Baby P council falsely accused me of abusing a child, reveals
whistleblower who feared she'd lose her daughter
By Eileen Fairweather
Last updated at 2:06 AM on 16th November 2008
In a devastating interview, the social worker who blew the whistle on
Haringey’s dire treatment of children before Baby P's death tells how
the council tried to destroy her life - for telling the truth.
The whistleblower who warned about Haringey Council’s failing social
services department six months before Baby P died has told how the
council victimised her, even going to the extraordinary lengths of
falsely accusing her of child abuse and beginning an investigation into
her nine-year-old daughter’s welfare.
In an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, social worker Nevres
Kemal said Haringey’s ‘monstrous’ allegation, which was made, she says,
in response to the concerns she raised, left her terrified she would
lose her daughter.
Miss Kemal had been accused, falsely, of shaking her fist in the face of
a 14-year-old girl (not her daughter) which, according to Haringey,
constituted ‘child abuse’.
Miss Kemal, 44, says: ‘They then turned their attention to my own
daughter and launched a child protection investigation into her, which
means that they felt she was at risk.
‘Ultimately, it could have led to her being taken away from me. I felt
terribly frightened all the time. It was evil.’
During what she calls a four-year ‘witch-hunt’, she lost her job, faced
a police investigation and saw her family and health fall apart.
An employment tribunal heard that she had been singled out by her bosses
because she was a whistleblower. Haringey eventually dropped the case
and paid her undisclosed compensation.
An experienced child protection officer, Miss Kemal had joined the
London borough in 2004, hoping it had learned lessons from the appalling
episodes in its recent past, including the case of Victoria Climbie, the
eight-year-old tortured and murdered in 2000.
Miss Kemal was ‘like a breath of fresh air’, said a colleague, ‘someone
who liked to roll her sleeves up and set to work, rather than take part
in meetings about meetings’.
Baby P
Preventable: Nevres Kemal warned about Haringey Council's failing social
services department six months before Baby P died
Yet very quickly it became apparent to Miss Kemal that the new
management brought in to prevent a repeat of the murder of Victoria
Climbie was still failing to protect children in its care. Unlike
others, Miss Kemal did not remain silent.
She warned that there was a very real risk of another murder. Faced with
her concerns, her managers took swift action – but not, it seems, to
avert another tragedy.
While they were busy trying to smear her, says Miss Kemal, Baby P was
being used as a punchbag and entering the final stage of his tragically
short life.
Miss Kemal offers a damning behind-the-scenes insight into Haringey’s
inept social services department.
‘God save us from endless inquiries,’ she says. ‘What Haringey needs is
managers sacked and arrested, common sense to prevail and money put into
frontline services.’
Children’s Services Director Sharon Shoesmith and Deputy Director
Cecilia Hitchen have now agreed in writing that Miss Kemal never abused
a child, in or outside of work.
‘I never regretted speaking up for the children who needed protection,’
says Miss Kemal.
‘I never thought, even when I was at my most scared, why did I not keep
my mouth shut?
'Even my elderly mother knew it was quite clear I’d opened my mouth to
defend children who Haringey wasn’t defending and they almost
immediately accused me of child abuse.’
Nevres Kemal began work at the council in late August 2004. London-born,
of Turkish Cypriot parents, she had specialised in child protection for
15 years.
She arrived with glowing references and an impeccable record and
expected to feel valued.
Miss Kemal’s immigrant parents arrived here in 1958 with just £7.50
between them and their little girl learned early to take responsibility,
as their interpreter in a foreign world.
She is a typically dutiful Turkish daughter.
After her father died, she moved back into her childhood home to keep
her mother company. She is also a Westernised, politically aware and
independent woman.
She says: ‘The office was very cliquey. Two key senior women were in a
relationship, and if your face didn’t fit, that was it. You’d just be
handed files, with no discussion. If you asked questions, you were
stupid.’
Haringey’s abysmal reputation had hindered the recruitment of
experienced, high-quality staff.
Of the 20 or so who worked in Miss Kemal’s open-plan office, most were
agency staff or newly-qualified Jamaican social workers, brought to
Britain by Haringey on expensive relocation packages.
On October 15, 2004, Miss Kemal’s manager allocated her a file about a
group of children.
Teachers and relatives feared that the same male carer had subjected
these children to grave sexual, physical and emotional abuse, and had
alerted Social Services many months before. But the social worker
responsible had quit, the file had not been reallocated, and the
children were simply forgotten.
Miss Kemal was horrified and told an employment tribunal last year:
‘Children had not been properly protected. It was exactly the sort of
situation, after the mistakes of the Victoria Climbie tragedy in
Haringey, that the new management brought in to improve procedures and
standards in child protection was supposed to prevent.’
