The ‘sad’ war between factions who should be working together to end the tyranny of parental alienation, is rearing its ugly head again…

Social media – instead of being the  world platform for free speech and the dissemination of ideas – is the new untamed wild west, a prairie blistered by vitriol, anger, viciousness, lies and libel.

Social media – instead of being the  world platform for free speech and the dissemination of ideas – is the new untamed wild west, a prairie blistered by vitriol, anger, viciousness, lies and libel.

There is no doubt the real prairie dog of insults and attack is Facebook.

And Andrew John Teague, from Swansea, and his supporters say he has become a real-life victim.

Andrew is co-founder of D.A.D.s  (dads against double standards) and the National Association of Alienated Parents and is seen by many as a prime mover in the battle alienation, climbing mountains and staging protests outside family courts across the UK.

However, he is regularly accused of theft, of cynically cashing in on the battle to bring parents and children back together again, of being a self-publicist, of accepting a free holiday and even being gifted a  car.

Now his personal story of surviving child-sex abuse, bullying and fear inside Britain’s child care system has been thrown in to doubt by social media posts.

The problem with the robotic world of social media is that it has no boundaries of human decency, lawfulness or compassion and allows heartless cyber bullies and keyboard thugs to share their vileness without control. 

In the meantime,  Peter Davies, NAAP founder and director, has submitted this in an attempt, as he describes it,  to put the record straight:

How the sheer hell of a child abuse victim has been used to perpetuate his suffering

Introduction

Andrew Teague says he spent a total of six years living in the inhumane conditions of children’s homes in North and South Wales during the 70s and 80s. 

We know now that some childrens’ homes were hellholes where many were routinely subjected to the most degrading, horrendous and appalling abuse imaginable.

In a cruel twist of fate when Andrew was a boy he says he had actually asked to be placed in care. 

Even then he was a survivor and reasoned that at least then his basic needs would be catered for. The reality of life in care turned out to be an even worse nightmare than the one he was trying to escape from.

As if living with the agony of these experiences has not been hell enough, in recent months, Andrew has been forced, by a certain individual and a few of his supporters, to relive these horrendous memories which are the stuff of nightmares. 

Why anyone would wish to goad, bait, harangue or bully a victim of child rape, violent beatings and ritual humiliation lies outside the scope of my understanding of human behaviour. 

To anyone with an ounce of empathy even the notion should be vile and abhorrent. Nonetheless, it came as no surprise to learn that the main protagonist of online abuse and bullying, besides fronting an online PA group and a campaign against PA  appears to have his own skeletons to hide.

This individual has publicised, and others have shared, some thoroughly disgusting, utterly thoughtless and unimaginably nasty allegations claiming that Andrew has lied about his childhood experiences. 

To justify these claims they have failed to produce one iota of evidence or produce anything that remotely resembles credible research or evidence. 

Unless one bears a compelling desire to do time it would be a great idea to learn the difference between evidence, opinion and hearsay. 

Our message for them is to either evidence your vile words or do us all a favour and shut-up.

Below, we have set out some evidence and information to allow readers  to make up their own minds.

To give a flavour of the climate which led to the disclosures of institutional child abuse in the children’s homes of North Wales this 2012 news report on C4 stated: 

’It’s hard to imagine a more tragic misnomer: calling Bryn Estyn a ‘care home’. ‘ 

It is perhaps one of the most tragic and callous misnomers since the signs at the gateway of the Auschwitz extermination camp. 

Background to the North Wales Children Home Public Inquiries

This next news-clip in 2012 follows David Cameron’s announcement of an independent review to the Waterhouse report of some 12 years before. This would become the Macur review.

The prime minister at the time also ordered a further police investigation by an INDEPENDENT force into the numerous complaints of child abuse in the North Wales children’s homes. This investigation by the National Crime Agency was to become operation Pallial. 

Several messages emerge strongly from the second news clip. 

Firstly, even by 2012, despite years of shining a light upon one of the worst child abuse scandals in living memory, there had been only around 10 convictions. Following the Macur review and investigation the number of convictions was doubled. 

