This chapter has explored the emergence of collective action by parents around child protection. Such action first emerged in the 1960s. At the same time as parents were becoming objects of psychological and clinical research, the NSPCC also made innovative efforts to engage parents as partners through their Battered Child Research Project. Through this project, NSPCC social workers collaborated with parents in the daily practices of child protection, and NSPCC leaders gave parents platforms from which to represent their own experiences to Parliament. While parental activism initially started in partnership with statutory agencies, it later developed as an alternative to professional interaction. This shift—from partnership to opposition—was fuelled by the challenges which social work and statutory agencies faced from the 1960s and 1970s. As these professions were reorganised and lost resources, parental support groups newly conceptualised their role as 'relieving some of the pressures' on the state.107 As well as acting to support state work, parental activism also policed and criticised it, particularly from the late 1980s. Activism from falsely accused parents looked to reshape professional practice, and to encourage social workers and clinicians to discuss and to use their own personal, experiential, and emotional resources.

Disparate forms of parental activism developed between the 1960s and the 1990s, as this chapter has demonstrated. However, common themes have emerged. All of the strands of activism studied here created collective responses to child protection issues: peer support, pastoral services, legal advice, and media representation. At the same time, individual figurehead leaders directed this collective action. Notably nonetheless, the groups in this chapter all represented the challenges of family life. The groups displayed and discussed complex experiences and emotions through media collaboration, working particularly with print journalists to represent the emotional labours of activism, the family politics of violence, and the lived effects of false accusations. Making these experiences visible reflected the will of parent leaders and parent members of these groups, as well as growing media interest.

From the late 1990s, many of the parent groups traced in this chapter had faded away. Phone lines and support groups run by and for parents at risk of committing violence had dissipated, and professional intervention instead managed this complex terrain. PAIN lost its grant money and employees after 1999. Susan Amphlett believed that the organisation had lost momentum, and that prospective funders no longer regarded it as 'new and innovative'.108 In part, the spaces in which parent groups emerged and gained media and political attention were reactionary ones, dependent on these groups being subversive and 'new'. A change in government was also significant, and the following two chapters examine how the New Labour governments worked with parent and survivor communities through partnership with individual figurehead leaders.

Nonetheless, while the influence of the specific groups studied in this chapter faded, a social policy interest in consulting with parents had formed between the early 1960s and the late 1980s. By the end of this period, the *Children Act* of 1989 stated that professionals and parents must work in partnership to protect children. This meant that those involved in child protection proceedings must 'seek the views' of parents, and that the state should avoid intervention unless there was evidence that a child was at risk of 'significant harm'.109 This policy was driven by social policy research, public inquiries, daily social work, and, relatedly, by the entwined and prominent campaigning of parents.110 Parental activism in child protection took a specific collective form in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and in that moment such activism was able to influence media and social policy debate, representing complex—and at times controversial—visions of family, voluntary, and professional experience, emotion, and expertise.

#### Notes

Point', *Independent*, 25 October 1992, 6; David Brindle, 'Parents 'still lose rights' in abuse cases', *Guardian*, 1 December 1992, 4; Brindle, 'Painful departure', p. 6; Erlichman, 'Ordeal of the innocent', 17.

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# Mothers, Media, and Individualism in Public Policy

This chapter examines the role of mothers in reshaping concerns about child protection over the late twentieth century, particularly through becoming subjects of—and at times active partners in guiding—gendered media coverage. The chapter explores a series of case studies: antipaedophile protests by mothers in the 1970s, the partnership between Parents Against Injustice and the BBC *Open Space* series in the 1980s, and the work of Sara Payne as an individual spokesperson in the early 2000s. While thus crosscutting the work of Chap. 5, this chapter also makes new contributions to this book. Most significantly, 'Mothers, Media, and Individualism' explores the gendered media representations of parents involved in child protection, and the ways in which journalistic interest in women's experiences and emotions also reconstructed mothers as irrational and hysterical.1

At the same time, the chapter also demonstrates that mothers were at times empowered in their work with media. Collectively and individually through the late twentieth century, mothers utilised and subverted media interest in their emotional states to direct and govern popular coverage, shaping a self-representation that could drive forward specific personal and political agendas.2 As such, mothers were both empowered and marginalised by media coverage of child protection and by public interest in their inner lives and social roles; a position which was negotiated during the rise and realisation of second-wave feminism and amidst increasing female participation

in the workforce. The chapter therefore focuses on the gendering of the politics of experience, emotion, and expertise, again emphasising that the growing social and political focus on individual experience challenged, but did not overthrow nor entirely counterbalance, long-standing structural hierarchies.

#### '[T]he Sickness of the Twentieth Century'

In the 1970s, much journalistic attention was paid to anti-paedophile protests launched by mothers. Public discussion of paedophilia developed in the late nineteenth century, when the term 'paedophile' was first invented.3 Yet public awareness of sexual relations between adults and children—and the construction of this new term—did not immediately precipitate activism. Indeed, Steven Angelides has argued that within Victorian society paedophilia was 'seldom discussed', except by sexologists such as Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who considered it a highly 'rare occurrence'.4 Looking at the early-to-mid twentieth century, Mathew Thomson argues that 'post-Freudian' ideas about child sexuality did not only ignore but actively averted social concerns about paedophilia, by suggesting that children were not damaged, nor innocent, in adult–child sexual relations.5 Thomson emphasises also that perpetrators were represented first as mentally deficient and later as psychologically flawed; characterisations which saw this group subjected to medical, rather than legal or public, interventions.6 While parents may have informally warned others about certain individuals in their communities, they rarely took collective political action against them.

From the 1970s, concerns about paedophiles became a 'major public issue', and the paedophile was newly considered 'the most terrifying folk devil imaginable'.7 The rapid development of concerns about paedophilia were linked to broader media anxieties about child sexual abuse, child pornography, satanic rituals, and serial murder emergent in this decade.8 Paedophile liberation groups also developed in the 1970s, further bringing this group to public attention. Two such groups were founded in 1974: Paedophile Action for Liberation and the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE).  They argued that the former group only engaged in consensual relations with children, while the latter did not. The groups couched this argument in terms of the topical discourses of rights, choice, and freedom of association and speech.9

These groups formed some—albeit often tense and tenuous—links with larger liberationist organisations, which brought them further to political and public attention. Many gay rights groups at this time were arguing that the 'sexual revolution' of the 1960s had not gone far enough in terms of, for example, creating an equal age of consent for heterosexual and homosexual sexual activities.10 Lucy Robinson has demonstrated that, in this context, the Gay Left Collective perceived paedophilia as 'a new battlefield from which to extend sexual liberation', opening up debates about the fluidity of sexuality.11 Other gay rights groups—notably the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE)—defended the rights of paedophiles to associate and to speak publicly but sought to emphasise that this was the only connection between their organisations. CHE's annual conference of 1983 passed a resolution condemning attempts to use public concern over assault cases to conduct 'witch hunts' against minority groups such as PIE, but framed this decision as 'entirely a question of freedom of speech'.12

Utilising contemporary anxieties about freedom, in 1975 the PIE also affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL); a loose association granted to nearly 1000 organisations upon the payment of a small fee.13 Chris Moores has shown that the relationship between the PIE and the NCCL was formed mainly through the NCCL's Gay Rights Sub-Committee, primarily in order to discuss freedoms of speech, movement, and association, and the uses of 'public morality' legislation.14 Thomson and Moores have additionally argued that paedophile movements also found some support from certain radical academics in medicine, sociology, and law at this time, who were 'uncomfortable about using the law to police sexual boundaries', as well as among child welfare workers, psychologists, and educational theorists.15

Paedophile rights groups were marginal and relatively small in the 1970s and early 1980s, but nonetheless also held loose relationships with factions of counter-cultural and radical thought. The development of these groups was an international phenomenon, and British paedophile groups formed fiscal and emotional connections with concurrent movements developing in Western Europe and North America; exchanging letters, newsletters, and occasionally donations.16 The development of paedophilia movements on a global scale was ardently criticised. Mary Whitehouse stated that the PIE, 'encapsulates the sickness of the twentieth century'.17 In the Commons, Conservative Members branded the organisation as 'an abominable child sex group', whose membership were 'publicity-seeking freaks' and 'crackpots'.18

Second-wave feminists also mounted a powerful challenge to paedophile rights groups. For example, in *Spare Rib* in 1981, workers from London's Rape Crisis Centre strongly rejected these groups' attempts to function within broader movements of sexual politics.19 Rather, the authors wrote, paedophile advocacy groups should be analysed and critiqued as part of a society in which men held power over women and children.20 This argument foreshadowed continuing links between female activism and sexual danger, whereby women—notably mothers—became the key figures in anti-paedophile protest. These critiques—from the moral right and second-wave feminists alike—also demonstrated that paedophile organisations had failed to disassociate 'the paedophile' and 'the child molester': both figures were seen as equivalent. Any analytical distinction between these terms, indeed, dissolved further when many leaders and members of paedophile rights groups were arrested for sexual offences against children in the late 1970s.21

#### 'Mothers on the Warpath'

As men associated with paedophile rights groups were convicted of sexual offences, public awareness of—and disgust about—these groups grew. In this context, newspapers focused on isolated incidences of anti-paedophile protest by individual women. The *Guardian* reported in 1977 that a woman from Swansea had 'drenched' the leader of the PIE in beer when she saw him in a local pub.22 In the same year, another woman became a self-styled 'Campaigner against Sex Offences on Children', launching a national questionnaire and a petition to demand increased legal restrictions against sexual offences.23 The *Guardian's* coverage of these stories noted that both women had the title, 'Mrs', and indeed that the former was a 'mother of two' and a 'woman teacher', motivated in her actions by the 'upset' caused to her family.24

Newspapers continued to emphasise the gendered nature of antipaedophile protest. One notable thread of this discussion centred on the coverage of the first—and only—public meeting of the PIE in September 1977. PIE held this meeting at Conway Hall in London and priced tickets at £1.50.25 On the day, newspapers estimated that approximately 100 people gathered outside the venue to protest. This protest did not receive mass media attention; however two substantial articles in the *Daily Mail* and *Guardian* provided coverage. In these articles, journalists suggested that the protesters were primarily working-class women, joined by a smaller group of male members of the National Front.26 Despite the evidence of popular right-wing political agitation, it was the mothers who were the key focus of analysis. The articles were titled: 'Mothers on the Warpath' and 'Mothers in child sex protest'.27

Using the language of contemporary industrial relations, the *Mail* article claimed that men from the National Front had made 'burly pickets', and 'kicked, punched and spat on' conference delegates.28 Protesting women, meanwhile, were represented as 'near-hysterical mothers' and 'young mothers', who stood outside the building 'closely-huddled and with arms linked'.29 In contrast to this communitarian and gentle view of femininity, newspapers also reported that those at the conference received 'deep scratches on their faces from [the] women's nails'.30 The *Mail* reported that the women threw domestic items, including 'rotten eggs, tomatoes, apples and peaches'.31 The *Guardian* added that in addition to throwing 'eggs', 'fruit', and 'vegetables', the women also launched 'stink bombs' and 'insults'.32 Newspaper coverage in part represented female activism as a manifestation of a mothering 'instinct'. Indeed, a subsequent letter to the *Daily Mail* from a member of the public went as far as to state that the women's 'missiles', the fruit and vegetables, expressed 'the natural and God-given instincts of mothers in protecting their children'.33 At the same time, media descriptions of the women's physical violence were also to an extent at odds with representations of their youth, docility, and nurturing femininity, manifested, for example, in descriptions about 'huddling'.

