I've just come across this thread, after promising myself that I wouldn't spend so much time on Mumsnet, I've spent two and a half hours reading it instead of working - once I started I couldn't stop. It's been the most moving, frightening, enraging, harrowing thread I've read. Cheeseball and Bunglie, your experience has been horrific, and I just hope you get your children back (emotionally). I also hope you're both part of a class action to sue the bejasus out of all the authorities involved in this - people should be named and shamed, and though you could never be compensated for what you've been through, we live in a society where the value of everything is measured in cold hard cash, unfortunately - and the cold-hearted b***ds who run the place understand that language better than any other.
Roy Meadows (I wonder what his relationship with his own mother is like? Dysfunctional I bet - I think we should be told) did not operate in a vacuum. Yes it's very frightening that this one man had so much power, but he didn't wreak this level of havoc on so many families on his own - he had the connivance of the rest of the medical profession, the judiciary and the social services. Without the climate of mysogyny and in particular hostility to mothers (what shall we call it - matraphobia?) which exists in those professions, I don't think his mad theories would have been given house-room. This demented mother-hater convinced a whole bunch of highly qualified, professional people, most of whom would consider themselves rational and compassionate, to accept his theories and destroy families as a result. The laxness of it as well - the fact that they could accept his diagnosis even if he hadn't met the individuals concerned - in no other area of law, medicine or anything else, would this be accepted. If you phone NHS Direct, for God's sake, they won't even diagnose the common cold without seeing the patient, let alone a rare and possibly non-existent disease. What is so frightening about this, is that Meadows has been discredited, but the people who eagerly seized on his theories, are still there, still making decisions and still promoting the same attitudes to mothers. Am I the only paranoid person who is glad that if my child has a bad fall in public, that there are witnesses to it, so I have a defence against a false allegation of abuse? This climate of suspicion against us is at the root of all this - one man took advantage of it and made a career out of it, but he didn't create it, and it is still there.
I'll be writing to my MP, and to the caring Margaret Hodge - whoever pointed out that Cleveland etc. had a huge enquiry when it was only a few families, whereas this has been 5000, and they're already trying to sweep it under the carpet, was right - and I just hope and hope that you two get justice. Good luck to you, don't give up, you've got the support of everyone who is sane.