Peter Garsden, Vice-President

(Association of Child Abuse Lawyers)

“I have a similar situation at a secure Care Home in the North West where
Cheshire Police were more determined to prosecute the Head of the Home
because they knew he was ignoring complaints of abuse by staff from
children, and permitting it to carry on.

 

The CPS advised them, however, that there was no criminal offence to match
the act of gross negligence in public office, and no prosecution proceeded.

Whilst the criminal law has moved on, I am not sure that there is a criminal
offence to match the crime.

A better solution might be to call for a public enquiry (or local enquiry)
into what went on. If this happens however it might halt in its tracks any
civil action.

I am not an expert in criminal law, and leave such matters to the CPS.
The time in reality to call for a local or public enquiry might be after the
civil case is over.

I hope this helps. I have been through exactly the same process in the North
West several years ago.”

Incidentally I am very impressed at the insight and depth of understanding
you have of the subject matter. Well done.

Regards,
Peter Garsden, Vice-President (Association of Child Abuse Lawyers)

"The margins of society"
Hi there peter and thank you for your rather surprising remarks about the article I emailed you.

I thought I would write you one more to give you the reason why I wrote to you in the first place, and that was James Browne from fireinice sent me a link to your emails to and from Vera Baird QC MP (Conflict of interest in our cases I might add)

just a few lines on reasonability and why we can not in any way shape or form be referred to as of reasonable mind or body by those who act to silence the past in a "reasonable?" way that does not involve the blame and responsibility landing on them.

The reason why its title is the “margins of society” is; I do believe that the margin of society is where most if not all people who have been through the institutional care system ends up. Many if not all again, have suffered physical, mental, and sexual abuse.

Either familiar, peer, or indeed institutionalised, abuses that at the times of their lives when learning structured behaviour patens from all of the above are the most indentured into the adolescent mind.

Where the abuser is either, an adult who is meant to be a carer, or foster parents or an employee of the state, who is also their abuser, young people learn quite quickly who not to trust.

When this happens the young person attempts to internalise their feeling as they search for answers to many confusing question, only to find them rebounding from a place where no knowledge exists as this experience is competing with everything they are taught at school and by those around them in the wider society.

As these feeling rebound, and are on their outward thrust, young people display a bad attitude to school, this I believe is because they consider the teachers tell lies to them telling them the world is a lovely fluffy place and that mums & dads are all wonderful, with the society around them being made up of fine upstanding people only to find out the hard way that the teachers are talking uneducated and relative to themselves only, tripe.

The days of the 60’s were very austere for what society would term the working class, however the actual fact that just like now you had a “Not” working class, termed the underbelly today. Families where neither parents are working, ill educated at a time when things where even fluffier and lovely than today for those with the advantage of having rose tinted glasses.

They were basic human beings with all the obvious problems that inevitably came with that situation. Father is an alcoholic trying to drown his lifetime of abuse, taking out his drunken rage on the mother and children. The mother of course has six children, once again due to the lack of education and in many cases errant religious dictums.

This situation served only to swell the populations of the church orphanages and local council run children’s homes at a time when there was no training or observational structure or monitoring of children, and which is infinitely worse, the same lack of principle management of the staff who in far to many cases turned out to be paedophiles, (if I hear anyone say) “well paedophilia is a relatively new phenomena.”

I’ll burst a blood vassal. Just look at the word! Big clue… It’s Greek!!!

So we have a situation where these young people who have already become disillusioned by school, parents, and now the care system has its shot at it and fails miserably leaving a post pubescent heap of very angry flesh and bone neither equipped or ready to take on the massive task of societal integration. Ha! You have got to be joking?

What person in their right mind could ever think that you will get a positive transition into society given the background and the depths of depravity they have only just experienced at the hands of the neglect of that society?

Where can there be any sense of responsibility found within these young people who have, in many cases found that those who were trusted to be responsible were actually some of the most reprehensible society could imagine?

