bryn estyn

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM?

Book review: Richard Webster, 'The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch-hunt', Orwell Press, 2005.

Reviewed by Chris Clode

This book has been written about a whistleblower and all the consequences of her whistleblowing, the trials, investigations and tribunals that followed. The whistleblower was Alison Taylor and the events were in North Wales and the investigations of abuse of children in care that led years later to the Waterhouse Tribunal.

And "The Secret of Bryn Estyn" by Richard Webster is a big book, with all the appearance of having been exhaustively researched. But it is a book that takes a familiar stance in relation to whistleblowers. Webster, in his 600 pages, explores what he calls "the psychology of righteousness" in the person of Alison Taylor, the residential childcare manager whose whistleblowing and subsequent sacking led to the unravelling of links between her claims and the evidence that started with the imprisonment of Steven Norris, the paedophilic home manager, who had once worked at Bryn Estyn children's home.

Webster applies a scrutiny to Taylor's life to "prove" her pathology- a scrutiny that is not applied to those earning his natural sympathies, such as Gwen Hurst, the union officer who had also worked in Bryn Estyn and became the spokesperson for those denying abuse ever took place there. Webster brushes over the issue of Alison Taylor's confidential letters being opened by "colleagues" and minimises the out-of-court settlement she received from the Gwynedd County Council for her dismissal with "it is reasonably clear, this was a pragmatic compromise [by GCC] rather than a principled reversal of their original position." Of course.

His forensic examination of changes in details of Alison's evidence over the more than a decade she was seeking a hearing for it has no recognition of the process of being a whistleblower; from making sometimes crude and fragmentary initial statements in the heat of daily harassments by "colleagues" seeking her silence, the whistleblower, suspended or dismissed, then has the time and opportunity to develop a more systematic and detailed dossier, to which may be added details supplied by others who discover each other raising parallel concerns about the organisation.

Webster, however, dismisses whistleblowers as "those whose consciousness is dominated by feelings of righteousness appear to be psychologically incapable of weighing the moral significance of individual acts according to any calculus other than one derived from their own most passionate beliefs", before going on to discuss theories of "righteous deception."

As if all the passion and the anger of the whistleblower was not needed to confront the elaborated denials of colleagues fearful for their jobs; then backed up by the serried ranks of union officers fudging the issues while defending their members accused of the abuses; then the County Council legal departments and their bottomless pots of money to employ barristers to defend the Chief Officers, whose cover-ups have turned into conspiracies. In all this, Mr. Webster, whose is the pathology?

The backgrounds of the abused children now become key adult witnesses, are given the same forensic examination as Alison Taylor's (again, without a similarly harsh light being shone on the behaviour, for instance, of key individual members of the North Wales Police at the time and subsequently). With the (ex-) children's records of criminal offences and the clear evidence that, among all the hundreds of witnesses to the trials and the public enquiry, there were some liars, Webster sums up his position with "Some did respond favourably to the regime [in Bryn Estyn] that they found. But many remained almost compulsively given to making up stories about their lives."

The implication seems to be: like Bryn Estyn or be branded a liar if you complain about the place. Branding as a liar a child accusing an adult of abuse has a very long history. In an institution like Bryn Estyn, to maintain such an accusation against the collective disbelief of staff requires an exceptional determination and articulacy, seldom found in any children, much less the deprived and already abused children arriving on the doorsteps of children's homes. It is not so surprising that such children mostly waited into their adulthood, without the expectation that anything would ever happen to their claims, only coming forward when they heard or read that ex-children were at last being listened to. The change of culture in the way such allegations were dealt with came in the trail of the

evidence that children were easily intimidated into silence, or even denial of their original claims, when faced with the cross examinations of traditional legal due process. Similar changes have taken place to the way Police and Courts are required to deal with female rape victims.

But the most damning evidence against Webster's book is his complete failure to make use of the evidence provided by the Andy Sutton case. Within its 600 pages, nine years in the making, with apparently unlimited "forensic examination" of the evidence, including the ability to interview anyone remotely linked to events in North Wales, the author omits reference to it. The book was published in 2005. The full Public Interest Report by Andy Sutton has been on the Freedom to Care website for three years and Webster is aware of the case, because his own website included a critique of a BBC "File on Four" programme on which Sutton was interviewed last year. So why would he exclude it? He very swiftly terminated my own e-mail enquiries of him about this omission. Two key issues appear in Sutton's Report.

One is the possibility that key files were held back from the Waterhouse Enquiry by Flintshire County Council, who acted on behalf of all the North Wales Councils.

The other is that, after being sacked, Sutton was warned off pursuing his inquiries by the then head of the North Wales Fraud Squad with the injunction to "beware of the Brotherhood". Webster does address the question of Masonic involvement in the North Wales events, but settles the issue by accepting a Crown Prosecution Service statement that a long list of police names that it produced were not Freemasons. Given the secret loyalties of the Masons and their well known breadth of membership across all professions, including police and lawyers - and even the occasional investigative author, I have no doubt - how credible can such a denial ever be?

No, Mr. Webster, you will have to do better than this, however high the stacks of your tome are in Wrexham's branch of Waterstone's. You could have used some of the resources at your disposal to balance the equation and find out what evidence was denied to the public inquiry. But maybe that was outside your brief.

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FtC June 2005