Media coverage did not only focus on the women's 'instincts' but also discussed their stated aims, which were, first, to register 'revulsion and disgust at the sickness of these people' and, second, to lobby for paedophile organisations to be banned.34 The latter aim was not fulfilled, although a Conservative Member of Parliament, Geoffrey Dickens, did suggest a bill to this effect in 1984.35 Female protest had not necessarily inspired Dickens' bill however, since it had only received minimal newspaper coverage years beforehand. Furthermore, Dickens' bill was unpopular. Other Members of Parliament argued that this was a radical move, since only two groups had previously been proscribed: the Irish National Liberation Army and the Provisional Irish Republican Army, both on the grounds of advocating violence.36 Further demonstrative that political representatives did not take up the messages of female anti-paedophile protesters, Parliamentarians also argued that they should ban acts, not organisations.37

This case illuminates a complex chain of relationships between small campaign groups, media attention, and legislative change. The 'mothers on the warpath' did not receive substantial media attention; however, their protest was documented in two significant articles which contributed to a broader media narrative in this period, focused on stoking up public disgust about paedophile advocacy groups. This media narrative had an effect on one such group: Paedophile Action for Liberation, which closed in 1977 in part in response to the *Sunday People*'s front page calling them the 'vilest men in Britain'.38 Yet media coverage did not affect the ongoing work of the PIE. Indeed, the organisation's Chairperson (1977–1984), Tom O'Carroll, to an extent courted such attention and had, the *Guardian* reported, 'an obvious flair for publicity'.39

What ultimately led to the closure of the PIE in 1984 was legal and logistical pressure, raised after police arrested several of the group's members and leaders for conspiracy, obscenity, and postal offences. These offences related to the organisation's newsletter, which provided a contact sheet of its membership that, courts ruled, may have enabled paedophiles to arrange to meet up in order to abuse children.40 These prosecutions related to broader media debates of the period about the meaning of 'obscenity', and the PIE was again used by the moral right to demand that firm legislative limits were placed around acts, texts, and organisations.41

The aims of the 'mothers on the warpath' were thus ultimately fulfilled. However, this was not a clear-cut case of experience or emotion becoming expertise. Indeed, the parents who were protesting were not purposefully harnessing their experiences as mothers in order to claim authority in deciding how to cope with the rise of paedophile rights movements. Rather, media coverage used their overlapping identities as women, mothers, working-class people, and protesters as an analytical framework imposed from above to bolster broader reporting narratives. The women's activism was presented dismissively as hysterical, passive, violent, and mothering, and contrasted to the male identities of the paedophiles involved. Despite this, however, the media coverage did not simultaneously reflect on the relationships between patriarchy, violence, and sexual abuse.

In part, the lens of motherhood represented the stated factors driving the women's activism. The woman from Cardiff, for example, argued that it was for her family that she threw her drink. Another protester at the Conway Hall protest told the *Daily Mail* that these women had all acted because, '[w]e're frightened for the sake of our children'.42 At the same time, the media emphasis on gender was also a disempowering framework, preventing the women's arguments from being taken seriously. The leaders of the PIE certainly attempted to entwine and discount the women's experiences, emotions, and identities in this way. The group's newsletter argued that the women were 'hysterical' (a term also used in the *Daily Mail* coverage) and had acted because the PIE 'poses a threat to the traditional mother role'.43

While problematic, the representation of women's 'hysteria' in mainstream media also marked a significant historical moment in which women's emotions and experiences were being brought to public attention by the press. The representation of these women joining together, 'closelyhuddled and with arms linked', echoed concurrent coverage of the Women's Liberation Movement.44 Although media coverage did not make this connection explicitly, these mothers were in a similar period drawing on their personal experiences to take political action; in this case demanding that their individual concerns for children should be translated into a ban on paedophile groups. The women were insisting that their individual beliefs were authoritative and worthy of attention, or expert. Newspapers documented these beliefs in terms of the gendered tropes of emotion and instinct, but nonetheless the women's activism had also commanded a media response, and shaped a broader critique of paedophile advocacy groups. In years to come, media interest in women's experiences and emotions radically extended. In response, women collectivised into formal groups, and capitalised on this interest to disseminate their arguments powerfully.

#### Gender and False Accusations45

In the 1980s, women harnessed media interest in motherhood to add complexity to visions of child protection and to drive televisual analysis. Significantly, Parents Against Injustice (PAIN)—the campaign group for parents who had been falsely accused of abuse—worked closely with the BBC's Community Programme Unit in 1986. The Unit's *Open Space* series allowed members of the public to work with BBC staff to design and produce half-hour documentaries about their lives. Between 1983 and 1997, several of these programmes were aired per year in popular midevening timeslots on BBC Two.46 PAIN had the opportunity to create one of these programmes, which was entitled *Innocents at Risk* and which aired on 17 March 1986. The programme featured extended interviews with the Amphletts and with three other families represented by PAIN. These testimonies, discussing the case histories and emotions of the parents ('guilt', 'despair', and 'helplessness'), were at the forefront of the documentary.47 Periodically, parental accounts were interspersed with narratives provided by a doctor and a social worker, but parents' self-narratives and experiences were central.

Significantly, PAIN's role in co-curating and designing this documentary meant that the organisation was able to present a complex view of family, gender, and child protection, in contrast to the simplistic vision of female hysteria offered by 1970s newspapers. Notably, *Innocents at Risk* referred to 'family' and to 'parents', rather than to mothers alone, and also offered visual representation of mothers and fathers.48 Indeed, when fathers were interviewed, they discussed their emotions, stating that it had been 'hard' to live without their child, and that they were finding their experiences within the child protection system 'frightening', 'harrowing', and isolating.49 Masculine discussion of working patterns and repressed emotion in part framed fathers' accounts: one father discussed how his work schedule made it particularly difficult to see his child while they were in care. Another father contended that it was hard to describe the emotions that he felt about this intrusion into his family life. As a result, he was feeling both 'intense anger'—paralleling the masculine constructions of emotion offered by 1960s paediatric radiologists in Chap. 2—but also, he admitted, 'helplessness'.50

Interviews with mothers likewise featured discussion of the maternal role. One mother stated that when her child was taken away, and she could no longer breastfeed, she felt that, 'I was just another person, I wasn't her [the child's] mother'.51 When her child was returned, she felt, 'Brilliant… I'm a Mum again'.52 Susan Amphlett further stated that being involved in child protection investigations made her 'begin to doubt my capabilities as a mother'.53 The emphasis on mothers as the key caregivers, and as those particularly affected by issues of child protection, was thus to an extent continued from the 'mothers on the warpath' coverage of the 1970s. At the same time, and offering a more complex vision than previous media representations, another mother—who was presented without a partner in the documentary—reversed hackneyed gender tropes. Describing the first admission of her child into hospital, she emphasised that she had tried to 'reason' with a male doctor, and to 'explain to him how things had happened', but that he had behaved irrationally.54 This account confronted a long-standing Western vision of hysteria as female and rationality as male, and further challenged the ability of clinicians, as experts, to respond to evidence.55

The documentary indeed represented mothers and fathers in complex ways as both 'rational' and 'emotional', facing stress but also mobilising to regain custody of their children and to protect other parents. Gendered tropes of motherhood, visible in the newspaper coverage of the 1970s, were not absent here, but they were modified, mediated, and re-interpreted by parents themselves, drawing on their lived experiences. While a more complex vision of gender emerged from this work, therefore, explicit and implicit representations of class continued to bolster and fortify the parents' claims. The documentary opened by portraying two parents in a smartly furnished home, carefully putting on earrings and a tie. Looking to frame the testimonies of PAIN's members, Susan Amphlett stated in the piece that none of the families had been involved with the police before. Steve Amphlett, furthermore, attested that if the Amphletts could be accused of abuse, 'knowing what kind of parents we are', then anyone could be.56 This representation of universal—perhaps 'ordinary'—respectability was significant in PAIN's broader work.57 The group's submission to a public consultation in 1986, for example, likewise stated that their parents were the 'type of people' who made use of state health and social work services, enabling these authorities to ensure that their children were 'weighed and examined … up to date with the vaccinations'.58 PAIN's representations therefore drew on a vision of compliance, respectability, articulacy, and relative affluence; characteristics which framed the narration of experience and emotion in authoritative terms.

While visions of class and gender framed the work of many prominent parent campaigners, parent activists did also find new opportunities to represent their own experiences and emotions in their own terms in the 1980s. In doing so, parents did not challenge all forms of structural inequality; however, they did challenge professional competency, and they did challenge media representations of family life and motherhood. These representations became relatively influential. A small but significant proportion of the UK population—around 1.4 million viewers—saw *Innocents at Risk*. 59 This was among the highest viewing figures which the programme had ever had, and PAIN received over 400 responses after the documentary had aired.60 PAIN claimed that all responses had been 'favourable', and that falsely accused parents had written 75 per cent, and interested professionals the remainder.61

This evidence speaks to the kind of audiences that PAIN's media work was reaching. Even when aired at primetime in the 'age of one-nation television', the organisation's programme was not watched universally, but rather primarily by parents facing similar experiences.62 Nonetheless, the programme did also attract the attention of a small but significant cohort of policy-makers and professionals interested in child protection. *Innocents at Risk* may have challenged visions of gender, family life, and child protection for its viewers but, as the following sections will demonstrate, media emphasis on mothers—and indeed on individual mothers—was extended and continued through the 1990s and 2000s.

#### Sara Payne and Mothers in the Media

In the 2000s, Sara Payne led a highly prominent parental campaign, which illustrated ongoing media focus on the experiences of women, but also new pathways through which individual parents could influence New Labour thinking. Sara and her husband Michael Payne came to public attention after their daughter, the eight-year-old Sarah Payne, was abducted and murdered by the paedophile Roy Whiting in 2000. Whiting had previously been convicted of abducting and indecently assaulting another young girl in 1995. All mainstream newspapers provided substantial coverage of the Paynes' personal tragedy—the hunt for Sarah when missing, the grief of her parents, and the search for, and conviction of, her killer.

As with the PAIN families in the 1980s, Sara's emotional inner life was central to this coverage, particularly in the popular tabloid press. News stories discussed Sara's 'tears' and praised her 'dignified and courteous' statements to the courts.63 One *Daily Mail* article suggested that, as the case continued, Sara's 'dignity' and her 'passionate' demeanour had shifted to a 'calmer' and 'quieter' way of being, 'as if somehow a flame has gone out'.64 News stories entwined descriptions of Sara's emotional and domestic lives, for example writing that her home was 'a tip, both dirty and untidy… It is perhaps symbolic of her depressed state of mind.'65 Sara herself expressed emotions clearly to newspapers, telling the *Mail* in 2002 that her pain remained 'raw', but that she had 'got used to it' and 'built a brick wall around my heart'.66 Interlinked descriptions of Sara's devastation and her resilience were thus key to framing this case, and to constructing Sara as a significant individual spokesperson.

While Sara was the primary focus of much newspaper reporting, at times newspapers also emphasised the partnership between the Paynes and the protective role of Michael. For instance, newspaper coverage described Michael putting his arm around his wife and Sara 'clasping the hand of her husband' and 'collapsing into the arms of her husband'.67 Nonetheless, on the whole newspapers provided less representation of Michael's grief and, when paying attention to him, often focused on his quietness, for example stating that he 'trembled uncontrollably at her [Sara's] side' or was 'so distraught that he was unable to speak'.68 In 2003, discussing the Paynes' separation, the *Daily Mail* argued that Michael felt guilt for not having been able to protect his daughter; a description tied to a masculine vision of fatherhood protectiveness.69 While the primary media focus was on the Payne parents, the experiences of their other children were also represented in gendered terms, for example with the oldest boy, a teenager, described as 'trying to be strong and unemotional', while the youngest daughter was 'walking around bewildered'.70

While the ongoing news coverage of the Payne case was far more substantial than that around the PAIN families, like the parent campaigners of the 1980s, Payne asserted that her personal experiences entitled her to speak authoritatively about child protection. Payne later recorded that she had initially questioned whether it was her 'place to get involved in something like this' since she was part of an 'ordinary family', with no particular knowledge about politics.71 However Payne subsequently asserted her own claims to expertise, stating that she was in fact one of 'the most qualified people' to campaign on issues of family safety, because she had had personal experience in this regard.72 The Paynes' self-framing as 'ordinary' continued in 2003, as Sara told the *Daily Mail*, explaining the emotional burden of this case, that she was part of 'a very ordinary couple catapulted into the spotlight'.73 Newspapers subsequently linked this vision of ordinariness to working-class aspiration, describing the Payne parents as 'cheerfully struggling along, making ends meet, in and out of jobs' and as 'all squashed into a council house', for example.74 While inflected by visions of class, *The Times* also used this construction to invite 'all parents' to reflect on their own lives and to consider, 'how we would bear up had it been one of us standing there yesterday?'75 In this statement, the identity of 'parent' was seen to supersede class identity, and to provide an element of collective feeling across all families.

