Child abuse

A diet of evidence

Myles Harris

Unlike its counterparts in the south, Glasgow Social. Services does not, make you feel you have stumbled into a branch office of some vast conspiracy to, overthrow the state. There are no anti-apartheid sandals, electric blue haircuts, giant ear- rings, designer impoverished suits or all the other divisive paraphernalia English social workers think essential. Glaswegians are egalitarians, tremendous enthusiasts, great talkers and very hospitable. Above all they are normally dressed.

Even so I was cautious. My last contact with a social services children's department had been at a child abuse conference in a London slum. I remembered several white women social workers with no make up and flat shoes sitting in a circle giving each other sly glances and making little scrib- bled notes with tiny pencils. A black father had come to try to prevent his daughter being taken into care and made the mis- take of professing a strong belief in Christ who, he announced, would persuade the department to let her stay with her family. That finished him. A flat shoe asked if he had seen a psychiatrist. When he left, crying, somebody casually mentioned that his other daughter had becoMe pregnant while in care, aged 14. I felt soiled.

In England and Wales after such a case conference a local authority social worker is delegated to take departmental suspi- cions before, a magistrate and apply for a place of safety order. This application is ex parte, the parents and the child are not by definition present, and, if granted, it can be for up to 28 days. The social worker then takes his order — or a warrant and such policemen as he feels necessary seizes the child and bears it off to a foster home or an institution. To keep the child until a full hearing in the juvenile court (often many months away) he then applies for an interim care order. This is a more formal affair but still not a true test of the evidence. The parents are not regarded as `full parties to the action' and the social worker has to bring only sufficient facts to convince the magistrates there is a case to answer.

Interim care orders are frequently re- newed; twice is usual although it is often more. There is one case, still to come to trial, where the child has been in care for over a year. With the care order the magistrates usually substitute the child's parents with a guardian, usually another social worker.

After months of waiting there is worse to come. At the full hearing parents discoVer that, unlike a criminal trial (where often much less than the life of a family is at stake), the rule that requires advanced disclosure of evidence does not apply. An unco-operative local authority may keep vital evidence secret, only to spring it on the day. The defenCe then has to seek another adjournment — which means more months of separation for the child.

This was the system that allowed things to go on in Cleveland, and now we learn, in Leeds. In Scotland they have remembered Thomas More's injunction that without the law there is nothing between us and the devil.

As in England, Scottish social workers can obtain a place of safety order from a magistrate which is ex parte. But within hours the evidence of abuse goes before a children's reporter. This official is usually a lawyer, sometimes a social worker, some- times both. Appointed by the Secietary of State he cannot be dismissed by the local authority, nor has he any alliances with them. He assembles the, evidence and if he thinks it is sufficient must, within seven days; take the case before a children's panel.

The panels are made up of three lay members who have been given training in children's law. Their decisions can override custody orders from the High Court. and are more powerful than parental rights legislation. Parents are present at the hearings, which are informal. If they object to the evidence, or the child is too young to understand it, the case must be sent for `proof' before a sheriff (a judge) within three days. After I had given an undertaking in open court not to reveal any details of the cases, Sheriff Jardine allowed me to sit in on a proof hearing. Such hearings are not accusatory. They are places where . the facts, called 'a diet of evidence', are sent to be proved. The sheriff, a big man in a morning suit, stood and swore the witnes- ses in himself, arm upraised high above his head. The cases, were inexpressibly sad. The victims, parents and children, at first confused and,weepy, were, I thought, later reassured by the solidity of the proceedings and the quiet questioning of the sheriff. He said to one frightened woman, 'These questions are not intended to upset you but to find out why it was you did what you did.'

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One case, defended by a sprightly old solicitor of 80, was proved and returned to the children's panel for their recommenda- tions, the other was dismissed when one witness failed to corroborate the evidence of the second, necessary for proof in Scottish law.

In the afternoon I visited the Drum- chapel estate where many of the cases come from. Blocks of flats reminiscent of prison buildings stood randomly on a hill devoid of trees or life. Here and there a burnt out group of windows signalled a final act of desperation. It was cold, raining and grey, the steets deserted. Thirty per cent of the men are unemployed. The docks are shut. Goodyear and Singer have left. 'The toughs come out after dark,' somebody told me. I asked if we could come back then. 'You can, I won't,' was the reply. A small centre has been built in one of the blocks to cope with abuse cases. The statistics are uncertain. As in England, cases are rising, but how much this is a new phenomenon or is due to greater discovery is difficult to assess. It makes the reality no less awful. One new case comes each day to the centre out of a population of 23,000. They have 48 cases at present on their register. We walked down a corridor past a small playroom. I glimpsed brightly col- oured walls, a stuffed kangaroo and a red engine on the floor. There the very small would sit numbly among the colours, with- drawn into a grey world of incomprehen- sion. It was better not to think about it too much. Thirty per cent, a woman social worker told me, are due to sexual abuse. All her women alcoholics had been seriously sexually abused as children. 'Abuse begets abuse,' she said.

The causes? Immaturity, poverty (the address alone will deny you credit in every shop in Glasgow), the general stress of living in such awful houses, an inability to draw the line at some childish misbe- haviour and the subsequent violence when it becomes unbearable. Drink is about 40 per cent of the problem. People in Drufn- chapel are reared to violence as a means of family control.

Later a paediatrician went through a familiar list of children's assaults and some unusual ones. Cigarette burns under the armpits, broken limbs, starvation, awful head injuries, serial buggery and felatio, often by a living-in uncle or grandfather. She had known of a case where the child's blood and urine glowed in the dark. The mother had tried to poison it with a fluorescent dye. In another, cardiac surgeons were about to fit a pacemaker to a child whose heart faltered whenever it was fed, until a watchful nurse spotted the mother trying secretly to strangle the child in the crook of her arm while she fed it.

The doctor, who was English, liked the sheriff's court system. 'Sometimes you feel you are on trial, but that is no bad thing.' Generally speaking, knowing the shatter- ing effect an accusation of child abuse can have on a family, doctors tended to under- diagnose rather than overdiagnose the condition. It was however pretty common and not confined to the working classes.

A taxi took me back into the centre. Below on the Clyde the Finnieston crane hung over the docks. How many of the poor had sailed from there? Children's ghosts from another continent came to my mind. This was the same as Ethiopia, less dramatic perhaps but pain has no measure- ment to a child. Worse is the slow know- ledge that an adult is the cause. What do you do about it? One social worker said, 'We try to build a scaffolding around the family to prevent it falling apart. We often fail. If you work here you soon realise that this is something we cannot prevent.'

He was right. Child abuse will always be

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with us. It might lessen with wealth, or change its form, but it is always awful. Human beings are capable of as immense a cruelty as they are of love. But the horror of it must not blind us to the necessity of law. Taking away a child from its family for more than three or four days is both accusation and sentence rolled into one. It should not be possible as it is in England to carry out this sentence on, as one Scottish official said to me, 'just the evidence of a week bittie of a social worker'.