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Society's unhealthy obsession with abuse
Sir Roy Meadow is not single-handedly responsible for a culture that sees child abuse everywhere.

Retired paediatrician Roy Meadow is currently facing charges of gross professional misconduct before the General Medical Council in connection with his evidence against a number of parents wrongfully convicted of killing their children.

Over the past two decades he has helped to popularise the view that children are being abused and even killed by their parents much more commonly than was previously believed. But he did not single-handedly create the obsession with abuse that led to these unjust convictions. Nor are these parents the only victims of a climate of opinion that is predisposed to believe the worst about how people behave in intimate relationships.

According to Dr James Le Fanu, 'the medical advocacy of contentious theories of the mechanisms of child abuse is likely to have been responsible for a systematic miscarriage of justice on a scale without precedent in British legal history - with devastating consequences for the parents wrongly convicted'. Though the scale of these injustices remains unclear - in only a handful of cases has a guilty verdict so far been overturned - the consequences of such wrongful convictions are undoubtedly devastating.

Dr Le Fanu traces the origins of the current situation back to the 1980s, when Professor Meadow (and Dr David Southall, the subject of earlier disciplinary proceedings at the GMC) described 'two covert forms of child abuse' - factitious illness (which Meadow labeled Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy) and smothering (famously exposed by Southall through covert video surveillance) (1).

Individual doctors, no matter how brilliant and charismatic, do not have the power to transform the culture of society in relation to a matter as important as the ill-treatment of children by their parents. A closer look at the new outlook on children that emerged in British society in the 1980s reveals that when Professor Meadow and his colleagues suggested that there was 'a hidden epidemic of child abuse' there was widespread acceptance of this view, among medical - and legal - professionals, the media and the general public....