Expert Witness Journal Dec 24 - Journal - Page 73
Speech by the PFD: Suspected
Physical Abuse of Children Experts in the Family Court
An Address by Rt Hon Sir Andrew McFarlane, President of the Family Division to the British
Society of Paediatric Radiologists
I suspect that each member of this audience is well
used to lecturing. From time to time we will have each
found ourselves preparing to speak to an audience
which is well outside our normal professional round.
The natural thought, as the date draws near and the
need to prepare some words becomes pressing, is to
say ‘why on earth did I agree to do this!’.
It was around 1982 or so. The case involved a toddler
who had been found to have, I think, as many as 20 or
more metaphyseal fractures. The fractures were at the
end of almost every one of his long bones and they
were of a range of different ages. The parents, who
originated from the high mountains of the Hindu
Kush, but were living in Birmingham, could not give
an account to explain the injuries.
Today might have been one of those days for me, but,
as I will explain, the opposite is very firmly the case.
The case for the social services, for whom I acted,
turned on the radiological evidence. At that time
Birmingham Children’s Hospital was most fortunate
to have the first, and I think still then the only, full
time paediatric radiologist in the country, Dr Roy
Astley. Dr Astley was our expert. Before that case I
had never heard of metaphyseal fractures and I recall Roy Astley painstakingly educating me in the various presentations, aging and causation of this
distinctive category of fracture so that, in turn, I
could ensure that the evidence was presented to the
bench clearly and accurately.
So, why did I agree to speak to the British Society of
Paediatric Radiologists Scientific Meeting.
An easy answer is that I have known one of the
organisers, Dr Tom Davies, since he was a very young
person. I have always liked him and an invitation from
Tom was therefore a hard one to refuse on that
ground alone. But the true reason why I am keen to
be here in this room addressing you is a much deeper
one.
You may be familiar with ‘The Road Less Travelled’,
a well-known poem by Robert Frost in which a traveller, faced with a choice of two equally attractive paths,
chooses to take the one ‘less travelled’.
The poem’s final verse is:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The case was complicated by, and at turns made more
interesting by, the instruction of an expert for the defence. He was Dr Colin Paterson, a renowned specialist in bone disorders and co-founder of the Brittle
Bone Society. Dr Paterson’s expert opinion was that,
in this case, the metaphyseal fractures could have resulted from normal parental handling because this
child, in his view, suffered from copper deficiency
thereby rendering his bones more brittle than those of
a normal infant. I recall much evidence about the
child’s feeding regime, whether the sclerae of his eyes
were green and whether he had, or had not, had Cow
and Gate Milk.
When I started to practice as a young barrister in
Birmingham at the end of the 1970’s, the idea of being
an expert in the law relating to child protection would
have been quickly dismissed. There were few child
protection cases and, all but a few, were heard by lay
magistrates, rather than in the higher courts. For a
barrister, at any stage of seniority, to seek to pursue a
career in children’s law at that time was most certainly
to choose a road less followed.
I found the whole thing absolutely fascinating. It was
also important in that, if the findings were to go
against the parents, the court had the power to remove their child forever from their care for adoption
by strangers. This, in terms of its consequences, was
of a wholly different order to the low level criminal
and civil cases that I would otherwise have been doing.
Whilst it is dangerous to put too much weight on one
experience, one court case, in my mind I can pinpoint
the singular experience that ‘did it’ for me and caused
me to diverge from the paths that were more travelled
in those days and head off in the direction of child
protection work.
EXPERT WITNESS JOURNAL
In all this I was greatly impressed by Roy Astley, and
I was very interested in the science behind his evidence and the response that he and other experts
gave to Dr Paterson’s testimony.
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DECEMBER 2024