After leaving care those who could leave, or have grown too old to be able to be managed by adult manipulation and can finally stand up and fight for themselves against their abusers. Feeling angry, rebellious, and anti social in the extreme, they hit the streets running destined to looking back over their shoulders into adulthood.

As in the majority of cases running foul of the law which has already got it mark on them as a recidivist delinquent, A hoodie, a chav, a mod, rocker and many other ways adults find to explain the troubled times these young people seem to be bringing to society with out a single idea or understanding that it is society itself, that are directly responsible by act or omission, for the bad behaviour in the youths of that day and this day too.

We then see these young people placed into youth custody and again subjected to a regime of pain, suffering and brutality in a detention centre, having crimes perpetrated on them daily, which would have any man on the street arrested and imprisoned going by this societies principles, crimes by prison officers that would not look out of place in documents written about Treblinka, or Auschwitz.

Police in Consett have been contacted by our victim’s months ago to have these prison officers and governors management re-questioned, those who are still alive today and indeed some are still working in youth custody and some are a leading light in the restorative justice movement. We are still waiting for an answer from Consett police.

Justice4survivors.org
Thursday, 22 March 2007
Who can victims trust?

We have considered the letter Peter Garsden sent to Vera Baird QC MP and I appreciate that she can not comment on individual cases, however it is my belief that these cases are generally not individual in their outcome although are individual in the fact that it is one of the ways the law specifically isolates victims of institutional abuses.

We also believe that one of our victims was not treat fairly by the Lords who sat at the high court in the Strand in the recent case of the Catholic Care & the Home Office v Young [2006] EWCA CIV.1534.

In reading Adams (FC) V. Bracknell Forest Borough Council (Appellants).

First and foremost one can hardly call a case of misdiagnosed dyslexia an equitable analysis to bring into cases such as that ofPJ Mc and JB and Young, other victims from the Young case, who have only now served Court proceeding against the defendants, in fact the many cases that still have to be heard and all those who this limitations law has silenced.

Not to mention the fact that I myself have written many emails to Vera Baird QC MP and I was warned not to write to her again, which needless to say left me feeling intimidated and further isolated.

Dyslexia or "special learning difficulty" as it referred to is a congenital condition, and presumed to be neurological, related to brain functions, distinctive examinable aspects are that mental ability and long term functionality of the brain are impaired along with persistent problems with reading, writing and spelling. It is not curable however many victims of this mental problem have found ways to cope.

Deliberate Sexual, Physical and mental abuse and the subsequent abuse the victims are still going through today, can not be judged under the same light as that of a congenital medical irregularity of a persons brain function.

Adams then talks us through the age of majority and the date he started his action, as well as the evidence and notes that were destroyed making the council unable to defend themselves due to lack of substantiating evidence

One of the main reasons why actions like that of Adams seems to be a new development is the fact that pre the 80’s people who were in care and the institutional system upon leaving ended up on the streets, as heroin addicts, or back in prison, and alas dead because their abused went unaddressed as well as the many who didn’t take those institutions to court because they could neither afford to do so and were not as intellectually equipped as people in the same situations today, it being still a time when children were seen and not heard.

As a consequence of these claims that stated to come forward and by the time they generally get to an appeal stage, in many cases years down the line from the initial complaints being made.

The laws on limitation have a very convenient date attached to them almost as if they knew what to expect in the near future, and that section 14 of the act look like a deliberate move to prevent cases like that of PJ Mc and JB and Young, JL CL RP RH MP and PGT.

The Court in Catholic Care & the Home Office v Young [2006] EWCA CIV.1534.

Found that the present Limitation Act was unsatisfactory in that the Judges were obliged to apply an objective test of when they thought “a reasonable man in the circumstances of the claimant would reasonably turn his mind to litigation”.

They concluded that the more serious an injury is, the greater the compulsion for the victim to start legal proceedings. The Court found that they were bound by not only the Limitation Act, but were also bound by the rulings of, Adams V. Bracknell Forest Borough Council.

