1. Ms Smith also commented on this letter. She said that she had no reason to believe that Professor Friedrich had not overcome any difficulties he had mentioned in watching the videos in European format. She certainly believed that he had watched them.

    2. Dr Sandra Hewitt and Dr Hamish Cameron: Child behaviour

  2. The experts dealing with interpretation of child behaviour, and the extent to which certain manifestations might or might not be linked to sexual or other abuse, were Dr Sandra Hewitt for the Defendants and Dr Hamish Cameron for the Claimants. Each of them considered individual children and the available information about their behavioural patterns, but also addressed more general issues.

  3. Dr Hewitt records how she would often encounter very young children and experience difficulty in structuring interviews in a way that would efficiently extract reliable information. She explained that this was, or appeared to be, because the children were lacking in the language skills (and presumably also concepts) that were necessary to communicate what she wanted to know. She then decided that she could regard behaviour as "the language they did have". She claimed that "suddenly" it was easy to understand children. "Behaviours are the mirrors of young children’s experiences. In assessing cases of pre-school sexual abuse, that is where we were to look for information about a child’s past".

  4. As to the 28 Shieldfield cases she reviewed, she referred to a recurring leitmotiv ("something very powerful") which they had in common. She claims that they were caused "massive dysregulation from their stable entrance behaviours". She identified eight issues to be considered:

    5. 1) The combination of significant trauma and atypical sexual behaviours.

    2) A commonality of fears, actions and references to places (not normally experienced in a random sampling of abused children) pointing to a common source.

    3) She thought old memories were triggered and recalled in detail following a medical examination or formal interview. She describes "remarkable responses" to such events that were "unprompted and unstructured", thus emerging "with emotion and content intact".

    4) Consistency of recall "not only within their accounts, but also across many children".

    5) The commonality of atypical sexual behaviours she regards as "virtually impossible" without a common source.

    6) She excluded the hypotheses of cross-contamination and suggestive questioning in her child-by-child analysis.

    7) The commonality of atypical symptoms across so many children defies the probability of other causes than the origin of the trauma at Shieldfield.

    8) In sum, she concludes, the cases reviewed match a "research and practice population of sexually abused pre-school children" but, in any event, the rich behavioural data cannot be explained by any other reasonable hypothesis than the experience of sexual abuse at Shieldfield Nursery during the time the children were in the Red Room with Lillie and Reed as their nurses.

  5. This list gives rise to questions that I shall have to consider carefully, namely (1) the extent to which these eight issues are truly distinct from each other, (2) whether significant questions have been begged, and (3) whether Dr Hewitt has been operating on correct factual data. (For example, Child 5, Child 11, Child 14 and Child 31 were never in the Red Room.)

  6. Once again, the experts divided more or less on "party lines". Dr Cameron was asked to consider a sample of only seven Shieldfield children. While he agrees that sexualised behaviour in two to four year olds, provided it is "persistent, intrusive and seems ‘driven’ within the child", should alert one to the possibility of sexual abuse, neither this nor any other behaviour can be regarded as probative or diagnostic of sexual abuse. So much depends on context. He highlighted the very important point that one cannot come up with a responsible diagnosis on paper without having seen the child and investigating his or her particular circumstances. That is something Dr Cameron is used to doing either clinically or for the purposes of family litigation.

  7. Some of the behaviours noted at Shieldfield are neither probative nor indicative of sexual abuse in two to four year olds (e.g. nightmares or disturbed sleep, lack of speech development, fear of dogs, becoming upset in certain locations, fear of clowns or beards, pre-occupation with death, aggression, bed-wetting or soiling). In the course of cross-examination, Dr Hewitt was quite prepared to put the issue of clowns to one side as irrelevant to the matter of child abuse.

  8. On the other hand, unusual sexual posturing or play can at least be indicative of sexual abuse. It is thus important to be careful about what is classified as "sexual" in this context – a matter I shall turn to again.

  9. It is necessary to allow for "separation anxiety" when starting at a nursery, or changing rooms within it, as a possible explanation for behavioural changes or regression. Moreover, behavioural deterioration arising after questioning might connote the awakening of dormant memories of past abuse or, alternatively, the arousal through clumsy interviewing of fears about certain individuals, if portrayed as threatening or wicked people. It is inevitably the case that a belief that one (or, in the case of a parent, one’s child) has been subjected to wicked behaviour can in itself lead to trauma and severe disruption of one’s life.

  10. While Dr Cameron recognises that it is established knowledge that one of the techniques used by paedophiles is that of threatening or cajoling their victims into silence, he regards it as unrealistic to suppose such a technique could have worked in relation to all of these children, so as to prevent the making of contemporaneous complaints. He considers that a significant proportion, at least, would have complained immediately to a principal carer or trusted relative. He expressed "grave doubt" as to whether any of the relevant children’s remarks could be construed as indicating coercive threats or enticement. It is his opinion, in respect of the children he reviewed, that such remarks as could be interpreted as reflecting enticement, or coercive threats, were so inconclusive that a reader would have to construct that scenario out of very few facts. In this context, it is naturally worth remembering how widely the Review Team cast the net of the Claimants’ alleged abuse. They did not in the Report confine their findings to the 27 children in this case. Far from it. They suggest that the abuse was much wider. On Dr Cameron’s thesis, therefore, it becomes even less likely that all the supposed victims would have remained silent.

  11. Dr Cameron considers that it is important to focus first on more common or expected causes for clusters of symptoms in young children, before attributing an explanation which is not within ordinary experience. Each child has to be considered individually, with particular reference to family background and personal circumstances. It is also important to recall that the large majority of children suffering from sexual abuse incur it within the family. "Stranger sexual abuse is less common. Even rarer is sexual abuse by an unrelated man and woman working together to organise and systematically sexually abuse a large number of children in their care". Unlike Dr Hewitt, Dr Cameron does not regard the recurring themes in the children’s "disclosures" as pointing inexorably to abuse by Mr Lillie and Miss Reed. He refers to some of these notions (e.g. "flats", "lifts", "an old woman", "nakedness in bed together") as having an "interactive imaginative quality, typical of childhood story telling under questioning". He went, originally, so far as to offer the opinion that, focusing specifically on the behaviours described, the balance would be 90:10 in favour of common place explanations rather than a planned sexual abuse programme engineered by Mr Lillie and Miss Reed which, in his view, remains no more than a "possibility". (I believe, in the witness box, he accepted that putting a precise figure to the probabilities was unsatisfactory and that, in any event, if one were to assess the evidence separately in relation to each child the probabilities would vary.) In coming to an overall conclusion, of course, Dr Cameron accepts that one has to factor in to the exercise other forms of evidence and, in particular, statements by the children and any physical findings by paediatricians.

  12. Because he was taking a cautious approach rather than claiming certainty, very little was added to the overall picture by his oral evidence on 16-18 April. But I found him helpful, cautious and objective. It is true that he started off a little bumptiously and cracked a few jokes, but he soon got into his stride. His primary message was to warn about leaping to conclusions too readily – especially in the light of the Cleveland inquiry to which he had given expert assistance 15 years ago. One needs to approach the matter in an open-minded way and without being wedded to pre-conceptions or any idée fixe. He was referring particularly to Dr Marietta Higgs and her apparent obsession with reflex anal dilatation. He said that one always needs to be watchful for any professional who was narrowly specialised and over-zealous in diagnosis. That is wise advice and I bore it in mind.

  13. There was an interesting example of the need for full information in the course of his cross-examination. His attention was directed to Child 23 whose video material he had been asked to watch before giving evidence. He said that it was necessary to consider carefully all possible explanations for her symptoms. He had not been given her GP notes and was, therefore, unaware of her history of urinary problems and associated soreness. When told about this, he immediately recognised that it was a material factor. This is simply one of many examples in the case where the addition of one new category of information about a child can significantly shift the balance of probabilities derived from first impressions.

  14. There were a number of significant general propositions put forward by Dr Cameron and underlined with considerable conviction. First, at the beginning of his evidence on 18 April, he referred to the situation where a mother may suddenly come to believe (as a result, say, of a parents’ meeting or some other conversation) that her child has been abused, and thereafter becomes obsessively committed to an idea which had not previously entered her head. This is, as it were, the "zeal of the converted":

    15. "A difficulty, my Lord, is that that kind of sudden understanding, the flash of understanding comes with such force into the mind of the mother, a very reasonably concerned mother about her child, is often so strong that [it] becomes really a very entrenched belief which has far more energy from the emotions attached to it than from the logic attached to it, but I agree that it is understandable and reasonable presumption that the mother leapt to. But it is the way it sticks in the mind. It is the sudden conversion of belief which is driven emotionally as much as by intellect".

  15. Secondly, Dr Cameron was asked by Miss Page about the possibility for diagnosing child abuse without the opportunity of seeing the relevant child or children or of investigating the family circumstances. He made the following point:

    16. "I actually think paper exercises are very difficult things to do and fraught with risk in drawing conclusions. I like the approach that Dr Hewitt talked about the interview and I particularly like when she says [in her book] ‘to schedule at least a 2 hour intake period’. ‘At least’ is in my experience quite the operative word. You often need a long time to really get the feel of the child. A paper exercise can take you so far, but actually it is in my view a very risky business going and drawing conclusions from papers alone. That is the difficulty I have myself found in giving evidence in this case – that I have been asked about behaviours on paper, and that is it, and I think it has come out in cross-examination. This is – it is a limited exercise".

