One evening in May of this year Brian
Johnson, a 43-year-old former care worker from South Wales,
telephoned me from a call box in Cardiff. He had been charged on
several counts of physical and sexual abuse. But the prosecution
had offered a deal. Good-humoured as always, Johnson told me:
"If I plead guilty to the physical charges, they are prepared to
drop all the sexual allegations and I will almost certainly walk
out of court a free man. So what do I do?"
I didn't really need to answer. Johnson had already made up his
mind. His legal team had collected substantial evidence that all
the allegations against him had been fabricated. "I'm going back
tomorrow," he said, "and I am going to tell them exactly where
they can stick their offer. I am going to fight."
For some time, there was no news. Then I found out what had
happened. After a three-week trial, Brian Johnson had been found
guilty on several counts of sexual abuse. He was sentenced to 15
years in prison. He was led from the court, shouting out that he
was innocent.
The evidence against Johnson was collected during a new form of
police inquiry which has developed only in the past ten years:
the trawling operation. First used by Leicestershire police in
the Frank Beck case in 1990, the method spread to North Wales,
Cheshire and Merseyside. Now it has been used by as many as
two-thirds of the country's police forces to convict dozens of
alleged abusers.
Detective Superintendent John Robbins, of the Merseyside police,
has described this new kind of investigation as "the reverse of
normal police methods". Instead of starting from a crime and
setting out to find the criminal, the trawling procedure starts
with the suspect (or an allegation) and then attempts to find
the crime. Police officers trace and interview former residents
of care homes and, during these interviews, more evidence
against the original suspect, or against other care workers,
almost unfailingly emerges.
These investigations are often said to involve "children's
homes". In fact they are usually residential institutions for
troubled or difficult adolescents and, since the allegations of
abuse usually refer back ten, 20 or even 30 years, those making
them are not children at all. They are almost always adults,
many of them with long criminal records. In a number of cases
they make their allegations in prison or while facing serious
criminal charges. It is here that the real dangers of police
trawling operations become apparent - or ought to become
apparent.
If police officers interview hundreds of damaged young people
with long records of deception and dishonesty, with the aim of
gathering allegations of abuse against those who once cared for
them, it would be surprising if they did not succeed in
provoking a large number of false allegations - particularly
when it is known that such allegations can result in thousands
of pounds being paid out by the Criminal Injuries Compensation
Authority.
Yet police forces up and down the land continue their trawling
operations with the full knowledge and implicit approval of Home
Office ministers.
Lord Williams of Mostyn, for example, recently wrote that there
are "no viable alternatives" and that "sexual abuse allegations
are too serious not to look for further evidence".
Here is an example of how the police do it. In September 1997
former residents of St George's School in Formby, Merseyside,
which had always enjoyed an unblemished reputation, received a
letter from Robbins, headed "Operation Care". It read:
I am the senior investigating officer of the above operation
which is currently investigating allegations of child abuse
reported to have taken place within a number of residential
establishments in the Merseyside area.
I am aware from records provided to me that in times past you
have been a resident at St George's/Clarence House School . . .
I am concerned that there is a possibility that such abuse may
have taken place whilst you were in residence there.
If you have any information or if we can help you with any
complaint you may have [my italics], please respond by
completing and returning the attached slip using the enclosed
pre-paid envelope or by contacting a member of my staff using
the above telephone number . . .
One man interviewed as a result of this trawl is the Southampton
football manager Dave Jones, who worked at St George's for four
years during the 1980s, and whose conduct at the time was
considered exemplary. His case was leaked to the press because
he happens to be well known. But it is believed that 80 former
members of staff face allegations, and Robbins recently told a
judge that charges would be brought against as many as 50 of
them. Yet until recently St George's enjoyed an unblemished
reputation.
St George's is only one of a hundred institutions that have been
investigated by the Merseyside and Cheshire police forces in the
past five years. It would seem likely that, in these two
counties alone, trawling operations have led to allegations
being made against as many as a thousand care workers.
The original North Wales investigation produced allegations
against 365 different people, and this tally has now risen. In
South Wales, according to a report in Community Care
magazine, an investigation carried out by Gwent police into a
single home, Ty Mawr, has already led to accusations against 60
former members of staff. So far, however, the police have
interviewed only 200 former residents. According to the report,
it is their intention to interview another 6,800 before their
investigation is concluded. In another care home, five former
members of staff, one of whom is in his eighties, have recently
been charged by the South Wales police with more than 200 counts
of abuse.
Another case involves Derek Brushett, former head of Bryn-y-Don.