A key difference between the parental campaigning in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s and that in the 2000s was that the criticism of professional authority had in part diminished by this latter period. Payne's promotion of experiential expertise, and her testimonies about her own emotions, were not tied up with criticism of clinicians, social workers, or other professional bodies. Indeed, Payne testified that she was 'extremely lucky' as she experienced 'support' and 'respect' during her dealings with the criminal justice system.76 The Paynes made public statements of thanks to the police involved in their case.77 Appearing on *BBC News* in 2001, Sara also offered a moderate analysis of the judge who had previously sentenced Whiting to four years in jail following a previous sexual assault of 1995. While the director of the Victims Crime Trust told newspapers that there was 'never too high a [jail] sentence for a paedophile', Payne stated that she did not 'blame' the judge, but rather recognised that he had acted with the information he was given at the time.78

Payne's lack of critique for professional services thus reflected her own experiences but also, importantly, a broader context in the 1990s and 2000s in which media critiques of professional authority had, to an extent, been replaced by a focus on multi-disciplinary action and partnership working with families. In this context, newspaper reporting emphasised that Sara Payne referred to 'we' and 'us' as the family, police, and media. Newspaper coverage presented Sara as empowered within this network of actors—for example, reporting that she had made suggestions about how best to publicise the missing person case.79 Newspapers presented Sara's empowerment as at odds with her working-class background and her feminine emotions, however, and charted a narrative transition from 'working-class Sussex family' and 'terrified mother' to 'articulate, persuasive campaigner'.80

While Sara thus became 'expert' in interactions with media and police, newspapers were also increasingly interested in describing the personal experiences and emotions of involved professionals, continuing developments charted in Chap. 5. Newspapers reported, for example, that detectives had 'wiped tears' from their eyes at Whiting's trial, while Sara stated that the judge who sentenced Whiting in 1995 would have 'to live with the "if onlys…"'.81 Media coverage therefore constructed police and legal professionals as emotional and reflexive subjects. This construction was relatively new, and was not as present in the descriptions offered of, nor by, the clinicians working on the battered child syndrome in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, discussed in Chap. 2.

#### *Media Partnership*

The Paynes' work, like earlier parental activism, relied on collaboration with newspapers, though the Paynes became more deeply embedded with media contacts than previous campaigners. Sara Payne was potentially more empowered in interactions with media than previous parents, and harnessed the public interest in her experiences to lobby for change. Once police found her daughter's body, Sara began sustained research about paedophilia and child protection law. When Payne was contacted by a journalist from the *News of the World*, looking for an interview, she asked the paper to investigate Megan's Law: American legislation designed in 1994 to create a publicly accessible database of the names, addresses, and convictions of all sexual offenders.82 Days later, the *News of the World* contacted Payne again to propose the 'For Sarah' campaign, which would lobby for a range of child protection measures, including enabling concerned parents controlled access to the Sex Offenders Register (already established by the *Sex Offenders Act* of 1997).83 Sara was not a naïve actor in interaction with newspapers but, rather, reshaped media interest to drive change. Acknowledging and indeed analysing this complex relationship, one contemporary reporter argued that interaction with the media was a way for the Paynes to contribute to the search and to cope with their personal distress.84

The first effort by the *News of the World* to promote the 'For Sarah' project was a 'Name and Shame' campaign, which published the names and photographs of people on the Sex Offenders Register. The Home Office, the NSPCC, the Children's Society, ChildLine, and the police condemned this as dangerous, potentially driving paedophiles underground, further endangering children, or leading to mistaken attacks.85 In terms of the latter, some people were mistaken for those on the list, and their homes surrounded by protestors.86 Despite its controversial start, this campaign was ultimately influential. The *News of the World* began to collaborate with the NSPCC, police, and probation services, and constructed proposals that were partially enacted in the *Criminal Justice and Court Services Act* of 2000. This act established new laws to prevent paedophiles from working with children, ensured that police would inform victims of sexual abuse if their abuser left jail, and strengthened the resources in place to monitor sexual offenders.87 Following this, four police areas piloted controlled access to the Sex Offenders Register.88 This act also introduced Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements: new panels to manage offenders in the community and composed of representatives from police, probation, prison, health, housing, education, and social services again demonstrative of a shift towards co-operation between professional services in the 1990s and 2000s.89

The Paynes' campaigning hence in a sense followed a similar pattern to the work of parent campaigners in the 1980s: parents, particularly mothers, provided emotional and experiential testimony, which the media disseminated and interpreted. However, newspaper discussions of the lives and feelings of the Paynes were far more extensive than ever before, led by tabloid press but also echoed in broadsheet newspapers.90 The tabloid media also worked more directly and closely with Sara than it had with campaigners of the 1980s. *News of the World* journalists became, for Sara, 'good and trusted friends'.91 Indeed, for journalists Sara was both a grieving mother and a powerful activist. These dual roles were expressed by the *Daily Mail* in 2002, which described how Sara had 'channelled her relentless grief into a one-woman campaign to change the law to protect the nation's children'.92 This campaign created a debate about who should be able to access information about crime, and about whether parents were equipped to understand and utilise this information, or whether it should be left within the criminal justice system.

While the Paynes, and particularly Sara, were in part empowered in interactions with newspaper outlets, by making their experiences public they also became subject to press intrusion and sensationalism. In 2001, the *Independent* reported that when the police were telling Michael and Sara that they had found Sarah's body, the other Payne children were already hearing this news from a television in another room.93 Newspapers thus critically reported on the level of press interest into the Paynes' family lives, while also contributing to it. In a related line of analysis, in 2001 the *Daily Mail* questioned whether the parents were 'more confident in front of cameras than the police'; again reporting on this case while also raising a set of issues about whether such coverage inhibited the Paynes' relationships with statutory authorities.94 In 2011, such debates—about the relationships between Paynes and press—came to the fore with allegations that the *News of the World* may have hacked Sara's phone.95 Hence, parents had new access to journalists in the 2000s, and were in part empowered in guiding the object of media coverage. However, the ethical and legal boundaries of this new terrain had not yet been established.

#### Individualism in Public Policy

Through Sara Payne, parental campaigning may have directly influenced legislative change. In addition to forming significant connections at the *News of the World*, Payne also developed important links in the political world; a new space for parent campaigners. In September 2000, the Paynes met with Jack Straw, the first Home Secretary appointed under the New Labour government of 1997. Demonstrative of multiple sources of influence in this encounter, the Paynes were accompanied by Sarah's grandparents and by Rebekah Wade, *News of the World*'s editor. The parents also promised to present Straw with a petition containing one million signatures from members of the public.96 The network between policy and public thinking—connected through petitions, political representatives, and media—was not new, but the entry of parents and grandparents into political discussions, directly through meeting with politicians, was significant.

Meeting with a home secretary did not guarantee parental influence, nor the fundamental disruption of public–political relations. Following a 90-minute meeting, the press reported that Straw had 'told the parents' that the *Sex Offenders Act* would be changed. While this was what the Paynes had called for, Home Office spokespeople looked to frame the level of parental influence carefully. One department spokesman told *The Times* that the home secretary had 'an opportunity to give Mr and Mrs Payne an indication of the direction the Government will be taking'; a statement which presented discussions with the Paynes as intended to disseminate, rather than to reshape, policy.97

While parental influence was not instant or guaranteed, Sara Payne did form important and new informal relationships with successive home secretaries under New Labour. In 2002, the *Mail* reported that Sara and Michael met regularly with David Blunkett, the home secretary between 2001 and 2004. In interview, Sara called Blunkett 'lovely'. Further—and again demonstrating interest in discussing the experiential expertise of public figures in this period—Payne also iterated that Blunkett 'always asks about the children before we get down to any business'.98 Emphasising the informal nature of her relationships with politicians in her own book of 2009, Payne reported being phoned on a Sunday morning 'while lounging about in her bed' by John Reid, home secretary between 2006 and 2007. Payne reported that Reid had called to warn her that a judge had mistakenly released a sexual offender, and that the media would soon be in touch.99

While New Labour spokespeople may have initially distanced themselves from the influence of the Paynes, the parents did find informal pathways to influence from the early 2000s and were consulted as expert. From the late 2000s, furthermore, Sara Payne also gained formal influence: in January 2009, she was named as the first 'Victims' Champion' at the Ministry of Justice, part of a broader 'explosion' in the number of outside experts appointed by New Labour.100 The idea of utilising external experts had roots dating back to Harold Wilson's governments, but over 100 'tsars', 'advisors', 'independent reviewers', 'commissioners', and 'champions' were appointed between 1997 and 2010.101 Many of these appointments were high-profile individuals, for example Lord Alan Sugar (Enterprise Champion), Tim Berners-Lee (Information Advisor), and Sir Steve Redgrave (Sports Legacy Champion).102 These experts had no one clearly defined mandate, but generally their roles were as 'innovators', appointed to coordinate and inspire 'a range of actors' and to 'deal with particularly intractable problems'.103

The appointment of tsars such as Payne marked new opportunities for parents to influence policy—providing a further source of expertise for media discussion, as well as access to politicians and political events. The appointment of tsars also marked a shifting relationship between New Labour and the voluntary sector, moving focus from working with organisations towards appointing individuals. This strategy increased the policy capacity of central government but also changed interactions between parents and politicians. Previously, in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, voluntary groups represented parents and took their concerns, collectively, to public inquiries, select committees, and media. From the late 1990s and 2000s, individuals such as Payne embodied parental concerns. As an individual, Payne was able to speak informally with politicians, and to be appointed for a formal political role.

To an extent, the creation of tsars and the passing of the *Criminal Justice and Court Services Act* of 2000 represented an individualist policy moment. In this act, individual parents were encouraged to be increasingly 'responsible' for overseeing and monitoring their children's development. The idea that parents had rights, as long as they exercised their responsibilities, while key in the *Children Act* of 1989, was extended by New Labour governments, for example in the creation of parental control orders, curfew orders, and legislation around anti-social behaviour.104 One of the key tenets of the Sarah's Law campaign was 'empowering parents to protect children': parents would have the 'right' to controlled information about offenders in their neighbourhood but, with this, the conferred responsibility of ensuring that they monitored their neighbours to keep their children safe. The parent, rather than the family or indeed the mother, was to be the key object of social policy, and the agent responsible for promoting change. This escalated the interest seen throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in engaging families, children, and parents in child protection practice. Newly however, the state and statutory agencies as well as the voluntary sector—would support and facilitate familial responsibility.

#### *Professional Retaliation*

While the Paynes became influential, contemporary journalists, psychologists, and children's charities challenged the significance of experiential expertise. Lynda Lee-Potter from the *Daily Mail* argued that the government should not 'concede to the emotional pressure' of passing the *Criminal Justice and Court Services* bill. She further suggested that the bill's passing would evoke emotional public responses, such as 'mobs' or even murder.105 Writing for the *Guardian*, the clinical psychologist Oliver James made a different critique: he argued that Sara Payne was not being treated as an expert by professional agencies, but rather that parent campaigners were 'wheeled out to express their concern' and exploited to sell newspapers.106 These accounts portrayed emotions as powerful motivators for policy reform, and as underpinning popular appetite for newspapers. At the same time, these accounts also expressed concern about who controlled the portrayal and expression of parental emotion and experience.

