A culture of denial that transends borders and countries

Emailed to Members of Parliament

I was a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of Neville Husband at the Medomsley Detention centre in Co Durham in the Northeast of England.

I was promoted again to write you all Members of Parliament Not feeling sanguine about the chances that some Members of Parliament will even take the time to read this as a number of emails and documents have been sent to every MP in this country and only one person had the decency to write back to say how sorry he was that these things happened to you and I wish you well with your campaign.

This MP is and has always been a consistent liberal.

The overall majority of returned emails were auto responders or emails not from the MP but their secretaries which for one thing breaches the data protection act as the addressee does not necessarily read the email and the mail is private and of a highly confidential nature and should indeed be read by the intended recipient only! Nevertheless that is the position. At this point I wish to say that the parliamentary restriction is nothing more then a way to cover things up.

My Parliament, in my country should be available to anyone in the country and all should be responsible for stamping out institutional child abuse. It is the direct responsibility of those elected into the highest positions of respect in this country to make sure that when a victim is writing to them that they do not treat it like the ramblings of a lunatic or dismiss it as “He’s not my constituent so he’s not my problem.” What happens if it is a MP who is the abuser?

Who do his/her victims go to tell when almost every MP in this country turns their back on the victims whom are trying to tell them of the abuses that they have had to endure and further injustice of those in power at the home office dragging these victims through year and sometimes decades of litigation while knowing the full incontrovertible facts and truth of these cases.

Many are in fact so close the current unfolding case at Les Chenes, (now known as Greenfields) the secure children’s home and school based on the island of Jersey, we are now hearing for the second time about the institutional child abuse that has been going on there. In 2002, British childcare expert Dr Kathy Bull produced a report which was given confidential access by the BBC. It was in the wake of her findings that Les Chenes was re-named.

More to the point we are hearing about a cover-up within their Parliament where the health minister has been fired by those who would rather protect the interests of Jersey in the international world of finance then look after the Island’s children or help them in times of great stress and pressure to and past the point of criminality,

I would also like to bet that their parliamentary protocols are exactly the same as the UK. It is time for the doors of parliament to swing in both directions as one way traffic will always tell the story one way and either fail to see another way out or blinker themselves away from the truth in the hope that these abhorrent crimes will not tarnish their reputations or stop the flow of cash coming to them.

Two professionals in positions of service to society were sacked for speaking out, although this is of course denied by their employers. One was Jersey's former minister for Health and Social Security, Senator Stuart Syvret, and the other a social worker. Simon Bellwood, this British social worker confessed, "What concerned me most was that it was quite clear that the system was able to go on without a single senior manager or inspector picking up that the system was abusive to children."

How many more times do we have to hear this?

If your job is to care for youngsters, and you are sacked because you notice that children are being abused on your watch, the choice is very clear. You keep quiet and keep your job. You speak out, and are sacked.

It was exactly the same at Medomsley, in Consett Co Durham. Almost every member of staff knew exactly what was going on but did nothing to help the young boys in their care. Kevin Young has just come from the House of Lords after winning the right to sue the Home Office for the abuses he and others at the centre suffered. This is because those who ran the centre at the time didn't care to stop it even though they knew exactly what was going on. They had found copious amounts of substantiating evidence to back up their testimony, but proceeded to destroy it.

It is terrifying when you are not able to tell someone about the abuse you endure, and imagine what it’s like when even the ones you tell either do nothing out of fear for losing their jobs, or victimise you even more for speaking out. You are ensnared by the very authorities that are meant to guide and protect you.

Those who were in the highest positions of power back then may have been replaced, nevertheless that does not make them less culpable or negate their responsibilities to the many victims that this country has produced. Most of these victims derived from the care system, and many went on into various penal institutions or were homeless and or drug addicts with deep psychological wounds that could and should not be bourn alone.

In the news this week, the remains of a child were discovered under the floor at a former care home in Haut de la Garenne in Jersey, and are believed to date from the early 1980s. It’s unlikely the police would have gone looking for bodies without having identified and listened to the 140 victims and 40 suspects that have either come forward or given interviews.

