NASTY BARKER - MALICIOUSLY DISHONEST
(This is most of an article in Private Eye -
May 2003 - which appeared under the title of Barker Bit. These people should be in
prison, instead they are 360,000 pounds better off)
Richard Barker professor of social work at the University of Northumbria was found by a judge to have been maliciously dishonest in a case which wrecked two nursery nurses’ lives and careers. Nevertheless, Barker continues to lead a university department and teaches undergraduates to be social workers.
Barker was head of a Newcastle inquiry team which wrongly found Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie guilty of abusing children in their care. Last summer Mr Justice Eady ruled that Barker and his colleagues, social worker Judith Jones clinical psychologist Jacqui Saradjian and former social services director Roy Wardell — had been deliberately untruthful in writing the inquiry report. Reed and Lillie each won £200,000, the maximum permitted libel damages.
In his damning judgment Eady said his finding of malice was ".. unavoidable. The team had made a number of claims in the report which they must have known to be false — some of them were blatantly false — which is indefensible. The claims cannot be explained on the basis of incompetence or mere carelessness." The four, he concluded, had "consciously... set out to misrepresent the state of the evidence available".
Only at a late stage of the trial did it emerge that Barker and co had reached a secret arrangement with the police. ln return for access to all the videos of the children’s interviews, they agreed not to criticise the police or social workers for breaching government guidelines and asking the children countless leading questions. In the final report Barker actually praised the quality of the interviewing.
Barker was repeatedly singled out for criticism by the judge. Eady said he was struck by Barker’s "lack of objectivity and willingness to use his position to bully", which "put not only [Reed and Lillie] in danger, but several other quite innocent people". Many of these people were represented by Unison’s Kevin Hattam. Barker tried to prevent Hattam from representing his members during the inquiry, considering him unsuitable on the grounds that Hattam actually believed his members were innocent.
Despite unequivocal condemnation, Barker has neither resigned nor returned the money he was paid for the malicious report (the four authors received more than £360,000 between them). In fact he told the Times Higher Educational Supplement that he “cannot accept that I was malicious”. The case was "a clash of two very different systems that use different language".
That is not how Eady saw it. He said: "I was unable to place reliance upon anything said by Professor Barker", who displayed "a cast of mind closed to all reason, whereby whatever piece of evidence may be produced, however inconsistent with the last, is perceived as supporting the basic unchallengeable datum that abuse occurred. It is not an unfamiliar cast of mind, but it is one not normally associated with university professors".
www.slimeylimeyjustice.org