Furthermore, and demonstrative of the pervasiveness of this hierarchy, newspapers also continued to contrast the experiential knowledge of the Paynes to 'professional' expertise.107 This critique continued even when Sara Payne was appointed the Victims' Champion tsar. On the publication of her first report, *Redefining Justice*, the *Independent* suggested that 'some lobbying groups' had 'hinted heavily that it said nothing new'. The newspaper interpreted this to reveal an underlying attitude that 'Payne was an amateur stumbling through territory better left to professionals like them'.108 This contrast between the 'amateur' and the 'professional' signified continuing challenges for parent campaigners. Even as they began to speak in the most influential circles, their testimony was often still interpreted as 'emotional', unoriginal, or 'amateur'. The holding of personal experience could confer *access* to media and policy spokespeople but could not guarantee influence. As with the 'mothers on the warpath', parents were encouraged to share their emotions publicly, particularly through press, and yet the visibility of their emotions was also used to undermine their arguments.

Payne therefore gained a prominent position in British politics, yet was also reliant on a level of patronage and support from politicians at the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office. Significantly nonetheless, by the 2000s parents were not only influencing policy from the 'outside', through street protests, but also through collaboration with the most influential figures in politics and media. The Home Secretary John Reid presented this as a broader process whereby the 'sincere views of the public, represented by parents such as Sara Payne', were politically powerful.109 Other politicians though, such as Home Affairs spokesman Nick Clegg, questioned whether the government was using these reforms as 'populist headline-grabbing announcements', rather than to fundamentally shift public–political relationships.110 Certainly, while Payne's campaign had substantial traction, other contemporary groups representing parents struggled to be heard. The shift in parents' campaigning from a collective to an individual phenomenon, and the increasing media fixation on campaign figureheads, did not wholly confront nor subvert long-standing debates about how communities, families, and policy should work together to protect children.

#### Conclusion

Chapters 5 and 6 of this book have analysed a series of moments in which parents sought out influence over policy and public debate in the late twentieth century. The 'mothers on the warpath' had some opportunities to disseminate their aims in the popular press. The subsequent articles published however were somewhat dismissive. Through the 1980s and the 1990s, numerous newspaper articles reproduced the narratives of falsely accused parents at length and near verbatim. The television show *Open Space: Innocents at Risk* also disseminated the experiences of these parents. Very small parental advocacy groups such as PAIN acted as mediators in this process, recording the stories of falsely accused parents and presenting them to press and policy. By the 2000s, the experiences and emotions of Sara and Michael Payne were documented daily by newspapers, and Sara was appointed as a special advisor to government, as part of New Labour's focus on appointing 'tsars'.

Looking across these case studies, one may be tempted to draw a smooth narrative, whereby parental campaigners assumed increasing influence over policy and media in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This may seem like a linear progression of the increasing influence of experiential and emotional expertise, amidst the rise of an investigatory media. To an extent, this narrative holds significance; however, this is by no means such a linear history. Chapters 5 and 6 also demonstrate that the extent to which parents successfully gained influence was shaped by their successes in negotiating relationships with journalists, policy-makers, social workers, and medical professionals. In the 1980s, parents had to both assert that their experiential expertise was more significant than the knowledge held by clinicians and social workers, and yet also to demonstrate that they had support from such professional groups. Media and parental focus on criticising professional practice also contributed to a moment in which social workers and clinicians defended their work in experiential terms. People's experiences and emotions became significant as sources of evidence, placed alongside medical and research reports, though such evidence was sometimes seen as irrational, as well as powerful.

Women's testimonies in particular were the focus of much media coverage in the late twentieth century. A media and policy focus on mothers—their bodies, emotions, and daily lives—has a long history throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.111 What was new, however, was the reshaping of these broader trajectories in terms of unprecedented media interest in women's narration of their own experiences, shaped by right-wing anxieties around increasing female participation in the workplace and the development of second-wave feminism. Descriptions of women's experiences and emotions were both empowering and disempowering in this moment. The protest of the 'mothers on the warpath' was explained by newspapers as a communitarian act, in the context of Women's Liberation, and yet also somewhat dismissed, and presented as a hysterical, 'womanly' reaction. Mothers were questioned from the 1980s about how their campaigning would affect their parental duties, and many felt expected to give up their jobs when contesting accusations of abuse. Mothers such as Amphlett and Payne understood the processes of media work and were able, to an extent, to channel media interest towards their own campaigning. Nonetheless, to gain influence, the women also faced significant press intrusion and the multiple burdens of parenting, activism, media work, and workplace life. Media coverage rarely analysed the position and role of fathers in child protection debates. Indeed, this absence itself motivated the activism of Fathers 4 Justice, which was founded in 2001 and undertook a variety of high-profile stunts to critique the treatment of fathers in family courts. In contrast to press coverage of protesting mothers in the 1970s and 1980s, newspaper articles about Fathers 4 Justice emphasised and explored the men's 'masculine' identities: their vigour, anger, and use of physically demanding feats.112 Ideas of cultural masculinity were further represented in the organisation's own publicity materials, which invited men to join the group 'for less than the price of a pint a month', and made heavy use of the iconography of superheroes, particularly Superman.113

In these ways, the processes through which parents came to assume influence in the late twentieth century were complex and disordered, heavily shaped by perceptions of gender, and deeply reliant on collaboration and conflict with media, medicine, and social work. Nonetheless, the case studies of this chapter were also revealing of a space in which experiential and emotional expertise was somewhat further valued—or at least further visible—by the 2000s. The next chapter of this book analyses how survivor experiences and emotions also became visible in public policy and media from the 1980s and particularly from the 1990s. In doing so, it traces many parallels with parental activism—in terms of collaboration with media, the role of voluntary groups, and the focus on individual spokespeople under New Labour. At the same time, Chap. 7 also demonstrates that survivor campaigners faced further challenges to speaking out, as literary, social policy, and media actors were often reluctant to confront and analyse the long-term effects of childhood abuse, and to consider its lived effects on adult life.

#### Notes

Sigmund Freud, *On Sexuality—Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works* (New York, 1962), as cited in ibid., 272.

118, no. 3 (2013): 653–678; David Bradshaw, Rachel Potter (eds), *Prudes on the prowl: fiction and obscenity in England, 1850 to the present day* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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# The Visibility of Survivors and Experience as Expertise

This chapter examines the multi-layered processes through which adults who had been abused in childhood—survivors—began to discuss their experiences of abuse in public, often for the first time, through published letters, autobiography, newspaper interviews, and testimonies offered to academia and social policy. These spaces were shaped by and reshaped the narration of individual experiences and emotions, entwining personal processes of thinking and remembering with the changing interests of publishing houses, newspaper editors, and researchers. The chapter argues that public and political attention shifted to the long-term effects of child abuse for the first time only in the 1980s, and particularly from the 1990s, decades after attention had been paid to the experiences and emotions of children and parents. It took time for survivors to come forward, and for public and policy attention to consider the long-term effects of abuse on children. While the chapter uses the word 'survivor' as shorthand, echoing contemporary accounts and the activism of multiple voluntary groups, survivor testimonies—influential in social policy and media interviews from the 1990s and 2000s—have also demonstrated the complexity and range of lived experiences of abuse.

As attention was turned towards survivor experiences and emotions, several processes traced through this book solidified at the turn of the twenty-first century. Notably, experiential knowledge became a key

resource for framing—and for criticising—political and media analysis. Continuing a process traced throughout this book, consultation with voluntary groups remained the key mechanism to access survivor views and, to a new extent, representative groups grew and consciously entwined experiential and professional expertise. As we saw in the previous chapter, under New Labour individual voluntary leaders found new opportunities to influence public inquiries—although survivor spokespeople remained critical of state legislation and services. These spokespeople operated at a juncture: at times reliant on state-funding, often lobbying for legislative change, but also seeking to work productively with social services, police, and law.

Relationships between survivor representatives and specific journalists cross-cut this policy work, and survivors used media interest to express their viewpoints and to criticise child protection practice. This chapter hence demonstrates that the expertise of experience and emotion had become significant by the year 2000 and that, in this context, survivors themselves were able to play a significant role in reshaping policy and media debate about child protection. This new role, primarily assumed through voluntary groups, intervened in long-standing relationships between policy, media, and publics, and raised questions, which would become key in the twenty-first century, about *whose* experiences and emotions were being represented on the public stage.

#### Confessional Cultures?

From the mid-1960s, amidst renewed interest in child protection, social policy and medical texts made only occasional mention of the potential long-term effects of childhood abuse. Adults who were abused in childhood may have been speaking privately with agony aunts, counsellors, psychologists, and to one another before this decade, but their accounts were not yet heard publicly. Survivor accounts indeed were notably absent from broader 'confessional cultures' and 'cultures of self-expression' which, Deborah Cohen and Martin Francis have argued, emerged from the 1930s to the 1970s, or from the late 1950s and early 1960s.1 Without open discussions about child protection at this time, survivors could not yet discuss their personal experiences or emotions on the public stage.

From the 1980s, however, early accounts about the long-term effects of childhood violence began to surface. Developing psychological research about trauma was also important in this moment, and the category of post-traumatic stress disorder was first included in the 1980 edition of the *Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders*. 2 In this context, psychologists discussed the 'long-term effects' of guilt, trauma, betrayal, and secrecy for children, and the 'psychological scars' that may 'remain for a lifetime' following childhood abuse.3 Social surveys—conducted by academics, popular magazines, and the voluntary sector—likewise were looking to uncover the long-term effects of abuse. A survey in *Woman* magazine in 1983 found that of 15,000 respondents, one-twelfth had suffered sexual abuse within their family.4

Social policy documents likewise began from the 1980s to consider this issue. The report of the public inquiry into the Cleveland case, published in 1987, included one paragraph mentioning that the Member of Parliament Frank Cook had provided information from three brothers who had revealed after many years that their father had sexually abused them as children.5 The report did not present further details, simply writing that this did not come within its remit. Nonetheless, it emphasised that this suggested broader and long-term problems, that: perpetrators may remain in communities; abused children may require counselling in their futures; and authorities may face 'insuperable difficulties' confronting retrospective accusations of abuse.6 While not addressing these issues at length, the report stated that this was an area 'we feel should be recognised and consideration given to it'.7

To an extent then, psychological, sociological, and policy researchers working in child protection were increasingly confronting the long-term effects of childhood abuse through the 1980s. This analysis signalled an important shift in terms of thinking about abuse over the life course, and in terms of its long-term effects—points notably absent from earlier debates which focused solely on the child in their childhood, rather than the child as a long-term, reflexive, living, and ageing subject. Survivors themselves in part drove this increased focus on their experiences. A range of charities—the NSPCC, ChildLine, Kidscape, Samaritans, Phoenix Survivors, and Relate—all testified that adults who were abused in childhood started to contact them, seeking help, in the 1980s and 1990s.8 Survivors later testifying to select committee inquiries in the early 2000s emphasised that they had been 'too scared' to come forward as children, and that they had needed time to 'feel strong enough to give evidence'.9

These personal journeys of reflection occurred at the same time as new spaces opened up for children to disclose their experiences in the 1970s and 1980s, and alongside broader psychological interest in trauma. While survivors played a significant role in this process by coming forward in the 1980s and 1990s, professions also mediated the ways in which their experiences would be heard, disseminated, and used. The complex interactions between survivors—calling for assistance—and media, the voluntary sector, and policy may be analysed through a series of case studies: the work of agony aunts, autobiographies, and the NSPCC's *Childhood Matters* project.