  16. Shortly afterwards, Dr Cameron gave evidence which is fundamentally important for this case and it is therefore desirable that I should set it out in extenso:

    17. "Did it occur or did it not occur? What I was trying to say is that, as I understand this case, Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed are alleged to have abused a group of children, a substantial group of children, so that the children themselves are the focus of having been abused, and the case emerges out of that group phenomenon. The parents say ‘our child has been abused’. The alternative view is that there is still a group phenomenon but the group phenomenon is based on a collective belief that the children have been abused. The first one, the child has actually been abused. The second one, is there is a collective belief the children have been abused. When that collective belief takes root in a group it is a very powerful force. It actually holds people in a group, who mutually reinforce each other and it is quite difficult for professionals, unless they are very experienced, to stand back from the weight of that belief system. Now, that is the sort of belief system that child psychiatrists (of whom a number have been mentioned in this case) are familiar [with] when parents have a belief about a sickness in their child. That is the factitious disease by proxy idea: ‘I believe my child is ill or harmed, therefore my child is ill or harmed, and my neighbour’s child is ill or harmed, and my neighbour’s neighbour’s child is ill or harmed. All of us together as parents who have a child at this nursery – our children are ill or harmed’. What is striking is that when one looks at that group of parents who come to occupy that belief, you find that others within the group will not say the same and that they refuse to join that group. They say, ‘No, no, we do not think anything went on’, but the belief system is a very powerful one. So when I am talking about the alternative hypothesis I am not trying to have a ‘yes – no, were these children abused or not?’ I am trying to say these children have suffered harm. Either these children have been physically and sexually abused, as described, and they had actually been harmed, or the belief system in the group of parents, supported sometimes by professionals, has led to the perception that they had been harmed, and that perception has itself been abusive to the children. These children have been emotionally abused by the collective belief. So that is what I am saying, when I just wanted to set out the context within which I would analyse the case".

  17. I asked Dr Cameron to elaborate further, so as to give any examples either from his own experience or from the literature of such a group phenomenon in operation. He told me that he had come across it himself in the context of new religious movements and, in particular, the "Children of God" case in which he was involved. He said that there was a collective belief system about the children within that organisation. He did, however, refer to other examples in the literature such as the Kelly Michaels case and the Little Rascals case in the United States. As to this jurisdiction, reference was also made to Re E [1991] 1 F.L.R. 420 (Scott Baker J) and Rochdale Borough Council v. A [1991] 2 F.L.R. 192 (Douglas Brown J). Both of these cases are well known and I do not think anything would be gained by my summarising them or addressing parallels with, or distinctions from, the present case. Each factual situation must be addressed individually.

  18. Dr Sandra Hewitt found herself in a difficult position because she was being asked to offer an opinion in a case for which, as she put it, there were "no road maps". She agreed with Dr Cameron as to the limitations upon a purely paper exercise such as that she was required to carry out. She did not regard it as her function to "diagnose" child abuse in this case. She accepted that the decision as to whether abuse had taken place at Shieldfield could only be taken by the court in the light of the overall evidence. Since, however, she had been asked by the Defendants’ solicitors to offer an opinion on the behaviour of children in this case, she would do her best. But she emphasised that it was an artificial one-off exercise, since not only was her task to be carried out on the papers alone but it was to be confined to behaviour (thus excluding many potentially relevant factors).

  19. This was a perfectly reasonable stance to take, but it seemed a little difficult to reconcile with what she had actually said in her report. For example, Miss Page referred her to page 21, where she appeared to be offering something very like a diagnosis in respect of Child 2:

    20. "Child 2’s patterns, over time and across situations, strongly indicate that she suffered trauma as a result of the placement with Lillie and Reed. Her behaviours, coupled with [her] statements best identify the source of trauma".

  20. Dr Hewitt would not accept that this could be described as a "diagnosis"; she preferred to call it "a conclusion from data". This is, of course, to some extent a matter of semantics.

  21. It is quite obvious to me that Dr Hewitt took a great deal of time and trouble over preparing a report in this case and that she was determined to be as objective and helpful as she could. I must pay particular attention, however, to the fact that she (like the other experts) finds herself in unusual circumstances in this case. The exercise is inevitably an artificial one because she had to work on what she called "retrospective data" without seeing the children or having an opportunity to establish the complete factual background in relation to any child. Nevertheless, her terms of reference may somewhat obscure the limited nature of the enterprise. She referred me to a passage on page 9 of her report, which included the request from the Defendants’ solicitors that she should "… express an opinion as to the extent to which any inference may reliably be drawn from the behaviours of those 28 children as to (a) whether they have been abused; and if so (b) what form the abuse took; (c) when the abuse took place and (d) the setting in which the abuse occurred". It is noteworthy that Dr Hewitt was not, in principle, prepared to take what has been described as a "leap too far". She has rightly emphasised that all she could do was to assist the court by reference to the limited data in the light of her experience. I am grateful for that assistance but naturally I can only regard anything in her report that looks like a "conclusion" or a "diagnosis" as of limited value.

  22. Dr Hewitt focused very much in her report on the concept of traumatic stress disorder and referred to the recognised criteria for understanding trauma responses in young children to be found in the Zero to Three Diagnostic Classification Manual. As I have already made clear, Dr Cameron has pointed to the danger of looking at symptoms sometimes associated with traumatic stress disorder and working backwards from them to a conclusion that, in any given case, a trauma must have taken place. In the course of his re-examination, he said this:

    23. "I have great respect for Dr Sandra Hewitt’s work, my Lord, but I have to say that when children have experienced a major trauma at the hands of carers they will actually tell people that they have experienced something awful and frightening and in my view if trauma (by that I mean menacing violent actions towards the child) is fundamental to the assessment, and there is no evidence of that, no satisfactory evidence of that whatsoever… then I cannot professionally see how there can be a post traumatic stress disorder assumption. You have to have a trauma before you can have a PTSD. If you diagnose PTSD in a child and then say, ‘therefore there must have been a trauma’, that is not logical and it does not add up".

  23. This warning ties in with the content of a chapter in Expert Witnesses in Child Abuse Cases: What Can and Should Be Said in Court published by the American Psychological Association under the editorship of Stephen Ceci and Helene Hembrooke. The chapter is by Celia B. Fisher and Katherine A. Whiting, How valid are child sexual abuse validations? It contains the following relevant paragraphs, at p.166:

    24. "Psychologists applying the PTSD diagnosis as validation of child sexual abuse fail to recognise the tautological nature of this position (Fisher, 1995). According to DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994), the essential feature of PTSD is ‘the development of characteristic symptoms following exposure, to an extreme traumatic stress’ (italics added, p.424). Thus, the validity of the PTSD diagnosis depends on first establishing that the child has been a victim of an uncommon trauma. Accordingly, to meet ethical and forensic demands for scientifically based evidence of child sexual abuse, a PTSD diagnosis cannot be established in the absence of independent documentation that sexual abuse has occurred.

    In some cases, PTSD-like behaviors may be a consequence of the stressful nature of repeated interrogations by investigators, parents, therapists, or some combination of these people who attempted to substantiate whether sexual abuse had occurred (Fisher, 1995; Gardner, 1994). For example, in some instances, overenthusiastic social workers, police investigators, or psychologists may attempt to elicit from a child information regarding suspected abuse by describing lurid accusations made by others about the accused (see Bruck, Ceci, & Rosenthal, 1995). According to DSM-IV, learning about serious harm experienced by family or close friends may also trigger PTSD symptoms. Gardner suggested that court-appointed evaluators of child sexual abuse should attend to the temporal framework of PTSD symptoms, thereby distinguishing between abuse-related PTSD symptoms due to a sexual abuse trauma (usually present, to varying degrees, during and immediately following the discontinuation of the abuse) and investigatory-related PTSD that does not appear until after the disclosure and interrogation. Other investigatory-related PTSD-like symptoms, such as repetitive play in a therapist’s office, may be a product of the repetitive nature of the therapy sessions rather than a pathological acting out of a traumatic event (Fisher, 1995)."

  24. Against that background, it seems to me, Dr Hewitt’s resort to Zero to Three has to be approached with caution. I did not understand her to disagree. As Miss Page pointed out, at an early stage in cross-examination, that document in itself quite expressly makes clear that it is not intended to be used in the context of any legal application. She accepted this, although she agreed that with the benefit of hindsight it would have been better to make that clear in the body of her report. She emphasised that she was not using the criteria in a standardised way, but merely as an aid to assisting the court in these very unusual circumstances. She explained how she came to use it shortly before her report was due for delivery in the middle of December:

    25. "I was trying, as I said earlier, to look at this data through the framework that I used to analyse the cases or to organise the cases that come to my practice – the prior history, ‘rule out’ factors, objective measures – and somewhere, about a week and a half before my report was due, I was feeling very crazy because none of the data … I could not manage it, there was no way I could get it into conceptual framework that made sense to me and then suddenly I realised I could not stay with the framework – as it was not working and I did not know where to go. Based on what I had read and the cluster of symptoms which I was concerned about, it felt to me that the best framework was going to be some measure of traumatic stress behaviours that are seen with children that comes out of a reliable source. Now, I went to the conference at Zero to Three when the sequelae to some earlier research were discussed and ended up being in this version of the manual with the traumatic stress disorder and I thought, I bet if I look at this data, organised around traumatic stress factors and central behaviour factors, it may make some sense, and in fact that is what I did. Suddenly, that lens organised the data for me. It is from looking at that, I could then reach the conclusions that the combination of traumatic stress behaviours, coupled with the atypical and unusual level of sexual behaviours would come together to say there has been a traumatic history for this child".

  25. Shortly afterwards, Dr Hewitt emphasised the special use she was making of these criteria:

    26. "If I am not to make a diagnosis, then I am not using this in that sense to frame a diagnosis, I am using it in combination with factors. I am using this cluster of behaviours which ends up being at a level which is significant. It is across the various types of behaviour that children can exhibit and across a number of sub-categories".

