wrote: ' "One sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder until proved otherwise" is a crude aphorism but a sensible working rule for anyone encountering these tragedies. '

The problem was that this became an accepted rule for the child-protection industry - police, social workers, lawyers - and it was only at this stage in 2001 that it started to be challenged properly. The wonder is that all these people believed all this bad science for so long sigh

The high court judgement upholding the right of expert witnesses to say what they believe in good faith without penalty is probably right. Our adversarial system pays expensive lawyers to challenge expers with other experts.

But how come no-one did challenge him in court? Since it's obvious that it's nonsense? And also, I've heard that both Sally Clarke's babies died nine days after having the MMR - is that an urban myth? If not, why wasn't that brought out in court?

But how come no-one did challenge him in court?
Because no one there had a basic science education.
Think of this case when you next read that the government is creating yet another "centre of sporting excellence", rather than education.

Also, let's be honest here. A mother who is pointed out as murdering her kids isn't a sympathetic figure. People will confuse the horror of the crime with the chances of her being guilty. Happens a lot.
Than god she wasn't black.

It's an extraordinary case and the website is worth a read as a hooror story in the legal system going awry.

From my armchair, the accouts of the conviction sounded to be based on poor evidence. But five eminent paediatric pathologists gave evidence in support of Sally and midwives, health visitors, friends and neighbours, not to mention husband Steve, all confirmed that they had rarely seen a stronger bond of love between a mother and her children.

But Meadow said that cot deaths were independent 'lightning strikes' events, so the second time there must be something nasty in the woodshed. It was accepted wisdom at the time, not just in this criminal case, but as evidence in lots of social-services-inspired custody cases in the family courts.

[Yes it's right that the only common factor, which may or may not be relevant, is that both deaths followed shortly after vaccination. There was research into the possibility that the vaccinations could cause death within a few days for infants with certain genetic defects.]

It wasn't possible then to establish a contrary opinion. Best analogy is that policemen were once automatically belived in court - what was written in their notebooks was the unvarnished truth.

Actually even the analogy is bad.
Lightning strikes are not all that random.

As a layman, i have always thought that one is tragic and 2 is absolutely unimaginable in terms of grief and how the hell do you cope with that. But i have never understood how a professional person can say this must be murder when the cause of SIDS is not known. Chances are in the vast majority of cases it is genetic, so surely it stands to reason ,if you have one cot death, you are at higher risk of another. I have a friend who has 8 kids. She should have 10 but she lost 2 to cot death. She is the best mummy in the world and was just terribly unlucky to lose 2. She was however very lucky not to have roy meadows on her case or we could be talking about her now too.

In defence of Roy Meadows...something that is never talked about in all the media coverage of his 'dangerous lies' is the research he conducted in the 80s into sleep apnoea (babies stopping breathing in their sleep). He observed - in a hospital environment - several mothers who had brought their infants in supposedly suffering from this problem. Covert surveillance in the hospital revealed a significant number of these women were actually trying to smother thier children while they slept.

Have been trying to find the exact details and stats on this - it's in Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's book 'Mother Nature', which is a fantastic read anyway, especially for those who need helps coming to terms with the fact that some mothers do hurt or kill their kids.

The fact is that, regardless of the terrible miscarriages of justice that lead to women being falsely imprisoned for child murder, there are women out their who kill their kids and get away with it. The forensic evidence of smothering for example is practically identical to the forensic evidence of cot death, which is itself still an unknown quantity.

I'm not playing devil's advocate here, in fact someone very close to me lost 2 kids through cot death. He however says that you are made to feel like a criminal either way, even the first time; it is routine for the police to attend a cot death to take statements from the parents. What I don't agree with is the withholding of facts ie in this case, that Roy Meadows has a long and distinguished history in medicine including original research. There might be a lot of women now being released from jail on the grounds that 'statistics are flawed', but I think we would be naive in thinking them all innocent. What has happened here is that English law has decided it needs irrefutable evidence in the case of baby murder, ie wounds or brain damage, before it will convict. Whatever Meadows' faults this will result in more guilty women never serving time.

