It was a Wednesday that started out like any other day for mother of two, Clair Willis. She was dashing to work after the school run when her mobile phone rang and a voice said: "This is the Metropolitan police. We're outside Lily and Tom's school."
Clair dropped the phone. "I thought they'd been killed."
Once she'd recovered herself, the voice continued: "This is Pauline from the child protection unit. Your case has been referred to social services and therefore to us because Lily has allegedly said that her brother, Tom, comes into her room and does things to her." They asked for permission to interview Lily, which Clair unhesitatingly gave. "I had absolutely nothing to hide," she says. "But once I realised they were still safe, I was furious. I thought to myself, who are these trashy people making such absurd accusations? Yet, as absurd as they were, I also knew this was a very frightening position for any parent to find themselves in."
Tom is 10, Lily 7. They go to one of the more sought-after local primary schools. Clair and her husband, David, live in north London. She is a GP; he is a college lecturer.
Within 20 minutes of the initial phone call, Pauline rang back to say that they had interviewed Lily and the case was now closed. She apologised for the mistake and told Clair, "We're entirely satisfied there is no abuse taking place in your house and we don't need to interview Tom."
"Of course, I was relieved," says Clair, "but by now I was seething. To have been put through this and then told that the police went away practically laughing because the allegations had been so absurd made me think there is something terribly wrong with our child protection system."
Clair learnt of the sequence of events after talking to the headteacher who said she had not informed Clair of the police investigation on the LEA's advice. She said that the allegations stemmed from a sleep-over held three months earlier by a friend in Lily's class. The friend's mother had been shocked to overhear the girls talking about sex and, in particular, Lily telling her daughter, "I sex my brother."
She had sat uneasily on this information until March this year when Lily was off school for a couple of days and her daughter said, "She's probably pregnant with Tom's baby." It was enough for the mother to go to the headteacher. Since the police have to be informed if allegations of suspected abuse are reported to a school officer, the headteacher tried to convince the mother that it would be far better to talk to Clair first. "But I don't know her well enough," was the response.
Once Clair knew the source of the allegations, she confronted the mother outside the school."I said I was very disappointed that she hadn't felt able to talk to me about it first. I pointed out that as a result of her actions my daughter had to be interviewed by the police. She was ruffled but still patronising. 'I'm sorry this has upset you so much, Clair,' she said 'but children don't just say things.'She was shocked: she didn't realise that once you make such serious allegations you forfeit anonymity."
For the next week Clair was sufficiently traumatised to dose herself with valium. "David was equally outraged, but he wasn't as emotional as I was, perhaps because I was the one who'd received the phone calls. It was the most horrible experience." When Clair later spoke to the duty social worker at the social services department, he said he knew she'd be terribly upset because there was clearly no foundation for the allegations. A week later she received a letter from the duty social worker which began: "I hope you and your family are well and that you are feeling less stressed after your child protection procedures experience."
When I called social services to ask if they now regretted the action taken, a spokesperson maintained: "It is always best to err on the side of caution. If there are allegations floating around which don't then involve the appropriate authorities, imagine the repercussions if it transpired there were some truth in them."
Clair does not blame the authorities for having stuck to the guidelines, but she wonders why Lily's headteacher (who later admitted she never believed the allegations) could not have made further enquiries.
But what of the "sexing" talk that set the whole process in motion? Was it unreasonable for the friend's mother to find this disturbing? Consultant psychologist David Cowell is sanguine: "Children will come out with the most explicit comments that can sound astonishingly knowing. Anyone who has seen children informally will realise their conversations can be pretty hair-raising."
In possible contrast to the childhood experience of their parents, children today are constantly exposed to sexual behaviour and language beyond their years (in pop music, soaps and so on). "Young people have sex on their mind and there's a lot of fantasy," says Peter Wilson, director of children's mental health charity Young Minds. "Often adults are uncomfortable with children's sexuality and certainly with their own children's, but we live in a time when sex is common parlance."
If Clair hears her children talking in a sexual way now, she deals with it as she always has. "They're such innocent things and everything they learn is from the playground," she says. "But, very occasionally, they may talk about 'sexing' this or that, and then I just say, 'I think this is going a bit far now,' and they stop."
It is now four months since the police turned up at Tom and Lily's school. Clair is less angry now but just as bewildered. "From day one I was completely open about it because it was so preposterous," she says. "Fortunately, Tom is hardly aware of what's been going on and Lily seems unaffected by her police interview."
If there are any lasting repercussions of the ordeal, it is that Clair is much less trusting of other parents. And sleep-overs have been banned.
Some names have been changed.
