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Introduction

   Six weeks before the start of the Tribunal, The Bridge[935] was asked to set up a witness support programme for people who were to give evidence. Witnesses included those who had suffered abuse in residential or foster care as well as those who were alleged to have abused children or young people looked after by local authorities.

   The Bridge had no idea in advance how many witnesses there would be, how many of them would need a service or how many would be located in North Wales or elsewhere.

   It was clear from the outset that The Bridge was setting up a programme to support witnesses and not to counsel them because the latter would require long-term arrangements which the Tribunal was not in a position to make or finance.

   The agreement was that the programme would offer support on a number of levels:

Setting up the programme

   The Bridge had to identify a core team with the equivalent of three full-time staff. They were required to have professional qualifications laid down in a protocol between the Tribunal and The Bridge. In addition, it was agreed that staff used in the programme would come from outside North Wales and should not have worked in residential care in the area covered by the Tribunal. The team appointed was made up of six part-time staff, a mixture of social workers, social work managers and counsellors. Some of the staff were employed directly by The Bridge, others came on secondment from other agencies (Barnardos, Victim Support and the City of York Social Services), whose help was greatly appreciated.

   The team was completed by a full-time administrator, who played a key part in ensuring that the systems were maintained and information co-ordinated. Organisational support was provided from The Bridge centrally, which found and equipped an office base in Holywell.

   As the work of the Tribunal unfolded, it became necessary to identify a range of professionals (in addition to the core team) who could offer support to witnesses living away from North Wales. These professionals were a mixture of social workers, counsellors and psychologists and were based across the United Kingdom stretching from Scotland to Devon. This was not easy to achieve, but a number of agencies showed a desire to help. In the case of the core team and other professionals special arrangements had to be made for police checks to be undertaken.

   Despite the shortage of time in setting up the programme, The Bridge did manage to have two staff in place by the time the Tribunal opened.

The Task

   The first task for the staff was to listen to witnesses on the telephone. The levels of distress being experienced by those individuals, even up to 20 years on from the experience, was clear from the outset. Yet very few had received counselling or therapy to help with the impact of abuse on their mental health. At this stage the task was very much to listen. From the beginning the team had to be clear that in whatever way help was given it should not contaminate the evidence the witness was to give to a Tribunal with judicial powers.

   The team had to provide services to those who had been abused as well as those who it was alleged had abused children or young people. It was important to ensure that an even-handed service was delivered to both complainants and alleged abusers and discussions took place within the team to ensure that this happened.

   In some instances staff spent a great deal of time with individual witnesses to help them decide whether or not they wished to make contact with the Tribunal in order to give evidence. This included helping an individual to focus on the impact that giving evidence would have on them and on their partners, families and communities.

   Once the Tribunal hearings started The Bridge had two team members present at the Tribunal every day, plus an additional team member to answer The Bridge Helpline, which was set up to offer support.

   On the days when the Tribunal was sitting the team members helping witnesses would typically:

   Once a witness had given evidence the same team member would be available to listen, support or advise for as long as this was necessary; this was particularly important bearing in mind that many witnesses had to drive themselves home safely after what had been an emotional experience. The accounts given to the team in the waiting room often went way beyond the formal evidence given in the Tribunal.

   Once a witness had given evidence they were reminded that The Bridge could offer medium-term support which they could use if they so chose; alternatively, they could be offered support from a professional in their own area if they lived away from North Wales.

   As the months went by those witnesses who clearly needed more than could be offered by the witness support service were gradually introduced to long-term services in their area.

   These were in the main, but not exclusively, adult mental health services.

The Witnesses' Experience

   The way in which witnesses made use of the witness support service ranged from no contact at all, to the occasional telephone call, to regular face to face contact. In setting up the programme The Bridge wanted to ensure that it was the witnesses who determined how the service was used and to be clear that it was alright if witnesses chose not to use the service.

   Throughout the hearings it was indeed the witnesses who determined how much or how little support was required. For example, one small self-help group requested that The Bridge team did not provide support at the hearings whilst others asked for consistent longer term help.

   Ultimately 121 witnesses, of whom 106 were people who had been abused in care, made use of the service outside the hearings in one form or another. Of these, 56 lived in North Wales and 65 in other parts of Britain, ranging from Lothian to Devon. Twenty nine were female and 92 were male.

   In total, outside Tribunal hearings 1,087 hours of support were provided to the 121 witnesses.