Perhaps we can put to bed the idea that child abuse was not really heard about in the 60’s and 70’s. If that was so, the powers that be were hardly going to be listening to victims coming forward from the 40’s and 50’s. By its very nature, when evidence and testimonies of child abuse occur, they are denied and customarily destroyed.

Those who knew what was going on were deeply entrenched in their behaviour of denial, and we flatter ourselves in thinking things have changed in modern times. The sackings listed above occurred after the millennium, and the abuse deniers still left in employment are still receiving wages from those institutions. In the Medomsley case in particular, there were Masons from the local Masonic lodge involved. There was a sub-structure of social interaction, expectation and control that has never been rigourously addressed. As well as those in high office being members, it is said that the Masons contain many police officers, judges, clergymen and doctors.

Society has already awakened to the fact that it is common for child abusers to hold positions of high office. The reality is that child sexual abuse is as old as the human race itself, and those who claim that they have never heard of it in any decade you care to mention are either lying, or standing upon the foundation of an education that erased any common sense they ever had.

We won’t be fooled any more. In Jersey, there is now an opportunity for the lies of the past to be exposed so that the slate can be wiped clean. It’s either that, or the world will be subject to dribs and drabs of ‘new revelations of child abuse’ for every decade of our children’s lifetimes until there is sufficient collective determination to face up to child suffering, and stop it for good.

The Young v the Diocese of Leeds Catholic church and one other, the one other is the Home Office and the abuse was in a Detention Centre for Boys near Consett County Durham, the abusers were many! The abuse was physical, mental and sexual all at the same time everyday for 17 years.

The Home Office are considering their position, after the landmark ruling in the House of Lords where Lord Hoffmann, Lord Walker of Gestingthorpe, Baroness Hale of Richmond, Lord Creswell and Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood unanimously shared the same opinion in favour of the victims of what after all were in the words of Judge Cockroft, Who was the Judge at Leeds who originally read the case files and used his discretion in the correct manner saying “This is a serious matter concerning Crown Officers.” I feel it would be unjust not to allow this case to go to trial?

At this point the Home Office immediately appealed judge Cockroft’s decision and forced the case to go to the high courts at the strand.

We then at this point were very weary men who were already suffering catastrophic psychological problems manifesting in panic attacks nightmares deep depression hopelessness and a deeper mistrust of the very authority who put us in Medomsley

These were the same authority now dragging the victims through years of litigation and trauma when all this time they were fully aware that what we were telling them and what we wanted to tell the court was nothing but the truth.

Collectively our group have had two of what we would say from bitter experience, the most predatory and consistently prolific pederasts who have ever been heard of as this country and that statement is being very generous. The abuse was relentless for 17 years whilst the abuser was the chief at the now “technically” closed centre. As we all no it’s none other than the privately run Hassockfield secure unit where Adam Rickwood was found hanging in his cell.

We can only wait to see whether justice is finally done and seen do be done. The noble lords are listened to at long last. The statute laws originally brought about to deal with Medical Malfeasance for 30 years has been stopping many legitimate claims by using this dysfunctional law to manipulate and control the leakage of so called historic cases of sexual abuse on 30 years of mainly already vulnerable youngsters
In the same way we believe they have done in the care systems institutions throughout the 50’s 60’s 70’s and 80’s.

Every time it is mentioned or rears its ugly head so called professional dive for cover and I mean that in the literal sense. And in almost every high profile case where the high profile doesn’t get its name from the number of victims involved it is in fact because the pederasts and paedophiles and high profile (Or should be except that the highest put great distance between them selves and those below them who invariably get the blame for the abuses.

Some of the crimes committed by these lads pale into insignificance when held up against the mind blowing barrage of crimes perpetrated by those who were meant to guide and teach us the errors of our ways. Many of the victims had fully accepted that they were being punished for the wrongs that they had done.

We now await the Home Office and what they have to say on the matter. All five Labour Home Secretaries since Labour came to power know about this case and have been given the opportunity to stop this charade form continuing knowing full well that the law commission had already made specific recommendation in 2002 to effect the current statute of limitations in much the same way as the noble lords advocated on Wednesday 30 January 2008.

Where they changed 400 years of legal statute law that governed the guiding principles of Parliament in the way that they considered, Parliament had originally intended those principles to be interpreted.