Scourge of the child
snatchers;
She rose from obscurity
to challenge Sir Roy Meadow - the controversial medical expert in the Sally
Clark case - and now wants an inquiry into the courts that use his theory to
seize children
BYLINE: David Cohen
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It is published here by special
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THE live video footage taken in the maternity
ward by the father of the newborn child is deeply shocking. It shows his wife
lying peacefully, but exhausted, on the bed after her caesarean, their baby
still covered in vernix cradled in her arms. Suddenly, a policeman, in uniform,
accompanied by a social worker, burst through the door. The next scene is the
most heart-wrenching: the baby is gone and the mother lies slumped and defeated
on the maternity ward floor.
Child welfare campaigner Penny Mellor pushes the
pause button on her remote control. She has seen the disturbing images of this
mother, who subsequently came to her for help, many times. But they tear her
apart each time.
"Why did they have to take her baby in that
barbaric way?" she asks, her face creased in anguish and anger. "Why
did they have to take the baby away at all?" According to Penny, at least
six British mothers of whom she knows personally - including Karen Haynes,
whose dramatic story we featured last week - have had their newborn babies
snatched from them at childbirth in this inhumane manner. A further six
mothers, including Sally Clark who was wrongfully jailed for smothering her
sons Harry and Christopher, have lost their liberty and been sent to prison for
infanticide.
And she knows of more than 100 mothers who, in
the past six years, have had their older children taken from them by family
courts and put into care.
All of this has happened, she says scathingly,
because of incorrect or insufficiently proven allegations of Munchausen
Syndrome by Proxy (MSbP).
Unlike Munchausen Syndrome, a rare malady where
a depressed mother is said to harm herself as a perverse cry for help, in MSbP
a mother is said to cause harm, not to herself, but to her children.
Almost all of these "tragic" child
removals have been sanctioned on the say-so of experts, the main one being Sir
Roy Meadow, the inventor of MSbP back in 1977, and whose evidence and use of
statistics was revealed after Sally Clark successfully appealed against her
conviction in the High Court.
Until the release of Sally Clark last month,
Penny was a feisty voice in the wilderness coming to the aid of terrified
mothers gagged by the family courts. She is currently helping 50 such mothers
fight social services' departments up and down the country, which, she says are
armed with nothing more than an opinion by Sir Roy and are threatening to take
away their children.
These 50 mothers do not have a history of child
abuse; their children have neither physical scars nor burns or blemishes.
Rather, they are ordinary mothers from
But now Penny hopes the tide may be turning.
John Batt, Sally Clark's solicitor, says that his client's important case
cannot be seen in isolation, and that it raises the issue of other potential
miscarriages of justice.
Powerful people are beginning to line up
alongside Penny to question just why many of these mothers - who continue to
protest their innocence - have lost their children.
Earlier this month, Lord Howe, shadow
spokesperson for Health in the House of Lords, delivered a scathing attack on
Sir Roy and his theory. He called MSbP "one of the most pernicious and
ill-founded theories to have gained currency in childcare and social services
over the past 10 to 15 years".
"It is a theory without science," Lord
Howe said, articulating what Penny has long maintained. "There is no body
of peer-reviewed research to underpin MSbP. It rests instead on the assertions
of its inventor Sir Roy Meadow and on a handful of case histories. When
challenged to produce his research papers to justify his original findings, the
inventor of MSbP stated, if you please, that he had destroyed them."
Lord Howe's concern is that MSbP has so deeply
insinuated itself into the language and thinking of social services that it has
become an all-purpose label for problem parents and children. "A loving
but apparently fussy mother who, on behalf of her sick child, badgers a GP to
take her concerns seriously, can suddenly find herself accused of abuse. Once she
has a label of MSbP pinned on her, it is very difficult to remove it."
Yesterday, speaking to the Evening Standard,
John Batt paid tribute to the unique role played by Penny in helping him fight
the Sally Clark case, and put her contribution into a broader context.
"Experts tell me there is no doubt MSbP
exists, but in tiny numbers compared to the numbers who are actually
pursued," he said. "A mother accused by social services has no
organisation to turn to. One person who, for no material gain and for nothing
other than the cause of humanity, has come to the aid of such people is Penny
Mellor. She is an extraordinary human being who has helped unstintingly and
often with great personal risk to herself."
Penny Mellor has spent £50,000 of her own money,
has worked tirelessly, sometimes going 24 hours without a break, and even paid
with her liberty, enduring eight months in prison last year for assisting one
mother. But who is she?
You only have to meet Penny Mellor, 41, mother
of eight, to see that she defies typecasting.
