By
Jonathan Gornall
Another week, another broadside in the propaganda war being
waged against the nation’s child-protection system by the right
wing press.
And, as in any war, truth can be the first casualty.
The latest lopsided horror story concerns Fran Lyon, a pregnant
22-year-old who, according to the Sunday Telegraph, has been “told
that her baby will be taken from her [by Hexham social services] at
birth because she is deemed capable of ‘emotional abuse’, even
though psychiatrists treating her say there is no evidence to
suggest that she will harm her child in any way”.
The Daily Mail’s coverage, while based on some facts, is also
provocative – it suggests the issue boils down to “Whose baby is it
anyway?”.
Both papers have been running stories for some weeks now in support
of MP John Hemming’s campaign to portray social workers as “legal
baby-snatchers”.
Normally, issues of confidentiality mean that the validity of
such stories cannot be tested, but thanks to unique circumstances –
Lyon herself has offered confidential details and documents
relating to her case to journalists – the published “truths” of
this case can be examined in some detail.
Details failed to emerge
This is not about whether the decision by social services is
right or wrong. It is about the way the process has been
misrepresented. Several significant details failed to emerge in
both newspapers’ coverage, all of which cast this story in a
different light.
This was not Lyon’s fault. I spoke to her and she was entirely
open and frank about her history and personal circumstances. It is
those hijacking her story in the service of their own agendas that
have dealt economically with the facts.
The Sunday Telegraph led readers to believe that “Miss Lyon came
under scrutiny because she had a mental health problem when she was
16 after being physically and emotionally abused by her father and
raped by a stranger”. But this was not the trigger for concerns.
There had been, Lyon told me, “a difficult incident with my ex
where I needed to call the police and the police put a report
through to social services because I was pregnant”.
Social workers did their duty
So far, then, so fully in line with every government edict
issued in the wake of the Victoria Climbié Report, including the
Children Act 2004, that “places a statutory duty on key people and
bodies to make arrangements to safeguard and promote the welfare of
children”. In notifying social services, the police were doing no
more than their statutory duty – and, post-Laming, God help them if
they hadn’t.
Next, it was the turn of social workers to do their duty. Lyon
was invited to an initial interview at which, she says, the focus
was on her former partner. She says she was then asked to attend a
second interview with her mother and that this was “focused on my
childhood and my previous mental health issues”.
Lyon frank about her history
Lyon, who works for Borderline UK, helping people diagnosed with
borderline personality disorder, is frank about her own personal
history.
She explains that, by 13 or 14, she was “already seriously
anorexic” and “was being quite seriously abused”.
By her own account, she was raped by an acquaintance while
working as a volunteer in a charity shop and her behaviour became
increasingly self-destructive. In addition to her difficulties with
eating, she began self-harming by cutting her arms.
To complicate matters further, Lyon says that since the age of
11 she has suffered from angioedema (swelling of the skin) and for
the past two years has been fitted with a permanent tracheostomy
tube to help her breathe.
At 15, Lyon says she was diagnosed with borderline personality
disorder and admitted to the Cassel Hospital in Richmond, south
London, where she spent a year as an in-patient, followed by nine
months as an out-patient. The diagnosis was finally removed when
she was 18.
Hemming accused social services
Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley, told
the Sunday Telegraph that in reaching the decision to intervene
when Lyon’s baby was born, social services ignored “evidence from
professionals treating her, that she would have no problems”.
But, according to Lyon, her last contact with a psychiatrist as
a patient was four years ago. After her second interview with
social services, however, Lyon contacted Dr Stella Newrith, the
last psychiatrist to have treated her, and asked her to write a
letter in support. This Dr Newrith did, on Oxfordshire and
Buckinghamshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust headed
paper.
“On the basis of my clinical observations,” wrote Dr Newrith, “I
consider the risk of harm to a child to be so unlikely as to be
negligible. There has never been any clinical evidence to suggest
that Fran would put herself or others at risk, and there is
certainly no evidence to suggest that she would put a child at risk
of emotional, physical or sexual harm.”
Doctor was responding to concerns
According to the Sunday Telegraph, the recommendation that
Lyon’s baby should be taken from her at birth was based “in part on
a letter from a paediatrician she has never met” and the concern
that she “was likely to suffer from Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy,
a condition unproven by science in which a mother will make up an
illness in her child, or harm it, to draw attention to herself”.
(The Daily Mail shared the Sunday Telegraph’s ill-informed view of
MSBP – now better known as fabricated or induced illness (FII) –
describing it as “an unproven condition”.)
It is quite clear from the letter, shown to me by Lyon, that the
doctor was not raising but responding to concerns about fabricated
or induced illness that had been put to him. Indeed, his first
concern was that it should be determined “whether or not Ms Holton
[as Lyon used to be known] does indeed fabricate or induce symptoms
or illnesses in herself”.
Hemming’s two agendas
For Hemming, Lyon’s story taps into two agendas – his campaigns
against social services and the adoption system and the diagnosis
of FII.
In 2005, Hemming accused social services in Birmingham of acting
like the “Gestapo” after they had followed up a doctor’s reported
concerns about a woman pregnant with the married MP’s child. On 23
October 2005, Hemming told the Daily Mail that social workers had
“threatened to place his newborn baby daughter…on an at-risk
register”. His threat to sue the council came to nothing.
Commenting on the Fran Lyon story, the MP told the Daily Mail:
“How can it be in the child’s best interests to take a baby away
from its mother at birth? The reason why they do it is because it’s
much harder to take away a baby the longer it spends with its
mother, and a healthy newborn baby is so much easier to find
adoptive parents for.”
Hemming is also a member of a cross-party group of MPs seeking
“the review or withdrawal” of the government guidelines on FII,
issued in 2002 and has been a frequent contributor to the website
Mothers Against Munchausen Allegations (Mama).
An awful situation
This is, of course, a sad and difficult case and no one could blame
Lyon for taking the action she has. All she wants is to be able to
keep her baby when it is born. Similarly, however, the
professionals involved – social workers, doctors and the police –
should not be castigated for carrying out their statutory
duties.
To her credit, and despite the heavy-handed rhetoric of the
Sunday Telegraph and Hemming, Lyon appears to share that view. “I
don’t believe anybody is in this to cause harm,” she told me.
Indeed, she says she has sympathy with the social workers in her
case, who “are in an awful situation with an incredibly difficult
call to make. All I’m asking is that I’m given a chance to assuage
their concerns and fears. Hopefully that isn’t too
unreasonable.”
Of course it isn’t. What is unreasonable, however, is that yet
again a delicate human story has been hijacked and misrepresented
in the name of a vociferous campaign to undermine public confidence
in the child protection system.
* Fran Lyon’s appeal against the decision is ongoing
More information
Daily Mail article - My baby will be taken from me the moment it's
born
Sunday Telegraph article - Threat to take new-born over emotional
abuse