childcarers' libel victory: Lost innocence

Two nursery nurses accused of child abuse have won the legal fight to clear their names, but the cost is still being paid by children and society, argues Professor Frank Furedi

With their reputations restored, Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie can finally hope to get on with their lives. Since early 1993, these two nursery workers had been forced into a nightmarish existence. Lillie was accused of abusing the children in his care and Reed of being party to the abuse, which included filming them. It was alleged that both abused children for their own gratification and for the production of pornographic material (see News, page 4-5).

Fired from their jobs for gross misconduct, they were charged with a variety of sexual offences. While he was in prison on remand, Lillie was assaulted and had his nose broken. In the end the prosecution's case collapsed and the two were acquitted by Newcastle Crown Court in 1994.

But malicious rumour alone appeared to be treated as proof of guilt by some local people, and the criminal justice system often finds it difficult to protect the freedom of those who have been accused of sexual offences against children. Four years after Lillie's and Reed's acquittal, an independent inquiry into the affair set up by Newcastle City Council published its report. Even though the nursery nurses had been found innocent by a court of law, this report condemned them and branded them as child abusers.

The published report created a minor panic regarding the running of council nurseries in the area. Dozens of parents who feared that their children may have been abused indicated that they were prepared to sue Newcastle City Council.

Faced with widespread public hostility and hounded by the media, the two nursery workers moved from the area to try to rebuild their lives elsewhere. And that would have been the end of the matter if Lillie and Reed had not initiated libel action against Newcastle City Council and the report authors.

On 30 July 2002, Lillie and Reed were awarded 200,000 each at the High Court for the 'ruinous' allegations made against them by report. The judge, Mr Justice Eady, was unusually critical of the so-called child abuse experts who had condemned the nursery workers. His verdict upheld Newcastle City Council's defence of qualified privilege, which usually protects reports published in the public interest from libel action. But he made a 'very rare' finding of malice against the authors of the report, because, he said, 'they included in their report a number of fundamental claims which they must have known to be untrue and which cannot be explained on the basis of incompetence or mere carelessness'.

The judge stated that the authors 'set out to misrepresent the state of the evidence available to support their joint belief that Mr Lillie and Miss Reed and other local residents were child abusers - and indeed abusers on a massive scale - and to give readers the impression that statements by parents and/or children had been corroborated by police inquiries'.

So is this a one-off case? Sadly not. There is now such a level of paranoia that no-one working in a nursery is immune from false allegations of child abuse.

In the United States, there have been numerous high-profile accusations against nursery workers. In the McMartin daycare scandal of 1983, a wrongful accusation of abuse developed into a veritable witch hunt involving more false claims of satanic rituals against dozens of carers. Since then many people have been sent to jail on the basis of the kind of evidence used in the Newcastle affair. Even where they were exonerated of any wrongdoing and let out of jail, the damage to their lives had been done.

Such accusations are not confined to the other side of the Atlantic. Throughout Europe, nursery workers have come under suspicion as possible child molesters. Nursery workers in Denmark, Germany and Norway have also faced the type of malicious accusations experienced by Lillie and Reed.

A culture of suspicion

Every nursery worker is affected by the climate of suspicion and mistrust generated by such cases, whether the defendants are cleared or not. Sensationalist media accounts of abuse perpetrated by professional carers create an atmosphere where nursery workers can easily become objects of suspicion. And years later, what the public remembers of the incident is the accusation of abuse, not the exoneration of an innocent carer of children.

The prominence given to the Newcastle case may be rare - childcarers facing accusations of misconduct often choose simply to resign rather than attract publicity - but it has a disproportionate impact on the public imagination. In particular it preys on parents' fears and erodes the positive image they have of nursery workers. It is a sad sign of the times that many parents feel uneasy about the harm that nursery workers might be able to inflict upon their children.

Some privately-run nurseries have responded to this anxiety by introducing 'webcams' so that parents can keep an eye on their children while in someone else's care. Elaine White, a mother of a two-year-old girl, regularly inspects what's going on in her child's nursery. 'There might be some funny people working there,' she told me. 'I hate myself for spying on them,' says Heather Armstrong, a mother of a three-year-old boy, before adding that it gives her 'peace of mind'.

Several parents I interviewed for my book Paranoid Parenting said that they frequently ask their children pointed questions about the behaviour of their carers to reassure themselves that all is well in the nursery.

Not surprisingly, many nursery workers have altered their behaviour for fear of being accused of anything inappropriate. Increasingly, the whole question of physical contact between adult carer and child has become a minefield. The fear of being accused of misconduct may be among the factors putting men off working in childcare, and women nursery workers also feel increasingly inhibited from engaging in physical contact with children.

Nursery worker Carol Thorpe tells me that she is 'fast becoming a walking fridge'. She says, 'I feel that I shouldn't respond to kids in a natural warm way.' In recent years, she, like many of her colleagues, has become less spontaneous in displaying physical warmth and affection.

In some nurseries, concern about physical contact with children has become institutionalised, so that workers are not allowed to rub sunscreen cream on the children's bodies. We have become so obsessed about abusive behaviour in institutions that we seldom pause and ask 'what are we doing to our children?' How long before all physical contact between a toddler and a nursery nurse is deemed inappropriate?

A nursery that feels uncomfortable about physical contact between carer and infant is unlikely to be working in the best interests of the child. Infants need closeness and affection. Touching and cuddling provide them with the reassurance they need. And when nursery workers become defensive and have to worry about their actions being misinterpreted, they become far less effective carers of children.

Parental suspicion and a growing mood of defensiveness among nursery workers is the outcome of a culture that finds it difficult to trust adults with children. It is a culture that encourages the public to continually question the motives of professional childcarers. Worse still, it leads some individuals to pursue obsessive witch hunts.

Those zealous crusaders in Newcastle who wrote the report branding Lillie and Reed as child abusers probably did not think they were acting maliciously. They appear to have been following in the tradition of the old religious inquisitors whose job it was to prove guilt by any means necessary. And that is scary. It means that when it comes to nursery workers, the idea of innocence until proven guilty is facing a major threat.