  26. She was very clear that the manual was intended for assisting the diagnosis in individual cases – not to have application in the present circumstances for what she called "a review of group data". It follows that I must look at the available data for each child separately and weigh any of the behavioural symptoms in the individual context (remembering that there is no cluster of symptoms diagnostic of sexual abuse).

  27. Miss Page took Dr Hewitt through her conclusions relating to a number of individual children (which looked remarkably like diagnoses of sexual abuse). There is no need for me to reflect them in detail in this judgment, but she focused particularly on Children 1, 2, 11, 14, 21 and 24. She demonstrated in doing so that (despite her terms of reference, however artificial) Dr Hewitt had in fact taken into account matters other than behaviour.

  28. She purported on a number of occasions also to take into account statements, but without having seen the videos, up to that time, or without having the full context of the statements before her. Miss Page suggested that Dr Hewitt had indeed made a "leap too far" and, what is more, that she had displayed bias in her methodology. This may have been partly a factor of her limited information, and I am sure it was unconscious. Nevertheless, Miss Page was clearly right about this. There were a number of examples, but perhaps the most striking was Dr Hewitt’s classification of vulval soreness as an "unusual sexual behavior" with reference to Child 2. It was also curious that this should have been so readily accepted as a pointer to Red Room abuse since Dr Hewitt herself listed the symptoms before as well as during the Red Room period. When pressed, Dr Hewitt agreed that her report was "misleading" at least in this respect. No doubt all the experts are very busy people, but by December 2001 when the reports of Dr Friedrich and Dr Hewitt were prepared it must have been apparent how grave the allegations were that the Review Team had chosen to make. Sloppiness of this kind is not good enough.

  29. Dr Hewitt explained that her very strong conclusion in respect of Child 2 (that she had suffered trauma while in the Red Room) had been reached by combining behaviour with statements. I can readily understand the artificiality of separating out behaviour and statements. I noted the same problem with Professor Friedrich, who was supposed to be concentrating on verbal disclosures but decided to refer to behaviour in addition (for reasons I have explained). Nevertheless, it was a fair point for Miss Page to make that Dr Hewitt did not make clear when and to what extent she had departed from her specifically behavioural brief. Miss Page pointed out to her that the picture she had been given was somewhat incomplete since the mother of Child 2 had in May 1993 described her as "loving" the Nursery at the material time (i.e. prior to July 1992).

  30. One of the more surprising claims of Dr Hewitt was that the court could rule out cross-contamination as a factor in respect of certain children (including Child 2). Miss Page suggested this as an indicator of bias, but more importantly it was a matter outside Dr Hewitt’s expertise and she lacked a good deal of relevant information now before this court. In any case, although she tried to explain how she had ruled out cross-contamination (on the morning of 19 April), I found this part of her evidence difficult to follow.

  31. Once again, I shall have to address the opinions expressed by these two experts on child behaviour, in relation to the individual children, when I come to assess the evidence relied on for the purposes of justification.

    32. 8) The evidence of multiple abuse

    General Introduction

  32. I shall now turn to consider the evidence relied upon by those Defendants pleading justification to support the primary allegations of rape and indecent assault, child by child, as well as the secondary (but obviously grave) allegations of involvement in a paedophile ring and the supply of pornography.

  33. Ms Judith Jones made the point in her evidence (probably regarded in some quarters as controversial, and certainly of some sensitivity) that, since this was primarily a social services nursery, one would expect a significant proportion of the children to be suffering from some form of abuse simply on the basis of ordinary experience. She would also have expected to find some of them on the child protection register. What surprised her in the present case was how few, relatively, were so registered. It is clearly necessary to factor in this evidence to the exercise of weighing what is or is not inherently unlikely, in the context of applying the principles discussed by Lord Nicholls in Re H (cited at paragraph 358 above).

  34. As I have noted elsewhere (paragraph 481), Dr Cameron made the very telling point that, over a large cohort of supposedly abused children, it would be quite astonishing if threats by abusers could be so effective as to prevent any single child from making a contemporaneous complaint. One of the factors mentioned by Holland J in July 1994 was that none of the indictment children (subject to one possible minor qualification) had made such a complaint. Given that the Review Team have now airily accused Mr Lillie and Miss Reed of abuse on such a massive scale, the absence of contemporaneous complaints has become a major factor. It is true that the Review Team brushed it aside, on the basis of speculation, but I cannot take such an approach. Such a widespread and deafening silence prior to April 1993 could be explained on the basis that Mr Lillie and Miss Reed had so skilfully terrified dozens of children that they were unwilling to disclose ongoing abuse to parents/carers, but Dr Cameron thinks it highly unlikely. So do I. The relevance of the point is that I propose to look carefully at each and every case to seek some solid evidence of threats by Mr Lillie and/or Miss Reed that might account for the child’s silence.

  35. Miss Page sought to introduce similar evidence given by Professor Bruck in a supplementary report served in June 2002. Her focus was not so much upon threats to child victims but rather to the ability of children, in general, to "keep secrets". She cited a number of studies, from which I believe it is fair to say that the general import is that a significantly high proportion of children appear to be unable to comply with requests not to reveal matters which they have been asked to keep secret and, what is more, that the proportion would appear to increase inversely to age.

  36. Professor Bruck suggested in the light of the papers she cited (and indeed some others which were not available for production) that the data indicate that at least 50% or more of children under the age of five will tell a secret even if asked not to by their mother or a familiar adult.

  37. It is unnecessary to rehearse the underlying materials in any detail, but one study might have appeared to be of particular interest which focused particularly upon children aged three to five. They witnessed "a male confederate" break a particular glass. He instructed the children not to tell anything about the incident. Some of the children were offered a reward not to tell; some were told "sternly" not to reveal the information; others were told it would be "fun not to tell". Most of the children who were simply instructed not to tell revealed the secret in due course (86% of three year olds and 57% of five year olds). Those who were instructed not to tell "sternly" appeared more reluctant to reveal the information, but the pattern was similar (64% of three year olds and 50% of five year olds).

  38. Another factor which emerged from research by Douglas Peters and colleagues was that there is a tendency to keep a secret only for so long as the "transgressor" is present (see Jeopardy in the Courtroom, Ceci and Bruck, 1995, p.145). Another trend revealed by research (Thompson, Clarke-Stewart and Lepore, 1997, What did the Janitor do?) is that, perhaps not surprisingly, there is a greater initial reluctance to reveal such information when questioned in a neutral manner (e.g. "What happened?"). Leading questions, of one sort or another, are more likely to reveal "a secret" without delay. Even, however, neutral interviewing, if pressed further, appeared to lead to revelation.

  39. Shortly after I received this supplementary report, Mr Bishop responded and it became clear that he did not accept that what Professor Bruck was saying amounted to a fair representation of the current state of research. It would not be right for me to take these matters into account without Mr Bishop having an opportunity to cross-examine or call evidence in rebuttal.

  40. I naturally appreciate, in any event, that these experiments have to be approached with caution. Not only are they inherently artificial, but the factual circumstances are very far removed from the issues with which I am concerned in this case. It would, therefore, clearly be appropriate to approach this information conservatively and to allow a considerable discount when addressing percentages. I propose, therefore, to concentrate on the evidence of Dr Cameron, to which I have already referred, which suggests strongly that the scenario for which the Review Team would contend (upwards of 60 children being cowed or cajoled into silence) is at least as unlikely as untutored common sense would suggest.

  41. A further general point arises from the evidence of Lorraine Kelly. She has been Mr Lillie’s partner over the last decade. It is necessary to emphasise that it has never once been suggested, or even hinted in the Review Team’s case, that Miss Kelly was implicated in any way in criminal or paedophile activity. She gave evidence about the flat they shared in Red Barns from December 1992. It will be remembered that a constant theme in the pleas of justification advanced on behalf of the Review Team (and until 23 February also by the Newcastle Chronicle) was that children were taken to "Chris’s flat" and that abuse took place there. Allegations are variously made that on such occasions people took baths, indulged in sexual intercourse, rape, buggery, oral sex, and also sadistic assaults with knives, forks, spoons and scissors. There was urination, ejaculation and bleeding. Yet not once did Lorraine Kelly come home before, during or after December 1992 and find any signs of disturbance. There were no blood stains, no seminal stains on carpets or bedding, no wet sheets or clothing. There was not so much as a damp towel. There was nothing.

  42. She was cross-examined by Miss Sharp (still participating at that stage for the Chronicle) on the basis that she must surely have found disturbed or damp towels because a friend of hers came sometimes to exercise and feed the dog – and he surely must have washed his hands from time to time. It did not seem to strike any particular chord with Miss Kelly. But even if he did wash his hands, that would hardly advance the case Miss Sharp was then putting forward of regular orgies and sadism.

  43. Naturally, Miss Kelly’s evidence would not trouble the Review Team. Ms Jones, for example, took the line that if a child refers to "Chris’s house" that may not actually mean Chris’s home at all. It might simply be a reference to Mr Lillie’s domain in the Nursery. If this reasoning is taken to its logical conclusion, it might well apply to every reference made to "Chris’s house". Therefore, presumably, one should take every such allegation with a pinch of salt. Moreover, if it is reasonable for me to treat one or more of the "disclosures" about Chris’s house as truly relating to the Nursery, one has to address the alternative scenario that the orgiastic behaviour alleged took place in the Nursery without parents or other members of staff spotting anything amiss. The Jason Dabbs case affords no precedent for anything remotely like that.

  44. As Detective Constable Helen Foster confirmed, in evidence on 22 May, the immediate neighbour at Red Barns had been shocked when she found out about the allegations because she had heard and seen nothing suspicious. It is hardly realistic to suppose that if children and/or paedophiles were trooping in and out of Miss Kelly’s flat she would have remained oblivious. The police were given this important piece of evidence but it seems to have been accorded no significance. Nowadays, Miss Foster acknowledged, a statement would have been taken from the neighbour.