I would have thought and I know in my case this works in the opposite of what the Lords think in as much as the more serious a case of sexual abuse is the less the victim wants to discuss the level of depravity they were forced to undergo. And the deeper the shame they feel along with the fact that their abuser is affirmed as part of the system they must complain to, rather like a prisoner being asked if everything is alright by a member of the board visitors at he is stood in his cell seeing the three officer behind the visitor scowling back at him. Not conducive to wanting to say anything except what you wont get beaten up for.

We believe this is also artificial as one can’t make a judgement that is equitable and fair where the situation exists that the Lords, Defendants and the Plaintiffs lawyers all agree that the law to be used in the case is unsatisfactory.

This must lead to an imbalance in the application of the law even as they are written as I go on and on and on to, attempt in my best possible way given my limited legal knowledge and educational circumstances.

We considered the objective arguments of the three Lords who sat the High Courts in London 14th November 2006, The fact that they have to use their heads and not their hearts to decide the merits of a case in the legal sense, is neither hear not there in as much as even if you looked at this case objectively, only using your mind one could still only come to the decision that laws were broken, that home office staff were and are negligent.

We noticed that the objective view of a case is based upon the laws and statutes of the irrational, because they do not take into account the actual evidence in a case and merely deal with the objective surface of the actual statute itself.

We also realised that when our argument was given a limited hearing in court it was viewed as subjective even when those who were doing the arguing both knew that the evidence was as clear as a bell and the victims had proved they were telling the truth, the victims had already secured a guilty plea of their abuser who was given 10 years in prison.

They had heard evidence that many other people not only knew what was going on and the young boys were being sexually molested and raped and still they did nothing to help the victims, the opposite was the case. Servants of the crown actually destroyed copious amounts of evidence that clearly showed what was going on.

This evidence was not shown in the court as the whole point of the appeal was to deal with a thing called the statutes of limitation section 33 and once again we were not allowed to have any evidence presented to the court, so once again the objective perception was adhered too.

Section 33 discretion.

In seeking to bring justice in an application under section 33 a judge must make a decision of which the consequential effect is either to deprive a defendant of a statute-bar defence or to deny a claimant's right of action against the civil wrongdoer who caused his personal injuries.

In choosing between these outcomes the court must be guided by what appears to it to be equitable, and fair to both sides as far as can be possible, and it must have regard to all the circumstances of the case and in particular the evidence in full of the basis for bringing the case to court .

The problem that underlies the true nature of statute law is now undermining the very reason for the statute being there. Any court who fails to bring justice for victims of deliberate sexual abuse by a civil service upon a child, without first taking into account the evidence is also part of the perceived conspiracy by the victims who after all this case would not be in a court had they not been victimised.

The statute law in relation to section 33 gives off the appearance that it treats the plaintiff and the defendant as individually liable to suffer any prejudice on the outcome of a case, and with no legal acknowledgment that it is recurrently in the interests of big insurance companies, who will be liable to suffer prejudice.

The plaintiff has not in any legal sense a representative insurer that can be made to suffer the prejudice for a lost case using the section of the law under the microscope generally having only self to fall back on his lawyer does not insure against the lost case and no justice in the fairest sense is achieved for the victim and not as the law sees it as the plaintiff.

The law does look at the insurance aspects of the case and given that the plaintiff or in our case victims do not generally have an insurer then they are already suffering prejudice before the case has been heard.

The lords decided that an error of law was made bye Judge Cockroft and claim that fact that one of the victims attempted to seek out his social services records of his time in the care system,

Lord Justice Dyson:

As was observed by the Law Commission (Limitation of Actions, Law Com No 270), claims by victims of child sexual abuse pose particular problems for any limitations regime. The acts giving rise to the cause of action will, by their nature, occur when the claimant is a child. The claimant may suffer immediate physical injury as well as prolonged psychiatric problems. These problems may only become manifest, or at least be recognised as such by the victim, many years after the abuse. This creates difficulties similar to those created by latent disease.

