The child sexual abuse scandal in the English county of Cleveland in the 1980s was a defining moment in the history of child abuse and the duties of child protection professionals and the police. 

But it was not the scandal we were led to believe it was. Acclaimed journalist Beatrix Campbell has uncovered government documents that show that Parliament and the public were misled. 

The government ordered a public inquiry when police and politicians repudiated evidence of childhood rape that had been identified by pioneering paediatricians; the Cleveland Report rebuked the paediatricians and professionals whose statutory duty was to respond to the dramatic medical evidence.  

But before the Cleveland Report was presented to Parliament in 1988, government ministers and officials in the Treasury and the Department of Health were worried: the Report was not damning enough of the professionals. 

According to government documents released in the National Archive under the 30-year rule, Ministers were aware that independent experts confirmed that independent experts had confirmed that: 

‘the diagnoses of sexual abuse were correct in at least 80 per cent’ of the cases.  

But this was ‘dangerous territory for us to get into…‘ 

Why? Because the truth was ‘liable to be turned back on us later as bids for extra expenditure.’  

And so it came to be. Parliament and the public were encouraged to believe that the professionals were wrong, that children had been seized from ‘innocent families’. It was more important to save money than save children.

Secrets and Silence reveals how this cover-up has framed policy-making and public opinion, and the consequences for children, professionals, justice and the state, ever since.

Despite the deaths of ‘national treasures’ Sir Jimmy Savile and Sir Cyril Smith, leading to a torrent of evidence of childhood suffering, the 2024 Makin report on the Church of England’s cover-up of John Smyth’s sadistic sexual abuse – forcing the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury – and the discovery of widespread sexual exploitation and institutional abuse across the world (all in plain sight), the Cleveland children have remained in the shadows. Now, for the first time in Secrets and Silence, a Cleveland child delves into her records and shares her story.

The most senior family judge in the land, the President of the Family Division, vindicates Beatrix Campbell’s book exposing the ‘continuing false belief that the Cleveland children did not experience sexual abuse…’’ 

“…Matters came to a head in Middlesbrough in 1986/87 when 2 paediatricians came to diagnose child sexual abuse in no fewer than 125 cases over the course of just a few months. The report of the ensuing public inquiry, chaired by Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, as she then was, provided a watershed moment and purported to give an authoritative view on many of the subject’s professional debate at that time.

Pausing there, I suspect that those in the audience, like me, had understood that what had happened in Cleveland arose from misdiagnosis by the two paediatricians. In that regard a recent book by journalist Beatrix Campbell, ‘Secrets and Silence’ may be of interest. All these years later, with the ability to inspect previously confidential documents in the National Archive, the book explains that most of the children were probably the victims of sexual abuse, and therefore the diagnosis by medical professionals was likely to be correct. The book reveals a lack of transparency which has had lasting impacts. As a result, there has been a continuing false belief that the Cleveland children did not experience sexual abuse and that the crisis was the result of over-zealous and incompetent practice.”