  45. Of course, one could overcome these difficulties if one transfers all these abusive trips to an unspecified flat (perhaps with a lift) or a house (perhaps with a black door or a red door) in some other location within push-chair distance of the Nursery. That is a very attractive option to the Defendants because not only is it difficult to prove a negative but virtually impossible to destroy a chimaera. The problem I face is that this would be purely speculative. It is not simply that there is no corroboration for such allegations (although that is certainly true). In the present context, I am postulating (at Ms Jones’ invitation) that one rejects all references to "Chris’s house" as being inaccurate. I am therefore not concerned with corroborating a child’s account at all (since it is ex hypothesi wrong). I am not prepared to conjure up such flats or houses, to serve as imaginary substitutes for "Chris’s house", out of thin air. There is simply no solid evidence. There are some statements attributed to children which I shall have to consider in individual cases, as I come to them, but they all have to be assessed according to the circumstances of each particular case – including Ms Jones’ warning that they are not necessarily to be taken literally.

  46. One of the general propositions to which great significance was at one time attached by the Defendants was that Mr Lillie and Miss Reed were supposed to have an exceptionally high ratio of recorded accidents as compared to other staff. The theory was that they were recording bogus accidents to cover abuse. What was said at page 244 of the Report was:

    47. "There appears to be the possibility that Chris Lillie and Dawn Reed abused children and covered their activities by recording fictional accidents to disguise either physical signs of abuse or distress caused by the abuse".

  47. This fell apart as soon as it was examined. Not only was there no correlation between the "accidents" and reported examples of abuse, but the Defendants were not even comparing like with like. The statistics they produced made no allowance for the fact that some of the comparator staff had only been in the Nursery for a relatively brief period, or that others were responsible for less vulnerable age groups, or even primarily for administrative duties rather than the direct care of children. It was utterly spurious. No more was heard of it (apart from a brief mention in closing submissions). Yet it was used both in the Report and in the Defendants’ case on justification. In court, one could see the inadequacy of the allegation and discount it. Unfortunately, however, the readers of the Report were not in a position to see through the Review Team’s "statistics" because, as in other instances, the reasoning is not set out for readers to make their own assessment. They were supposed to take it all on trust. They were presented with a picture of careful, planned and long-term manipulation of records to disguise paedophile activity. This would naturally carry conviction, on a superficial level, because paedophiles are widely perceived as cunning and manipulative. Ironically, of course, it does not tie in with Mr Dervin’s sceptical assessment of the two Claimants as being "among the most disorganised and chaotic abusers in the history of child care".

  48. There is another aspect of the regime at Shieldfield at the material time that needs to be borne in mind when assessing opportunities for abuse and the likelihood, or otherwise, of its having occurred. I am prepared to accept that there were legitimate matters for criticism and that later the Newcastle City Council attempted to make radical improvements. In particular, so far as the present Claimants are concerned, there was a lack of accurate record-keeping as to when and with whom children left the Nursery premises. As one parent pointed out, had there been a serious fire on the premises, it would not have been easy to pin down at any given period who was supposed to be on the premises and who had gone out (for whatever reason). Several parents spoke of having come to collect a child and finding that he or she was not there and of having to wait for staff to bring them back. Moreover, on some such occasions, no one on the premises (including managerial staff) was able to say where they had gone or when they were due back. That was obviously not satisfactory, to say the least. Not surprisingly, much has been made of this by the Defendants in suggesting that such occasions provided opportunities for abuse outside the premises.

  49. Another aspect of the "chaotic" administrative arrangements often referred to was the problem of clothes being muddled up. Children sometimes wore different clothes when collected from those worn were delivered at the Nursery that day. On occasions, these were ill fitting and uncomfortable. No one disputed that there were sometimes "accidents", requiring a change of garments, or that children’s clothes were sometimes wet from playing with water, or dirty from playing inside or outside, or from food being dropped over them. The criticism was that there seemed to be no system, and everything was done on a "hit or miss" footing. Again, this is relied upon as affording opportunities to cover up abuse. Although never quite spelt out, I understand Mr Bishop’s point to be that evidence of abuse, such as bleeding or seminal staining, could be removed and substitute clothing provided. On the other hand, I believe that these "chaotic" elements of the Shieldfield regime were what Mr Dervin had in mind when he expressed scepticism (as I find that he did) in his letter of 22 January; in other words, I believe he was expressing doubt whether any cunning and manipulative paedophile would ever be so "chaotic" about covering tracks. One of the more bizarre allegations is that a small boy was delivered in the morning wearing his new football strip and came home in a pink dress and cardigan. Neither Claimant would accept this was possible. They certainly knew nothing of it. On the other hand, it is not the sort of thing a mother would forget. If it did happen, however, it hardly has the stamp of a manipulative paedophile trying to cover his/her tracks.

  50. In the light of the allegations of widespread abuse outside the Nursery premises, in unspecified flats or houses, it is necessary to have in mind some background context as to the typical daily regime at Shieldfield during the relevant period.

  51. I quite appreciate that, as the Review Team have emphasised, it is rarely possible from contemporaneous records to identify when children were taken out of the nursery, where they were taken, or how many children went at any one time. It is fair to say that record-keeping was, to say the least, sketchy. Nonetheless, I have received evidence from Mr Lillie and Miss Reed about the general pattern of daily routines and activities which was, at least in general terms, not the subject of challenge.

  52. There was in operation a shift system, with nursery officers tending to alternate the shifts between themselves from day to day. Accordingly, Mr Lillie would be on early shift (beginning at 8.00 a.m.) one day, whereas Miss Reed would take that slot the next. I was told that the manager and assistant manager also alternated their shifts in a similar manner.

  53. The building was normally opened at 8.00 a.m. Those present at that time would be the early shift nursery officers, the cleaners, the cook and one of the managers. Those children who arrived early would all be ushered into one room. The other staff and the majority of children would arrive at about 9.00 a.m. At that stage, the children were moved to their individual rooms. The next event was a trolley round bringing milk and biscuits for everyone at about 9.30 a.m. It was quite usual for some parents to stay on the premises and chat rather than leaving immediately after the child was delivered.

  54. It was expected that the individual rooms would be set up for the day’s activities by about 9.30 a.m., so as to be ready for 10.00 a.m., by which time it was anticipated that all those arriving for the morning session would be in place.

  55. When Mr Lillie and Miss Reed were in the Red Room (i.e. from approximately the end of February 1992 until April/May 1993), it was generally the case that they would be joined once or twice a week by a home care worker. Such persons were employed by the Social Services Department for the specific purpose of looking after a child if the parent/carer needed a rest for some reason. (It so happened that one of the home carers was also called Dawn. Her only potential relevance to the case is (a) that it is conceivable that some children when referring to "Dawn" might have had her in mind rather than Dawn Reed, and (b) that on a trip to Whitley Bay on 10 February 1993 she accompanied Mr Lillie and Miss Reed.)

  56. It was generally the case that the "morning session" lasted from 8.00 a.m. until 11.30 a.m. The lunch period seems to have taken up a significant part of the day. By about 11.15 a.m., the children were being encouraged to tidy up in readiness. It was necessary for them to wash their hands and clean up for lunch, while tables were laid. During this period, also, there would be some movement between the rooms while staff were replacing borrowed toys.

  57. Lunch normally began at about 11.30 a.m. Some children ate faster than others, and regularly the meal went on for over an hour. Sometimes members of staff would add 15 minutes on to their lunch break if they had been unable to take their scheduled break during the morning period.

  58. From about 12.30 p.m., the children would be tidying up after lunch and having nappies changed where necessary. Some would at that stage have a nap. Also, the parents of those children who were attending the morning session only would begin to come along to collect them.

  59. At around this time, the member of staff who had come on for the early 8.00 a.m. shift would generally take a break while other members of staff supervised the children. The second member of staff (i.e. the one who had not been on early shift) would take a slightly later lunch break at around 1.00 p.m.

  60. At this halfway stage, it was also necessary to set up the activities for the afternoon session. In most cases, this was shorter than the morning session. It would generally last until about 3.00 p.m. At that time, or shortly afterwards, the bus would arrive to pick up those children placed at the Nursery by Social Services (if parents were unable to collect). The children, therefore, began to thin out at this point and, if there were not many children left in the Nursery after 3.30 p.m., then the number of rooms in use would be reduced.

  61. Another regular practice at the time was that there was a rota for cleaning rooms. This meant that each room would be vacated once a week between around 3.30 and 4.00 p.m. for a thorough cleaning. Meanwhile, the other rooms would have floors only cleaned.

  62. For those children still remaining at the Nursery at 4.00 p.m., tea would then be served. By that stage, only the staff on late shift would still be in attendance. Members of staff from the early shift would leave the premises or stay on to write up their books.

  63. Those members of staff on late shift (i.e. up to 6.00 p.m.) might leave early if there were only a few children remaining at the Nursery. There would always be a manager present until it closed at 6.00 p.m.

  64. In this context, Mr Lillie pointed out that the bald statement on page 236 of the Review Team Report, to the effect that he was alone with children in the early mornings and late afternoons, gave a misleading impression. He made clear, first, that he worked alternate shifts and, secondly, that there would generally also be a student or home carer present as well. At the beginning of the day, those members of staff from the other rooms who happened to be doing the early shift would also congregate with the children arriving early. It would, therefore, be exceptional for him to be the only member of staff present between 8.00 a.m. and 9.00 a.m. Moreover, one of the cleaners ("Jackie") would usually be there at 8.00 a.m. as well.

