Liz Davies’s speech on 14th January 2015 to the WhiteFlowers House of Commons Meeting. Child Abuse Inquiry. Time for Action and Justice

I need to clarify the term organised abuse.  You will have noticed that this meeting is about organised child abuse and not specifically child sexual abuse. This is to definitely include physical torture, emotional harm and neglect. We use the term abuse but it is important to be clear we are speaking about the most serious crimes.

There is a vast global industry of organised crime against children and the stakes are high for those wanting to protect the financial interests and networks.  The powerful of this society have been reliant on harm to children in order to blackmail and control each other’s activities. This has sadly been the political foundation of this society. The Dirt Books, the Government Whips records of MPs ‘misdemeanours’, including sexual harm to children, kept in the safes of this very building,  were used to control the actions of MPs and have still not been seized by police. This is a disgrace.  

Organised abuse includes the illegal adoption trade, abusive images and online abuse, illegal organ trade, trafficking and sexual exploitation across the country and internationally. The child victims are from all social classes, genders and ages.  Yet there is no national police team to investigate these crimes. We know exactly how to do this job but the systems and resources are not in place for the scale of the networks.  We need an increase in the police response working closely with survivors as Lenny Harper did in Jersey.

Organised abuse was defined in the statutory guidance for professionals in 1991 and until 2010;

‘one or more abusers and a number of children. The abusers concerned may be acting in concert to abuse children sometimes acting in isolation or may be using an institutional framework or position of authority to recruit children for abuse’ .

The means of investigating organised abuse are very clearly outlined. These were good systems and instructions that reflected the work Peter McKelvie, myself and others were doing as social workers working jointly with police child protection teams in the 90s. However, in 2013, in a revised version of this document, this government eliminated the term organised abuse and everything concerning it. This is shocking and this guidance for professionals MUST be reinstated or we just don’t have the tools for the job.

The WhiteFlowers  campaign is based on the Belgian march of 1996 where 300,000 people took to the streets against the establishment  in solidarity with parents of children kidnapped and murdered by a paedophile gang including people of very high status.   The campaigners were angry at the corrupt state that had let this happen.  Marchers carried white flowers and balloons to symbolise the innocence of the children.

We haven’t had anything comparable in the UK as yet but it is our wish to build up to something similar. The WhiteFlowers campaign here has definitely caught the moment. The first vigil was outside Elm Guest House, Richmond where it is alleged that boys were subjected to sexual crime by powerful people.

The next vigil in October was at 114 Grosvenor Avenue, one of 41 Islington children’s homes where crimes were committed against children, the managers were involved in numbers of large paedophile networks and also children were trafficked to and from Jersey. The manager of the home was eventually convicted in Thailand. This time the vigil hit the headline news and more survivors came forward.

Vigils enable us to remember the child victims. They are quiet, emotional and respectful events which enable survivors, whistleblowers and those at the grassroots to collaborate and have a voice and speak about what happened at the places where it happened.  We hope there will be many more which will provide a record of historic crimes at a time when we are relying almost entirely on personal testimony because files are largely missing and those we have obtained are seriously sanitised.

For those who do not know me, I was a social worker when I exposed the Islington child abuse scandal in 1992. I bore witness to many crimes against children, there were murders, abductions and sexual assaults some in the context of cults and ritual abuse. Children were being trafficked across the country and to Jersey.

All my efforts and those of my police colleagues to protect children were suppressed

All the 14 Inquiries were a complete sham ; Who conducted them? Who commissioned them?

All my records of child victims were missing from the Inquiries.

Later, when Margaret Hodge became Minister for Children, my lawyer lost my entire archive of evidence.    In 25 years I haven’t stopped trying to get an investigation. There has been a great deal of news coverage and I have met endlessly with police, journalists and lawyers repeating the same evidence again and again. Many of the abusers are still out there and those who colluded with them and covered up are still in powerful positions. 

