Pretty and fashionably dressed, the two young sisters look the very embodiment
of confident modern womanhood. In fact, Lindsey and Paula's lives have been
almost too shocking to comprehend.
For these are the two girls who were at the centre of the Cleveland child
abuse controversy that rocked Britain exactly 20 years ago.
Raised by a loving family, they were the first victims of the 1987 scandal
when hundreds of parents in the North-East of England were wrongly accused of
the worst crime imaginable: molesting their own children Lindsey and Paula
Wise are speaking out today for the first time.
They want the world to know exactly what happened to them on the say-so of a
maverick paediatrician called Marietta Higgs and other child doctors in the
hope that their story will stop such a travesty ever being repeated.
The girls, now 23 and 22, were taken from their devoted parents, Barry and
Linda Wise, and put in foster homes.
They escaped adoption by a whisker. They spent their youngest years in the
hands of the state instead of their family.
Still
at large: Dr Marietta Higgs is now a paediatrician working in Kent
Like the 119 other children ensnared in what was Britain's first and biggest
abuse scandal, they were interrogated by social workers and endured a battery
of the most intimate examinations by doctors.
As a toddler Lindsey was photographed or examined for signs of sexual abuse 17
times, according to her own medical records. In fact, it may have been many
more - she will never know. For, mysteriously, the official files on the
Cleveland debacle, provoked by Dr Higgs's blind faith in an unproven medical
technique to prove child abuse, have since been destroyed.
Now Lindsey and Paula Wise plan to take legal action against those they allege
ruined their young lives. This week they asked police in Middlesbrough, where
they both live with their parents in a neat terraced house, to investigate
their cases.
They acted after the admission on Monday by the Government's Chief Medical
Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, that mistakes were made in Cleveland.
Sir Liam, coincidentally the medical officer in charge of the Northern
Regional Health Authority covering the area in 1987, confirmed that the
medical technique used by Dr Higgs and her acolytes was unreliable.
By looking at and probing a child's bottom, Dr Higgs believed she could see if
there was Reflex Anal Dilatation - or RAD.
She insisted that the existence of RAD - originally devised to detect
homosexual abuse -showed if a child had been interfered with. Today it is
known that RAD can appear in any boy or girl quite normally and spontaneously.
After a long fight through the courts, 80 per cent of children taken in
Cleveland were returned to their innocent parents. Yet the damage was done.
Many were traumatised. For years afterwards, they would hide if there was a
knock on the door.
As Lindsey, now training as a nurse in Middlesbrough, told the Mail: "I
believe I was a guinea pig of the doctors. I lost my babyhood and nearly my
family. The state kidnapped me at two years old and I did not go home again
until I was four.
"My mother and father were accused of an unspeakable offence. It has almost
destroyed their lives. My father was never strong enough to work again. My
mother can never forget the trauma of nearly losing her children.
"Now I want answers. I want an apology. I will not be silenced."
Paula, the manager of a hairdressing salon, added: "We were abused by the very
people - the doctors and social workers - there to protect children. We were
put up for adoption. Now we want to know why."
The story of Lindsey and Paula Wise began innocently enough exactly a year
before the Cleveland crisis gained national notoriety.
On July 9, 1986, their mother noticed bruises on Lindsey's arms when she came
back from the local play school. No one realised at the time, but they had
been caused by Lindsey getting scratched as she picked bilberries from bushes.
Linda recalls: "I mentioned the mysterious bruises to our health visitor, then
our GP, and, astonishingly, we found ourselves being accused of harming our
own children. The whole family were driven by social workers to Middlesbrough
General Hospital."
The clock was ticking. At the hospital, a local social worker called Carol
Towers presented Barry and Linda with a "place of safety order" (which meant
legally, the children could not be taken from the hospital by the parents) and
said the family would have to be monitored 24 hours a day.
The young couple - both aged 22 and virtually teetotal, churchgoing Methodists
- were told they had to live in a special family unit 30 miles away at the
Fleming Memorial Hospital, in Newcastle. If they refused, the children would
be taken from them. There, for the first time, they came face to face with Dr
Marietta Higgs.