  65. It will thus be appreciated that within this broad structure the opportunities for lengthy trips out of the nursery were necessarily restricted. I was told by Miss Reed that she and Mr Lillie were keen to take the children out whenever possible for fresh air and exercise and to provide a more interesting environment. Naturally, however, such activities were limited by a number of factors. Obviously the weather played a part. Also, it was obligatory to have a certain ratio of staff to children. It was necessary to have a group of less than eight children. One of them had to be able to take the hand of each child who was walking, but if there was a child in a buggy then it would be possible for them to take three children each (i.e. a maximum of six). They would only be able to go out with more than six children if there was an additional adult (for example, a student or careworker).

  66. During the relevant period, there were building works going on upstairs and use of the garden was therefore restricted. There were no opportunities, therefore, for outdoor play on the premises. Trips out of the Nursery were more frequent in the afternoon than in the morning and, generally, it was necessary to be back in time for 3.00 p.m. when the Social Services bus arrived. I was also told that normally the time for going out would be between 1.30 and 2.00 p.m. I was told by witnesses (for example, the parents of Child 1, Child 7, Child 10 and Child 14) that there were occasions when Mr Lillie and Miss Reed were not back in time for the Social Services bus and that, on occasion, a parent might have to wait for half an hour longer than expected. I have no reason to disbelieve this evidence.

  67. Miss Reed took particular offence at the assertion made by the Review Team in their Report (page iii) that "children were frequently and inappropriately taken out of the Nursery by Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed on the flimsiest of pretexts". The implication seems to be that they were taken out frequently for purposes of child abuse. This is one of the central allegations in the defence of justification, and I shall return to it in due course. It is necessary, however, to bear in mind just how circumscribed the opportunities were for trips out of the Nursery and that, in the periods available (i.e. normally a maximum of one and half hours), it would be necessary to transport the children back and forth from the Nursery – quite apart from any time spent at the relevant destination.

  68. In this context, I should record that in February I acceded to the request of the parties that I should go to Newcastle and visit the Nursery (which has undergone significant physical changes since the material time) and also to walk over the various routes that were considered significant. Not least, I was taken to various roads and blocks of flats where it was suggested that abuse might have taken place. I therefore have the geography of the locations very much in mind.

    69. The evidence of Dr Camille San Lazaro

  69. Dr Camille San Lazaro gave evidence on 13, 14 and 16 May. She was in a somewhat ambivalent position since, although she is a consultant paediatrician at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, and a senior lecturer in paediatric forensic medicine at the Newcastle University, she was not for the purposes of these proceedings an expert witness, but rather a witness of fact. Nevertheless, her findings in respect of many of the children formed a significant part of the Defendants’ case on justification, as they did in the ill fated criminal proceedings in 1994. They are relied upon, together with certain oral statements made in her presence, as part of the factual material from which I am invited to draw an inference that Mr Lillie and/or Miss Reed abused the children in one way or another. She personally examined no less that 53 children from Shieldfield looking for signs of sexual or other abuse.

  70. Dr San Lazaro has practised in the field of paediatrics for about 30 years, and has specialised in alleged child abuse or neglect since about 1980. Those were the very early days in the recognition and diagnosis of widespread child abuse and experience was gathered somewhat "on the hoof". Until relatively recently, and particularly before the routine use of colposcopy, practitioners in this field sometimes felt isolated and under pressure. It seems also to have been the case that there were few opportunities for training, peer review or the auditing of individually developed practices.

  71. She produced reports or records of examinations carried out in relation to the children and also documents described as "child protection records". Many of these were made available along with her original witness statement and other materials were produced later along with a supplemental witness statement. The purpose of this was mainly to clarify some of the terminology which she had used in her records and also to meet some of the points made about her evidence by Dr Watkeys. I shall consider the impact of her various assessments when I come to the individual children; and I shall confine myself at this stage to general matters.

  72. Dr San Lazaro immediately recognised in the witness box that her approach would be quite different nowadays. She said that "we" are less isolated and that paediatricians are more ready to consult others on issues of child abuse. She recognised also that there were points during the Shieldfield inquiry where she "lost her way". There were things written then which she would not write today. There were also inaccuracies in what she had written. Indeed, on 14 May she admitted in cross-examination that her records were in some cases inconsistent and difficult to interpret. As to Child 14, so fundamentally significant in this case, the following exchanges took place:

    73. "Miss Page: I am suggesting the whole picture is so unreliable and so flawed that the court could not safely conclude that this child had signs of penetrative injury at all?

    Dr San Lazaro: I accept that this – that the medical findings as laid out in this child’s records cannot be relied on in their specificity, specifically. But I believe that all the information put together is clear on the fact that there was penetrative damage to the hymen and I quite accept that that is a difficult matter for this court".

  73. This was not easy to follow. A finding of penetrative damage in a hymen is "specific". Unlike cases where the physical findings are neutral, it is not a question of "all the information put together". One ought to be able to rely on a paediatrician to give a clear factual assessment of whether there is diagnostic evidence of abuse or not. If I cannot rely on her medical findings "specifically", I am not clear what is left.

  74. A little later she was asked about the particular inconsistencies in her descriptions:

    75. "Miss Page: Why did you not take the opportunity to clarify and write down in your notes whether you had one or two complete transections or no complete transections, partial tearing, how many partial tears? Is it not extraordinary, bearing in mind that you were going to go into court as a prosecution witness on a charge of rape, that you should have the opportunity, with this child under anaesthetic, [and yet] you did not make any note of what you observed in those conditions?

    Dr San Lazaro: It is regrettable. The whole of this is regrettable and I do not know why it was not done.

    Miss Page: It was a professional lapse not to have done it, was it not?

    Dr San Lazaro: All of this is a substantial professional lapse, I would have said."

  75. It is to some extent a question of trying to assess through written records what the witness found eight or nine years ago with the benefit of hindsight. In some cases, the surviving information is so defective that it is just not possible. Unfortunately, things are not quite that simple. However ready Dr San Lazaro may be now to recognise her human frailties, and the improved techniques available today for dealing with such cases, there are certain facts that cannot be obscured. The truth is that Dr San Lazaro’s professional judgment and objectivity were in some of these cases hopelessly compromised. In particular, I can hardly sweep under the carpet the untrue accounts she was giving to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board with a view to assisting some of the parents recover compensation out of public funds. She herself recognises that there were "inaccuracies". She could hardly do otherwise. I am afraid, however, that the problem is more fundamental and goes to professional integrity rather than competence.

  76. To take but one example, Miss Page drew to her attention a passage in her so-called "generic report", which was produced to provide the Board with a general summary (but presumably a fair and accurate one) of the supposed multiple abuse at Shieldfield. She apparently did it "from memory", which would be hardly satisfactory in itself. More importantly, however, I need to consider the terms in which she referred to the streptococcal infection found among a few children. She included it in the generic report in a very short section supposed to be identifying physical signs relevant to the issue of child abuse. It had no place there at all. Such infections are quite common and the presence of the infection was not probative of child abuse. Indeed, it could easily be due to poor hygiene. Yet she deliberately gave the impression that it was significant. It was given a prominence in the overall picture of Shieldfield that was wholly disproportionate. This was reflected in the Review Team’s Report also, where it was said, "Dr Lazaro describes this as an unusual finding which suggested a common source". Its only relevance in the Report would be to give the impression that it was evidence of some sinister (but unspoken) form of child abuse.

  77. She spoke of "negotiating" the content of this report with a man from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, but she accepted responsibility for its contents. She actually admitted to Miss Page that she had adopted the role of "advocate" for the children’s compensation claims – and this inevitably seriously compromised her professional independence and integrity. Many thousands of pounds of public money were paid out at least in part as a result of her assertions.

  78. More generally, on 16 May, Dr San Lazaro made the following startling admissions:

    79. "Dr San Lazaro: I think I did advocate for these children. I think there was – I was certainly very distressed for them and affected by their trauma, and I accept that I attempted … to do my best for them, or to present the best case for them. I do not think that is unusual practice for doctors in any situation.

    Miss Page: The usual practice for a doctor is to simply send to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board their original report on the child and not to elaborate save to the extent that they are asked to do so.

    Dr San Lazaro: In children who have been sexually abused, and I have been doing Criminal Injuries Reports for a very long time, I recognise that they have been emotive and they have been exaggerated and overstated in the past … and they are much more measured now".

    I cannot believe, as she appeared to suggest, that it would be "not unusual" for doctors generally to behave in this way with regard to their representations to the C.I.C.B.

  79. She accepted specifically in relation to Shieldfield that her presentation to the Board was exaggerated and overstated in the "generic report" (in other words, the report applying to all the children claiming compensation). That is indefensible.

  80. It is ironic, in the light of this very serious state of affairs, to recall what Mrs Saradjian had to say about Dr San Lazaro on 20 February:

    81. "As a result of seeing Dr Lazaro I was impressed by her professionalism. I was also impressed by the information that she had to give about the large number of children that she had interviewed and examined that had medical findings of abuse, and also the level of trauma that she had witnessed and heard from these children.

    I was also impressed by her impression of the parents, in that she did not feel that they were exaggerating the situation with the children. I was also impressed by her analysis of the situation, as she saw it, from her point of view as a very experienced forensic paediatrician".

    The Review Team clearly fell under her spell.

  81. Dr San Lazaro’s admissions are not only serious in themselves, but they have profound implications for the evidence in this case. It is not simply that there are numerous examples of poor record-keeping and inconsistent entries, which make it difficult to be satisfied what Dr San Lazaro actually perceived at the time of her examinations. Everyone agrees that hymenal examinations in small children are difficult, such that even the average paediatric registrar would not be equipped to carry out or interpret them. Therefore a good deal of subjective interpretation is involved for a consultant in arriving at the basic data before they come to be recorded.