Secondly, far from being a ‘witch-hunt,’ as convicted perpetrators and pedophiles have claimed, there was every indication that there had in fact been so little action after ‘…dozens of council inquiries…’ and ‘…dozens of police investigations…’  that the repeated investigation and lack of prosecutions arising from the institutional child abuse at the North Wales children’s homes bore the noxious smells of injustice and establishment cover-ups. 

Thirdly, as with parental alienation and other forms of abuse there were strong suspicions that undue influence had been at play to protect, divert attention from and shield the pedophile perpetrators of systematic institutional rape and child abuse.

The Waterhouse Inquiry and Cover-ups

In 2000 Sir Ronald Waterhouse chaired a public inquiry which reported that:

‘The evidence before us has disclosed that for many children who were consigned to Bryn Estyn, in the 10 or so years of its existence as a community home, it was a form of purgatory or worse from which they emerged more damaged than when they had entered and for whom the future had become even more bleak.’

The Waterhouse inquiry marked a significant milestone in changing public and government attitudes of the day. Once the genie was out of the lamp it could not be put back in. In the case of Bryn Estyn, once the cover was taken off the cesspool it could not be put back on. Nonetheless this has not stopped some very dishonest, obsessive, vindictive and nasty people from having a go. 

Establishment cover-ups are not exactly unheard of in the world we inhabit. Where money, wrongdoing and influence are involved they are the order of the day.  

For fine examples of institutional cover-ups of the day we need look no further than Stephen Lawrence’s murder in 1993 which took the valiant efforts, devotion and persistence of his parents until 2012 before there were convictions of Stephen’s murderers. 

The Hillsborough disaster in1989 took a series of inquests and inquiries before charges were brought for manslaughter and negligence in 2017. 

Bryn Estyn and the North Wales children’s homes provide further examples of how power and influence have stood in the way of fairness and justice for many years before ordinary and highly vulnerable people, who are often unable to defend themselves, are able to get as far as the courtroom steps. In all of these situations justice and belated apologies have needed to be prized from the jaws of the state who has only ever conceded anything grudgingly.

Jillings Report, Waterhouse Report, Macur Review and Operation Pallial

The Waterhouse report also marked a watershed in obtaining justice for the abused child residents of the North Wales children’s homes because it was the first major inquiry in this sordid and squalid affair to be heard publicly and to be subjected to public scrutiny.

The 300-page Jillings report, prepared for Clwyd council in 1996, provides a sorry example of how easy it was to hush up findings  which in any free and democratic society should have been in the public eye. This report was not even published until 2013 some 17 years later.

The pathetically inadequate reason for the secrecy and deliberately suppressing valuable evidence and damaging findings was that it would inevitably have opened the floodgates for compensation claims from the victims of institutional child abuse. 

Details of the findings of the Jillings, Waterhouse and Macur reports are easily accessible on line. 

Unfortunately, the official lack of transparency concerning earlier inquiries than Waterhouse allowed the propagation of conspiracy theories from parties such as some children’s home staff whom were subsequently convicted of numerous charges of child abuse. Organisations such as a pressure group, calling themselves, North Wales FACT (Falsely Accused Carers and Teachers), formed in 1999. 

The group claimed that false allegations had been made about their membership in the North Wales children’s homes and campaigned for ‘justice’ for the men they claim were vilified during the Bryn Estyn care home cases of the early 1990s. Despite these claims of innocence and of a ‘witch hunt’ between 1978 and 1995, at least nine people were convicted of offences against young people relating to care homes in North Wales and there were around 10 additional convictions of abusers and pedophiles arising from operation Pallial after 2013. 

We cannot find any trace of appeals or wrongful convictions since. Far from there being a witch hunt or a climate of false allegations the total of around 20 convictions indicates an epidemic of child abuse and pedophilia on a scale not seen before. Indeed, 7 of those convicted worked at Bryn Estyn.

Public hysteria and conspiracy theories

One of the main protagonists was an author named Richard Webster who was a supporter of FACT and was to have spoken at the FACT conference in 2005. Richard Webster’s book entitled ‘The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt ’ was published in 2005. 

