Quotessence
Home / Authors / Sue Richardson Biography

Sue Richardson Biography

Author

Related Quotes

“It is often said that Vietnam was the first television war. By the same token, Cleveland was the first war over the protection of children to be fought not in the courts, but in the media. By the summer of 1987 Cleveland had become above all, a hot media story. The Daily Mail, for example, had seven reporters, plus its northern editor, based in Middlesbrough full time. Most other news papers and television news teams followed suit. What were all the reporters looking for? Not children at risk. Not abusing adults. Aggrieved parents were the mother lode sought by these prospecting journalists. Many of these parents were only too happy to tell — and in some cases, it would appear, sell— their stories. Those stories are truly extraordinary. In many cases they bore almost no relation to the facts. Parents were allowed - encouraged to portray themselves as the innocent victims of a runaway witch-hunt and these accounts were duly fed to the public. Nowhere in any of the reporting is there any sign of counterbalancing information from child protection workers or the organisations that employed them. Throughout the summer of 1987 newspapers ‘reported’ what they termed a national scandal of innocent families torn apart. The claims were repeated in Parliament and then recycled as established ‘facts’ by the media. The result was that the courts themselves began to be paralysed by the power of this juggernaut of press reporting — ‘journalism’ which created and painstakingly fed a public mood which brooked no other version of the story. (p21)”

LawCrimeLiesAbusePropagandaChild AbuseHypeChild Sexual AbuseAccusationLegalAbuse Of PowerClevelandAbusersSociety DenialMedia ManipulationAllegationsChild RapePedophiliaWitch HuntChild ProtectionMedia DistortionFalse AccusationPaedophile RingSystemic FailureFalse AllegationsSocial ServicesPedophile RingChild Custody
Book:Creative Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: Challenges and Dilemmas
Create image

“...Cleveland was the first war over the protection of children to be fought not in the courts, but in the media... Given that most of the hearings took place out of sight of the press, the following examples are taken from the recollection of child protection workers present in court. In one case, during a controversy that centred fundamentally around disputes over the meaning of RAD [reflex anal dilatation], a judge refused to allow ‘any evidence about children’s bottoms’ in his courtroom. A second judge — hearing an application to have their children returned by parents about whom social services had grave worries told the assembled lawyers that, as she lived in the area, she could not help but be influenced by what she read in the press. Hardly surprising then that child protection workers soon found courts not hearing their applications, cutting them short, or loosely supervising informal deals which allowed children to be sent back to parents, even in cases where there was explicit evidence of apparent abuse to be explained and dealt with. (p21) [reflex anal dilatation (RAD): a simple clue which is suggestive of anal penetration from outside. It had been recognised as a valuable weapon in the armoury of doctors examining children for many decades and was endorsed by both the British Medical Association and the Association of Police Surgeons. (p18)]”

LawCrimeDoctorsLiesAbusePropagandaChild AbuseHypeChild Sexual AbuseAccusationLegalAbuse Of PowerVictimsClevelandAbusersSociety DenialMedia ManipulationAllegationsChild RapePedophiliaChild ProtectionAbused ChildrenMedia DistortionFalse AccusationPaedophile RingSystemic FailureFalse AllegationsSocial ServicesPedophile RingChild Custody
Book:Creative Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: Challenges and Dilemmas
Create image

“But nothing in my previous work had prepared me for the experience of reinvestigating Cleveland. It is worth — given the passage of time — recalling the basic architecture of the Crisis: 121 children from many different and largely unrelated families had been taken into the care of Cleveland County Council in the three short months of the summer of 1987. (p18) The key to resolving the puzzle of Cleveland was the children. What had actually happened to them? Had they been abused - or had the paediatricians and social workers (as public opinion held) been over-zealous and plain wrong? Curiously — particularly given its high profile, year-long sittings and £5 million cost — this was the one central issue never addressed by the Butler-Sloss judicial testimony and sifting of internal evidence, the inquiry's remit did not require it to answer the main question. Ten years after the crisis, my colleagues and I set about reconstructing the records of the 121 children at its heart to determine exactly what had happened to them... (p19) Eventually, though, we did assemble the data given to the Butler-Sloss Inquiry. This divided into two categories: the confidential material, presented in camera, and the transcripts of public sessions of the hearings. Putting the two together we assembled our own database on the children each identified only by the code-letters assigned to them by Butler-Sloss. When it was finished, this database told a startlingly different story from the public myth. In every case there was some prima fade evidence to suggest the possibility of abuse. Far from the media fiction of parents taking their children to Middlesbrough General Hospital for a tummy ache or a sore thumb and suddenly being presented with a diagnosis of child sexual abuse, the true story was of families known to social services for months or years, histories of physical and sexual abuse of siblings and of prior discussions with parents about these concerns. In several of the cases the children themselves had made detailed disclosures of abuse; many of the pre-verbal children displayed severe emotional or behavioural symptoms consistent with sexual abuse. There were even some families in which a convicted sex offender had moved in with mother and children. (p20)”

LawCrimeEvidenceDoctorsLiesAbusePropagandaManipulationChild AbuseHypeChild Sexual AbuseAccusationLegalAbuse Of PowerVictimsClevelandAbusersSociety DenialMedia ManipulationAllegationsChild RapePedophiliaChild ProtectionAbused ChildrenMedia DistortionFalse AccusationPaedophile RingSystemic FailureFalse AllegationsSocial ServicesPedophile RingChild Custody
Book:Creative Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: Challenges and Dilemmas
Create image

“The development of an incipient careseeking/caregiving system involves moving from avoidance to intra-subjectivity. This can be very anxiety-provoking. One person described it as a 'crisis of attachment '. Any past internal relating is likely to have been highly ambivalent at best. This is my face and which internal beliefs, such as being unworthy of care, which were formed in identification with the perpetrator, are challenged. The little creature [a hidden dissociated part of the self] may perceive both caregiving and careseeking as dangerous. He or she may fear being vulnerable to further abuse or exploitation and 'flinches, expecting pain again '.”

HealingAttachmentDissociative Identity DisorderTraumatizedAltersExpecting PainFear Of Attachment
Book:Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder
Create image

“The external therapeutic relationship remains a template for the kind of supportive companionable relating it needed internally. At the same time, this stage facilitates the role of the therapist as a consultant to the system [person with dissociative identity disorder].”

HealingTherapyDissociative Identity DisorderDissociative SystemSecure Base
Book:Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder
Create image

“All parts need to be honoured for their role in survival and re-framed as helpful before new coping strategies can be developed. The ability to internalise the relationship with the therapist as a caregiver is key to the individuals ability to provide for self-care and management.”

HealingTherapyDissociative Identity DisorderAlter PersonalitiesCoping MechanismsOsddDid OsddPartial DidUnhelpful Coping Strategies
Book:Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder
Create image

“Because survival has been equated with internal separation, proximity can set off panic and fears of disintegration, i.e. 'fearing the trembling must turn to such severe shaking the vibration would dissolve her entirely, scattering her irrevocably wide'.”

Dissociative Identity DisorderOsddDid Osdd
Book:Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder
Create image