There was also a very famous case in the States, 1970s I think, about a woman who lost seven (yes, seven) babies through cot death. She was given every sympathy in the media until finally confessing that she had indeed murdered every one of her children.

"Covert surveillance in the hospital revealed a significant number of these women were actually trying to smother their children while they slept."

I remember seeing the programme about this, and actually, the covert surveillance revealed nothing of the sort. It showed mothers putting their hands up to their children's mouths. Now if you were inclined to believe that a large number of mothers who have children with unexplained illnesses are actually abusing them, you would interpret the hand to the mouth as being an attempt to smother the child. If you were normal, you would interpret the hand to the mouth as being a paranoid, scared mother checking that her baby is still breathing. I accept that some of these women may have been attempting to smother their children, but the video evidence at the time was not as conclusive as the munch-bunch would have us believe and I think if we looked back at it now, we might be surprised by just how ambiguous it was.

it's so nice to know that idiots like him are unleashed upon an unsuspecting populace to practice medicine on children. NOT.

Caligula,
I do not want to put too much here for personal reasons, I am sure you understand???
I am trying to find out the answer to your origional question you ask at the start of this thread.
I think you will find that there is a long queue of people all wanting to know as the reason given as to why the cases were not going to be heard wa that he was no longer a doctor, having been struck off and it was theredore no longer a GMC matter.
It might be that all the complaints have to be made again.....I really do not know but I and several other women are trying to keep calm until we find out. Peronally I could do unspeakable things to the man but that would make me no better than him.
How one man can destroy so many lives, supported by the people who are supposed to protect our children and are legal system in the Family Courts. Whether you believe him or not is a personal matter but is it right that one man has so much power and hundreds of children and parents have had their lives destroyed by a man who does not want to talk to his 'victims' as he says, he feels that 'these women are so manipulative that they would only lie. So you are damned by a man who does not even speak to the women he is accussing of harming or killing their children or any doctor who has ever seen the parent or disagrees with his point of view.

About 12-18 months ago I leant out 8 copies of a DVD called MAMA. It has the last known interview with him and it really shows how our Family courts and the use of expert witnesses needs to be urgently reviewed.

If you have a copy of the MAMA DVD still could you please return it as there whereabouts are unknown! If you would like to borrow a copy of the DVD then could you post here and I will try and get some of the origional ones back or send you a new one. In my opinion it is sadly true that child abuse exists but what Meadows has done is give it a name, a syndrome with a profile that would fit any normal careing mother. Ones labelled the label sticks and yet you are not even allowed to speak to a counsellor in some cases due to court gagging orders.

How can a loving Mother ever come to terms with having her children FALSELY removed from her? One day she is a mother careing and doing the best she can. The next day it has all gone, no family just emptiness and an ache that never goes away.

I do have some BRILLIANT news....my ds sent me a text message for Mothering Sunday....I have waited 16 years for this and although I have had a lot of 'steps backwards' lately this is a step forward and with time one I hope that we can build on.

Bunglie - thought about you yesterday - glad you got a text from your ds.

I lit a candle for you and the other mothers affected by this yesterday, Bunglie - I remember doing it a couple of Christmases ago, and given the Roy Meadows verdict it felt right to do it for Mother's Day. Sorry if it was a bit of a liberty to take but it just felt like the right thing to do.

I'm pleased your ds contacted you yesterday. I know you've had a rough time recently and I hope that things are on the up again, and you have something you can build on.

xxx

'these women are so manipulative that they would only lie. '

I'm so disgusting by his level of blatant misogyny it makes me want to be sick.

The only thing more disgusting is that he is permitted to practice medicine on ANYONE, much less children.

It all makes me want to spit and he deserves what he has coming in the next life.

So glad to hear about the text, Bunglie.

Tamz, English criminal law has always been based on 'proven beyond reasonable doubt'. Not 'irrefutable evidence'. Yet the courts seem to have ignored this in the cases in which Roy Meadows, Southall et al were involved - the say so of eminent 'expert' witnesses was just accepted without much apparent atttempt to weigh the evidence.