  82. Even where it is possible to identify what her original conclusion was, the question arises as to how safe it is to rely on Dr San Lazaro’s interpretation of what lay before her. Since she was so committed to what she perceived to be the children’s best interests and was "affected by their trauma", and because she was apparently prepared habitually to overstate and exaggerate, I must approach her unaudited personal conclusions with the utmost caution. It is as clear as can be that I must not proceed on an assumption of objectivity or truthfulness. On the other hand, I cannot simply dismiss everything she claims to have found. I do not believe she was setting out mischievously to misrepresent everything. It is rather that she was unbalanced, obsessive and lacking in judgment. I have thus to chart my way through a very treacherous terrain. In doing so, I have been greatly indebted to Dr Ward and Dr Watkeys, of whose experience and integrity there can be no doubt.

  83. Dr San Lazaro even went so far in May 1996 as to tell the Review Team: "I believe that children were removed from the nursery for reasons either of specific paedophile activity or to be used in possible commercial paedophilia or both".

  84. She also told the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board in her generic report "there were syringes with medicines inside to make their bottoms feel all right". She was only regurgitating her interpretation of what some children had said, but appeared to be endorsing the allegation with her professional authority. As far as I understand her own view of the matter, she said she believed that they were objects used as part of a deception rather than actually to inject the children with drugs or medication. She added, "I still think I have that view". It is not easy to reconcile these statements. Either she believed that syringes were used to drug the children or she believed that they were part of a deception. Of course, either way she was merely speculating, but she does not seem even to have passed on her true belief.

  85. The overall picture she conveyed to the C.I.C.B was that the abuse had been "bizarre… almost certainly involving instrumentation, drugs and pornography". It was put to her by Miss Page that she had no proper basis to make such claims. Her answer was that she believed the children had placed inside them "items of cutlery - objects". Miss Page was obviously right.

  86. There can be little doubt that, because of the weight the Review Team appeared to be willing to give to people’s opinions, Dr San Lazaro must have given them considerable encouragement in respect of their conclusions about the administration of drugs and the use of pornography. It is a good illustration of why it is necessary always to keep in mind the distinction between evidence, on the one hand, and imaginings on the other.

  87. It is important to note that Dr San Lazaro also supplied dubious information relating to individual child applicants. I cite an example below in relation to Child 1. The same pattern is to be found replicated in other cases. It is clear to me that it was not only in the generic report that Dr San Lazaro was saying things that were untrue. Some of the individual reports are flawed. What is deeply disturbing is her tendency, when writing a witness statement or letter to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, to "beef up" her basic findings by adding a sinister slant to what had been recorded originally as a neutral or non-specific finding.

    88. Child 1

  88. This child was born on 28 March 1990 and attended the Nursery from 1 October 1992 to July 1993 (usually 2 days per week). Until their suspensions, he was in the care of Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed. He is the one child Mr Lillie admitted to taking briefly into his flat at Red Barns – something which he has no doubt bitterly regretted for the last nine years. He explained that he was a child who needed individual attention most mornings to settle him down. On this particular morning, he took him out of the nursery for a walk because he was on his way to the flat to collect something he had forgotten. Miss Reed confirmed that the child was difficult in the mornings and needed individual attention to settle him.

  89. No professional person has ever heard Child 1 make any accusation against Christopher Lillie or Dawn Reed. No criminal proceedings were ever instigated. The "disclosures" seem to have been largely through the mother. The Review Team were warned by Detective Inspector Findlay that the Child’s mother had suffered mental health problems, and also that she appeared to be obsessed with the allegations of abuse at Shieldfield and "determined to get in on it". Mr Wardell said, on the other hand, that they did not accept this assessment as being accurate, and he thought the mother was "sincere". He clearly attached weight to her evidence as to the behaviours and disclosures of Child 1. It was a fundamental tenet of the Review Team’s approach to accept, unquestioningly, what complainants said on the basis that they believed what they were saying (or were "sincere"). They seem to draw no distinction between that which is sincerely believed and objective truth. What was perceived as sincerely believed was accepted as having happened.

  90. I cannot speak, of course, as to her demeanour nine years ago when it is quite clear that police officers had reservations about her, but the impression I formed on 23 April 2002 when she gave her evidence was a favourable one. She was the most visibly distressed of the mothers to give evidence and had to pause from time to time because she found it so upsetting. There is no doubt that this mother was in 1992-1993 having to endure real stresses and strains in her life. She was divorcing her husband who, she said, only occasionally turned up when he felt like it and was behaving unpredictably because of a drug problem. She started a new relationship with an old friend by whom she became pregnant in the Spring of 1992 and who moved in with her in that July. But by December he was telling her that he wanted to bring the relationship to an end. She had the baby on 12 February 1993 but shortly thereafter she had to worry about the Shieldfield "scandal". This took its toll finally on her relationship with the new partner. From the records, it appears that she had to cope with episodes of violence during this period involving each of the two men. It is easy to understand what an unhappy time this must have been for her.

  91. When she was first seen by social workers on 12 May 1993, she said that Child 1 got on well with Chris and often talked about him, asking where his house was. It is important not to lose sight of this in the light of later developments. Her account changed, however, after contact from other mothers. In particular, she was given information by the mothers of Child 22, Child 23 and Child 12. Child 22 had apparently referred to Child 1 in the course of his own disclosures.

  92. She came into contact with two pivotal figures in this case who clearly had a significant influence upon her, namely Dr San Lazaro and the mother of Child 22. The latter came to see her on 26 June. Later that day when she was reporting her conversation to her partner in front of the boy, Child 1 kept putting his hand over her mouth. What significance this was supposed to have remains unclear, but more importantly a fresh observation (recorded by social workers) was made the following day.

  93. It will be remembered that one of the matters to which Professor Friedrich attached particular significance was what he chose to call the "proffering of the bottom". I have already discussed that in the context of his expert evidence, but for present purposes it is important to note when this was first recorded. It appears on a note made by Kulvinder Chohan on 7 July 1993 referring back to an incident reported to her as having happened at 8.20 am on 27 June – in other words, the morning after the mother of Child 22 had been round to her home spreading alarm and despondency.

  94. The boy was lying on his bed "with his bottom in the air". His mother at that stage, according to the note, said that he should lie down "properly", to which he replied that this was the way to be nice. According to the mother, he lay in that position on more than one occasion and, indeed, still does so from time to time. I am supposed to infer that he was taught to do this by Mr Lillie to facilitate buggery or other anal abuse. Mr Bishop seemed to suggest that this was the only reasonable interpretation. I cannot agree. I am not prepared to dismiss as coincidence the fact that it was first observed the very morning after she had to listen to the mother of Child 22 cataloguing her concerns about her own son. The mother of Child 22 can, when in full flow, be a dominating and disquieting presence. It seems to me quite likely that she alarmed her and led her to misinterpret something which was of no consequence.

  95. This was, of course, a month before the police paid the mother of Child 22 a visit to try and stop her spreading alarmist notions, which they perceived as jeopardising the whole investigation. It appeared in Julie Kinghorn’s notebook for 30 July that the police had received information that she had been putting words in the mouths of "children of tender years". She could not recollect what the information was or to which children it related. But it shows the need for a cautious approach to interviews with children if they had come into contact with her.

  96. The visit also occurred some six weeks after Detective Inspector Findlay had told her, "No bull shit. I don’t want you talking to anyone". She clearly ignored that friendly advice.

  97. The other pivotal figure this child’s mother came into contact with was Dr San Lazaro. She apparently gave her regular "support", but Dr San Lazaro appears to have behaved oddly with regard to this child. When he was examined and she found no physical abnormality, she did nothing to put the mother’s mind at rest but left her believing that there was reason to think he had been abused. She then arranged for him to be examined under anaesthetic and for swabs to be taken to see if he had a sexually transmitted disease. Of course he did not. Yet again the mother was left to believe the worst. She was given some medication but not told that the child was merely suffering from a streptococcal infection common in infants. I have no doubt that Dr San Lazaro fostered this mother’s belief that her son had been abused. As the mother put it in the witness box, "she confirmed my worst fears".

  98. Dr San Lazaro played the psychologist and the detective and seems almost to have forgotten her role as a paediatrician. When she wrote a long letter to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, she set out a whole series of speculative thoughts, but she failed to mention at all the one matter directly within her expertise – namely the negative physical findings. The letter is by no means unique to Child 1, but it is worth setting out in the context of assessing the nature of Dr San Lazaro’s role in the development of the Shieldfield "scandal" and the extent to which she was, or was not, capable of professional detachment:

    99. "Thank you for your enquiry about this child. I can confirm that I saw him on 7.7.93. [Child 1] had been in the Shieldfield Nursery for 9 months.

    At first he seemed happy there and his mother was gradually able to leave him alone. Within 2-3 weeks, however, [Child 1] became extremely distressed, screaming and wrapping his legs around his parents, begging them to allow him to go home. Mother remembers that she always tied double knots in [Child 1’s] training shoes and that these had never come undone before he had gone to the nursery, or indeed when she had him home. However, he would often return from the nursery with a single knot in his shoes or his laces undone.

    [Child 1] also stopped using the toilet to open his bowels and began to display markedly aggressive behaviour, often looking as if he had been crying when they picked him up from school. There was soiling and periods of marked aggression when he hit his mother, telling her that he hated her and that she didn’t love him. He developed odd sexualised posturing and other sexualised behaviour and he appeared very frightened about having his nappy changed.

