What it feels like... to be accused of harming your baby

[Alison J Stevens]

When Victoria Ward’s son broke his leg, a two-year nightmare began, as she and her husband were charged with child cruelty

Mia Aimaro Ogden Published: 24 April 2011

 

After more than a year, the police dropped the case (Universal Stopping Point)

P oor little boy, what have you done? You’ve broken your leg.” The doctors swished the curtains around us and started whispering, and that’s when I knew: they thought we’d hurt our son. They thought this was child abuse.

William was only three months old. He was born at home, 8lb 10oz, a good, healthy weight. A happy little boy, he was just starting to roll over when all this happened. We did the usual things: baby yoga, singing — we were just ordinary, thirtysomething parents with a very precious, much-longed-for first baby.

The nightmare came out of nowhere. He’d woken up three nights before screaming, which was unusual. Obviously, we were inexperienced, and we didn’t know what was wrong. We had this awful night where he wouldn’t feed, couldn’t settle. He just kept on crying. None of us got much rest.

We took him to the GP the next day, but she couldn’t find anything wrong with him; all seemed normal. Then, that night, when we were getting him ready for bed, I said to my husband, Jake: “Don’t you think one of his legs looks bigger than the other?” And when we put him in the bath, he was only kicking on one side; that was unusual, because he loved to splash. And I thought, that’s it, that’s the cause of the crying: there’s something wrong with his leg.

We took him back to the GP twice and were finally sent to A&E at Addenbrooke’s, in Cambridge. There, they immediately did an x-ray, “to rule out anything untoward”. And that’s when the radiographer told us that William had broken his leg. I was utterly shocked. Suddenly, it all started to make sense: the jerking and crying when we touched him. Everything fell into place.

That’s when everything started to unravel, too. The doctor told us that William’s injury was considered to be a suspicious fracture. They were going to run more tests — and they didn’t want us to go home. A kind paediatrician said to us, “Sometimes, unexplained things happen to children and they stay unexplained”, which gave us some reassurance. But when they did the tests the following day — a full-body x-ray and a retina examination — what they were looking for was child abuse. It wasn’t about the fact that he might be ill, or hurt, and that was hugely frustrating for us. The radiologist decided the x-rays showed shadows on William’s arms, which meant they might have been broken in the past. So, suddenly, someone’s saying, “It’s not just this injury: you’ve hurt your baby before.” That’s when they called the police.

We were interviewed that afternoon, in hospital, by the police and social services. All we could say was that we didn’t know how William had broken his leg. We racked our brains for every possibility, but we were such overprotective parents: we never left him alone.

They arrested us for grievous bodily harm and child cruelty. Social services agreed that they would let us take William home after four days, provided we were never left alone with him. We had to move his cot out of our room. My parents came up from Devon to “supervise” us, initially for 15 days, while we waited for a child-protection conference, when we thought things would be sorted out. They stayed for 15 months.

It was a kind of schizophrenic existence: on the one hand, we had this beautiful baby boy, and we were both at home — Cambridgeshire county council immediately suspended us from work — so we got to enjoy being with him. Daytimes were all about family and maintaining normality, and then he went to bed and the reality hit us: we had to fight an almighty care battle with social services, as well as a criminal case with the police.

At the child-protection conference, a paediatric radiologist looked at the x-rays and said: “A baby’s bones change and grow so fast — chances are, the shadows are perfectly normal.” So, no broken arms. But with William’s leg, unless we could prove how it happened, we would be held responsible. And we couldn’t prove how it happened, because we didn’t know.

It all stemmed from that 10pm on a Monday night when he’d woken up crying. At the hospital, they’d asked us: “Could he have got his foot caught in the bars of his cot?” He would have had to twist it to get it free — and he had a twisting fracture. There was just no other explanation. We filmed William sleeping after he came home from hospital. He would start tucked in, but he’d kick his way out of his bedding and end up lying across the cot. Often, his leg would poke through the bars. That had to be it.

After more than a year, the police dropped the case against us. But my parents were still living with us, and social services hadn’t ceased their involvement: nobody wanted to be the one to say, “Let’s sign this off.” Finally, the local authority decided to take us to court, with a view to putting William into care if they found us guilty. We gathered evidence from expert witnesses: a rheumatologist who suggested the tendency for bones to break more easily was linked to hypermobility, which runs in my family; and a paediatrician who stated that you can’t conclude the parents did it if there’s no witnessed accident — there has to be a grey area. Which was what we’d been saying all along.

The court hearing lasted two weeks, and we had to wait another six before the judge’s ruling. Her report said: “There is no cogent evidence that these parents injured their son.” In other words, William was not at risk. It was over. We couldn’t really celebrate. How could we feel happy to be told what we’d known all along: that we didn’t hurt our child. There was a huge sense of anticlimax and a need to do something positive.

We feel so strongly about the injustice of the system that we want to tell our story; normally, care proceedings are shrouded in secrecy. We’ve just won a landmark judgment allowing us to publicise the case. Parents should have the right to speak out if they feel it’s the right thing to do.

William is now a normal little boy, covered in bruises, playing football, climbing trees. We don’t want him to be this overprotected child. We’ve all moved on with our lives.

Parents Against Injustice: parentsagainstinjustice.org.uk