Murder, they wrote

Peter Wilby

The Guardian

Last month, Jersey police announced that, so far as they could establish, there was no torture and no murder at the Haut de la Garenne children's care home in Jersey. The widely reported "human remains" (actually tiny bone fragments) were mostly animals, though three were possibly humans who died at least 58 years ago, and maybe more than 500 years ago. A "skull fragment" was a coconut shell. Underground "torture chambers" were floor voids where a grown person could not stand straight. "Shackles" were bits of old metal guttering. And so on and so on.

You probably saw the story, though you could be forgiven if you missed it. The Sun, Mail and Mirror had it on pages 19, 29 and 35 respectively. Back in February, when the abuse allegations first surfaced, Jersey was front-page news. Every paper gave it dramatic elaboration in the following months. Children had been "dismembered" and "incinerated". This was "a house of horrors", a "fortress of fear", a "kiddies' Colditz" where children were flung into "punishment pits". Detectives had discovered "sex abuse bunkers" and "mass graves". Terrible crimes, perpetrated by "a ring of evil men", had been "covered up" by the "close-knit Jersey establishment" on "the isle of secrets and whispers".

A Daily Mail reporter visited a nearby church where "faceless perverts" were damned by the Dean of Jersey. "From their muffled sobs, the victims, mainly middle-aged and careworn now, were all-too-easily identifiable ... others ... appeared to shift a little uneasily in their pews as the dean demanded that the culprits be called to account."

If all this colourful reporting was based on false premises, last month's reports implied, that was the fault of the police. "Shambles" was the Mirror's headline. "£1.5m, 100 police, 7 mths to discover no one killed". The only thing missing was a call for heads to roll. Jersey's police chief, Graham Power, had already been suspended and Lenny Harper, the chief investigating officer, had recently retired.

Perhaps the press was also inhibited by its own failures. Its reports cast suspicion on anybody who ever worked at Haut de la Garenne and implied that just about every resident of "the isle of secrets and whispers" was guilty at least of complicity. Journalists had, for the most part, reported accurately (albeit with embellishment) what Harper told them. But when I spoke last week to Detective Superintendent Mick Gradwell, seconded from Lancashire CID to take over the investigation this autumn, he expressed surprise that Harper's statements hadn't been more strongly challenged. Why didn't journalists contact the "forensic experts" who examined the "human remains" (and eventually reported they were no such thing)? Why didn't they ask more questions about "evidence" they were shown? Why didn't they ask Harper (described in one paper as "a no-nonsense, old-school policeman from Londonderry") about his experience and qualifications for leading complex investigations?

Occasionally, doubts about the evidence did surface - some as long ago as the spring - but journalists generally added that, as the police had received 160 or more complaints from individual abuse victims, awful things must have happened. But these, too, needed challenging. Some were trivial, some simply false, some concerned other children's homes, some concerned domestic abuse. Though nobody has yet been convicted, there probably was abuse at Haut de la Garenne. But it was not systematic, organised or endemic. Nor, it seems, was anybody killed.

This isn't the first time the press has rushed to print allegations of organised abuse in children's homes. Most journalists want to be crusaders, exposing evil conspiracies and cover-ups. Many police officers have similar ambitions. For them, it's more interesting and exciting than dealing with routine burglaries; for hacks, it's better than taking down names of funeral mourners or writing up thinktank reports. The two combine in a kind of group-think, laying aside normal occupational scepticism. They listen to former residents who talk of violence and sexual molestation, ignoring any who insist they were treated kindly, even lovingly.

The failing is not confined to downmarket papers. For example, in the early 1990s, allegations of systematic abuse at the Bryn Estyn home in Wrexham and others in north Wales first came from the Independent and its Sunday sister. As many as 365 people were accused and questioned. Just a handful of prosecutions followed from the main investigation, leading to only two new convictions for sexual abuse, one of them probably unsound. These were followed by further allegations that local police officers who conducted the inquiry were part of an abusive ring, based on Masonic links. One of them successfully sued for libel. Only thanks to an exhaustively researched, 700-page book, The Secret of Bryn Estyn, by Richard Webster, a freelance writer, do we have an inkling of the true story. The book, however, although shortlisted for the Orwell prize, went almost completely unnoticed in the national press.

In such cases, even the usual watchdogs relax their vigilance. Private Eye made much of the running both on Bryn Estyn and on an earlier story about Kincora boys' home in Belfast, where cases of real abuse became allegations that young boys were provided for the pleasure of leading Northern Irish politicians. Nick Davies, author of Flat Earth News, wrote eloquently about north Wales in the Guardian in 1997. I was deputy editor and then editor of the IoS when it "exposed" Bryn Estyn. Since then, we have all edited and written more sceptically - Davies wrote twice in the Guardian about Jersey, the first time in April - but the question remains: why did our usual instincts not kick in years earlier?

The answer is simple. Presented with what the trade calls "a cracking good story", reporters and editors do not waste time asking if it's true. They try to unearth more details and "take it further". From hundreds of people who formerly attended children's homes, many of them vulnerable and suggestible, it is not hard to find at least a few who will assist. The press is interested above all in narrative, not, as it likes to think, in that elusive and untidy entity, "the truth". Jersey and similar cases offer ideal ingredients, recalling such films as The Wicker Man (a comparison actually used by the Sun in its coverage of Haut de la Garenne): unspeakable acts perpetrated against children; powerful men who take advantage of sexual opportunities and then help "cover up" the truth; demonic conspiracies, probably based on Masonry; isolated, closed institutions where nobody can hear you scream. Note how often these stories emerge at locations remote from the metropolitan centre: Jersey, north Wales, Belfast or, to take one of many instances from abroad, Nova Scotia. As the old maps said, there be dragons.

Webster argues that modern "scandals" of mass abuse - which, he emphasises, "inevitably undermine the credibility of those who make genuine allegations" - echo the witch-hunts of the middle ages. It is not surprising that the media, a sort of modern priesthood, play such a central and willing role.