I didn’t know then what I know now;

• That the Paedophile Information Exchange and some leading PIE members were based very close to my office. Keith Harding and Roger Moody among them. It was an International group signing their letters with  ‘paedophile love and kisses’ with an HQ in Islington.
• That there had already been murders of children in the locality just a few years before I was raising the issue.
• That the late Geoffrey Dickens, the now famous Tory MP, had been raising the ‘child brothels of Islington’  in parliament and was ignored and of course his dossiers of evidence are now known to be ‘lost’ by the Home Office.
• That similar events were happening in many other parts of the country. I only knew of a few – hence how, as just one example, I went to Hereford and Worcester with the police to work with Peter McKelvie on the Peter Righton case.
• My archive was ‘mislaid’ by lawyer. I went to view the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) archives and saw that PIE had been influential and had infiltrated this professional body and social work academia.

In 1992 there was no internet. We are in a different place now some of us have reconnected and found our wonderful former colleagues and there are very strong bonds between us.

We are joined by so many well organised survivors and whistleblowers from all over the country with an army of helpers – lawyers, politicians, police, researchers, archivists, journalists and so on.   Those in power can destroy all the records they want but we have our memories. None of us will ever forget what we have seen and witnessed. 

We had individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but now we see the connections and it is vast and overwhelming. The whole sordid picture of what has happened to children is being very swiftly assembled. There is no hiding place now for the perpetrators and for those who collude with them.

We must work closely with police and statutory agencies to get prosecutions to succeed and children protected.  It is through brave survivors coming forward that current children gain protection. We must all be very cautious not to interfere with police evidence and to protect witness testimony.

We are bound to have opponents. We are challenging the establishment and how it has functioned through an orchestrated strategy of child abuse. So there are obviously those spreading disinformation, distracting us with false campaigns, there are front organisations which infiltrate, undermine and deceive. There are academics promoting theories that support paedophilia. There are those who try to set us up to make mistakes and call us all kinds of names.  This has been ever the case since I began this struggle in 1992 and we know the main players and fight them off every single day. 

But WhiteFlowers and the survivor organisations are very strong and with cross party support the campaign will definitely build. We will not stop until we get the Chair of the Inquiry we want, the Panel we want, the Terms of Reference we want and the Safeguarding protocols we want. Today we have come out of the shadows and there’s no going back.

Liz Davies’s speech on 23rd June 2015 to the WhiteFlowers House of Commons Meeting. Action and Justice Now. Protection and Support for Whistleblowers.

Welcome to this meeting on whistleblowing in the context of organised child abuse.

The organised abuse of children knows no bounds.. in my experience in Islington children were trafficked across children’s homes to other abusers abroad and in the UK, they were abducted,  tortured, hypnotised and drugged. Some were murdered. The impact is so severe that some who contacted me twenty years ago are still too frightened to meet me. I get a phone call or an email now and then and that’s that. Over 200 social workers were in Islington at the time I worked there in the early 90s but only 4 blew the whistle. I still don’t know why this is. I don’t think anyone has studied what makes a whistleblower. I didn’t know who to turn to. I eventually went to Scotland Yard to report crimes. No one could criticise me for this. But the police advised working with the media and that was hard because that was forbidden to me as a social worker. However, I was persuaded that it was in the public interest. It was and still is very frightening.

But once a whistleblower always a whistleblower – there are people here today who I worked with 40 years ago and others from all the years in between. When we meet up – we are instantly reconnected in struggle.  It’s about persistence and strength and determination. We have right on our side.

In 1990 an Islington police officer said to me ‘ This is very big – are you prepared to investigate it?’ I replied – ‘its about children – how could I walk away from it..’ I feel the same today… even at the most difficult times and when those who seemed to be on-side turn out to be on the other side. I can’t give up – the issues are more important than any of us individually.

Others have given me the title of whistleblower over the years since 1992 when I exposed the Islington child abuse scandal. However I prefer to define myself as a professional social worker doing the job I was being paid to do – protect children – this is still the case today. Only now do I realise the extent of child abuse networks in Islington and across the country. We knew in the 90s that it was vast but now we can barely allow ourselves to believe the scale of organised crime against children and how many perpetrators were and continue to be involved.

WhiteFlowers is a campaign I’m very proud to be part of. The first meeting here in January made history and we are doing that again today. Bringing together survivors, whistleblowers and campaigners although not directly representing them, we become strong in our aims to protect current children from abuse and to gain justice and healing for survivors. This includes seeking the prosecution and conviction of perpetrators.

