Transcript

We were set up because myself and my husband got caught up in the system when our youngest daughter had a series of fractures from very minor tumbles. Both her and her sister’s name was put on the Child Abuse Register as it was called and we very much lived in fear that they were going to be removed from us because the professionals kept saying ‘it can’t have happened the way you said it did, Mrs. Amphlett, children don’t get fractures from minor tumbles like that’. Eventually, quite some time later, and on our insistence at getting second opinions, she was diagnosed as probably having mild brittle bone disease. I was a nurse by profession, I was a registered child minder at the time, I’d held very senior posts, I’d worked with abused children, I knew what the system was about. And I had an image of myself and my family and my children, that I was a very good mother, and my children were happy contented children; and suddenly I had a complete batch of strangers looking at me with a suspicion that actually I was abusing my children. And we felt so marginalised in the process. Only our GP had met us to any degree, or even seen the children. The social worker who came to do the initial interview actually went on holiday the day before the conference, so there was nobody at the conference who knew us, and we’re sitting to make judgements as to whether these were abused children and whether they should be removed and what action they should take.