#### Agony Aunts

Agony aunts are an important case study, demonstrating how the public narration of private experiences by survivors was mediated by the norms, cultures, and agendas of national institutions—newspapers—and by 'new experts' in confessional culture. Agony aunts turned to focus on child sexual abuse as a topic from the early 1990s, initially thinking about children but, later, shifting their focus towards adults. In these years, agony aunts told newspapers that they received a 'distressingly large' number of letters on child abuse—with indeed Deidre Sanders, agony aunt for the *Sun*, stating that one in five of her letters discussed this topic.10 Accordingly, Sanders began to respond to many such letters in her column, publishing almost 400 letters about abuse and violence between 1998 and August 2015. Suggesting a further increase in openness about this area over the early twenty-first century, over half of these letters were published between January 2013 and August 2015.11

Agony aunts played a significant role in publicly disseminating lengthy individual and qualitative accounts, adding to the quantitative data collected by social surveys and the private qualitative information recorded by psychologists and public inquiries. People's experiences were framed in emotional terms: letters to the *Sun*'s 'Dear Deidre' page described life histories and, following this, testified that people felt 'so full of anger and hate' or 'frightened' about discussing their childhood abuse.12 Sanders emphasised that abuse may leave 'emotional scars' and could surface in later relationships.13 While the bylines chosen for these letters emphasised negative emotions—for example, 'Haunted by years of childhood abuse' and 'So hurt by evil abuser'—the letters' content also often reported therapeutic progress. In 2002, one young person of 26 wrote to the *Sun* to announce that, after Sanders had provided information and recommended counselling, they had 'moved on enormously' in their thinking.14 While agony aunts therefore provided important support, the selection, publication, and framing of public letters also demonstrated significant interest in this period in lived experiences and the power of emotion. Emotion was coded as a motivational force; encouraging people to write to newspapers, to bring their perpetrators to justice, or to reach out to others. However, emotion was also presented a barrier to action—described as stopping adults from having spoken out before, and as a hindrance to developing relationships or careers.

These letters were therefore not only a product of shifting openness in discussing child abuse, nor of increasing disclosures from survivors about their life experiences. The publication of these letters also reflected the shifting interests of newspaper editors—issues that they thought would sell papers—and the assumed interests of members of the public. In 1993, agony aunt Suzie Hayman of *Woman's Own* discussed public letters as a commercial entity, as well as a therapeutic forum, emphasising that newspapers 'put a lot of money' into providing 'an enormously expensive reader service', and that they 'can't justify that unless the column's entertaining'.15 While the agony aunt column was a 'service' to the public, the content of letters chosen for publication also revealed shifting ideas about what would 'entertain' newspaper readerships. Indeed, and reflecting different norms around discussing abuse, *Independent* agony aunt Virginia Ironside argued in 1993 that the 'very, very nervous broadsheets and posher papers' were later to offer agony aunt columns than tabloids, fearing initially that such columns may be 'tacky and silly'.16

Nonetheless, in curating and responding to these letters, agony aunts from tabloids and broadsheets alike emerged as a new type of visible and highly accessible expert in child protection. Agony aunts testified that they were often the first people who survivors shared their accounts with, and that many had previously 'kept the feelings bottled up inside themselves'.17 In becoming expert, agony aunts further blurred the boundaries between professional and personal forms of expertise. Continuing a shift towards professional reflexiveness, visible throughout this book, agony aunts discussed their own emotional responses to receiving these letters, discussing how they were 'really upsetting' and made them 'sad' and 'angry'.18 In addition, and extending the professional openness traced in Chaps. 5 and 6 through the 1980s, agony aunts also disclosed their own life stories, and indeed argued that personal histories of counselling, mental health, and family challenges, for example, provided key 'qualifications' with which to answer public letters.19

Tied in with their focus on experiential expertise as a resource, and with their own provision of expert help, agony aunts both replaced and challenged statutory services in child protection. Interviewing agony aunts in 1993, the *Observer* argued that letters were sent by people who had been ignored by teachers, doctors, and 'others in authority'.20 Ironside testified that people often wrote to agony aunts 'because the experts have failed them'.21 Agony aunts acted politically and used this analysis of expertise to challenge broader social policies and social changes. While some agony aunts argued that 'resources are dwindling for social work', Philip Hodson, writing for *News of the World*, contended that child abuse had risen in response to parental employment and the divorce rate.22

Agony aunts therefore gleaned significant personal authority as individuals, and were able to challenge social and political change beyond child protection issues alone, but nonetheless with expertise based on their exposure to, and grasp of, public experiences and emotions. Recognising that public accounts were key to the construction of their expertise, agony aunts regularly deferred to self-help organisations, directing public inquiries to these groups, and also explicitly stating that many survivors wrote to their columns because others had.23 Through the emergence of agony aunts, therefore, the experiences and emotions of survivors became visible. The sharing of these experiences and emotions bolstered the expertise of survivors, but also constructed the media as a provider of therapeutic care, a voice for marginalised populations, and a key critic of state services.

#### Autobiography

Autobiographies, like letters to agony aunts, became an important medium through which to express and share experiences of childhood abuse from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Again, this medium reflected both increasing willingness from members of the public to discuss their childhood experiences openly, but also a new commercial appetite—in this case from the publishing industry—for sharing experiences and emotions. The confessional memoir has a long history. Deborah Cohen has shown that interwar memoirs were highly candid, capitalising on a primarily female market which 'liked to read about family skeletons'.24 In the late twentieth century, new forms of the confessional memoir emerged, linked in with developments in second-wave feminism, the interests of commercial publishers, and increasing social explicitness about the internal mechanisms of family life.

From the 1970s, second-wave feminists offered new accounts of childhood abuse which looked to mobilise descriptions of experiences and emotions to lobby for political change, and to draw together thinking about violence against women and children. Demonstrative of the growing production of such work by voluntary groups, writing from the London Rape Crisis Centre in 1981, one *Spare Rib* article emphasised that adult women who faced sexual abuse may experience vivid flashbacks, leaving them 'numb, depressed or acutely anxious', and experiencing feelings of blame, betrayal, humiliation, outrage, anger, and upset.25 Feminist authors also produced memoirs and autobiographies describing their own experiences and those of others. Louise Armstrong's *Kiss Daddy Goodnight* (1978) was significant in this regard. Drawing on testimony from 183 women, recruited through adverts and peer networks, the book contained letters about incest written by women of 'every class, every family structure', charting experiences of fear and trauma, confusion and denial.26 The book's back cover emphasised that Armstrong had written this text 'through the words of the victims themselves', breaking a 'conspiracy of silence'.27 Reflecting in 2008, an obituary of Armstrong offered a similar perspective, arguing that her work had given many survivors 'the courage to speak out'.28

Within Armstrong's book, descriptions of emotion were central to women's accounts of their experiences, and contributors expressed hurt, guilt, fear, disbelief, denial, anguish, and rage.29 One contributor questioned why she had never received help, given the transparency of her 'obvious emotional trauma', clear to 'anybody who had an IQ of more than one point above a ripe cucumber'.30 The text therefore framed descriptions of experience and emotion as challenging existing professional services, and as challenging structural systems of patriarchy and power. In 2003, Armstrong argued that since 1978, and the publication of her book, 'experts' had sought to appropriate the experiences of survivors and of women and to 'dismiss feminist analysis as biased, political, unprofessional'.31 Her book and subsequent works, therefore, positioned experiential expertise as authoritative, continuing women's efforts to present their own experiences, and those of others, publicly.

From the 1990s and 2000s, decades after the development of feminist memoirs about child abuse and incest, another distinctive form of child protection autobiography was popularised.32 Informally titled 'misery lit', Victoria Bates has argued that such works were framed by a feminist-psychoanalytic model and centred around a single traumatised female, her traumatic memories, and a traumatic event.33 These works, providing explicit accounts of childhood trauma, were written by men as well as women: the books *A Child Called It* (1995), *The Lost Boy* (1997), and *A Man Named Dave* (2000), all written by Dave Pelzer, were important in this genre.34 Like earlier feminist accounts, these works brought narratives about the experiences and emotions involved in recalling historic abuse to wider audiences. Pelzer's first book, for example, described how his 'will to somehow survive' continued despite significant abuse by his mother, including physical violence, neglect, enforced labour, and 'using food as her weapon'.35

*A Child Called It* included graphic descriptions of Pelzer's childhood abuse, recalling his sensory environment and emotions. For example, in one passage Pelzer described how his mother burnt him on a hot stove, and he described the feeling of his skin—which 'seemed to explode from the heat'—and the smell of the 'scorched hairs from my burnt arm'.36 Significantly, and demonstrative of public interest in such graphic accounts, 'misery lit' became an incredibly popular genre. In 2006, 11 of the top 100 bestselling paperbacks were memoirs about surviving abuse. Newspapers and publishers reported that supermarkets were a key space in which these books were sold, and that their purchasers were 80–90 per cent female.37 The popularity of 'misery lit' declined from 2008, in part as journalists challenged the veracity of some accounts—including those offered by Pelzer—but also shaped by a changing economic climate.38 The journalistic concern about the 'truth' of these accounts reflected a growing mode of investigative research, but also showed that long-standing sites of expertise would police, criticise, and analyse survivors' expressions of experience and emotion, once made public.

In part, there was tension between the genres of the 1970s and 1990s autobiographies. The trauma scholar Anne Rothe has argued that while Armstrong's book was 'part of her feminist activism', and a call for cultural and political change, 'misery lit' sought 'to sell the pain of others as entertainment'.39 Contemporary journalists echoed this argument: an article in the *New York Times* about Pelzer was titled 'Dysfunction For Dollars', while the *Observer* wrote about 'Child abuse as entertainment', and the *Independent* described 'A million-dollar industry called Dave'.40 Nonetheless, the publication, popularity, and dissemination of all of these texts marked a key shift in late twentieth-century British society. Survivors were able to share their own experiences in public, in their own terms, often for the first time, and these accounts were commercially, publicly, and politically significant. Survivor accounts provided in feminist and 'misery lit' texts alike were not solely framed around 'misery', 'cruelty', and 'despair', but also in terms of 'hope', 'resilience', 'survival', and 'triumph'.41 Enabling survivors to provide their own accounts led to complex representations of emotion over the life course. These works presented the confrontation of experience and emotion as a liberating process, and were supported by concurrent accounts from survivors in newspapers about the entwined and long-term physical, emotional, and mental effects of childhood abuse.42

The ways in which survivor autobiographies were promoted and discussed in this late twentieth-century moment were distinct to the British context. While journalists in British newspapers criticised the idea that suffering had become entertainment, national publishers also sought to frame these books carefully, in comparison to how the same books were packaged and marketed in America. Making this point in 1988, an article in *Feminist Review* argued that the American marketing of *Kiss Daddy Goodnight* involved 'disgusting, almost titillating hype', presenting the book as 'A shocking, challenging expose of our ultimate sexual taboo!'43 In 2001, the *Observer* reported that most British publishers had initially rejected Pelzer's book, even though it had been on the *New York Times* bestseller list for three years. The newspaper reported a 'consensus' among British publishers that this type of descriptive account 'wouldn't work here'.44 When Pelzer's first book was published in Britain, the *Observer* stated, publishers replaced its 'garish' packaging with a 'classy-looking' cover.45 British audiences, like American ones, were interested to read these graphic recollections of childhood experience and emotion, but they were marketed in Britain in more careful, discrete, and private terms.

Examination of autobiographies relating to child abuse thus demonstrates another new space in which survivor experiences and emotions were shared from the late twentieth century. This space was governed by survivors themselves—sharing positive as well as negative accounts—but also by the interests of commercial publishers and members of the public, and by overarching cultural frameworks of trauma and emotion. Discussing childhood abuse was constructed variously as therapeutic, politically powerful, and as public entertainment. Yet discussions were also modified by distinctly British assumptions about when and how private family experiences should be shared and made public, and policed by concerns about whether descriptions of personal experience were 'authentic' or 'true'.