   The statistics, however, do not tell the real story. The whole Tribunal process was concerned with the excruciating suffering that so many witnesses had experienced. Day after day witnesses told their story in the witness box; for many this meant reliving the horror of the abuse from which they suffered; some had been helpless onlookers unable to affect the situation they saw; a few experienced remorse for abuse inflicted.

   Set out below are some of the individual stories:

-- One young person burst into tears in the witness room and spent 1Ö hours with a team member before feeling able to face their family who had come to give moral support.

--Another, who had arrived apparently confident, afterwards sat with one of the team struggling to make sense of the day's events. They had thought they had moved on from the abuse in care but the painful memories came flooding back.

--A witness who for 20 years had successfully held down a good job felt unable to return to work for several weeks and needed the supportive help of the witness support service, friends and GP.

--One witness was very distressed and described giving evidence as like being abused all over again; the witness very much needed contact with the team for several weeks.

--A parent recently reunited with their adult child sat and listened to the account of the abuse that had been suffered in care. The team member recalls the intensity of the feelings--pain, guilt, anger, sadness and remorse.

--A young adult now running a business and employing others decided to tell the full story of the abuse for the first time at the Tribunal. Previously there had been fears of the impact on the business of giving evidence and the effect on the people employed learning about the past. The decision to put these fears to one side was motivated by the determination to stop other children being abused in care (this was often cited by people as a reason for agreeing to give evidence at the Tribunal).

--From a Helpline call, a parent who remembered insisting that their child return to care from home leave despite protests, asked "why didn't someone tell me what was happening there?"

   A very small number of witnesses required an emergency admission to psychiatric hospital. Others came from prison to give evidence; it proved more difficult, though just as important, to find longer term help for those individuals.

   For others who were already feeling vulnerable before attending the Tribunal, or who were already undergoing counselling or therapy, our task was to ensure the support they needed continued.

   On other occasions external but major things needed our attention such as helping a parent tell an adult child that they were terminally ill.

   Other witnesses found the experience to have some form of cathartic effect and some examples are set out below.

--One young adult had used our service to develop the confidence to give evidence and attending the hearing was part of the moving on process.

--A young adult gave evidence with a partner and child sitting in the public gallery so that they could hear the story, it was seen as "my day in court". Although feeling a little distressed the family left holding on to each other as though leaving something negative behind.

--One witness told The Bridge Helpline he came away feeling much more positive than they had in ages-- "like a human being again".

--Another witness wrote "The process returned some of my dignity".

--Another wrote "Thank you for all your help over the last few months".

   Sometimes it was what seemed to us the simple things that helped a witness most. For example, a team member helped one young adult access their social services file, where the only photograph was found of the witness as a child.

   The Tribunal has been about the experience of witnesses and so has the witness support service. As one of the team put it "nothing could have prepared you for this experience". Sharing the witnesses' experience in a very small way by listening again and again as they repeatedly told their stories was a deeply humbling experience and has affected all team members in a way that will ensure their practice will never be the same again. As this is being written we are reminded of how difficult it is to convey a picture of the pain, the long-term suffering and the negative consequences for so many people.

What can we learn about witness support in such circumstances?

  1 Recognising that for many people giving evidence of abuse and rape in any setting means emotionally reliving the experience and that in itself can traumatise them or undermine their abilities to cope.

  2 The importance of involving a support service from the early stages, at the point a witness makes a written statement or makes telephone contact.

  3 The value of a service which was separate from the Tribunal itself, outside the internal machinery, and used staff who had not worked in the geographical area where the abuse had occurred.

  4 The importance of having clear operational protocols to ensure:

(i)  evidence is not contaminated;

(ii)  service is consistent.

  5 Recognising that witness support in Tribunals can mean something different for each witness and the service needs to be flexible enough to be able to respond to the individual needs.

  6 Recognising that witnesses have a right not to use the service.

  7 The desperate need that exists for long-term counselling and therapy services nationally which can be accessed much more speedily by young adults in need.

   Perhaps the most important lesson that was learnt through The Bridge's work at the Tribunal was the fact that so few of the complainant witnesses had received any counselling or therapeutic help to deal with the pain of the abuse they had suffered. The witnesses were adults who had not received appropriate help for anything up to 20 years after the event.

   The Bridge's experience in other settings is that only in a handful of situations do children abused in the community or residential care receive any formal therapy or counselling. If the pain and suffering that The Bridge has witnessed is to be eased, if children, young people and adults are to be helped to recover, then a radical change in mental health service provision is needed.

Footnote:

935   The Bridge Child Care Development Service.