Miss Kemal hurriedly interviewed the sad little group - the youngest was
only three - and decided they urgently needed rescuing.
Medical evidence could be vital if they were to be taken into care or
the man prosecuted, and they could need urgent treatment.
But, incredibly, no one seemed clear who was responsible for authorising
medicals - whether it was Social Services, police or health officials.
Post-Climbie, Miss Kemal found this extraordinary: medicals are basic to
child protection work.
She fired off desperate emails, and finally went over her manager’s head
to alert the department’s chief. She made it clear that the children had
already waited months - a delay which could be traced back to Social
Services. But she received no reply.
She therefore blew the whistle by alerting a local nurse consultant on
child protection, Dorian Cole. He finally cut through the lethargy.
He raised the case at the Area Child Protection Committee and even
circulated a flow chart on who had which responsibilities. ‘OK, folks,’
he wrote, ‘this is getting stupid. This is not complicated – let’s get
it sorted.’
On November 15, Miss Kemal managed to get the children added to the
Child Protection Register and they were eventually taken into care.
‘But,’ she says, ‘after this whistle-blowing, management became hostile
towards me.’
She adds: ‘I was destructively and comprehensively investigated and
punished for doing nothing wrong, whereas the managers who investigated
me left children with an abuser for months. It was Climbie all over
again, except that thankfully on this occasion no child died.’
Haringey used the allegations of a violent, mentally-ill man as the
basis of their case against Miss Kemal.
Her own family had been friends with the man’s family, fellow Turks, for
50 years, and her mother spoke by phone every day to his wife.
But the man had become a gambler, paranoid and violent and was, for a
time, compulsorily sectioned to a mental hospital.
Six years ago, the frightened wife found the courage to leave him, and
Miss Kemal helped her and her then 12-year-old daughter find a new home.
The Muslim husband furiously blamed Miss Kemal, a Christian, and her
‘feminist’, Western ways.
In November 2004, the woman rang Miss Kemal’s mother. The woman’s
daughter, who was now 14, had begun staying out late and, she feared,
mixing with boys who used drugs.
But, like many modern teenagers, the girl became angry when her mother
pointed out the dangers. She asked if Miss Kemal could come over to talk
to the girl about keeping herself safe.
The mother had already asked Haringey social services for advice, but in
vain.
Miss Kemal did not hesitate to help. But she found mayhem at the house.
Everyone was shouting and the girl told her to ‘f*** off’.
Two days later, the woman’s ex-husband falsely complained to the council
that Miss Kemal had shaken her fist in his daughter’s face.
The council that did nothing while little Victoria Climbie was tortured
to death - there were too many injuries on her emaciated body for the
pathologist to count - launched a full-scale investigation, accusing
Miss Kemal of child abuse.
Miss Kemal was first questioned on November 17 by her manager. Only
independent, external investigators are meant to question staff accused
of abuse.
She freely admitted that she had briefly raised her voice to be heard
above the clamour and, when the girl swore, raised her hand in a ‘stop’
gesture.
Miss Kemal, unwittingly, had provided the council the stick it wanted in
order to beat her. Extraordinarily, it decided that the raised hand and
voice constituted child abuse, or common assault. Now it set about
gathering further ‘evidence’.
A manager knew about the father’s mental illness and alleged domestic
violence, but interviewed the girl in her father’s presence. The
unhappy, confused teenager confirmed her father’s allegations.
Experts observe that she was likely to have come under great pressure
from her father and, indeed, she later retracted her accusation and
offered to give evidence for Miss Kemal. No matter, on the next day,
December 1, a divisional manager suspended her.
Miss Kemal returned to the family home in North London cowed, mystified
and terrified. The manager had announced a full-scale Section 47 child-
abuse investigation which would mean that Haringey would later turn
their attention to Miss Kemal’s daughter, who is now 13.
‘I reacted like normal families react - with anger and disbelief,’ says
Miss Kemal.
‘What was so terribly wrong is that a system that had the power and the
duty to protect children was now hounding me for trying to protect
children. It was
like I was in a fascist country. I felt totally alone.’
After Christmas I learnt that they would be investigating my daughter.
‘My daughter is my world, I adore her, it was such an injustice, a
farce. By launching this type of investigation - and to this day I don’t
know exactly what they did or who they spoke to - it means that the
child is at risk. It’s an understatement to say I cried. I cried a
river. Even now I cry thinking about it. How dare they cover their own
failures by accusing me of abuse?
‘It has made me a more sensitive social worker, I hope. I now know how
ordinary families feel if wrongly accused.