Her partner is the managing director of a food
retailing company and earns more than £100,000 a year. At her £250,000 detached
house in the
Until six years ago, Penny was a relatively
ordinary housewife with her hands full. Her seven children (she's subsequently
had one more) - then aged 18, 15, nine, six (twins), three and one - took up
almost all her time. She did, however, do some voluntary work as a
victim-support counsellor for a Domestic Violence Forum, and she was introduced
to a mother who was about to have her 11-year-old child taken away from her on
the grounds of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.
"I had never heard of MSbP," says
Penny. "The child had unexplained upper abdominal pain and had been
referred from one hospital to another. The doctors believed the mother was
fabricating the child's illness, causing her to have unnecessary medical
treatment, and social workers were about to remove the child on grounds of
MSbP. But the school teacher of the child, who had introduced me to the mother
in the first place, saw a warm, loving relationship and was convinced the
doctors had it wrong." Penny decided to do some investigating. She took
copies of the child's medical notes and went to toxicologists and
pharmacologists for a second opinion.
"They came back with reports that the drugs
the child had been given by the doctors were the probable cause of her pain.
Slowly, I was uncovering evidence that the mother was in all likelihood not
guilty but nobody in authority wanted to look at it."
SUBSEQUENTLY, the traumatic removal of the
screaming child from the mother's care - by police at gunpoint, in this case - deeply
affected Penny. "I began to ask myself some hard questions: How can this
be happening in modern day
"How can a child be removed from a mother
on such flimsy unscientific evidence? Why is it all done in secret? If she is
being accused of potentially killing or harming her child, why is she not taken
to criminal court where there can be an open and proper trial? And why is it
that all this is happening on the say so of just one person?"
Disturbingly, Penny recalls: "The police
and the social workers would say to me, 'We don't understand anything medical,
so we have to go with what the doctors tell us.' Later I saw this extended to
the judges too.
"The same expert paediatricians were called
time and again. Often Meadow, of course. And even when other doctors gave
contrary evidence, it was always his opinion that the judges 'preferred'.
"To me, the absolute authority given to
these few doctors, who were inclined to find in favour of their own syndrome,
was a recipe for systematic miscarriages of justice on a grand scale."
Sir Roy Meadow declined to comment for this
article.
Penny decided to thoroughly research MSbP and
the way it was being used to separate seemingly caring mothers from their inexplicably
ill children, or from their newborn children following an unexplained sudden
death.
Soon, dozens of other vulnerable mothers were
calling her after hearing about her through word of mouth. She acknowledges
some of these mothers might be guilty but she adopts the age-old English law
dictum that says she would rather "one guilty person goes free than 10
innocent people are convicted".
Penny proved herself a tireless voice for
voiceless mothers. When John Batt was appointed to the Sally Clark case three
years ago the person he turned to for information was Penny. Her children have
become used to her walking round pushing a hoover with one foot, telephone in
one hand, "call-waiting" sign beeping, and a second telephone ringing
in the other.
You become so immersed at the injustice,"
she says. "You get this awful feeling that no one is listening and that,
unless you are involved 24 hours, you are not doing enough." Penny has
travelled thousands of miles at her own expense to help mothers up and down the
country. She has rooms full of files relating to the more than 150 cases she
has worked on.
"The most devastating thing is when these
mothers fall through my front door sobbing after losing their children in a
secret family court hearing," she says.
ONCE, she was accused of going too far. One
family hatched a plot to prevent social workers from taking away the child on
grounds of MSbP, and Penny was accused of masterminding the plan, a charge she
has always denied.
Despite never having a previous conviction,
Penny lost the case and was sent to prison for two years.
She was released after eight months, getting out
last November.
Prison was rough, she says. Her baby had to be
looked after by her in-laws and an au-pair, and she had to endure being banged
up with - and physically beaten up by - inmates in Low Newton, County Durham,
and later Foston Hall, Derbyshire, where she broke bread with Britain's most
notorious female criminals.
Until the Sally Clark case, it had been one
defeat after another. Time and again Penny had to try and comfort an
inconsolable mother, like the one in the video footage. That mother physically
fought the police to keep her baby with her last ounce of energy but had her
four older children taken from her as well - all because of an allegation of
MSbP.
But the Sally Clark case, Penny believes, will
mark a watershed. "I was watching it live and I just burst into
tears," she says. "I saw Sally's haunted look and I cried because I
understood that, although she had won, everything that she had lost was there
in that instant too.
"But I also cried out of joy, because I saw
it as the beginning of the end. That finally people are going to listen. That
finally people will demand a public inquiry that will shake up the whole
judicial system and reveal the whole MSbP thing for the sham that it is."
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