Met must admit failure over cop foster dad’s child abuse
THE Metropolitan Police is to reinvestigate claims of a cover-up made by a woman who was sexually abused as a child by a serving member of the force.
Chief Inspector Stephen Willers will look into the case of Marina Narayan, following a new investigation by the Shirley Oaks Survivors Association (SOSA) and the Daily Mirror.
It may shed fresh light on the force, where 657 officers are currently under investigation for sexual or domestic abuse or both – and where a report by Baroness Louise Casey strongly criticised internal culture and standards of behaviour.
Detective Sergeant John Hudson, then a member of the Vice Squad, abused Marina from the age of six, after he and his wife, June Hudson, fostered her as a baby in 1966.
She first reported the abuse at the age of 13. But, while June Hudson was later found guilty of perverting the course of justice in covering up abuse at the family home, her policeman husband had already died.
Now, after Met Commissioner Mark Rowley pledged to “put matters right” following Baroness Casey’s report, Marina wants the Met to admit their failure to prosecute Hudson allowed abuse of her and foster sister Shelagh Largan to continue.
EXPLOSIVE
SOSA submitted an explosive 90-page dossier to the Met in May alleging a cover-up, followed by a legal action for damages in August by her solicitor, celebrated human rights lawyer, Imran Khan KC.
The Mirror has learned the Met referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct over the claims, with the IOPC saying that it will have “oversight” of the Met’s own investigation.
“Our clients are extremely pleased that the MPS is taking their claims so seriously that they have launched a formal disciplinary investigation,” Mr Khan says. “If the investigation is not satisfactory our clients will exercise their right of review to the IOPC. They trust that will not be necessary.”
But Marina was denied her legal claim for damages, on the grounds that the abuse took place too long ago.
Born in 1966 to a struggling family in Clapham, Marina’s mother gave her up for temporary fostering as a baby.
She was briefly placed in the nursery of the notorious Shirley Oaks children’s home – later found by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) to be at the centre of a paedophile ring – before being fostered by the Hudsons.
“My foster father was a member of the Vice Squad,” Marina says. “My foster mum was a Great Ormond Street nurse. A good family – or so it looked.”
The couple were already fostering another 10-year-old girl called Shelagh, and Mrs Hudson used the fostered girls “as slaves”, Marina claims. When Shelagh ran away at the age of 15, John Hudson began to abuse Marina. She was six years old.
“Every weekend June Hudson would go to visit her parents,” Marina claims. “That’s when the abuse would happen.”
Marina claims her foster mother came home one day to find her crying and bruised after a “particularly horrific” rape.
“She said to me, ‘why are you crying? Has he been playing with you?’ That told me, she’s always known.”
Marina attempted suicide twice as a child, and again after she was not believed as an adult. She developed severe epilepsy doctors thought was stress-related.
“I always knew what he was doing was wrong,” she says. “But I thought, this is what happens to kids in care.”
Last year, the IICSA found Marina and many hundreds more children had been abused while supposedly under the care of Lambeth Council in Britain’s worst child-abuse scandal.
SOSA’s founder, Dr Raymond Stevenson, says the new investigation will now allow the spotlight to fall on the Met.
“This is not just about whether the Met covered up for its own officers’ crimes,” Dr Stevenson says.
“It’s also time they were properly investigated for any part they may have played in covering up abuse by Lambeth Social Services.”
SOSA spent years uncovering abuse in Lambeth and has won more than £130million in compensation for more than 2,000 survivors. Professor Alexis Jay’s IICSA report found a previous five-year Met Police investigation, Operation Middleton, had been shut down “prematurely” in 2003 without identifying possible prolific offenders. While John Hudson was never found guilty of child abuse, his wife June and her half-sister Brenda Ball were found guilty of perverting the course of justice in 2016. It was Marina’s first victory.
“To find June and Brenda guilty they had to ascertain that Hudson had abused me,” she says.
But Dr Stevenson says bigger questions remain.
“By the time Marina won in court, her case had been ‘investigated’ three times. And even when she won, no officer was found guilty,” he says.
“By 1977, some officers in the Vice Squad, where Hudson served and which included the paedophile unit, were found by an internal inquiry to have engaged in ‘corruption on a scale which beggars description’. We believe that’s why Marina’s attempts to get justice over 40 years have always hit the ‘blue wall’.”
Hudson worked for the Met from 1958 until 1973. His file shows he was investigated on corruption charges and his conduct “fell short of exemplary or good”.
Marina got in touch with SOSA during a landmark Mirror investigation into Shirley Oaks children’s home in 2016. It turned out she and Dr Stevenson, who has dedicated his life to exposing the abuse and cover-up at Shirley Oaks, had both been in the nursery at the same time.
After reporting her abuse as a teen, Marina was placed in a Lambeth Council-run assessment centre, South Vale, where the IICSA report found the council were aware of at least 140 people disclosing sexual abuse.
A Lambeth Council spokesman said: “Lambeth has made a sincere and heartfelt apology to all victims and survivors of abuse and neglect while in Lambeth’s care.”
He added the council had made more than 300,000 historical documents available to the IICSA and is running a redress scheme that has benefitted more than 2,200 survivors.
But he said: “The council of today is unable to say why actions were not taken in the past, but we have endeavoured to uncover and share as much as possible.”
An IOPC spokesman said the police watchdog has directed the Met to look at “non-recent allegations relating to the Shirley Oaks children’s home and officers who investigated allegations made by the survivors” in a “reasonable and proportionate” manner.
DEPLORABLE
A SOSA investigation revealed the Lambeth social worker who Marina doted on as a child, Charlie Elliot, had been investigated for child abuse, and covering up paedophilia.
This was the man who took her to the police station when she first reported Hudson’s abuse as a child.
“I loved him so much I called my goldfish after him,” she says. “That’s when I realised, that’s why no one helped me.”
Imran Khan says that Marina’s claims are “of the utmost gravity” and that the decision to use “time limitation” to throw out her claim for damages is “deplorable”.
The Met says: “The defendant cannot consent to proceedings being brought so gravely out of time, in circumstances where a fair hearing is not possible.”
But Mr Khan claims the decision “goes completely against Sir Mark Rowley’s stated aim of righting the wrongs of the past”.
For Marina, the Met’s response is another twist on the road to justice.
“I have to do this because there are some others who were abused like me, who can’t,” she says. “I’m not a victim. I’m not a survivor. I’m a fighter. And I will never give up.”
‘‘ Her attempts to get justice over 40 years always hit the ‘blue wall’