Beatrix Campbell - Child Abuse Controversies

Child Abuse Controversies

In Marxism Today, Campbell protested that "anyone who respects children's accounts of child abuse aren't taken seriously," and for some reason professionals were reluctant to believe that Satanists were "organising rituals to penetrate any orifice available in troops of little children; to cut open rabbits or cats or people and drink their blood; to shit on silver trays and make the children eat it."

In 1998 Campbell reported on the Newcastle City Council report into allegations of child abuse at the Shieldfield Nursery in the city in 1993. She claimed the council inquiry was "stringent" and had found "persuasive evidence of sadistic and sexual abuse of up to 350 children". The alleged perpetrators were workers at the nursery, Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie, who had already been cleared of multiple charges in a criminal trial in 1994. They subsequently successfully sued the Council, the "Independent Review Team" who produced the report, and the local Evening Chronicle newspaper for libel. Awarding Reed and Lillie the maximum possible damages of £200,000 each, the judge in the case made a "very rare" finding of "malice" on the part of the Independent Review Team, in that "they included in their report a number of fundamental claims which they must have known to be untrue and which cannot be explained on the basis of incompetence or mere carelessness." One of the four people on the Independent Review Team was Campbell's close working partner Judith Jones (see above), who was previously involved in the Nottingham case.

Writing on the Sally Clark case, Campbell rejected any feminist arguments based on the "suspicion that medical men play God and pathologise women's distress". Such feminist arguments, she thought, ignored women's psychoses, or what Campbell called "the dangerousness of motherhood: it can make some women lose their minds, it makes some mothers murderous." These speculations about Clark's mental state proved unfounded, however, as she was cleared of murder on appeal. In 2007 Campbell defended paediatrician David Southall, whose involvement in the Clark case was being investigated by the General Medical Council, saying "David Southall established a gold standard in the detection of lethal child abuse." Southall was struck off the Medical Register for gross professional misconduct. However, Dr Southall is back on the medical register after winning an appeal against this decision in a higher court. The Appeal Court's decision means he is able to practise medicine again