 Webster relates a story of Bryn Estyn which he suggests became the focus for false allegations and a witch hunt. Well known and respected solicitor Richard Scorer was scathing of Webster’s book. In a review for the Association of Child Abuse Lawyers he said,’

‘However, I would put a very stark health warning on the front of the book. This is a very unbalanced book, and Webster is economical with the facts when it suits him to be.’ 

Scorer added, ‘The buggery of boys by a member of staff – the fact that it could happen, undetected, over a long period – apparently provokes no interest, comment or concern on Webster’s part, other than to complain that it encouraged the police to pursue their investigations further.

Around 30 years on and with the advent of  new technology it has never been easier to obtain information or to verify facts, evidence and data such as we have quoted and referenced above.  

Therefore, when individuals and groups of people fail to even attempt to verify basic data and choose to rely upon or cherry pick information, which in some cases could only have come from those convicted of paedophilia and child abuse, one has to ask serious questions about their integrity and their motives for doing so. 

Therefore, when an individual quoted from a New Statesman Article written by Webster any critical analysis or even a fair representation would automatically demand at least a mention of the reams of data that have emerged before and since 1999. Furthermore, some of Webster’s assertions are misleading.

Webster’s  1999 allegations of a witch hunt pre-Waterhouse.

Below we have quoted Webster’s words and answered each point in turn. This nasty and feeble excuse for individuals that abused children is beneath contempt. Please do not read Webster’s words on a full stomach because it really is a sickening and hateful attack:

“The next witness was Andrew Teague. Teague said he had been beaten and sexually abused by one unnamed member of staff and that he had also been sexually abused by Howarth.”

– Andrew actually claimed to have been beaten and sexually abused at Bryn Estyn, but beaten at another home called Ty Mawr. Immediately, Webster has mischaracterised the evidence in order to give his own version credence.

‘What the BBC did not tell us was that, although Teague had at one point agreed to appear as a witness at the North Wales Tribunal, he changed his mind at the last moment.’

The New Statesman published Webster’s article on 19h February 1999 but what Webster conveniently omits to mention is that the Waterhouse tribunal report was not published until February 2000 which is exactly a year after this. Andrew is not named in the Waterhouse report and he was not named in the course of the inquiry since the anonymity of victims in sexual crimes, although not mandatory until the sexual offences Act 2003, was nonetheless commonplace beforehand and this convention was observed throughout the inquiry.

– In fact the Waterhouse report was subsequently criticised for failing to name the abusers.

– The most likely source of this information, since Andrew was not interviewed by Webster, is indeed the perpetrator of physical abuse upon Andrew at Bryn Estyn, Fred Rutter, who was already safely behind bars at the time the NS article was written. Therefore references to the tribunal would appear to be a device used to give a degree of credibility.

The later Macur review praised the sensitive way that victims and survivors were handled by the investigators. All potential witnesses were screened by psychologists and psychiatrists to gauge whether the ordeal of giving evidence would cause them even further harm. The welfare of victims came before the conviction of pedophiles.

The fact that rates of suicide amongst former pupils were notoriously high is testament to the immense psychological and physical harm inflicted by staff in these homes.The few that escaped being abused directly would lie awake at night waiting to be taken away by staff to be shared, raped and buggered at any time. After being raped they would return to their beds to cry themselves to sleep.

Merely, being in Bryn Estyn was traumatising. Wondering whether it would be your turn tonight would have been nothing less than torture.

The decision regarding who should give evidence was taken by the prosecutors not the victims. This is another misrepresentation.

‘The tribunal declined to use its powers to subpoena him.’

There was no need and it would have been pointless. Andrew’s main abuser, Fred Rutter, had already been behind bars after having been convicted on 4 counts of rape and two of indecent assault. He was sentenced to 12 years on each count to run concurrently. The likelihood is that further charges would also have run concurrently so what purpose would be served by putting more vulnerable victims through the emotional trauma of giving evidence and reliving their abuse? This is the sort of thing domestic abusers are being stopped from doing in the family courts. Consequently, this is another misrepresentation by Webster.

‘Counsel to the tribunal, however, did read out a statement which Teague had made to the North Wales police in 1992.’

