In defence of David Southall

One of life’s difficulties, I have found, is that it keeps throwing up questions to which there is no indubitably correct answer. This means that the exercise of judgment is perennially necessary: and there is hardly a moment’s respite from this burdensome imperative. Alas, where there is judgment there is error, or the possibility of error. No one can be right all the time.

Of nothing is this truer than the vexed question of child abuse. Not to see it where it exists has terrible consequences for the child; to see it where it does not exist has terrible consequences for the parents or the others accused of it.

I have seen incontrovertible evidence of things done to children so terrible that, though no babe-in-the-wood when it comes to the human capacity for evil (having travelled through several countries in the throes of murderous civil wars), I should not previously have thought it possible for people to do them in conditions of peace and prosperity.

On the other hand, I am aware of how easy it is to make false allegations. Rare metabolic conditions may mimic factitious disease; there is even a very rare skin condition that gives lesions that are extremely difficult to distinguish from cigarette burns, which are a common form of abuse. Moreover, it has to be remembered that evidence of abuse does not by itself make any particular person guilty of it.

The subject of child abuse arouses deep passions, as two prominent British paediatricians, Professor David Southall and Professor Sir Roy Meadow, know to their cost. Both are the object of hatred of an exceptionally virulent and almost uncontrolled kind, far worse than if they had actually decimated the countryside or poisoned the wells.

Professor Southall first became the object of hatred when he videoed mothers suffocating babies who had had repeated apnoeic attacks (episodes when breathing stops momentarily) without any inherent physiological or pathological cause.