Rebecca Whitehurst
The FACT (Falsely Accused Carers and Teachers) organisation had their annual general meeting in mid-October, and a passionately diverse affair it was.
FACT was started around the turn of the millennium following a spate of accusations by ex-care home leavers and students against their former helpers and teachers. While some of these allegations were genuine, many more were not; the accusation of sexual abuse will stick, and only needs to be made once to destroy lives.
There is a suspicion that the stress of the allegations led to the cancer that later ended the life of Mr Warr, and the annual Falsely Accused Day UK is now regularly held on his birthday. Jonathan King is, however, in fine fettle at 78 years of age, and at this year's event held forth twice, his rage undiminished years after having many of the charges against him thrown out. I immediately played his 1965 debut hit Everybody's Gone To The Moon on Spotify when I got home (followed by a stream of mesmerisingly diverse other hits).
In a short speech JK presented the idea of Operation Dirty Dozen, whereby establishment figures who are genuinely guilty of abuse are stung all at the same time, in a replica of the tactics used in the disastrous Operation Midland from the middle of the 2010s:
“Let's do what they do” he said, not without some exasperation.
Resplendent in red baseball cap and multicoloured trainers, King later praised the retelling of the story of Rebecca Whitehurst - a languages teacher who had recently been through the fire of false allegations - holding the attention of the packed hall for more than two hours with an all too sadly relatable tale of youth obsession gone wrong – and the effect that Sir Keir Starmer's 'Believe the Victims' policy can have on the career of a clearly brilliant young drama teacher.
Dr Kiron Griffin followed this appropriately enough with a recap on his work on Levels of Trauma: in a nutshell just an allegation of sexual misconduct is enough to set off the trauma cycle, and it behaves much in the same way of that of grief, with anger, denial, reasoning etc. all having their day.
The bold Kevin Felstead from the British False Memory Society spoke of the cases in which his work had led to acquittals, and the difficulty he had thus had with the media – a sector which seemingly couldn't bear stories of miscarriages of justice – until the outcome of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial was recently heard, that is.
There is a sort of Post-Depp resetting occurring in the media, following (now not so) recent scandals involving Liam Allan's collapsed rape trial, the disgrace of ex-Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders, the lies of opportunistic fantasist Carl 'Nick' Beech,and the subsequent ennoblement of ex Labour deputy Tom Watson (amongst plenty of others).
This last outrage has led to an apoplectic social media campaign from K Harvey Proctor, new FACT President, topping the cake of a day that collected together the great and the good of the world of investigating and exposing false allegations and wrongful convictions: those who had faced the heat, and those who had supported them through it.
The only question on peoples' minds as they left the Edgbaston community hall, as well as the evergreen 'Why do these allegations keep happening to good people?' was 'What will the new name be?' Watch this space!
By Sean Bw Parker
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