Unless Webster attended every one of the 200+ days that the inquiry sat he could not possibly have known what or which evidence would be used. Again there was no sane reason to put more victims than absolutely necessary through the ordeal and trauma of cross examination when the evidence shows that a conviction was decisively obtained with a smaller number of less emotionally damaged witnesses. There was absolutely no need to further traumatise more victims.  The implication here is that Webster had sight of the tribunal manuscripts. The fact is that in 1999, when Webster wrote his article, they had not been written let alone published!

‘In this statement he made allegations of physical abuse but clearly said: “I never experienced any sort of sexual abuse by the staff.” ‘

Andrew was a resident at other homes besides Bryn Estyn. He was a looked-after child for around 6 years. Andrew actually claimed to have been beaten and sexually abused at Bryn Estyn. However, Andrew was beaten at Ty Mawr. Webster’s words have been cherry picked from the account of his time at Ty Mawr.

‘His main allegation was of serious and repeated physical abuse by a care worker, Fred Rutter. It was later pointed out to the tribunal that Teague was at Bryn Estyn between 1977 and 1978. Rutter, however, did not start working there until 1982.’

Webster omits to say where this information came from and that Rutter and others were regular visitors before their employment. Rutter the ‘Nutter’ was well known to the boys long before he was on the payroll of Bryn Estyn. The writer has written this final sentence to suggest that it was ‘…pointed out to the tribunal’, that that Rutter did not start worker at Bryn Estyn until 1982. The construction of this sentence would make it equally likely that the source of this allegation was Rutter himself. And, his history of offending means he is not the most credible person to have briefed a reporter.

General

Anyone, other than a bigoted imbecile imbued with lashings of hatred, reviewing this article critically and fairly would quickly realise that it was written before findings of the Waterhouse Inquiry were published, before the Jillings report saw the light of day and before evidence was available from anyone other than the complainants or their abusers.  The Macur review was to follow and so were a further 9 convictions arising from operation Pallial making around 20 convictions in all. 

The veracity of the claims made by victims were subjected to a considerable and, many would consider, inhumane degree of scrutiny.

 Already damaged young men were forced to relive their bestial abuse ad nauseam it would seem. For 20 years or more, time after time, they were compelled to relive their nightmares simply in order to be believed.

The BBC and press checked out individual accounts, all claimants underwent many interviews, there were psychological assessments, there were psychiatric assessments, there were numerous police interviews, cps interviews, lawyer 

interviews and assessor interviews which took place before and after Webster’s article. Therefore, so much for claims of poor hard done by staff members promoted by Webster and others who either knowingly or unknowingly were obscuring and supporting the appalling abuse perpetrated by pedophiles in the North Wales children’s homes.

Our support will always be for the victims and the people who are otherwise denied a voice. Please make up your own minds and please comment.

There was a Saturday morning ritual in the northern suburbs of Manchester in the 1960s. Kids and dogs were thrown out onto the streets while the moms did the shopping and the dads waited for the pubs to open again.

North Manchester, museum of bleachers, dyers, poets, pimps and perverts.

My family lived there on the outskirts of the Tall Town of Chimneys for more than a century.  Way back then, this wasn’t a godforsaken hole, it was a land fertile with dreams, hopes and opportunities. It was beautiful place … salmon in the Irk, woodlands and wild hyacinth, meadows, daffodils and primrose.

But 50 years ago, when those kids hit the streets they were in danger from the likes of Brady and Hindley who were looking for more young innocent victims.

They say that on the streets of Manchester you are never more than six feet away from a rat … well, Brady and Hindley weren’t rats, they were pure evil.

And even now after his death Brady is sending a shiver down the spine of this now grand  and vibrant city.

Brady’s body was not being released until assurances had been given that his ashes will not be scattered on Saddleworth Moor, a coroner has said.

He failed to reveal where one of his victims, Keith Bennett, was buried, meaning the youngster’s body may never be found. Yet, in a further insult to victims, a coroner said he may have wanted his ashes scattered on Saddleworth Moor, where he and Hindley hid the bodies of those they killed.

Some bash Bob’s 80s gospel period as God-awful but a recent retrospective shows it was a spirited time of passion and drama…

At the age of nearly 80 His Royal Bobness of Dylan is still creating controversy as his latest album Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 13, 1979-1981, is released

Almost 40 years down the line since his gospel period – which lasted just two years and consisted of three official albums – people still say that he lost the plot and certainly after world tours and concerts where Dylan preached and hectored audiences and listeners alike his career nose-dived.