'I was so frightened of losing her that I would hold her like when she
was a baby and just cling to her, just looking at how beautiful she was
and is and think how in the world can these human beings, these
professionals, my former colleagues, accuse me of hurting my own child.’
Christmas at the Kemal house was tense, and the social worker’s devout
mother prayed hard, often in tears.
Miss Kemal’s 71-year-old immigrant mother was from a simple background.
She had raised her children to do good and speak up for what they
believed in, and she could not bear to see her hard-working, once
successful daughter too anxious and scared even to eat.
Their home filled with legal papers and accusations that she could not
understand.
She was incredulous that, with so many children in Britain in obviously
desperate need, Social Services had nothing better to do than hound her
child, who had helped so many.
The family’s mortification was complete when, on January 11, 2005, two
police officers turned up unannounced at their home.
They cautioned Miss Kemal for an alleged ‘common assault’ on a child and
told her to accompany them to the police station. But she refused to be
questioned there ‘like a criminal’. She had worked with one officer on
several cases, and they agreed to question her at home.
She concluded that the police were trying to help her get Haringey off
her back; once the tape was off, they hinted she had already been
exonerated.
Sure enough, three days later, police told Social Services there were no
grounds for prosecution. Yet Haringey’s investigation continued: more
safety checks were now ordered on her own child.
The family doctor and school denied there were any concerns but Miss
Kemal’s stomach knotted with nerves when she stood at the school gates.
She was terrified other parents would discover she was under
investigation for child abuse.
She felt unable to ask children back to play with her child, and the
whole family became isolated.
In March, Haringey’s investigator submitted her conclusions: she felt
the 14-year-old girl was under pressure from her mother to retract the
allegation against Miss Kemal. She believed the original allegation and
that the girl’s father was protective and supportive.
Miss Kemal was now told she faced the sack. Her union, Unison,
criticised management for still failing to specify the charge.
The union pointed out to the council that child abuse could mean many
things.
The union said: ‘You know that “child abuse” is a very emotive and
damaging thing to be accused of. We feel that Nevres’s human rights have
been breached.’
The teenage girl who Miss Kemal had been accused of abusing begged to be
reinterviewed, and wrote an apologetic letter to her.
It read: ‘Dear Nevi, I’m so sorry your [sic] in so much trouble. You
always stood by me and watched my back. I hope that you will forgive me
some day.’
The girl told Unison representative Pauline Bradley that ‘Nevi never
done anything to me and I want all this to end.’
She courageously turned up, unexpectedly, at Miss Kemal’s four-day
disciplinary hearing in October 2005, and insisted on addressing it. But
management ignored her her pleas were declared by the panel to be ‘in
our view not credible’.
Miss Kemal was found guilty of misusing her position; inappropriate
behaviour (shouting); and failure to conduct herself appropriately. She
was given a final warning because the most serious charge against her -
of physical and verbal aggression - was ‘unproven’.
Haringey at this stage allowed Miss Kemal back to work, but not in Child
Protection, her area of expertise.
Fearing that management would soon frame her again, she entered a claim
for discrimination at an employment tribunal.
Early last year, Watford Employment Tribunal found in her favour by
default, after Haringey failed to appear but later the council
challenged that decision. The council dragged the case out for another
year before settling out of court.
Miss Kemal says: ‘I said to Sharon Shoesmith, “You can take everything
from me: my home, my job, my good name but you cannot strip me of my
integrity, I’m not going to shut up. You don’t know what is going on in
Social Services, what is being concealed from you."
‘I am sure she was misled by her managers. They are the ones that have
to go. When Baby P, died I felt ashamed of us all. I feel ashamed of
social work managers and ordinary social workers and I feel in all this
the real issue is being lost, that this little boy is rotting in a grave
somewhere.
‘How many if onlys are we going to go through, how many inquiries?
Someone, somewhere, collectively has to take responsibility.’
Haringey Council said in a statement: ‘Nevres Kemal was employed as a
Senior Social Work Practitioner in the Referral and Assessment Team in
August 2004. In October 2004 she raised concerns about a particular
case. The matter was investigated. No breach of the statutory child
protection procedures occurred and children were not at risk.
‘The Commission for Social Care inspection has confirmed in a statement
today that it was satisfied that the council had dealt properly with the
individual case raised by Ms Kemal.
‘Ms Kemal was subsequently suspended over a separate matter following an
external complaint. She was dismissed in March 2007, caused by a
breakdown of trust and confidence based on a substantial number of
employment-related disputes over the course of her employment.
‘An employment tribunal last year was settled without a hearing, with no
admission of liability by the council. Nevres Kemal did not win her case
in the ET [employment tribunal] nor did any tribunal make any findings
concerning alleged whistleblowing.’
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Sunday, 16 November 2008
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