It is not a legal argument to use similes, or metaphors when deciding the merits of a case when the merits of the case can stand up for themselves, if given an opportunity to do so, which in the setting of the high court one would expect that the evidence that would prove and justify the reasons why judge Cockroft came to the decision that he did, would at the very least be heard.

In this case the full evidence was not heard as the statute laws acted to prevent the case in its entirety from ever seeing a court, the reasons for this, is the defendants knew what the plaintiffs were saying was indeed the truth and the defendants were using the statute of limitations illegally, where there is testimony that clearly shows the defendants or agents of, hid and destroyed evidence that the abuses were happening, and could substantiate any possible allegations that could have been made, making the limitations inactive from the period of the actual offences as a deliberate breach of duty would not come under section 33 of the statute laws and section 32 would stop the time limitation until the victims where in possession of the full facts that could only have been at the trial of Neville Husband in 2003.


13. There came a time when police started making enquiries into the conduct of Littlewood and Husband. “It is not clear how the police became involved.”

When dealing with the law and the facts of a case. One should look at all the facts. It is not good enough to remain comfortable with any less than the full facts of a case nor is it proper for Judge Dyson to be able to make a judgement without first reading the evidence in full or to make rash statements like the one above, when within the evidence that the current limitations is being used to suppress, the answers that would bring clarity to just how the police became involved with the enquiries into Husband does indeed exist they just chose to ignore it or were not as diligent as one would expect high court judges to be.

The only time the victim could have realised that there was a chance that they would be believed is when the police sought them out after making enquiries about the abuser. So it’s not as if the victims were rushing forward to say anything to anyone in December 2000 and it wasn't until 2001 that questions were first asked by the police, or so Judge Dyson believes due to not seeing the evidence he was sitting in judgement of.

The trial of Neville Husband is the time that the statutes should have started as this was the first time complaints were listened to by a body that is in a position to actually do something about it.

Only as a result of the two trials of Neville Husband where it was revealed that other officers suspected Husband was sexually abusing boys and found Dildo’s Vaseline and homosexual pornography being delivered to the Kitchen officer, officers had destroyed evidence on a number of occasion as well as conspiring to destroy evidence where it was found jointly as they were finding it giving no chance for any of the victims to prove a thing.

It must be remembered that this is not about what Husband did or didn’t do, but what the prison service allowed him to do which could only have been known by the victims after Husbands trials.

Lord Dyson:?

(a) That the injury in question was significant; and

(b) That the injury was attributable in whole or in part to the act or omission which is alleged to constitute negligence, nuisance or breach of duty; and

(c) The identity of the defendant;

And knowledge that any acts or omissions did or did not, as a matter of law, involve negligence, nuisance or breach of duty is irrelevant.

(2) For the purposes of this section an injury is significant if the person whose date of knowledge is in question would reasonably have considered it sufficiently serious to justify his instituting proceedings for damages against a defendant who did not dispute liability and was able to satisfy a judgment.

(3) For the purposes of this section a person's knowledge includes knowledge which he might reasonably have been expected to acquire-

(a) From facts observable or ascertainable by him; or

(b) From facts ascertainable by him with the help of medical or other appropriate expert advice which it is reasonable for him to seek;

but a person shall not be fixed under this subsection with knowledge of a fact ascertainable only with the help of expert advice so long as he has taken all reasonable steps to obtain (and, where appropriate, to act on) that advice".

This is the main points of the case really as all of the above when its considered that the victim did not have any knowledge of the facts leaned at the Husband case until the Husband case in 2003 fall flat on their face.

(a) That the injury in question was significant; this could not be known or quantified by the victims until he was seen by a competent psychologist post the Husband trial.

(b) That the injury was attributable in whole or in part to the act or omission which is alleged to constitute negligence, nuisance or breach of duty; the actions of alleged negligence, breach of duty was not learned until the Husband trial.

(c) The identity of the defendant; the identity of the defendants would be also not known until the defendant gave their testimony at the Husband trial.