He was derided, laughed at and written off.

Yet, he is now accepted as the funkiest pensioner in the world – a former chain-smoking, hard drinking real-life rock ‘n’ roll survivor.
Trouble No More, an eight-CD set, is full of revelations – six masterful versions of Slow Train, plus 14 unreleased songs, such as Making a Liar Out of Me. There is also a one-hour film with  footage from 1980.

The day I stepped into my first national newspaper office at the beginning of my life as a journalist I was told something I would never forget…

That doyen of the Red Tops Derek Jameson had just taken over as editor at the Daily Star and he saw me as one of a new breed of Fleet Street bad boys, investigators who wanted to get to the truth and would allow almost nothing to stand in their way.

Before taking on the ailing Daily Star Derek had edited the Daily Express and the News of the World and had been managing editor of the Daily Mirror. Born in poverty in London’s East End he grew up in care and openly admitted he was ‘street-wise’.

And this is what he told me over a welcoming whiskey in his darkly paneled office: “News is something somebody somewhere doesn’t want you to print … don’t ever forget that.”

It is the principle I still adhere to today.

And still today  I tell the stories that thugs, criminals, cheats, liars, corrupt politicians, reprobate celebrities and big conglomerates with bamboozling bosses don’t want anybody else to know about.

That conversation with Derek Jameson was back in the smoky boozy world of 1980s newspapers, and within weeks I was on the road, hunting down the likes of Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall and Cyril Smith.

I had begun my journey to become one of that hallowed few, the writers of wrongs.

Journalism is a dirty job but, yep, somebody has to do it and those who do, generally, stick to two fundementals – 1. Seek the truth and 2. Don’t hurt anybody who doesn’t deserve it.

But sadly, in today’s world of spotty illiterate bloggers, false news sites and foul-mouthed social media the gentlemen and ladies of the Press have been recast as the villains.

And now there are plans afoot to force these villains to pay the legal costs of their opponents in court even if said villains win and are proved to have been telling the truth all along.

And perhaps unsurprisingly, that former boss of motor sport Max Mosley is quoted as saying he believes that this new potential law is ‘eminently fair’.

Fair to whom though? The exposed? The exposer? Or those who have a right to know what’s going on in the world?

Mr Mosley, the millionaire who some say has a past as chequered as the flags of his chosen sport,  is hoping the Government will approve Impress, an organisation the Daily Mail says is almost entirely backed by his millions, as the new state-backed press regulator.

Of course, nobody can think that he is extolling the virtues of the freedom of the Fourth Estate by making such a statement and surely it is actually a clarion call for the end of freedom to speak our minds out.

It is perhaps almost equally as worrying that Culture Secretary Karen Bradley – whose only claim to understanding the Press is perhaps that she once wrote a leaflet on The Leek Town Spires and Chimney Pot Trail –  is about to decide what kind of truth is to be presented to the British public in the future.

Soon she will decide whether or not to implement the measures in Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013, to force newspapers to pay the legal costs of both sides in libel and privacy actions, win or lose.

Yet, most newspapers have already signed up to the Independent Press Standards Organisation, a voluntary body not backed by the Government.

Still hurting  I suppose, from the exposure of their expenses claims and blaming the Press  for swinging the Brexit vote, many of those who skulk in the shadowy corridors of Westminster power are determined, if not to destroy national newspapers entirely, at the very least to bring them to tippy-toe  at their well-shod heels.

And they may yet get their revenge because of this outlandish and wholly undemocratic clause in this bit of anti-Press legislation which slipped through Parliament as the UK was spellbound by the awfulness of the News of the World’s phone-hacking scandal.

The problem is that Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act has the potential to bankrupt newspapers and this cannot be seen as any kind of natural justice or any kind of fairness. It would be a form of legislation as twisted as drowning witches to decide if they were telling the truth or not.

This plan to tame the Press offers up a real danger that newspapers will avoid printing potentially damaging material — even if it’s true — for fear of financial ruin.  One of the final nails in the coffin of democracy.

