Juu lime englanniksi ja limetti suomeksi paitsi värinä lime myös suomessa:
Lime eli kellanvihreä väri on nimetty limetin (engl. lime) mukaan, koska väri muistuttaa limetin hedelmälihan väriä.
Limetti (Citrus aurantifolia) on ruutakasveihin (Rutaceae) kuuluva sitruspuu (Citrus). Sen hedelmää kutsutaan samalla nimellä.
Happamuutensa ansiosta soveltuisi juurikin tuohon jälkien peittelyyn.
Jerseyn lastenkoti
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kameleontti
- Lauri Hanhivaara
- Viestit: 120
- Liittynyt: Ke Touko 09, 2007 5:40 pm
Hidas kun olen niin edelleen jankkaan. Englanniksi lime tarkoittaa asiayhteydestä riippuen joko kalkkia tai limettiä, kuitenkin epäilisin tässä tapauksessa kalkkia, koska kuka sinne olisi limettejä puristellut tuhotakseen todisteita??? Saa aika monta limettiä meinaan muussata siihen tarkoitukseen. Tosin kalkin ph-arvosta mulla ei ole tietoa, että olisiko se voinut tuhota luita...
Selvennykseksi "Lime is the product of the burning of chalk or limestone." Ja yleinen materiaali etenkin vanhemmassa englantilaisessa rakentamisessa.
Selvennykseksi "Lime is the product of the burning of chalk or limestone." Ja yleinen materiaali etenkin vanhemmassa englantilaisessa rakentamisessa.
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Sijaltainen
- Harjunpää
- Viestit: 338
- Liittynyt: Pe Maalis 14, 2008 1:08 am
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kameleontti
- Lauri Hanhivaara
- Viestit: 120
- Liittynyt: Ke Touko 09, 2007 5:40 pm
Joo, olette varmaan oikeassa. Menin pelkästään tuon suoran suomennoksen mukaan ja limestone toki on sanana tuttu, mutta ei pelkkänä limenä käyttäminen ja en oikein osaa yhdistää miten se ja luu reagoivat.
Lähinnä tuo hedelmähappo oli vain mielessä, toki tuskin sitä löytyisi enää vuosikymmenten takaa montusta. Kalkkikivi on niin yleistä että varmaan senkin tähden yhdistin ennemmin tuohon erikoisempaan vaihtoehtoon.
Omalla asiantuntemuksella kumpi vaan tuntuu yhtä oudolta tässä yhteydessä.
Lähinnä tuo hedelmähappo oli vain mielessä, toki tuskin sitä löytyisi enää vuosikymmenten takaa montusta. Kalkkikivi on niin yleistä että varmaan senkin tähden yhdistin ennemmin tuohon erikoisempaan vaihtoehtoon.
Omalla asiantuntemuksella kumpi vaan tuntuu yhtä oudolta tässä yhteydessä.
-
kameleontti
- Lauri Hanhivaara
- Viestit: 120
- Liittynyt: Ke Touko 09, 2007 5:40 pm
Juu, kalkkikiveä se on ja vaikuttaa tuohon maaperän ph-arvoon luiden kannalta epäsuotuisasti, mutta silti kalkkikivirikkaasta maaperästä löydettyjä luita on voitu jäljittää jopa 8000 vuoden päähän jos edes 1% kollageeniä on säilynyt. Luunpala on ilmeisesti liian pieni ja huonosti säilynyt että melkoista arvailua on sen ajoittaminen. Palasen viereltä löytyi kolikko vuodelta 1851.
Seuraavassa melko hyvä ja uutisointiin kriittisesti suhtautuva kirjoitus. Laitan sen kokonaisuudessaan tähän, kun se kai tapana on. Tämä on niin pitkä että olen korostanut joitain kohtia, jotka osuivat itselleni ensimmäisellä kerralla silmään. Sinällään ei ole tarkoitus muokata kenenkään mielipidettä.
