Beatrix Campbell

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Beatrix Campbell (born 1947) is a British campaigning writer and journalist, focusing on politics, class and gender. She is a lesbian and a feminist.^[1]

Her books include Wigan Pier Revisited (winner of the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize); films include Listen to the Children, a documentary about the watershed Nottingham child abuse case; and Dangerous Places, Diana Princess of Wales - How Sexual Politics Shook the Monarchy.

1 Personal life
2 Political Development
3 Child Abuse controversy
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Personal life

Campbell was married to the Morning Star journalist Bobby Campbell, a folk enthusiast who went on to work at the Scotsman in the 1970s. ^[2] Later she was a partner to Judith Jones, former leader of Nottingham Social Services Team Four (under her married name Dawson), criticised for her promotion of the Satanic Abuse panic^[3]. Jones is co-author with Campbell of a book Stolen Voices (withdrawn under the libel laws) and a play, All the Children Cried.

[edit] Political Development

Campbell joined the Stalin-inspired Communist Party of Great Britain about the time that it was turning itself from a bulwark of trade union officialdom, towards a more feminist and multi-culturalist programme. She joined a reform faction founded by University lecturer Bill Warren in 1970 ^[4] and was one of the 'Gramscians' who 'took leading positions in the party' ^[5] when she joined the National Women's Advisory Committee.

At that time, Campbell excused the party membership's identification with Stalinist oppression in Eastern Europe: '… in the main it is a solidly working class part of the Party which is called Stalinist … only by virtue of the fact that they thought the CIA was about to take over Czechoslovakia and it was therefore politically correct that the Russians moved in.” Instead, she interpreted the problem of 'Stalinism' to be a recidivist opposition to the leadership's new line: the ‘Stalinists in the party who have actually realised a position which is a very comprehensive criticism of where the leadership is going’. ^[6]

In 1977 Campbell defended the Communist Party's revolutionary credentials: ‘There is no way it is legitimate to say that the party isn’t revolutionary... the defeats, the comings and goings doesn’t make it an organisation that sells out the masses.’ ^[7] Thirteen years later, though, her hostility to radical protest was writ large in a report on the Poll Tax riots: 'when the movement takes to the streets, the sectarian samurai poke their spears at police and loot the Body Shop' ^[8]

In 1984 a perceptive Campbell anticipated that unemployment led to the criminalisation of young men: 'the form of boys' masculinity constitutes them as folk devils, a "danger to society" ... they generate a kind of moral panic ... symbolised by the social nuisance of big bad boys who bite social workers' ^[9] Seven years later Campbell lost her critical distance on the criminalisation of young men reporting rioting in Blackbird Leys: 'The riots of 1991 were driven not by pain but by pride, the vanity of fragile masculinity... Some of the 'bad boys' have just made some crap estates even worse.' ^[10]

As Campbell's distaste for the mob intensified, her attitude to the forces of law and order softened. Her sympathetic interview with Derbyshire Chief Constable John Newing was titled 'A Fair Cop' ^[11]

[edit] Child Abuse controversy

In Marxism Today, Campbell protested that 'anyone who respects children's accounts of child abuse aren't taken seriously' ^[12].The county council's report into the Nottinghamshire child abuse case she referred to listed the following children's accounts:

babies being cut out of the tummies of the female members of the family
babies being taken from next door and from across the road and having their heads bashed on the floor babies being thrown on the bonfire
a naughty policeman killing babies
the family having dead babies hung around their necks
a monster getting our babies
babies being stabbed in a balloon and cooked in the oven
a lady and little girl being shot, chopped up and put in the river in a bin (or variant - buried by the river)
Jesus being chopped up and eaten off a silver pad
a swimming pool with crocodiles, sharks and dragon that kill the children
a member of the family putting on a cloak and flying, the children being turned into frogs by the witches ^[13]

In 2007 Campbell leaped to the defence of paediatrician David Southall, as his case was being heard by the General Medical Council. 'David Southall established a gold standard in the detection of lethal child abuse', said Campbell. She had no such kind words for Sally Clark, the woman falsely imprisoned for four years on Southall's outlandish evidence.^[14] Writing on the Clark case, Campbell rejected the 'suspicion that medical men play God and pathologise women's distress'. Such feminist arguments, she thought, ignored 'the dangerousness of motherhood: it can make some women lose their minds, it makes some mothers murderous' ^[15] Sally Clark was cleared of murder on appeal, and David Southall was struck off the Medical Register.