ANYONE attending Sir Roy Meadow’s GMC hearing in London over the next couple of weeks might be surprised to notice that the “disgraced” and “discredited” “child-snatcher in chief” walks on feet rather than cloven hooves.
Rarely before has one man been subjected to such a sulphurous campaign in the media, but his persecution is not really about the evidence that he gave at the Sally Clark trial. He committed his unforgivable sin in 1977, when he put a name to something that few had the stomach to confront: Munchhausen syndrome by proxy, the tendency of some mothers to harm their own children to win attention.
Doctors who have dared to question the mythical sanctity of a mother’s love have always run into the same wall of incredulity. As Lord Astor of Hever said: “Everyone starts out totally dependent on a woman. The idea that she could turn out to be your enemy is terribly frightening.” So frightening, in fact, that in the current hysteria some take it for granted that all parents accused of abuse are innocent, and the doctors who suspect them must be lying.
Remember Maxine Robinson? I thought not. She was convicted in 1995 of murdering two of her children and her case became a cause célèbre because the evidence against her was propped up by Meadow’s work. This, we were told, was “the cruellest miscarriage of justice in Britain”. But then, in June last year, Robinson rather spoiled it all with a jail-cell confession — a timely reminder, said the judge, that “not all mothers in prison for killing their own children are the victims of miscarriages of justice”.
Whether such women should be in jail is a question for the judiciary, not doctors, although for the record Meadow believes these women need help, not punishment. The same might be said for doctors enduring the thankless task of child protection. On June 6 Mrs Justice Hallett — trial judge for Angela Cannings and one of the appeal judges who freed Clark and Donna Anthony — told a conference of expert child-abuse witnesses that she feared justice would suffer because “the experts won’t come anywhere near us . . . they risk being demonised in the media”. The real victims of that demonising are the babies.
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Meadow may be an expert who, in giving the odds of two cot deaths as one in 73 million, made a mistake. But he is still an expert.