So well-respected was he that he became a Welsh Office
inspector. Yet he now faces 40 counts of sexual and physical
abuse relating to more than 20 complainants. None of these
complaints was made spontaneously and all were the products of
police trawling exercises. At least 50 other institutions in
South Wales are under investigation.
Meanwhile on Tyneside, Operation Rose has reached such a pitch
that Gill Rutherford, a solicitor with Thompson's, has retained
the services of five barristers, who meet weekly. About 100 care
workers have already faced police interviews; more than 20 have
been charged.
Given the statistics already in the public domain, it is
reasonable to assume that the number of care workers implicated
by trawled allegations is now in excess of 3,000 and may well be
approaching 5,000. Many of these cases will never come to court.
But with the cost of the North Wales tribunal alone estimated at
£10-15 million, the overall cost to the public purse of
convening inquiries, mounting police trawling operations,
co-ordinating with social services, bringing suspects before the
courts and holding those convicted in prison must already run
into hundreds of millions of pounds.
Most people would consider this money well spent if it were
indeed contributing to the cause of justice. But many lawyers
believe that exactly the opposite is happening. Certainly some
of the care workers involved in these cases are guilty of sexual
abuse. But from the beginning, solicitors have expressed concern
about the alarmingly high level of false allegations that
appears to result from trawling operations. Chris Saltrese, a
solicitor based in Merseyside, takes the view that at least half
the convictions obtained in Cheshire and Merseyside are unsound.
He also thinks that, as the investigation in the North-west has
gathered momentum, the number of false allegations has
multiplied, to the point where as many as 90 per cent of trawled
complaints have been fabricated. Chief among the complex motives
of those who make false complaints, he believes, is the desire
to gain compensation.
The principle underlying all trawling operations is, in the
words of Robbins, that of "corroboration by volume". Terry
Hoskin, the former head of St Aidan's, Widnes, whose appeal
against his conviction in 1996 on a number of serious sexual
offences will be heard later this year, found himself facing
allegations made by no fewer than 40 complainants. All but one
had been trawled by the police. Even after the prosecution had
discarded the more obvious fabrications, 20 complainants
remained. In the face of such multiple allegations it is all but
impossible to find judges or juries who are prepared to acquit,
however many inconsistencies the evidence contains.
The same factor appears to have played a part in the conviction
of Brian Johnson last month, even though his own trial involved
only four complainants. One allegation against Johnson and his
co-defendant Geoffrey Morris (who pleaded guilty to a number of
counts) involved a claim of satanic abuse: a black cloak, an
altar and the drinking of blood were supposedly used as ritual
preludes to sexual assault. Although the jury rejected this
allegation, they accepted another from the same man that
actually ran counter to the evidence before them. The man
claimed that Morris had driven him in a minibus to a venue where
he was sexually abused by both Morris and Johnson. Even though
Morris could not drive, and even though this was accepted by the
Crown, the jury convicted Johnson on this count.
Another witness was a woman who claimed that Johnson had
indecently assaulted her. Her psychiatric records suggested that
she was unable to distinguish between truth and fantasy and that
she had made numerous allegations which were not true. Ten years
ago, after making an allegation of rape which had resulted in a
police investigation, she eventually admitted that she had made
up the entire incident. In court last month, however, she
claimed that the rape had taken place after all. In spite of a
great deal of other evidence, including the testimony of her
former foster mother, which completely undermined the
credibility of this witness, Johnson was found guilty of
indecently assaulting her.
In this respect, the trial followed the pattern of countless
others involving care workers: the sheer quantity of
complainants and allegations leads to a situation where the
quality of the evidence offered becomes all but irrelevant. That
Johnson - who, in the view of his legal team, is entirely
innocent - should have been found guilty "beyond reasonable
doubt" on the evidence presented is extremely disturbing. It is
tempting to criticise the jury system itself. But the real
responsibility lies with those who decided to put such cases
before a jury in the first place.
For sound historical and evidential reasons our legal system
contains safeguards designed to protect both individual citizens
and the public purse from unsound prosecutions ever being
brought before a court. Since its creation in 1986, the Crown
Prosecution Service has played a central role. Its brief is that
it should allow prosecutions only if there is a realistic
prospect of a conviction and if a prosecution would be in the
public interest. A second safeguard has traditionally been
provided by the magistrates' court. In cases initiated before
April 1997 it is still possible to hold an old-style committal
hearing in front of a magistrate. Witnesses can be called and
magistrates can dismiss weak cases without them ever going
before a judge. Even if this safeguard fails, judges can
themselves dismiss cases or prevent unsound evidence going
before a jury on a number of grounds.