    There is little doubt that this is one of the most severely affected children from the Shieldfield Nursery. He had gross signs of traumatic behaviour with regression, sudden phobias and anxieties, abrupt changes into infantile speech whenever the nursery was mentioned and he also gave an account to the police of being removed to a caravan site and having his underwear burnt. I understand that the police did indeed recover artifacts which supported this story.

    His mother’s relationship broke down after the discovery of abuse and events in the home have been very difficult and fraught. Certainly mother’s distress and [Child 1’s] own behavioural patterns have been such that I have spoken to her and seen the child on more occasions that I can count. I would suggest that there have been at least 30 contacts with our department since this original event and I also have spent hours late at night talking to the mother to try and help her through her distress.

    This boy is receiving psychotherapy and I believe that it will be some time before he is going to recover from these experiences."

  99. This was a classic example of Dr San Lazaro’s role as an "advocate" (to which she admitted in the witness box). Some of the information was simply untrue. The child did not give an account of having his underwear burnt. In any event, most of what she was saying merely regurgitated or garbled what she had been told and had nothing to do with her medical expertise. Nor did she make any attempt to discern any other possible explanation in the troubled domestic background for any of what she was told. Everything was hung on her theory of multiple abuse at Sheildfield. I strongly suspect that the "hours late at night" talking to Dr San Lazaro were not so much "supportive" to this mother as baleful and depressing.

  100. There was a legal dispute at some stage, with Child 1’s father seeking an order for contact with him. Dr San Lazaro made a witness statement dated 19 September 1994 in which she asserted that Child 1 "had suffered previously damaging experiences" and that further harm would occur if he had contact with a parent (i.e. his father) who declined to recognise this and was capable of minimising it.

  101. The father was thus apparently being criticised by Dr San Lazaro over a conversation she had had with him in which he appeared sceptical and dismissive. He felt that the mother was harming the child by her persistent focus on sexual abuse. The doctor went so far as to accuse him of being "extreme" and likely to destabilise the mother and child. It is disturbing that someone with such flawed judgment should have such power and influence over people’s lives.

  102. The same weekend as the visit by the mother of Child 22, Child 1 was also sick more than once, having woken at 3 a.m. sweating and restless. He said he had a sore tummy. I do not see why this is supposed to have any more significance than any other childhood ailment. I would need to be given cogent expert evidence to persuade me that it should be interpreted as a symptom of child abuse. Why should he not just have had a slight temperature and a tummy upset?

  103. There was a home visit by social workers Kulvinder Chohan and Vanessa Lyon on 9 July 1993. It appears that Dr San Lazaro had upset the mother by this time, telling her that Child 1 had been traumatised and that he froze up every time the Nursery and the "perpetrators" were mentioned. Dr San Lazaro was thus, it would appear, making certain assumptions and passing them on to the mother.

  104. During July 1993 Child 1 was, it is true, indicating that he was to some extent not happy at the Nursery, but this was associated with aggressive conduct by another child who hurt his "bum" and hit him on the head. In so far as Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed were mentioned at this time, it was only in the context of chastising the other child for hitting him. There is no evidence that he was cowed into silence by threats.

  105. Child 1’s last day at the Nursery was on 9 July 1993, when he was discharged for non-attendance.

  106. When Child 1 was interviewed on video on 28 July 1993, he had nothing to disclose about Christopher Lillie or Dawn Reed. Persistent attempts were made to get him to say things about them (including by leading questions). Nothing emerged.

  107. Despite this, a second interview took place on 7 February 1994. Again, it produced no evidence of abuse, although it becomes apparent early on that Child 1 was aware that he was supposed to be talking about Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed; it was he who introduced them into the conversation. What he said was that they had hurt Child 95, but he then qualified this by pointing out that, like Pinocchio, his nose was growing longer and longer; this, he explained, was because he had just been telling a lie. The mother told me that he was particularly interested in Pinocchio at that time and made it a habit to say the opposite of what he meant. The difficulty about such a habit, of course, is that one never knows what can be relied upon.

  108. There were a number of unusual behaviours noted about Child 1. For example, there was an unwillingness to let his mother’s current partner change his nappy or bathe him. Also, there was an incident of self-harm (arm-scratching) recorded by Miss Reed on 25 February 1993. But Dr Kate Ward drew attention to the fact that there had been significant events in his home life over the relevant period, which could have accounted for at least some of the changes in behaviour. She cited parental separation, the mother’s change of partner and a new sibling. Nonetheless, she was of opinion that these factors would be unlikely to account for sexualised behaviour. She was referring, essentially, to the following incidents. Child 1 is reported by his mother to have invited her, in or about December 1992, to kiss his genitals. He was at that stage two and a half years old. Later, in March 1993, aged nearly three, he is said to have touched his grandfather’s thighs and referred to a lollipop. It is certainly odd behaviour, but it would be a long leap to infer from this that he had been taught about oral sex by Christopher Lillie or Dawn Reed. The remarks were in no way linked to them.

  109. Child 1 is significant in the context of a passage in the Review Team’s Report on page 210:

    110. "The children were able to take parents to and/or describe places to which the parents had no idea their children had ever been. Parents were also surprised at the level of distress and panic some children experienced when they went to these places. Sometimes in the course of a routine journey, a child would suddenly become distressed and identify a place that they said they had been taken to by Chris Lillie and Dawn Reed. One child had such a reaction to a house near St. Dominic’s."

  110. Child 1 took the police on a roundabout trip ending up at a caravan or mobile home. The matter was referred to in discussions between the Review Team and Detective Inspector Campbell Findlay. The Review Team were prepared to conclude (as they would claim on the balance of probabilities) that Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed had taken him there for sexual abuse, no doubt with other children. It is quite obvious from the discussion with the police officer that he was highly sceptical about this and certainly that he had found nothing to support the contention. Without such corroboration the incident can give rise to nothing more than speculation. It is to be noted that there had been an occasion when the children had been taken to see trains. That is reflected in the mother’s evidence on 23 April (at pages 11 and 141). Indeed, according to her, the child himself had "said about standing and watching the trains" by way of explaining why he had been taken by Chris and Dawn to that particular spot. She agreed that there were train lines there (although "you could not even see over the wall").

  111. Detective Inspector Campbell Findlay had found a pair of partially burned underpants there, and there was some suggestion that they might correspond to a pair of red underpants that had gone missing from a pack of three the mother had bought from Adams. She told me that she supplied the other two pairs to the police for identification purposes but it appears that nothing came of it. There is nothing in police records to confirm this and I cannot be confident in the mother’s recollection on this point. I have seen records which suggest that the police contacted Adams and obtained from them a pack of red underpants for comparison.

  112. At all events, the mother heard no more. No doubt she would have been informed if a link was established. As so often, the Defendants put these matters forward in evidence without making clear what inference is supposed to be drawn from them. It was not obvious to me why a child abuser would wish to burn underpants rather than seeking to give the impression that everything was normal. It makes no sense. One might reasonably anticipate that the parent of a small child would raise a query as to where they had gone. It is all inconclusive. It is not merely that there is nothing to corroborate an allegation that child abuse took place at these caravans; it is important to bear in mind that the child made no such allegation in the first place. (The mother did report to the police, however, by September 1993 that the child had told her when she took him there that she should not go into one of the caravans because it was a "bad house" and she would get a "sore bum".)

  113. It is worth remembering what Campbell Findlay told the Review Team about the underpants – "… that did not take us anywhere because this place is frequented by drunks, alcoholics … it is used for illicit purposes, that place".

  114. One of the mother’s complaints was that having previously been a "good eater" Child 1 began to refuse food after joining the Red Room. What is striking, however, is how regularly the Day Book entries record quite the opposite – that he had a good appetite. I see no reason to believe that these entries were deliberately falsified. As a matter of fact, the mother had a number of criticisms about the record-keeping. She thought that Mr Lillie and Miss Reed had been under-reporting. The particular example she identified several times (see e.g. the transcript at pages 61-62) was that there was nothing from Christmas 1992 onwards about her son’s constipation. I have to bear in mind, on the other hand, that it is a normal concomitant of constipation that there is nothing to record.

  115. I am unpersuaded that these records are anything but genuine. They can perhaps be criticised in terms of lack of detail or occasionally compendious entries covering more than one day’s visit, but that is wholly different from false entries to disguise child abuse. In particular, I cannot for one moment believe that the "good appetite" entries are there to give a false impression of general well-being in order to put people off the scent of child abuse – nor can I derive any such sinister intent from the absence of any mention of constipation.

  116. On the other hand, if constipation was a problem at the time, it could account for soreness of the bottom and reluctance to have it touched – both of which are factors the mother has mentioned. It could also account for traces of blood apparently found in his underpants in January 1993. It may be significant, on the other hand, that even at that stage the mother’s reaction was not to explain it by reference to current constipation, but to say "Anyone would think he had been abused".

    117. Child 2

  117. Child 2 was born on 2 September 1989. She started in the Nursery on 11 November 1991 in the Red Room but Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed did not become her carers until the end of February 1992. She left then to go to the Orange Room the following July.

  118. Child 2 was one of the original indictment children in 1993-1994, although at that stage the allegation consisted of indecent assault only. There was no allegation of rape.

  119. It appears that in September 1992 (i.e. aged just three) she said to her mother and grandmother that "Chris" had touched her in the region of her vagina. I will assume that this referred to Mr Lillie. This in itself, of course, has to be seen in the context that he would have been quite probably responsible, when she was two years old, for taking her to the lavatory. It was this comment by Child 2 that Holland J had in mind in his ruling when he referred to a possible exception to the general absence of contemporaneous complaints. The Defendants place great weight upon this apparently spontaneous comment of the child and submit that it was "heavily probative of sexual abuse by Christopher Lillie in that he inappropriately touched the child on the genitals". Yet, at the time it was made, no significance was attached to it. The mother did not pursue it with her or associate it with impropriety. It only loomed large in the mother’s thinking eight months later when she mentioned it to social workers on 19 May 1993 in the context of the Shieldfield suspensions.

