Cleveland child abuse scandal

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The Cleveland child abuse scandal occurred in Cleveland in 1987, where 121 cases of suspected child sexual abuse were diagnosed by Dr Marietta Higgs and Dr Goeffrey Wyatt, paediatricians at a Middlesbrough hospital (in the now abolished county of Cleveland). After a number of court cases, 26 children from twelve families were found by judges to have been wrongly diagnosed, and cases involving 96 of the 121 children alleged to be victims of sexual abuse were dismissed by the courts. In the other cases, the child was subject to a child protection orders, and some were removed from their parent's care permanently.

Some parents in this case directly engaged journalists in contesting the child protection interventions. Media coverage focused particularly on a technique, known as reflex anal dilatation, that had been used to diagnose some children with sexual abuse. In only 18 of the suspected cases was anal dilation the only medical evidence of abuse, however, media coverage erroneously indicated that Higgs and Wyatt had relied solely on this indicator. The media also failed to report that many of the children's families had documented histories of abuse. Seventeen of the children lived with fathers or other relatives who had already been convicted of sexual offences, and several other children were outpatients after their parents had been registered as having harmed their children.

Following the media outcry, a public inquiry was enacted, led by Elizabeth Butler-Sloss. The judicial inquiry found that the pediatricians had "acted properly" and the report supported the manner in which they had applied the reflex anal dilatation test. This finding contradicted the decision of the judges involved in the case, who had stated that the test was "controversial".^[1]

On March 21 2007 people affected by the scandal spoke on British daytime TV lifestyle show This Morning about what happened in 1987. During the interview it was revealed that Marietta Higgs is still in practice at a hospital in Gillingham in Kent. On May 21 2007 Higgs said in an interview with BBC Look North that she would do the same again based on the facts and also said that she suspected the numbers being abused were even greater than the 121 named.