In any sane and reasonable society, no prosecution based on
allegations that have been actively sought or solicited by
police forces, in circumstances where substantial material
rewards may be available to those who make false allegations,
would ever be allowed to proceed. The case would be halted by
the CPS or the evidence would be ruled inadmissible either by a
magistrate or by the judge.
The problem that our criminal justice system now faces is that
the attitude we have adopted as a society towards allegations of
sexual abuse is neither sane nor reasonable. So terrifying has
the spectre of child sexual abuse become, so convinced are we
that we are beset by some unspeakable evil, that the ordinary
checks and balances built into our justice system have been
rendered powerless.
In recent years barristers have noticed an increasing tendency
for the CPS to allow sexual cases to proceed, regardless of the
quality of the evidence. At the same time both magistrates and
judges seem terrified to use their powers to dismiss unsound
prosecutions or to halt trials as an abuse of process. The
terror that an innocent person might be found guilty, which has
traditionally and rightly been the foundation on which our
entire justice system has been built, has been replaced by the
terror that a guilty man might go free.
In these circumstances, in which both magistrates and judges
have in effect relinquished their traditional responsibility to
protect the public against ill-founded and dangerous
prosecutions, it should scarcely be surprising that juries,
misled by the court into believing that the evidence being
presented to them is safe, should use this evidence as the basis
for convicting the defendant. For juries, too, are susceptible
to terror. And they, too, are liable to reach a verdict of
guilty not on the evidence but in response to the fear that they
might acquit a guilty man. If recent rulings are any guide, even
some appeal court judges appear to have succumbed to the terror.
When you are faced by an unspeakable evil, the safest course is
always to convict, whatever reasonable doubts there may be about
whether the defendant has actually committed the crimes of which
he or she is accused. We saw that again and again in the cases
brought after the IRA terror bombings.
In such a climate, the dispensing of justice is replaced by a
witch-hunt. And, because police trawling operations have been
allowed to develop virtually unchallenged over ten years, we are
now in the midst of a witch-hunt of unprecedented intensity.
Perhaps the most lavishly resourced witch-hunt in history,
taking up thousands of police hours and draining hundreds of
millions of pounds of public money, the present one stretches
across England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland and involves
literally thousands of care workers, former care workers and an
increasing number of teachers. One of the reasons that it has
spread so rapidly, so silently and so invisibly is that all free
societies depend ultimately not upon lawyers or politicians but
upon journalists to watch over their essential liberties and to
keep them safe. Yet in the present case journalists have
themselves been responsible for driving the witch-hunt forward.
Although we tend to assume that investigative journalists are
among the most sceptical of observers, that is by no means
always the case. As at least one former national newspaper
editor has noted, journalists are sometimes the most credulous
of people. So anxious are they for sensational stories that they
are frequently unable to interrogate these stories sceptically
or to investigate them properly. It is because the great
children's home panic, in the midst of which we now find
ourselves, was largely created by apparently responsible
journalists writing for broadsheet newspapers (or for Private
Eye) during the early years of this decade that its true
nature has remained, in effect, invisible for so long. It is
because it has been virtually undocumented by serious
journalists that this particular moral panic has become so vast,
so powerful and so dangerous.
Much can now be done by politicians, by lawyers and by the
judiciary. But whether it is done will depend on whether editors
and journalists can wake from their slumberous credulity and
begin to document in detail the phenomenon that they have played
such a large role in creating.
If they do not, it is likely that Brian Johnson, and the dozen
or more other innocent care workers who are already serving long
prison sentences, will continue to protest their innocence in
vain and that the carefully prepared submissions of their
lawyers will continue to be turned down by the Court of Appeal.
If this should indeed happen, it is certain that they will be
joined by many others from among the thousands who have had
allegations made against them. Given the scale of the
investigations that are now taking place, the number of innocent
care workers in prison is likely to rise by the score until it
reaches a hundred or more.
Such a prospect should not be tolerated in any society that
calls itself free. The present situation, where police forces
hunt crimes, rather than criminals, should not be tolerated,
either.
In allowing retrospective trawling operations to develop in the
way they have, we have created a machine for producing
miscarriages of justice. That machine is now out of control. It
has already done inestimable damage to countless innocent care
workers and their families. If it is not halted soon, and halted
by the very people who have thus far driven it forward, a great
deal more damage will be done, and a tragedy that is already
grave beyond the power of words to express will become graver
still.
Richard Webster is the author of "The Great Children's Home
Panic" (1998)