#### *Childhood Matters*

In addition to growing focus from newspapers and publishing houses, academic and charitable interest in the long-term effects of childhood abuse was also developing from the mid-1990s. The National Commission of Inquiry into the Prevention of Child Abuse was notable in this context, established in 1994 by the NSPCC to consider the 'different ways in which children are harmed, how this can best be prevented, and to make recommendations for developing a national strategy for reducing the incidence of child abuse'.46 The Commission members hailed from a range of professions and backgrounds. The Chair was former lawyer and Labour life peer Lord Williams of Mostyn, while other members were drawn from social work, academia, paediatrics, and Parliament. The NSPCC also appointed the chief executive of Channel Four, Michael Grade, and *Sun* agony aunt, Deidre Sanders, with the hope of gaining 'more coverage in the popular press and on television'—again indicative of growing public interest in this topic, and increased political recognition of the significance of media support.47

The Commission did not directly appoint individuals personally affected by abuse, though it did seek out their written contributions, as well as those from educationalists, clinicians, lawyers, researchers, and journalists. The Commission collected 10,000 testimonies in total.48 Significantly, one chapter of the final report's 'Background Papers', co-written by the sociologists Corinne Wattam and Claire Woodward, focused on learning about prevention from those personally affected by abuse.49 Following a parallel system to Armstrong, Wattam and Woodward placed adverts in agony aunt pages looking for the 'experiences' of 'victims of abuse', and received 1121 letters.50 The majority of these (721) told the author's life story; 130 responded directly to the Commission's terms of reference; and the remainder were written by concerned relatives, friends, and professionals.51 People who identified as female wrote 88 per cent of life-story letters. This gender disparity—in addition to reflecting the market for 'misery lit'—was also replicated in the responses to surveys conducted in the 2010s, suggesting an extent to which women felt more comfortable, or expected, to disclose, read about, and discuss historic abuse.52

In analysing these letters, Wattam and Woodward aimed to assess the common causes and types of child abuse, the ages at which abuse typically started, and the person believed responsible. Wattam and Woodward also analysed whether, when, and how the authors had reported abuse, and the strategies for recovery and prevention which they had found helpful.53 This represented a focus, again present in earlier sociological and policy work, in using survivor experience to draw 'lessons' for future practice. The key lessons drawn echoed the points made by agony aunts. Many letters received pinpointed a culture of denial within which abused children and surviving adults were encouraged to remain silent. Thirteen per cent of the 721 lifestory letters were written by authors who had never spoken about being abused before.54 Authors suggested that the majority of Britons would rather pretend that child abuse did not exist than address its unpleasant realities.55 Within the life-story category, only 32 per cent of authors had told someone about their abuse as a child, and 29 per cent of these people had received a 'negative' reaction and been ignored, dismissed, or even punished.56

A suspicion of child protection professions and systems emerged in Wattam and Woodward's study. Respondents described the 'child abuse system' as a 'faceless group' which had treated them abusively, and made particular criticism of health, psychiatric, and social and legal services.57 Demonstrating an appetite for peer support, one respondent wrote that 'the last thing we need is someone who knows nothing apart from what they have read in books or through so-called training'.58 Others argued that child protection professionals should have 'firsthand experience' or 'have been abused in childhood themselves'.59 A study published in 2002 also directly addressed this belief in peer support, and was written by Christine Walby, a member of this NSPCC Commission, Matthew Colton, a child welfare academic, and Maurice Vanstone, a lecturer in criminology. On carrying out detailed interviews with 24 individuals who were abused in residential homes, Walby, Colton, and Vanstone found that 'several subjects' of their interviews emphasised the importance of self-help groups, and that 'some felt that such groups offer the most effective form of help for survivors'.60

As such, the National Commission of Inquiry into the Prevention of Child Abuse directly sought out and took seriously the experiences of adults who had been abused in childhood, foreshadowing later work in child welfare and criminology.61 While this type of consultation was becoming increasingly important in policy and academic analysis, it was not the central focus of the Commission's final report, *Childhood Matters* (1996). Rather, the report focused primarily on providing recommendations to prevent future abuse, notably encouraging: better cooperation between health, children's services, probation services, teachers, and voluntary groups; and the creation of mechanisms for community reporting.62 Discussing the project, Members of Parliament and journalists likewise focused on prevention, and often on the recommendations to instate a Minister for Children and to see children as individuals, not possessions.63

Discussion of the long-term experiences of survivors was nonetheless present in *Childhood Matters*, which argued that the contemporary legal system was sometimes 'as damaging as the original abuse itself'.64 Furthermore, covering the report, the *Guardian* reprinted a comment from Lord Williams that 'the voices of survivors … were constantly in our minds'.65 Bolstered by broader shifts in confessional culture, and by the recognition of the long-term effects of trauma, social policy and the voluntary sector—along with commercial agencies—were turning their attention to the experiences and emotions of survivors, for the first time, from the 1980s and particularly from the 1990s. Social policy-makers and researchers were also beginning, for the first time, to couch the significance of their work in terms of accessing experiential expertise.

*Childhood Matters* was important also in extending debates from the 1980s, analysed in Chaps. 5 and 6, which encouraged practitioners and researchers to reflect on and share their own emotions and experiences, particularly when analysing child protection. Again, this belief was later addressed directly in the research of Walby, Colton, and Vanstone. Testifying to the range of emotions which survivors themselves expressed, the researchers found that their survey respondents felt 'anger' and 'pain' but that they also described the 'dignity of survival'.66 Walby, Colton, and Vanstone argued that listening to these stories was 'humbling and traumatic', and that they were concerned about the impact which their own research and 'intrusion' was having on their interviewees.67

Turning their gaze to social work and police, Walby, Colton, and Vanstone also argued that 'emotional distancing' by professions could be received very negatively, and could leave survivors 'being defined as "other" and in a sense dehumanized'.68 Criticism of the legal system in this regard was echoed in 2002 by survivors providing evidence to the Home Affairs select committee, one of whom argued that, 'my experiences were viewed as pieces of paper' when seeking redress.69 While another respondent to this committee argued that the Criminal Prosecution Service had done a 'good job', the entry of adult survivors into child protection debate nonetheless invited further professional reflection.70

#### Collective Action

Echoing the focus on community support in *Childhood Matters*, new voluntary and self-help groups emerged in the late-1990s and 2000s to support survivors in Britain, developing alongside parallel groups in America, Europe, and Australia.71 These groups sought to enable survivors themselves to provide narrative accounts of their experiences in collective terms, adding to representations collected and constructed by state, professional, and commercial organisations. In Britain, new voluntary organisations included national groups such as the National Association for People Abused in Childhood (NAPAC), One in Four UK, and Phoenix Survivors, and regional groups such as Survivors Swindon, Nottinghamshire's Survivors Helping Each other, and Norfolk's Surviving Together. By 2015, there were at least 135 of these national and regional groups united under the umbrella organisation The Survivors Trust.72

The shape, aims, and membership of each of these groups varied markedly. Some groups had specific foci, such as the Male Survivors Trust, Childhood Incest Survivors, and Minister and Clergy Sexual Abuse Survivors.73 Regional groups were usually small and primarily constituted by weekly or fortnightly support meetings, although some created leaflets, newsletters, and helplines. Other groups also engaged in campaign work. For example, Phoenix Survivors organised several national campaigns and spoke to Members of Parliament and journalists to lobby for restrictions in where sexual offenders could live and work.74 Notably, Phoenix Survivors took a broad approach to the problems of survivors—for instance helping people to pay their bills—as the group argued that challenges to material living situations reflected and contributed to people's 'bleak emotional state[s]'.75

One key parallel across these disparate groups was that many were founded by adults who had themselves faced historic abuse, and who had struggled to access professional help. Phoenix Survivors was established by Shy Keenan in 2001, who wanted to use her experiences of physical and sexual abuse and neglect to help others. Keenan was joined in 2006 by Sara Payne, whose activism was discussed in Chap. 6, and the group's mandate was extended to also provide support for families of murdered children—indicative of how leaders governed and reshaped the priorities of voluntary groups.76 Peter Saunders founded NAPAC, one of the largest groups working in this area, in 1997. Saunders had come to reflect on his childhood experiences of abuse when he was in his late 30s, in the mid-1990s.77 He had struggled to find support, telling newspapers that telling his family had 'torn' them apart and that he had tried to call ChildLine and the NSPCC to no avail.78

Following this, a second shared premise underlying many of these support groups was the idea that adults who had been affected by historic abuse may be able to help one another, more than professionals could; an idea echoed in the concurrent academic studies by Wattam, Woodward, Walby, Colton, and Vanstone. Discussing this explicitly with *The Times* in 1996, Saunders argued, 'The one thing that bastard gave me is an ability to empathise with victims of child abuse.'79 Testifying to the Home Affairs select committee in 2002, another survivor argued that through institutional abuse, in particular, they had been 'linked' to other victims by the 'perversion' of one perpetrator.80

While the value of experiential expertise was thus promoted by survivors speaking to social policy, select committees, and newspapers, many leaders of survivor support groups themselves initially questioned its worth, or their own status as expert. When Keenan first began to receive requests for help, she reported that she had felt 'lost', not only because she did not have the time or the money to reply to all requests, but also because she doubted her 'authority' to do so, in comparison to those working in legal, police, social work, or medical fields.81 In further interviews and in their own academic publications, nonetheless, the leaders of Phoenix Survivors and NAPAC came to assert that their personal experiences had given them the expertise to become spokespeople and had developed their emotional expertise and empathy.82

This premise shaped the specific types of support typically offered by these groups: phone lines staffed by other adults affected by abuse; websites with fora to talk to others; and online spaces in which adults could creatively express their feelings about the past, for example through paintings, poetry, and prose. As well as suggesting a growing culture of selfexpression in late twentieth-century Britain, these spaces also reflected the argument of Joanna Bourke that the communication of pain has forged 'bonds of community' throughout time.83 Memories of childhood abuse had forged informal interpersonal and community bonds previously, but these bonds became publicly visible, and to an extent publicly powerful, from the 1990s. A sense of community between and within survivor communities was fostered not only through the description of pain but also by sharing positive experiences of joy, strength, and happiness.84 Again, voluntary organisations provided a means for survivors to rebuff and challenge professional categorisations of survivorship, and to present complexity. While challenging professional interests, this activism also represented a radical model whereby the long-term impacts of child abuse would be defined, analysed, and even managed through collective peer support, which could supplement, or if necessary bypass, statutory, community, or family provisions.

These groups continued a significant new mode of voluntary action emergent since the 1960s. Like other groups studied in this book, they bridged the 'new politics' of identity and New Social Movements and more long-standing forms of self-help and mutual aid. The groups represented experiential knowledge, but were also not lacking in professionalism nor formal organisation: NAPAC, for example, won grants from the Department of Health, Home Office, National Lottery, charitable trusts, and private companies, as well as through fundraising.85 NAPAC also appointed formal boards of trustees and worked 'professionally' by establishing new helplines and websites and, as the chapter later outlines, working with policy and media. This book has analysed numerous such small voluntary groups who emerged around child protection and who, similarly, bridged 'professional' and 'expert', 'support' and 'advocacy' roles. The history of late twentieth-century Britain is incomplete without examination of such organisations.

#### Survivors as Experts

While policy-makers had consulted certain types of patient and serviceuser from the 1960s, it was only in the late 1990s that researchers began to acknowledge the long-term impact of childhood abuse and to consult survivors, with experience of abuse, as expert.86 The potential mental health consequences of childhood abuse were first recognised by the state in the *Mental Health National Service Framework* (1999), the *Women's Mental Health Strategy: Into the Mainstream* (2002), and the Social Exclusion Unit Report on *Mental Health and Social Exclusion* (2004).87 In a related shift, the *National Suicide Prevention Strategy* of 2001 included an explicit objective 'to promote the mental health of victims and survivors of abuse, including child sexual abuse'.88

By the early-to-mid-2000s, policy-makers began to consult survivors, often in terms of soliciting or reading select committee evidence about their experiences and emotions, as collated by voluntary organisations.89 A range of models of consultation, all of which became important, were apparent in the Victims of Violence and Abuse Prevention Programme (VVAPP). The programme was established in 2005 by the Department of Health, the National Institute for Mental Health in England, and the Home Office. It aimed to consider the nature, extent, and effects of child sexual abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, sexual exploitation, stalking, sexual harassment, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and 'honour crimes'.90 This broad approach to multiple issues demonstrated that, to an extent, social policy-makers were beginning to assess different types of violence in tandem in this period, following the late twentiethcentury contexts of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in which child abuse and domestic violence were often approached separately.