And what a victory for the enemies of freedom of speech, the terrorists, the cyber criminals, child molesters, rapists, powerful people who want to get their illegal kicks without any light shining on them at all.

It would be like putting a bunch of career criminals in charge of the police.

Newspapers are already subject to the criminal law, as the phone-hacking trials demonstrated, and the laws of libel.

Most mainstream papers submit voluntarily to an independent regulatory body called IPSO, chaired by a distinguished and scrupulously impartial former Appeal Court judge, who has the power to order front page corrections and impose fines of up to £1 million.

 So, why do we want to muzzle the only dog which is willing to bite the hand that   wants to feed it a diet of lies.

(First published 2010)

This morning I had a shock, a very good friend of mine, Brendan Mullen, the real Godfather of Punk, died in California last October. We’d been later-day Beats, but the vast expanse of sea that grew between us, meant that for the last twenty years we hadn’t so much as written a letter.

The last time I heard from Brendan was when he sent me a copy of Jim Morrison’s The Wilderness, he told me he’d found it in Allen Ginsberg’s City Lights book store in San Francisco. I suspect though, he would have found in a dime store in New York. But that wouldn’t matter, Brendan would simply have been living our dream of turning the truth into something far more romantic than reality.

I don’t have the book any more, an old friend of mine, Mike Wood, borrowed it. Mike and I were good friends too, so it didn’t bother me that he was sharing this gift from Brendan, but now, under the circumstances, I would be nice to at least hold it again.

Brendan and I were wild children in Manchester in the 70s. We lived on beer, guile, anxiety and drugs. We were both beautiful and a little bit insane and we shared an ambition to become writers … inexplicably we’d washed up together at the Ashton-under-Lyne Reporter.

We did something in the early 70s – something happened and I don’t know what. But Brendan and I left the Reporter with twin clouds of shame hanging over us. Whatever we did might have been shocking, outrageous, immoral or just plain crazy … but there is no doubt it would have been very very funny.

Brendan decided to head for New York and decided I should go with him. Almost that same day I found out I was to be an unmarried father. So, at 19 years old, I tried to face up to my responsibilities.

Brendan sailed for New York alone.

My ambition to be a writer was fulfilled partially as I tore a fairly successful career out of journalism. But Brendan in his own eccentric, single-minded, romantic way became the new Godfather of Punk. He opened a 10,000-square-foot basement behind a porn theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. He also made it as a music journalist.

When I heard he was dead, I had a picture of him in the recesses of my mind. He was still young, still dynamic, charismatic, dramatic, still drunk, still stoned … but he was 60.

A few minutes ago I saw a recent picture of him, he was unrecognisable, skinny, beat up, bald. I looked in the mirror … I have the same tracks in my face.

All I can say is, farewell Brendan. You will always be my friend.

Andrea Martin-Banks, chief researcher at the Preservation Society shared these Halloween photos from New York …

She was in McDougal Street when she spotted these skeletons climbing the wall near Bob Dylan’s old house near Café Wha?.  The house looks as if it is student accommodation now and somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to get the spooky figures attached to the wall and fences!

Greenwich Village is a lot different now from the place Dylan left for Malibu, but the village still has that grand air of statement honed in the 60s when people made pilgrimages to his white-painted doorstep.

Dylan himself described the Café Wha?, just seconds away from his front door,  as “a subterranean cavern, liquorless, ill lit, low ceiling, like a wide dining hall with chairs and tables,” but “that’s where I started playing regular in New York.”

Cafe Wha? is still a fixture of MacDougal Street but most of the other bars and cafes have gone and they have been replaced by coffee shops and boutiques.

Not far from the famous Chelsea Hotel, where Dylan also lived, Andrea came across the shop which appeared to be selling pumpkins by the wheelbarrow load.

Apart from Dylan living their New York’s most iconic hotel built a very rock n roll reputation – Sid Vicious Nancy Spungen there, Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey there. Dylan Thomas drank himself to death there, and Leonard Cohen famously wrote about Janis Joplin there.

Now that too has changed, and perhaps as far as rock n roll romance is concerned, not for the better.

#bobdylan #thevillage #mcdougalstreet #cafewha? #halloween #theskeletonhe’sintherain