And knowledge that any acts or omissions did or did not, as a matter of law, involve negligence, nuisance or breach of duty is irrelevant. The victims could not have known that any acts or omissions did or did not, as a matter of law, involve negligence; nuisance or breach of duty until 2003 is most relevant once again when this knowledge was not available to the victims at the time.

(2) For the purposes of this section an injury is significant if the person whose date of knowledge is in question would reasonably have considered it sufficiently serious to justify his instituting proceedings for damages against a defendant who did not dispute liability and was able to satisfy a judgment.

Yet again the simple facts stand for themselves.” When a person who was subjected to “Some of the most serious cases of sexual abuse Dr Elie Godsi Consultant Clinical Psychologist has heard of in 17 years of working with both offenders and victims of sexual abuse.”

Victims of this type of abuse generally take many years to come forward and this case takes on a gravity of its own when it is an institutional who is involved in the neglect of its care to children.

No sane person could call a victim or survivor of sexual abuse that involved some of the most soul destroying depravity and physical torture "A reasonable man" and this test applied by the Lords is beyond the ridiculous.

The significance of any injuries caused by Husband may well have been sub- consciously known by the victim deep within their fractured minds, however only after they had seen a qualified psychologist.

The actions at appeal were not against Husband but those who allowed Husband to do what he did. Which only came to light at Husbands trial, and the plaintiff can hardly be held responsible for not taking actions until they knew they could take actions.

(3) For the purposes of this section a person's knowledge includes knowledge which he might reasonably have been expected to acquire-

One can only acquire the relevant knowledge from the facts that arise from an action where a person who has stood trial and been found or pleaded guilty and duly sentenced to a term of imprisonment has taken place, whereupon testimony was given, and recorded, that states that others involved in the alleged negligence, nuisance, or breach of duty did act in a way that could only be construed as that of negligence, nuisance, or breach of duty.

This knowledge could not have been acquired by the victim, reasonably or otherwise until they were in a position to both mentally and physically be able to deal with the knowledge that they may have came into contact with due to any mental incapacity possession of that knowledge itself placed them under, which once again could only have been at the trial of Neville Husband.

(a) From facts observable or ascertainable by him; or

the facts available or ascertainable by the victim as before were only available or ascertainable after reading the documentation that arose from the trial of Neville Husband.

(b) From facts ascertainable by him with the help of medical or other appropriate expert advice which it is reasonable for him to seek;

the facts ascertainable by the victim of his actual abuse were known by the victim for a very long time. But placed in a secure setting in his mind in order to be able to function at a level where he could start to rebuild his life only to be shattered once again when he bumped into his abuser who was I believe dressed in his priests apparel which merely reinforced the victims mistrust of those who were meant to help, sending him into a deeper internalisation of his feelings and confirming his understanding that those who abused him were indeed all powerful still today.

Expert advice was sought by the victim only as a direct result of him taking the action which has landed him in an appeal court. This action is not against his abuser as the abuser has already been at court found guilty then been back to court for a second time and pleaded guilty to numerous other offences against inmates in the same institution.

This case is about the other crown officers, Governors and senior management of that institution and the home office, prison services negligence; nuisance or breach of duty in allowing these abuses to go unchecked for decades when they did have both constructive and actual knowledge of the facts that one of their prison officers should not have been of young boys and that he was a risk to them.

Men who you would expect could be called “Reasonable men” knew that Husband was a risk to young boys as early as 1967 when he was arrested for the importation of illegal pornography of men and boys taking part in sexual activities, it was later discovered by police that it was child pornography.

So Lord Dyson has himself made errors of judgement as well as in law.

Today it is customary, when one finds oneself compelled to acknowledge the logical impossibility of there being any other possible view for those who would purport themselves to be the “Law Lords” as it does at times actually seem as though they do not understand the laws themselves or make light of a situation where judge Cockroft said “These are serious crimes involving crown officers.”

(Notice the words chosen by this judge) “Serious crimes, crown officers.”

Not the crimes of one officer i.e. Neville Husband but crown officers meaning more than one and indeed we believe symptomatic of the whole system.


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