The first stage of the VVAPP was to gather evidence and six teams consisting of professionals, academics, and voluntary organisations were established.91 One of these teams aimed to consider adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse.92 Twenty-one 'expert advisors' composed this group, including academics, police, mental health specialists, clinicians, and representatives from the Home Office. Also included were seven members of voluntary organisations representing NAPAC, the Women's Therapy Centre, Rape Crisis, First Person Plural, and The Survivors Trust.93 Suggestive that credence was paid to the experiential knowledge of survivors, Gillian Finch, the chair of The Survivors Trust, co-chaired this expert group alongside a Consultant Nurse on Sexual Abuse, Chris Holley.94 The expert groups established the aims and scope of the VVAPP, which ultimately produced several outputs: mapping the common pathways from childhood victimisation to subsequent re-victimisation and the health and mental health of adults, producing a directory of the 180 voluntary organisations providing counselling for victims, and creating a Delphi method consultation.95

The Delphi consultation was significant because it not only demonstrated an appetite to consult with survivors as experts but also a social policy desire to find singular policy 'solutions' from a diverse and complex group. The consultation gave questionnaires to 285 'experts', including representatives from medicine, law, policy, children's charities, and survivor groups. The questionnaires sought out opinions about the existing provision of therapeutic services for child, adolescent, and adult victims, survivors, and perpetrators of abuse.96 Responses were drawn through several rounds, whereby the survey was revised and redistributed after each round looking to uncover common responses. Of the 285 experts consulted, 123 responded to questions about adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse.97 In the relevant section, the experts were asked about the 'most important principles and core beliefs' to inform work with 'victims/survivors', the most effective interventions, how to manage safety and risk, how to train people, prevention, and improving outcomes.98 While it is not clear how many survivors were consulted, a fixed question on the survey did ask those with 'expertise from personal experience' to explain what strategies had helped them to recover from violence and abuse.99

The final reports produced by the VVAPP documented several conclusions relevant to the care of adults abused as children. Analysis of the Delphi consultation found strong agreement that no 'single therapeutic approach' would be effective for all survivors—indicating that there was no simple, singular policy response.100 Participants agreed that any measures taken from the programme should be 'needs-led and victim/survivor centred', with all involved parties thinking carefully about survivor experiences, and giving survivors 'control' and 'choice'.101 While experts agreed on these broad principles, they disagreed about the efficacy of specific forms of therapy for survivors (namely regression, hypnotherapy, and inner child techniques) and also over whether therapy should be offered on an 'open-ended basis' or not.102 Experts also disagreed about whether those providing therapy needed qualifications and training, demonstrating that a level of professional suspicion remained about the value of peer support.103

The production, conclusions, and dissemination of the VVAPP demonstrated several key points about the ways in which survivors' experiences and emotions were becoming expertise in the 2000s. Notably, this project's survey consulted people with experiences of childhood abuse at the same time and in the same ways as those with professional experiences in law, social work, and medicine. This focus on experiential expertise was also highly visible in later analysis and framing of the programme and its results. In a subsequent book describing the VVAPP, the programme's director Catherine Itzin referred to the importance of consulting 'experts by both experience and profession'.104 At the press release for this programme in November 2006, the Minister of State for Public Health, Caroline Flint, stated that the VVAPP was 'essentially informed by the strong voice of victims and survivors, of all ages and from all backgrounds'.105

Significantly, leaders of voluntary organisations would mediate, represent, and interpret the 'strong voice' of survivors. Indeed, one summary report produced by the VVAPP stated that the voluntary sector 'represents the interests—and the voice—of victims and survivors'.106 Small voluntary groups had also played a significant role in representing the experiences and emotions of children and parents, as seen throughout this book. However, by the 1990s and 2000s, new spaces were also opening up for such small groups to yield significant influence over social policy and research. While the NSPCC's National Commission of Inquiry into the Prevention of Child Abuse, held in 1994, had invited survivors to write letters to its researchers, the VVAPP also appointed survivors, found through voluntary organisations, on to its advisory structures. One VVAPP publication released in 2006 even argued that 'survivor organisations' should become a key component in a broader system of multiagency co-operation, working as service providers alongside statutory services—a position in tension with survivor critique of such agencies.107

To an extent therefore, survivors had further opportunities to contribute to policy construction in the 1990s and 2000s, and spokespeople couched the significance of policy work in terms of accessing survivor experience. This marked a significant transition from the 1970s and 1980s, when the long-term effects of child abuse were rarely the focus of political inquiry, and in part reflected the work of survivors to represent their own experiences and emotions in autobiography, newspapers, and through collective action. Nonetheless, significant limitations remained in the extent to which survivors were able to influence social policy.108 Research by criminologists and by the parent representative Sara Payne emphasised that there was a significant 'implementation gap' between the rhetoric about victim and survivor support and the help provided.109

Further, voluntary survivor groups continued to struggle to gain financial support from successive governments, and statutory services were often the key beneficiaries of new financial commitments in victim support.110 Survivor representatives and groups also had to continue to assert their rights to be heard, and to justify the significance of experiential expertise. Saunders, the founder of NAPAC, stated in 2013 that his organisation was only represented during Operation Yewtree, looking into the sexual offences of Jimmy Savile, after a journalist asked why survivors themselves were absent from debate.111 Therefore, through voluntary groups, survivors found new pathways to share their experiences with policy-makers. Nonetheless, they were not always successful in disrupting existing processes of policy-construction, nor in making their experiences and emotions influential.

#### Role of the Media

Newspaper and televisual interest played a significant role in bringing public and political attention towards survivor experience and emotion, often through partnership between specific individuals in the media and leaders of voluntary organisations. Survivors guided these partnerships, but broader media tropes, interests, and agendas also shaped the narration of experience. One regular arena for survivor visibility and influence was in terms of, from the 2000s, leaders of voluntary groups offering expert comment on prevailing news stories, for example commenting on the appointments of new Ministers for Children, the issue of smacking as punishment, and the sentencing of sexual offences.112 Published letters and quotations by voluntary leaders were printed and placed alongside those written by politicians and the leaders of large children's charities, demonstrating the authority of survivor groups.113

Survivor representatives often used this media space to make significant critiques of policy and practice. For example, Saunders wrote to the *London Evening Standard* that the appointment of Margaret Hodge as the first Minister for Children was a 'bad appointment' and that 'jaws dropped', because of the cases of sexual abuse in local care homes while she had been the leader of Islington council between 1982 and 1992.114 Saunders emphasised that his critique represented the emotions and experiences of a broader community, arguing that this appointment had left survivors 'feeling disillusioned and saddened'.115 Saunders' role in representing survivor experience continued in coverage from 2005, when the European Court of Human Rights awarded damage payments to a convicted paedophile, because of delays in setting his trial date. This case accrued much tabloid interest, and the *Daily Mirror*, *Daily Mail*, and *Daily Express* all quoted Saunders, who told the *Mail* that he felt 'bewilderment' while survivors would experience 'pain' and 'heartbreak'.116

In addition to responding to political, legislative, and social changes, survivor organisations also drove newspaper agendas, particularly through their appointment of celebrity patrons who, by sharing their own experiences, directed journalistic attention towards the lived experiences of child abuse and the fundraising efforts of voluntary groups. NAPAC, for example, appointed celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson and model Jerry Hall as patrons. Both spoke out about their childhood experiences for the charity. Hall discussed how her father 'had a lot of rages' and was 'quite violent', meaning that she knew 'the trauma of being a child and living in fear'.117 Hall's statement, made while relaunching the NAPAC's helpline in 2006, received coverage in the *London Evening Standard*, the *Sun*, and the *Express*, leading *Third Sector* magazine to comment that 'the right celebrity with the right story can put a small charity on the front pages'.118

Survivor representatives also worked with television—for example Shy Keenan, of Phoenix Survivors, and Colm O'Gorman, of the charity One in Four, both made documentaries in partnership with the producer Sarah MacDonald, which aired on the BBC. These documentaries made the experiences and emotions of these voluntary leaders their primary subject, extending interest in the ability of such leaders to channel and represent broader communities of survivors. Keenan's programme was a sixtyminute Newsnight documentary, *A Family Affair*, which aired in November 2000. This documentary discussed Keenan's childhood and adulthood experiences, and featured undercover footage she had taken of her stepfather, Stanley Claridge, confessing to having sexually assaulted her and her sister, and to having allowed his friends to do so also, on multiple occasions.119 While Keenan's childhood had been in the 1960s and 1970s, she sought to confront Claridge again in 2000, in her late-thirties, feeling that her own life was more established, and out of concern that her stepfather may again have access to children.120 Keenan approached O'Gorman, who helped her to approach the BBC.121 After *A Family Affair* was aired more of Claridge's victims came forward and the police launched 'Operation Phoenix'. On the basis of this, Claridge was sentenced to 15 years in prison at the age of 82.122

Keenan therefore exerted significant influence in contributing to the creation and shape of *A Family Affair*. Her persistence brought her case to the attention of the BBC, and she provided the crucial undercover footage. Keenan also shaped a critique of professional services which ran through this documentary and its subsequent news coverage. The programme itself discussed how perpetrators remained 'unchallenged by the authorities', and featured a reassessment of Keenan's childhood case files, which had barely mentioned Claridge.123 In subsequent newspaper coverage, Keenan positioned her work as empowering, stating that she would fight for victims when they could not fight for themselves.124 While Keenan was thus empowered in terms of using her experiences to shape this call for change, visions of vulnerability also framed media coverage. The documentary, for example, showed footage of Keenan being sick on the side of a motorway after her encounter with Claridge.125 Subsequent media interviews described both Keenan's 'incredible bravery' and her 'vulnerability'.126

Continuing this close focus on the experiences and emotions of survivors, guided both by media interests and by survivors themselves, O'Gorman worked again with the director of *A Family Affair*, Sarah MacDonald, to make the documentary *Suing the Pope* (2002).127 *Suing the Pope* followed O'Gorman as he returned to his birthplace, County Wexford in Ireland, to expose a Catholic Priest who had sexually abused him between the ages of 14 and 16, and to highlight the institutional failings that had enabled this abuse. The programme highlighted the institutional barriers for individuals coming forward about child abuse, with particular focus on the power and insularism of Catholicism in this small community.128 O'Gorman was significant in directing the focus and content of this documentary. He reported that this work had given him a sense that religious and community power dynamics had shifted significantly, with the Catholic Church becoming the 'subject' of investigation, rather than the 'masters' of it.129 In later years, other survivor organisations also framed media responses to clerical abuse, and NAPAC called for the Pope to review historic cases, make an apology, and talk directly to community representatives.130

While O'Gorman was highly important in shaping the content of *Suing the Pope*, and the representation of his experiences on the screen, community and public responses to this television programme could not be controlled. The response to *Suing the Pope* was, an updated version reported, primarily dominated by more victims coming forward and by an outpouring of public sympathy for those involved. A radio presenter in Wexford told the programme that they had 'people ringing in crying', and, notably, 'women in tears'. However, a minority response made threats of violence towards the programme's interviewees.131 One interviewee later reported that they had initially struggled to cope with community attention after the documentary aired. They reported feeling like 'a goldfish in a goldfish bowl' and facing severe depression, although they later developed a sense of 'serenity'.132

Thus, by the 2000s survivors were in part able to drive media narratives around child protection, and were hailed by media as 'renowned expert[s]'.133 The expertise of these individual survivor representatives derived from their personal experiences of abuse, but also from their ability to represent the emotions of broader communities of survivors. Newspapers published critical letters from survivor leaders, but also complimented those who were 'measured and articulate', suggesting the ways in which tacit norms of 'appropriateness' governed which survivors became representatives and how.134 Indeed, not all survivors were convinced by the value of media relationships. One anonymous survivor of institutional abuse, for example, in 2002 told the Home Affairs select committee that the media 'seems to paint survivors of child abuse as money grabbing liars'.135 This testimony showed that, for some, suspicion of 'authority' and statutory services also extended towards the media. Further, the statement portrayed the challenges for voluntary leaders hoping to represent all survivor opinion publicly.

