Judge attacks social workers who took 'abused' girl, ten, away from parents for no reason

A girl aged ten was taken from her parents by social workers for no reason, a High Court judge has ruled.

Mr Justice Holman said there was not "the slightest worry or concern" about the girl's welfare to justify the separation from her family.

The girl and her 11-year-old brother were sent to live with their grandparents for nearly a year on suspicion of sexual abuse raised by doctors.

Despite the girl's adamant denials of abuse, social workers took no notice.

Mr Justice Holman said that the case was a warning that the lessons of the Cleveland child abuse controversy of the 1980s have gone unheeded by doctors, social workers and the courts.

He ruled that the parents were "completely exonerated" and that the child had never been abused.

But, the judge said, the children had been damaged by the intervention of the doctors, the social workers and the state.

The Cleveland scandal was one of a series of incidents in the late 1980s in which children were removed from their homes by zealous social workers for reasons that proved to be baseless.

A total of 121 children were taken into state care in North-East England over five months after abuse was diagnosed on the basis of physical examinations.

The family of the ten-year-old girl came from Leeds. This was the city in which Dr Marietta Higgs, the paediatrician at the centre of the Cleveland scandal, learned at a conference her method of diagnosing abuse from physical examination.

In the ten-year-old's case doctors made a diagnosis of abuse when the girl was taken by her parents to hospital after they discovered a bloodstain on her underpants.

Doctors found small amounts of blood in several examinations and subjected the girl to eight examinations.

They decided that the girl's condition meant she had been abused.

Mr Justice Holman said: "There was nothing at all about this family to attract the slightest attention, worry or concern.

"All the indications were, and are, that the parents and children were a well-functioning, happy and closeknit family, in which the children thrived."

After adding that the girl was "subjected to no less than eight invasive, intimate examinations of her private parts', he said: 'Both children must inevitably have been emotionally damaged by the experiences."

The judge said social workers should have listened to the children and he also condemned the use of flimsy medical evidence to break up a family.

Signs of sexual abuse were "considerably subjective", he said.

"Even 20 years after the Cleveland inquiry, I wonder whether its lessons have been fully learned," the judge added.