Adjudication No. 443 (June 1990) [1990] APC 15

ADJUDICATION No. 443 (June 1990)

The Press Council has upheld a complaint against the Sydney Morning Herald over a feature article headlined "Mr Bubbles - Where the Witch Hunt Went Wrong", written by Ben Hills and Jacquelyn Hole and published on 13 January.

The complainant, Dr Anne Schlebaum, a consultant child and family psychiatrist, listed detailed points of complaint against the article.

The nub of the complaint was that the article drew sweeping, far-reaching conclusions on the basis of the finding of the magistrate in what became known as the "Mr Bubbles" case of alleged child sexual abuse.

After a six-week hearing, the magistrate, Mr David Hyde, said: "I am satisfied that the children, due to their stage of cognitive development and other factors, had not just sufficient intelligence to justify the reception of evidence from them ... It would be impossible for examination ... to remove the layers upon layers which have been placed upon the child's memory. I accept that contamination has occurred."

Dr Schlebaum claimed that on the basis of factual error and misquotations, the article built up an account of events which sought totally to dismiss the allegations and the public concern caused by them.

In a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, Dr Schlebaum said "I was shocked to find how erroneous, misleading, irresponsible and blatantly manipulative your 'Witch Hunt' article was. On careful analysis, I found 67 points open to serious dispute, including a remarkable 46 factual errors. Your journalists also knowingly omitted many significant and relevant details."

The Sydney Morning Herald dismissed most of the alleged errors as matters of opinion, but it did concede that the mother of two of the children in the case, known as Witness X, was wrongly reported to have been examined by a psychiatrist six months before she had complained to police about the alleged child abuse. In fact, the psychiatric examination was five months after her complaint to the police.

Further, Witness X was described in the article as psychotic, a clinical condition which was denied by Dr Schlebaum.

The newspaper claimed that the mistake on the date was corrected in a letter from the psychiatrist who interviewed Witness X and her two children, published six days after the "Mr Bubbles" article.

The Press Council considers that the case put by the article for largely dismissing concern over children's reports of abuse was greatly overstated.

The conclusions, expressed in such ways as "hardly a shred of factual corroboration", "a police manhunt, later described as a witch-hunt, a massive but fatally flawed investigation that consumed fifteen thousand man hours", "not a shred of evidence", do not seem justified on the basis of a magisterial decision that children's evidence could not be accepted for the purpose of a trial.

The decision was restricted to the question of the admissibility of that evidence and came to no conclusion as to the veracity of the allegations, but the article failed to make this clear.

The error in date of the appearance of Witness X and her children before a psychiatrist appeared in a court transcript. Nevertheless, this error was central to the idea of doubt and mismanagement of prosecution being developed in the article.

The whole issue of sexual abuse of children is serious and complicated enough to demand a much more careful and thorough approach than evidenced in the Sydney Morning Herald article.