Barry, a former hotel manager, recalls today: "She walked into the room off a
main ward and just looked at us. Then she asked if she could examine Lindsey
and told us to take our daughter's clothes off."
It was a fateful moment. What Barry and Linda did not know was that only
a month before, in June 1986, 38-yearold Dr Higgs had attended a medical
conference in Leeds.
There the Australian-born doctor enthusiastically embraced a new method of
diagnosing child abuse - RAD - directly from its pioneers, two paediatricians
called Dr Christopher Hobbs and Dr Jane Wynne.
As Dr Higgs was to admit later: "This made a great impact on me."
Now at 1.30pm on July 16, 1986, at the Fleming Memorial Hospital, Dr Higgs
seized her first chance of trying the technique. "She examined Lindsey's
backside and then went away and told us nothing," says Barry today.
But a week later, Dr Higgs confronted Barry and Linda with the words: "I think
it is an appropriate time to inform you of my suspicions. I strongly suspect
that your eldest daughter, Lindsey, has been sexually abused."
Although outwardly confident of her radical diagnosis, it is now known that Dr
Higgs went home after examining Lindsey to try out RAD on the two youngest of
her own five children. When they did not show the same telltale signs as the
Wise family's eldest daughter, she concluded that Barry or Linda, perhaps
both, were abusers.
Two days later she asked them to bring Lindsey back to her Newcastle
consulting rooms.
"She put our daughter on the bed, kneeling face down, and parted her buttocks.
Then she said: "This is what I am talking about," and walked out,"
remembers
Barry now. "She treated Lindsey like a piece of meat."
Moments later a policeman arrested him and Linda on suspicion of assault and
buggery of their own daughter. Social workers took Lindsey and Paula away from
the hospital to foster parents and the Wises were driven to nearby Gosforth
Police Station to be interviewed.
Barry remembers: "We don't drink, we never went out at night and left the
children with a sitter, so they said no one else could have harmed them. We
were asked if I changed the nappies or bathed the girls alone."
No charges were ever brought. Throughout the ordeal, the parents could
remember Lindsey's cries ringing in their ears as they left her at the
hospital. She was screaming: "I want to go home." By her side, the 18-monthold
Paula was clinging to her sister.
Yet worse was to come. Six months later, in January 1987, Dr Higgs transferred
to Middlesbrough General, the hospital with which her name became
intrinsically linked.
There, with another paediatrician, Dr Geoffrey Wyatt, she introduced the
routine use of the anal dilatation test. It resulted in the mass diagnosis of
child abuse on a scale never seen before in the world.
Meanwhile, Barry and Linda tried to keep in touch with their daughters. Over
the 17 months they were away, they sent cards for Christmas, for their
birthdays and for Easter. They were returned in a brown envelope, unopened.
After the couple had been parted from their children for 15 weeks, in November
1986, they received a letter from social worker Carol Towers. It said there
were plans for Lindsey and Paula to "be provided with a permanent alternative
family with the intention that adoption will be the outcome".
The consequences of the letter were tragic. When Linda became pregnant with a
third child, in March, 1987, she was so traumatised and terrified that her new
baby would be taken by social workers that she went to South Cleveland
Hospital for an abortion.
"I don't know if I was expecting a boy or a girl," she said this week,
emotionally, "but it was a much-wanted child."
The demonic fervour of Dr Higgs was soon to prove her undoing. Between
February and July of 1987, 121 Cleveland children were diagnosed by her and Dr
Wyatt as sexually abused. The numbers were impossible to ignore.
An entire primary school of children was asked by Dr Wyatt to attend the
hospital for the RAD test because he said all the pupils were anally abused.
The local MP, Stuart Bell, demanded a judicial inquiry into why so many
children were suddenly being vilely hurt by their loved ones. The Cleveland
crisis was grabbing national headlines and parents began consulting lawyers.
For the Wises, something extraordinary was about to happen. Unknown to Barry
and Linda, their daughters had been growing up with good foster parents, with
three girls of their own.