Unlike the Inquiry, we do not specify a focus solely on child sexual abuse because victims of organised abuse suffer every form of abuse and crime against children.

Since January a lot has happened. WhiteFlowers has obtained the immensely important help from Mansfield chambers and many more people have joined the campaign and local groups are taking shape. But there has also been a wealth of both direct hostility, misinformation campaigns and attempts to divide us one from another. Twitter being a major arena of troubles providing a forum for instant emotion without time for reflection and drawing breath.   I guess we are coming closer and closer to who was involved, when and how and undoubtedly at high level in society – and that never was going to be easy.

Organised abuse was defined in statutory guidance 2010 as;

abuse involving one or more abusers and a number of children. The abusers concerned may be acting in concert to abuse children sometimes acting in isolation, or may be using an institutional framework or position of authority to recruit children for abuse.

It covers serious crimes – murders, physical and sexual assaults, abductions, torture, cruelty and neglect

This guidance was abolished in 2013. It MUST be reinstated because professionals in all agencies no longer have the protocols for investigating this form of abuse. (Yet those of us who worked to expose such abuse in the 90s had excellent procedures and we know exactly how to do this work based on the research and findings of large scale investigations and serious case reviews.)

But a real problem is that the UK has no national police led multi-agency  team to investigate networks of offenders against children. The perpetrators are so well organised they must be laughing at our inadequate investigation systems. Operation Hydrant is coordinating existing local investigations and this is welcome but this is not the same as proactively investigating organised crime at a national level. If the Inquiry is to protect current children and survivors as allegations come to light it must work with a national investigative team. This is obvious and is a severe deficit in the Inquiry structure.

We have a full schedule of speakers, each with only a few minutes, who will speak of their experiences of whistleblowing to protect children – police, social workers, psychologists, parents etc. I’m sure there will be many of you also who have experience of raising the alarm when you have witnessed or become aware of children being harmed in this context. The may be the reason you are here today. Revisiting the issues is traumatising and we recognise that. This is a very intense subject and I ask everyone to treat each other with full respect. Please allow each speaker the space to give their deeply personal account without interruption even if you disagree with what they are saying and we will provide some time at the end for your contributions and comments. We aim to be sensitive throughout and we have support available from qualified professionals should anyone feel they need to seek a quiet moment outside the room.

First we will hear a statement from one extremely brave woman- a victim of abuse in Kendall House, Kent placed by Wandsworth council. She has campaigned tirelessly for years for justice for the survivors who were forcibly drugged in what we think were experiments for pharmaceutical companies. When drugged they were sexually abused. She is now suffering severe illness as are so many other survivors. She sent me a photograph this week of a scan of a child in utero – it was shocking as the impact of this torture continues through to the third generation.

Our strength in WhiteFlowers is the strong alliance between survivors and whistleblowers. Many of us go back 30-40 years in our knowledge of each other and our achievements. These are bonds that cannot be broken.  There are now so many more witnesses  coming forward – feeling courageous and supporting and advising each other. Yet, we face non-stop confrontation, we are dealt misinformation to trip us up and people we think are on our side turn out to be the opposite. Emails are constantly hacked, files stolen and we watch as confidential information flies around the net exposing the most vulnerable – more recently some of us have had some very unwelcome threats.   We struggle against feeling frightened by this and we lose a few ‘warriors’ in this child protection war, as Phil rightly calls it, along the way through this understandably….. the campaign is bigger than all of us and we just have to go on doing whatever we can for as long as we can.   That’s why the Inquiry must provide protection for whistleblowers and also why the Inquiry must not end up a bottomless pit of information that goes nowhere – soaking up all the accounts but without a national police led multi agency investigative team alongside them no-one will be prosecuted as a result and there will be no justice for survivors their supporters and whistleblowers.

In WhiteFlowers meetings, parents, social workers, police, psychologists and others have spoken of their experiences in trying to protect children and being thwarted by those in power. Why would anyone stand in their way to this excessive degree when they are striving to keep children safe from harm? The agendas are political, financial and personal. .. and all to do with protecting power and the powerful.

Article in Professional Social Work magazine following the WhiteFlowers meeting

London Metropolitan University news item about the Whiteflowers meeting on 14th January 2014