NanaNina Thu 03-Dec-09 11:36:44
"Cory - thanks for your reply. I agree that if the sw you mention in a case 15 years ago did not admit that mistakes had been made (and I do actually remember the Orkney debacle) then she was in the wrong."
Not only did she not admit it but she went on national television stating that she did not care if people said these things had never happened, because they would say that, wouldn't they? The child witnesses recalled how they had answered leading questions in the hope that the SWs would let them leave the room and finish the endless interrogations.
Iirc Judith Dawson, the SW involved in the Notthingham satanic abuse trial, then went on to be on the panel that made such a spectacular mess of the Shieldfield nursery investigation. She was the one that told the policemen in charge that they had to believe everything the children told them (as a policeman stated later, this involved such evidence as "my Mum rides on a broom stick" and "I was murdered and put in a bin").
(in case you wonder about my personal interest, I read in depth about the witch trials not for personal reasons but merely due to a professional interest, as a historian, in early modern witch trials- this was long before I had children of my own)
Of course this was a very troubling time and it is now some 20 years ago; procedures have been tightened since and hopefully something like this could not happen today.
Yet what was worrying at the time was both that their colleagues did not react and expose them and that they were not hounded out of the profession after judicial review.
Also, it is worth noticing in the context of this thread that original court orders were overturned, that judges were shown to have acted on insufficient information, in other words, standard court procedure turned out not to be infallible after all.