  120. It is important to note that the Review Team on page 212 of the Report describe a number of "acts" endured by various children, which they say would be difficult to understand as anything other than sexual, physical and emotional abuse by Chrisopher Lillie and/or Dawn Reed and/or other people. One of the more striking allegations that follows is clearly attributable to Child 2 (it comes from her mother’s statement). It consists of an allegation that she was raped on a settee in Christopher Lillie’s house. The child has also apparently made "disclosures" of other penetrative injuries at his hands, including the insertion of knives and spoons from the kitchen drawer in his house.

  121. The Review Team thus will clearly be understood as making a finding of rape by Christopher Lillie of Child 2. The fair-minded reader might therefore be not a little surprised if told that she was found by Dr San Lazaro on 13 August 1993 to have normal outer genitalia and an intact hymen. This fact does not emerge from the Report; nor does it seem to have given the Team any pause for thought before endorsing and passing on such a grave allegation to the general public. It is one of the more lurid in that part of the Report (Chapter 13) which is introduced on page 209 by informing the reader that he or she is in for a "very difficult and distressing" read. The Defendants argue that it need not actually have involved penetration at all, but merely a placing of the genitals together. So also it is suggested that the knives and spoon may just have been placed at the entrance of the vagina. It is, of course, possible. The probabilities have to be assessed, however, in the light of her disclosures as a whole (e.g. where the incidents are said to have happened and in whose presence).

  122. I turn to the video interviews. The first interview took place on 22 June 1993. It produced nothing significant. Child 2 was able to recall some of her friends and members of the staff, but made no reference to either Christopher Lillie or Dawn Reed.

  123. After the interviewer had drawn a blank, her mother entered the room and began to question her (not, of course, good practice). At this stage, the furthest she would go would be to say that "Chris" had smacked another child’s "bum" on an occasion when Child 2’s mother was present. Eventually, she made an allegation that "Chris" had also hit her "bum" as well as taking her bouncy ball off her. Whether she thought this "Chris" was a child is unclear, but she spoke of "the teacher" (Diane Wood) telling Chris off. A good deal of pressure was then exerted both by Vanessa Lyon and the mother. In addition, the mother chastised the child while the social worker was out of the room, telling her she was being very silly and that she would not get any juice if she started "acting like a baby". The child moaned and said her mother was hurting.

  124. It is quite apparent from watching the video recording that by this stage the child has given up completely. She had become floppy and inert. She merely moans and whines. Meanwhile, her mother manhandles her back and forth to no effect.

  125. The Review Team did not all have the opportunity of watching this recording. No doubt, if they had, they would have concluded that the child’s behaviour indicated that she had something to disclose and that she was reluctant to do so for fear of retaliation. I can draw no such inference. I saw with my own eyes simply a bored and frustrated three year old.

  126. She was interviewed again on 1 December 1993. It became apparent that she realised she was there in order to tell the interviewer about "silly" things done by Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed. Things did not go well, since she appeared to have no recollection of them as Nursery staff at all. Despite this, she said that she had seen them "in their house"; and that she had been there on more than one occasion by car. She knew it was Chris and Dawn’s house because Diane had told her. She claimed that she had been taken there by Patricia, Jackie and Diane (i.e. three members of the Shieldfield staff). Although she claimed to have been taken to "Chris and Dawn’s house" in "Diane’s car", there is no truth in this. Not only is there no place corresponding to "Chris and Dawn’s house", but none of the three named teachers ever took them to any place that could be so described.

  127. Child 2’s mother is totally committed to the idea that her daughter was raped and abused by Mr Lillie and Dawn Reed. On 20 March in cross-examination, she was unable to deal at all convincingly with this difficulty about Diane Wood. She therefore resorted, so far as I am aware for the first time, to hinting that it might have been Lorraine Kelly who was participating and her daughter had mistaken her for Diane Wood. It is very sad that she felt driven to make such an allegation in a public court room. I can say, however, without any hesitation that it is quite untrue. It is necessary to recall, also, that Child 2 left their care (i.e. the Red Room) at the end of June 1992. This was six months before Christopher Lillie moved to Red Barns to live with Lorraine Kelly. It was about the time he was just beginning to go out with her. In any event, I have seen both Diane Wood and Lorraine Kelly giving evidence. I do not believe anyone, even a small child, could confuse them in a month of Sundays. Where it is alleged the child was taken remains entirely obscure, but clearly there was no confirmation for the story from any of the three other members of staff. That fundamentally undermines the allegation, obviously, but the Review Team failed to address the point. Even at the stage of closing submissions, the Review Team seemed to think it a sufficient answer to say that "…it should be noted that she does not allege them to have taken part in any abusive act or indeed that either they or the other children that she named as present witnessed the abuse".

  128. The supposed trip described involved a minibus. Apart from the five members of staff, there were about eight other children. Despite all these "witnesses", it is said that on the landing of the house Christopher Lillie raped her and also inserted into her vagina his knife, his gun, his pencil, his spoon, a crayon and his fingers. This is hardly likely to be the product of one child’s fevered imagination. It seems more likely that it was an amalgam of stories picked up from other children or parents. It is unclear whether this was a second rape (i.e. additional to that on the settee) or whether it is a different version of one incident. At all events, it simply cannot be true.

  129. The Defendants seek to overcome this by suggesting "the likelihood that some names are supplied simply because the interviewer is asking for more and more names". This raises two concerns. First, it hardly squares with the Review Team’s professed conclusion in their Report that children’s allegations could not be the result of suggestive questions or other pressure from interviewers. Secondly, if this child was so willing to come up with answers she thought the interviewers wanted to hear, how am I to distil the "core" allegation(s) that are free from such influences?

  130. I need hardly say that I am not suggesting that the child was dishonest. She was aged three and four when being asked to recall events that supposedly took place when she was two years old. It is a classic example of the general problem at Shieldfield following the suspensions in April and May 1993. Anxious staff and parents were asking questions and exerting pressure; frightening stories were doing the rounds among very small children, who were being encouraged to talk about events and concepts the significance of which they could barely understand.

  131. The Review Team point to corroboration in the account, for example, of Child 23 who claimed that she had been present during abuse by the Claimants. Their submission ignores, however, two fundamental points, namely (i) that Child 2 and Child 23 did not overlap in the same room at Shieldfield and (ii) that there is no evidence that Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed took children out of the Nursery from other rooms.

  132. Reliance was also placed on behavioural problems. It was this child who Professor Friedrich cited when giving an example of how difficult it was to attribute behavioural symptoms to child abuse because of the various other factors that could account for them. Indeed, one of the incidents which had clearly stuck in the mother’s mind was that on one occasion she had found her daughter looking out across Newcastle from a spot in their garden in the direction of where her father lived. She was expressing apparently some concern about whether he was all right. I am invited to draw the inference that this must have come about because Christopher Lillie had abused her and threatened that, if she told her mother, he would see to it that some harm befell her father. There is a more humdrum explanation, however, since it has to be seen in the context of a father who (according to the mother’s evidence) more or less swanned in and out of their lives when he felt like it. Since the child was clearly fond of him, it seems plausible that she would have been upset by unexplained and prolonged absences.

    133. Child 3

  133. Child 3 was born on 28 June 1988. He began with Amanda Caisley and Clare Parrish towards the end of October 1990. He left the Nursery finally on 22 January 1992. This was before Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed teamed up in the Red Room and they never cared for him directly. Physical findings were non-specific and within normal limits. No oral testimony was given in relation to this child. An unsigned witness statement was served on the Claimants from Child 3’s mother. Also a Civil Evidence Act Notice was served in respect of her interview with the Review Team.

  134. On 10 November 1993, nearly two years after his departure from Shieldfield, and when he was aged five years five months, his mother was visited by social workers. She told them apparently that she had questioned the child about Chris and Dawn. That is not a promising start to his "disclosure", since I can know nothing of how this questioning proceeded, or in such ignorance form a conclusion as to the significance of the fact that he apparently "froze". It is recorded in Social Services records between 12 January and 9 February 1994 that there had still been no "disclosure". The mother was, however, clearly becoming anxious. She reported that she felt very left out of things "and this became more evident when she had spoken to [the mother of Child 14]". She had informed his teacher at his new school "about Shieldfield" and was met with the response, "Oh not another one". She therefore did not feel "very supported". By 9 February it was being recorded that the mother was self-harming after a break up with her boyfriend. She was described as "very distraught".

  135. By 27 February of that year, however, Child 3 was apparently recounting to Dr McArdle of the Fleming Nuffield Unit that "they put pencils on my bottom". This needs to be seen against the background of what seems to have been persistent questioning at home (how suggestively I do not know) and the usual reservations required in respect of discussions in therapy (see the Cleveland Report).

  136. It is necessary to record an unusual feature about the child’s medical background. He was in nappies until he was three because of a stomach problem. He had two bowel biopsies and also required a special diet. According to Audrey Palmer, he was "not always easy to deal with".

  137. Nearly two years on, matters progressed to the stage where Child 3’s mother was reporting to Judith Jones, shortly after the Review Team had been set up, that Mr Lillie had at some stage stuck a paint brush up his bottom – and it hurt. By this time, of course, three years and six months had elapsed since the boy’s departure from Shieldfield. Ms Jones in evidence referred to the fact (while "trying not to be too indiscreet") that the mother had suffered "emotional difficulties" of her own and had received "some treatment for depression". According to Dr McArdle, the mother had lost much of her authority over her son. There was a vulnerability which "perhaps preceded Shieldfield&qu