The "Allan" family (we have changed the name, as they have asked the Mail to
protect their privacy) took the Wise girls to Middlesbrough Hospital in April
1987 for a final medical check-up with Marietta Higgs before being adopted.
There, astonishingly, the doctor
diagnosed that both had been sexually abused while in foster care.
Immediately, the natural children of the Allans - Selina, aged ten, Rebecca,
eight, and twoyearold Eleanor - were admitted to hospital.
Dr Higgs deemed that all three had "signs" consistent with sexual abuse. The
girls' father, Michael, a civil servant, was arrested.
"It was like being hit by a prize-fighter. Marietta Higgs and the others were
like religious zealots on a mission," he said this week.
As for his daughter, Selina, she managed to smuggle a letter to her parents
out of the Middlesbrough General Hospital where she was being kept with the
Wise girls and her own sisters.
It said: "Dear Mum and Dad. I miss you very much. In the hospital very early
on Saturday morning, Dr Higgs woke me up to take photographs of our bottoms.
And about Saturday too, in the afternoon, she took Eleanor, Lindsey and Paula
for photographs with June the nurse. The man who took the photographs was Ken
and he was horrid."
By the summer of 1987, wards nine and ten of Middlesbrough General were
overflowing with children taken from their parents after alleged sexual abuse.
Such an extraordinary number of cases prompted high-level concern. How could
there be so many abuse victims? Surely the doctors must be wrong?
Barry Wise said this week: "When the Allans were accused too, we realised we
were not alone. It gave us strength to fight.
"Lindsey and Paula were sent to yet another foster home. But we got legal aid,
and in February the following year, 1988, the children were officially given
back to us in a ruling by a judge at Middlesbrough Court."
A few weeks prior to this final decision, the family had been reunited in a a
tearful and desperately poignant scene.
When Lindsey, then aged four, caught sight of her father for the first time
since being ripped away from the family, she slapped him on the leg. "I used
to live with you a long time ago,' she said accusingly. "Where have you been?"
The parents hugged their two daughters as though they would never let go.
The ordeal was over. Or was it? Lindsey, an elegant girl who has already won
two prizes for nursing and will qualify later this year, believes that her and
Paula's childhood was fractured by the Cleveland doctors.
It was only this week, after the Chief Medical Officer's pronouncement, that
the two Wise girls have been told by their parents the entire truth. The
family have a plastic bag of newspaper cuttings about the Cleveland crisis and
they have read them through together.
Tragically, they have looked at the colourful birthday cards they never
received with the desperate messages from their parents telling them they were
loved and missed.
Lindsey says now: "Of course, I cannot remember everything because I was so
young. But I do recall the smell of Middlesbrough General Hospital at the
time. I associated it with fear.
"In my last year at primary school, I was first told by other children I had
been in care. At my secondary school, a boy said my dad was a "paedophile".
"I came home and asked Mum and Dad about it. They tried to protect me; they
only said they had been wrongly accused of hurting me and Paula when we were
little.
"Only now I realise the harm done to our family. I was away from my parents
for 17 months and only came back by chance. I was placed naked on all fours
and peered at by doctors again
and again. What does that do to a child?'
Her sister Paula adds: "We were kidnapped and then nearly adopted. My mother
was blackmailed into having an abortion so we do not have a younger brother or
sister.
'My father now says he did not dare even put a towel around me at the public
swimming pool for years. He was afraid of cuddling us in public. My parents
lives have been shattered."
So what of Marietta Higgs? Today she is working as a paediatrician in Kent. In
1988, a public inquiry headed by Lord Justice Butler-
Sloss (now in charge of the inquiry into Princess Diana's death) criticised
her and Dr Wyatt for being over-confident in their diagnoses.
Northern Regional Health Authority barred Dr Higgs from child abuse work in
their region. She has never apologised. "I reached my clinical diagnosis after
very careful thought and I would do the same today," is what she said then.
Although this week she refused to comment further, Dr Higgs made it clear she
has not changed her views.
No wonder Lindsey and Paula Wise shake their heads in horror.
