WRONGS

of their child’s injuries and the accounts of the charges against them in a language in which the professionals were fluent, but the bewildered parents were not.

The silencing of parents was made more effective still by the rules of confidentiality that wrapped the proceedings of the family courts in a cocoon of secrecy protecting the testimony of expert witnesses from external scrutiny, while concealing from public view the spectacle of so many respectable parents being convicted of inflicting these terrible injuries without the slightest hint of circumstantial evidence that they had done so.

For parents there was no escaping their fate. From the moment of the initial allegation against them, the alliance of medical experts, police, social workers and unsympathetic judiciary—well organised, experienced and well-financed— meant their eventual conviction was almost a foregone conclusion. Nonetheless, the two assumptions, scientific and legal, of the specificity of this syndrome as diagnostic of abuse remained as insecure as ever, with the courts’ willingness to convict parents resting almost entirely on their faith in the reliability and trustworthiness of medical expert opinion.

The first indication that such faith might be misplaced came with a series of high profile court cases exonerating three mothers—each of whom had lost more than one child from SIDS—from the charge of having murdered their children. Further research would refute Professor Meadow’s claim (as reflected in “Meadow’s rule”) that this was “extremely rare” and thus the cause was likely to be unnatural. On the contrary, it proved to be “not uncommon”; the consequence of one or other of several inherited conditions predisposing to fatal disturbance of heart rhythm.

Meanwhile, serious doubts about the validity of the diagnosis of Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy emerged when it transpired that a child’s “unexplained” symptoms— attributed, for example, to deliberate poisoning or the injection of foreign substances under the skin— were subsequently shown to be due to some unusual condition with which the doctor was not familiar.