An early reconstruction of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, founded in 2014 to explore historic cases, further probed this challenge. In 2014, the *Guardian* reported that panel members believed Home Secretary Theresa May was giving disproportionate influence to 'a vocal minority instead of the majority of abuse survivors', and that a 'small number of individuals and survivor groups' were exercising undue influence, particularly through their work with 'social media and the press'.136 In the early twenty-first century, therefore, as survivor groups further developed and became empowered partners in forming media relationships, the role of specific groups and leaders also faced new critique. This critique raised questions of representativeness and inclusion, but was also in part a revived challenge to the power and authority of experiential and emotional expertise.

#### Childhood and Survivorship

A complex relationship emerged between the constructed rights and responsibilities of survivors and children. On the one hand, interest in the experiences and emotions of children—traced in Chaps. 3 and 4 of this book—had lain the groundwork for professions and policy to listen to, and care about, the experiences and emotions of survivors in later years. Certain channels that were established in the 1980s for children, such as ChildLine, were later used by adult survivors looking to seek help and to raise awareness of the long-term effects of abuse. At the same time, the accounts provided by survivors in the 1990s and 2000s also demonstrated the limitations to the shifts traced in Chaps. 3 and 4. While there was increasing rhetoric from charities and social policy about 'listening to children' over these years, later survivor testimonies demonstrated that many were unable to report abuse in these decades, nor to discuss their experiences publicly.

In the 1990s and 2000s, policy researchers looking for participants often suggested that survivors would be driven by a desire to protect future children, or that they even owed these children a duty of care, as part of a related community. Many survivors echoed this sentiment. Replying to Woodward and Wattam, one adult wrote that while 'we can't undo what happened to us', 'we can do a lot more to protect future generations'.137 Providing evidence to the Home Affairs select committee in 2002, another survivor argued for the prosecution of all historic perpetrators, because they posed 'a threat to other innocent children'.138 Politicians echoed the idea that survivors discussed their experiences and emotions in order to help future children, and that these testimonies could be mobilised to prevent future cases.139

While concern for present and future children was a significant driver for participation in social policy, survivors did not only speak out seeking to protect present and future children. Survivors also at times discussed their experiences and emotions as part of an individual therapeutic process, and to encourage other adults to seek help. Further, voluntary survivor organisations also sought to shift the focus of social policy and academic research from children alone towards analysis of the lifelong effects of abuse and neglect—areas which had been overlooked from the 1960s. Testimonies collated and published by voluntary organisations provided space for survivors to discuss their childhood experiences and the ways in which they had processed these as adults.140 To an extent, survivor groups felt that they faced a more challenging task than children's charities in forcing publics to confront these issues, and that their cause was less 'fashionable' than that of the 'cosy, cuddly charities' which focused on children.141 This tension between self-protection and protecting future children was also felt by individuals: one contributor to Armstrong's collection, for example, grappling with her decision to leave her children, asked, 'what about my needs as a child? What about my needs?'142

By presenting the long-term effects of violence, testimonies provided by adult survivors changed the public and political perceptions of children facing abuse, emphasising that surviving children may face long-term emotional, physical, and mental issues which would require significant support. Testimonies in this area called for a reconceptualisation of childhood—to be approached as a transient state and assessed as part of a broader process of lifelong development, rather than separated off from thinking about adulthood. In this way, survivor campaigning challenged the broader post-war fixation on segregating childhood by 'stage' or 'category', visible, for example, in the proliferation of new categories in childhood psychology and education.143 This focus on approaching childhood as a transient state echoed work by Kidscape, studied in Chap. 4, in providing specific but interlinked support for children in infancy, childhood, adolescence, and as adults. Notions of survivorship therefore, and the sharing of lived experiences and emotions by survivors, came to the fore significantly later than the testimonies of children, but also challenged understandings of childhood.

#### Conclusion

Decades after children's voices were sought out by charities, social policymakers, and media in the 1970s and 1980s, in the late 1990s, and particularly from the 2000s, adults who had been abused in childhood—survivors began to be heard. Survivor representatives themselves in part drove the process through which these individuals were increasingly sought out, listened to, and portrayed. Survivors took the lead in describing their experiences and emotions anew in literature, to agony aunts, and in newspaper interviews. Voluntary organisations were significant in providing a forum through which survivors could access peer support and contribute to political and media lobbying, and new groups emerged which cross-cut categories of self-help, identity politics, and 'professional' non-governmental organisations. The process through which survivors became visible was also, however, shaped by the interests and influences of, for example, publishing houses, journalism, academia, and social policy. Self-expression was also governed and narrated through the broader analytical categories of 'victim' and 'survivor', though these classifications were challenged, as well as adopted and changed, by voluntary groups.

Through these multiple fora, public and political attention turned to the long-term effects of child abuse for the first time in the 1990s and 2000s. The experiences and emotions of survivors became forms of expertise, consciously mobilised by survivors and sought out by media and policy. By the late 1990s, survivor representatives sat on consultative panels of select committees, large charities, and public inquiries, and also—at times in conflict with these formal roles—criticised social policy, political appointments, and judicial decisions through television and print media. More than the parent organisations studied in Chap. 6, survivor groups became incorporated into a broad landscape of supportive statutory and voluntary services, and they provided significant levels of peer support by phone and through the new medium of the internet. Nonetheless, notable gaps in provision for survivor welfare remained, and the inclusion of survivor representatives in social policy was at times tokenistic, temporary, and not reflected in policy change.

This chapter—and this argument—raises a significant question: when experience and emotion developed as forms of expertise, whose experiences and emotions became powerful, and in which spaces, and why? Notably, women were the first and primary users of private spaces to discuss and disclose historic abuse: social surveys, agony aunt columns, and peer support phone lines. Both male and female survivor representatives became visible speaking publicly about their experiences through literature, public policy inquiries, and media. While the child was often addressed as genderless in the educational materials studied in Chap. 4, therefore, by the 1990s and 2000s the gender of survivors shaped how they responded to abuse on a personal level, but also whether this response was made in private or public spaces, and as a consumer, peer supporter, recipient of therapy, or prominent spokesperson. While experts by experience and emotion became prominent in the late twentieth century, researchers and policy-makers rarely made assessment of which demographic groups they were empowering or disempowering, nor of the extent to which experiential experts were drawn from specific class, gender, ethnic, or age groups. The next chapter of this book, its conclusion, considers inclusion and diversity alongside other key issues for the future of child protection work, and discusses how looking to history can reframe present thinking.

#### Notes

canon and practice', *Journal of Anxiety Disorders*, 21 (2007): 164– 175. For a discussion of the history and limitations of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, please see: Shadia Kawa and James Giordano, 'A brief historicity of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Issues and implications for the future of psychiatric canon and practice', *Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine*, 7, no. 2 (2012).

abuse', *The Sun*, 31 December 2002, 43; Deidre Sanders, 'Dear Deidre: Abuse agony', *The Sun*, 7 February 2003, 39; Deidre Sanders, 'Dear Deidre: Hurt by family secret', *The Sun*, 3 June 2003, 39.

Inc., 1997); Dave Pelzer, *A Man Named Dave: A Story of Triumph and Forgiveness* (New York: Plume, 2000).

Other studies have managed to find equal numbers of male and female participants, for example, this study in American interviewed 64 women and 57 men. This gender-balanced sample was recruited through significant canvassing for participants in transport stations, shops, schools, libraries, churches, cafes, and social service agencies (Claire Burke Draucker, Donna S. Martsolf, Cynthia Roller, Gregory Knapik, Ratchneewan Ross, and Andrea Warner Stidham, 'Healing from Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Theoretical Model', *Journal of Child Sexual Abuse*, 20, no. 4 (2011): 435–466.

fifth series, vol. 578, col. 742; David Brindle, 'Child abuse inquiry urges cabinet minister for children', *Guardian*, 22 October 1996, 10; Louise Jury, 'Child abuse inquiry launched by NSPCC', *Guardian*, 24 March 1994, 7; David Brindle, 'Public urged to act as abuse 'harms 1 million children a year"', *Guardian*, 23 October 1996, 2; C. J. Hobbs and P. L. Heywood, 'Doctors have a vital role in identifying children at risk of abuse', *British Medical Journal*, 1 March 1997, 314.

social worker wrote that Shy had forced herself upon him on her notes. This short statement, Keenan felt, 'influenced everyone else in authority I tried to tell.' (see Dwyer Hogg, 'To catch a child molester', 47).

143. For a fascinating account of the emergence of one particular new category, autism, see: Bonnie Evans, *The metamorphosis of autism: A history of child development in Britain* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). In terms of the history of post-war education, see: David Crook, 'Local Authorities and Comprehensivisation in England and Wales, 1944–1974', *Oxford Review of Education*, 28, no. 2–3 (2002): 247–260; David Crook, 'Politics, politicians and English comprehensive schools', *Journal of the History of Education Society*, 42, no. 3 (2013): 365–380; A. H. Halsey, *Education, economy, and society: a reader in the sociology of education* (New York: Free Press; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1965); Richard Harris and Samuel Rose, 'Who benefits from grammar schools? A case study of Buckinghamshire, England', *Oxford Review of Education*, 39, no. 2 (2013): 151–171; Terry Haydn, 'The strange death of the comprehensive school in England and Wales, 1965–2002', *Research Papers in Education*, 19, no. 4 (2004): 415–432. For an account of 'staging and aging' in the early twentieth century, see: Clementine Beauvais, 'Ages and ages: the multiplication of children's 'ages' in early twentieth-century child psychology', *History of Education*, 45, no. 3 (2015): 304–318.

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## Conclusion

Scholars of social policy, history, and media have outlined the ways in which prominent physicians, children's charities, and 'moral panics' have shifted the understandings of child abuse and guided child protection policy in the late twentieth century.1 Yet, attention must also be paid to the activism and campaigning of people who were themselves personally affected by child abuse. This is a recent history. It was as recently as the 1960s that clinicians invented the battered child syndrome, hoping to draw public and political attention towards abused children. Discussions about this term between paediatric radiologists and the NSPCC were ingrained with concern about the emotional inner lives and lived experiences of children and parents. Nonetheless, children, parents, and survivors did not initially have public policy or media spaces in which to represent their own experiences in their own terms.

This began to change from the late 1960s and through the 1970s, as parents formed small self-help groups and made representations to Parliament, looking to make public the inner dynamics of family life. Likewise, sets of moral and media crises—notably about paedophilia and the death of Maria Colwell—brought to the fore questions of how parents, teachers, the state, and the voluntary sector should educate, protect, and empower children. The processes through which experience and emotion became forms of expertise, akin to and in tension with medical, legal, social work, and political forms of evidence, accelerated from the 1980s. It

was in this decade that numerous new groups led by parents mobilised, alongside groups looking to represent children and to provide mechanisms for children's self-representation on the public stage and in everyday life. These new voluntary groups drew on and contributed to a reconfiguration of parents and children in professional discourse, whereby psychologists and social workers made new examination of the inner lives of families. Such organisations powerfully mobilised media interest in parent and child emotions and experiences—often representing their work in terms of tropes of ordinariness, respectability, and gendered emotion.