Accused of harming my baby

Jo Harris knows how close she came to losing her children. She looks on happily as her two eldest sons race around in excitement. Because of the snow, there is no school today where they live in Hertfordshire and Sam, nine, and Ryan, seven, are jumping up and down and looking out of the window.

Her youngest son, Connor, two, is gurgling contentedly on the floor, playing with his toys. Jo knows how lucky she is to still have them around her because, when Connor was just four months old, she was accused of shaking her little boy so violently that she could have killed him.

In April 2002, Jo, now 29, a full-time mum, put Connor to bed while she had a bath. When she came out some 20 minutes later, she went in to check on him and found, to her horror, that he had stopped breathing. He was blue and lifeless. "I just freaked out," she says. "I was in a complete panic. I picked him up and shook him very gently and he started breathing again, but he still wasn't normal, his breaths were really shallow." She called her husband, Dale, who works for a haulage firm and was at a nearby friend's house, and they rushed Connor to the local hospital.

"The doctors examined him and said he was stable," says Jo. "They did some blood tests and I told them I had shaken him to get him breathing again. They didn't say anything, they seemed fine about it. He was kept in for a couple of days but they couldn't seem to find anything wrong. They just said he had some sort of virus."

The Harrises took their son home but Jo noticed that Connor still wasn't quite right. "He was sleeping more than usual and not feeding well. About a week later, I noticed a swelling on the top of his head. I took him straight back to hospital." Jo spent a fraught night by her baby's bedside, fearing the worst. The next morning, one of the doctors said Connor needed to have a brain scan.

"The doctor came back and told me the scan showed blood clots on Connor's brain," says Jo. "She asked if he'd had a bad birth or been in a car accident.

When I told her he hadn't, she said the only other explanation was shaken baby syndrome, which I had never heard of before. She said he had signs of being shaken violently on a regular basis. I told her I'd shaken him the week before, but it had only been very gently and only the once. By this point I was in tears. It hadn't really sunk in that I was being accused. All I could think about was Connor and what would happen to him. I thought he was going to die."

The doctor told Jo that Connor would need another brain scan and, because of her suspicion of shaken baby syndrome, of which some 200 cases are reported every year, that she had contacted social services. "I couldn't believe it," says Jo. "I asked her if she thought I'd harmed my baby and she said she couldn't say. I phoned my husband in tears and he rushed over. When he got to the hospital he demanded to see a doctor and was told that I had shaken our baby."

The traumatic experience of two years ago came flooding back to Jo this week when Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, announced that dozens of parents jailed for shaken baby syndrome are to have their cases reviewed. The ruling came after Angela Cannings was acquitted of killing two of her children. She had been convicted largely on the evidence of discredited paediatrician professor Sir Roy Meadow. Thousands of cases - of infanticide, or where children were removed from their families - are to be reexamined.

From the moment the finger of suspicion was pointed at Jo, she wasn't allowed to be alone with her baby. "One of the doctors told me that if I even tried to take Connor out of the room, he would call the police. There was one very kind nurse but the rest of the staff just made me feel guilty." The second scan seemed to confirm the presence of blood clots; worse, when Connor was X-rayed, he was found to have a suspected broken wrist and fractured ribs.

"When the hospital told me I just broke down," says Jo. "I knew I hadn't hurt him but I started to think someone else had. I went through everyone I had left him with in my mind. I never doubted my husband. I demanded a second opinion and the scans and X-ray were sent to Great Ormond Street hospital."

When Connor had been in hospital for two days, a social worker and a child protection officer arrived to tell Jo and her husband that they weren't allowed to take him home. Instead, he had to be placed with a member of the family or a close friend. "I was crying and saying, 'He's mine, you can't do this' over and over again."

After he had been in hospital for four days, the doctors, who were still waiting for the results from Great Ormond Street, said Connor was stable enough to be discharged. Weeping, Jo handed him over to her sister-in-law, a lawyer, who lived nearby. "She doesn't have any children and she had no idea how to look after a baby," says Jo. "I gave her long lists of instructions, his cot, bottles, baby monitor. I made sure he had his favourite green blanket and dummy." Jo's eldest son, Sam, suffers from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder - diagnosed a month before Connor's birth - and because this makes him boisterous, Jo couldn't help wondering if he could have hurt his younger brother. "It did go through my mind," she says. "But I had always been careful not to leave Connor alone with Sam."

The effect on the children was severe. "I sat them down and explained that I had been accused of hurting Connor. Sam said, 'Tell them I did it and then he can come home' and Ryan said, 'You've never hurt any of us'. My husband was a big support. He never asked me if I had hurt Connor and I don't think he suspected me, but when doctors and the social worker were saying it had to be the only explanation, I would have understood if he had."

For Jo, being accused of harming her child was almost impossible to deal with. "I felt that I was having a breakdown," she says. "Losing Connor was hell. I couldn't sleep, I would just read medical textbooks every night to see if I could find any other explanation for his injuries. Most of the time, though, I just sat and cried. The idea that I could have hurt my baby so was alien to me. I was all ready to take Sam and Ryan to my sister-in-law's house to get Connor and just drive anywhere. I thought that if I was found guilty, all three boys would be taken away."

Later that week, Jo and her husband had to go to the police station. "They questioned each of us for two hours. They kept asking me if I'd shaken Connor. I told the truth - that I had, but only gently, because he wasn't breathing - but I felt like a criminal. It was so traumatic. I was in tears for the whole time."

Jo and her husband were allowed to visit Connor, but not to be alone with him. "He was waking up in the middle of the night for feeds and I simply couldn't get to him. It was so hard to leave him there."

Just over a week after Connor had been placed with her sister-in-law, Jo went along for her routine visit. Her husband was already there. "He opened the door and he had a huge smile on his face," she remembers. "He said the hospital had just called and they had the results back from Great Ormond Street - there were no blood clots, no broken bones - and that the hospital had made a mistake. We were allowed to take him home."

But the stigma and the emotional strain of being falsely accused - the family have never had an apology from the child protection unit, and a mooted inquiry has never materialised - still haunts them.

"I am so over-protective of Connor," says Jo. "He didn't start walking until late because I would wrap cushions around him so he wouldn't hurt himself when he fell. I watch him constantly. On the one hand, I keep wanting to take him to the doctor in case there's something wrong, but on the other I'm scared of doing that. He fell down some steps a few months ago and I had to think twice about taking him to hospital - I know that what happened is still on his record, so if anything happens to him, I would feel under suspicion."

The Harrises' children, too, still suffer. "Even now, if I say Connor has to go to the doctor, my older boys get upset because they think he's not going to come back. I can't get rid of the stigma of being accused of hurting my child. Just two weeks ago, Ryan came home from school in tears because a boy had said I was a babybeater."

Jo had read about Angela Cannings's case, and wrote to her in prison. "I wanted to show my support. Writing to her reminded me of how lucky I was. She would write to me about how awful it was to be in prison when she hadn't done anything, that all she wanted was to be at home with her daughter. I know that the doctors at the hospital had my son's interests at heart, but I want people to realise that medical experts can, and do, make mistakes."

To contact the Five Percenters, the campaign group which supports parents who have been wrongly accused of SBS, call 020 7639 0942 or visit www.sbs5.dircon.co.uk