Alkuperäisessä on kuvia ja linkkejä täällä:
http://www.richardwebster.net/jersey-skull.htm
Tarkoitus ei tietenkään ole myöskään vähätellä pedofiilirenkaan tekosia,mutta olisi kiva jos uutisointi ei lähtisi liikaa Madeleine-tyyliselle sensaatiolinjalle ja lehdistökin tarkastelisi asiaa faktojen pohjalta.
"The Jersey skull fragment, the police, and the facts which turned out not to be true
Wednesday 23 April 2008; last revised 24 April 10.15am
The skull fragment found in the Haut de la Garenne children’s home has always been the most important piece of evidence in the investigation. But some of the facts given to the press about it by the police were untrue. RICHARD WEBSTER conducts his own inquiry during which he speaks to the scientist who carried out the carbon dating of the fragment.
AT 9.30 AM ON SATURDAY 23 February a team of police officers and forensic experts made a discovery which would transform an obscure police inquiry in a picturesque corner of Jersey into a global media frenzy.
The discovery took place inside the main building of the former Haut de la Garenne children’s home. It was reportedly made not by the officers themselves but by a trained sniffer dog which had previously taken part in the search for Madeleine McCann. Almost immediately the police issued a press release saying that they had found ‘what appears to be potential remains of a child’.
A press conference was held and the effect on journalists was electric. News of the discovery rapidly shot to the top of radio and television news bulletins. That evening the BBC website headlined its story ‘Child’s body found at care home’. It went on to say that ‘parts of a child’s body’ had been discovered and that the remains were thought to date ‘from the early 1980s.’ Deputy Chief Police Officer Lenny Harper was quoted as saying that detectives ‘think there is the possibility they may find more remains.’
Within 24 hours this gruesome story spread around the globe amidst talk of a possible paedophile ring. Journalists descended on Jersey from all over the world. Massive resources were poured into what has by now almost certainly become a multi-million pound inquiry, and teams of experts were brought in from all over the UK.
The only problem with the initial story as it had been relayed by the BBC is that practically every element in it was untrue. In fact, no child’s body had been discovered. Nor had the police found anything which could reasonably have been described as the ‘remains of a child’. All they had found was a small piece of bone which was later said to be a ‘skull fragment’. There was no evidence to suggest that this fragment belonged to ‘the early 1980s’ and nor is it clear that it has ever been reliably identified as belonging to a child.
The small piece of bone, however, became the most important piece of evidence in the entire inquiry. It was immediately placed in a polythene bag and sent to a laboratory in the UK for carbon dating. Although results were initially promised in two weeks, the wait proved to be much longer. During this wait some journalists appear to have become sceptical. On 3 March, after a full month had passed, Jersey Evening Post reporter Diane Simon even ventured to ask during a press conference whether the skull fragment might turn out to be a red herring.
More than a month later, on 8 April, her question was partly vindicated when the police announced that scientists had been unable to date the fragment at all.
It is perhaps a tribute to the Jersey Police’s adeptness in handling the media that what was, on any reasonable view, a dismal forensic failure, was either not reported in the press at all or, even more remarkably, was presented as an investigative triumph. This was largely because the police announced the failure to carbon date the fragment in the context of three pieces of information which were entirely new.
In the first place the police reported the on-site archaeologists as saying that the bone could not have been found in a much less favourable environment as ‘there was a large amount of lime present’. It was this, the police implied, which had destroyed the collagen in the bone (on whose presence carbon dating depends).
In the second place the police reported the archaeologists as saying that ‘from a study of the materials in the location where the find was made, the bone was placed at that location no earlier than the 1920s’. This, they pointed out, ‘was some seventy years after the home opened as an Industrial School for Boys.’
In the third place they said that, according to the archaeologists, the fragment might have been deposited more recently than the 1920s:
It could well have found its way there more recently than that, but no earlier. This leaves us with no knowledge of how, when, or indeed, where, the person died. All we can say is that the bone was placed where we found it in the 1920’s or more recently.
The effect of surrounding the news of the disappointing outcome of the carbon dating tests with these three new pieces of information was remarkable. This can best be illustrated by the story which appeared at the time in the Daily Mail: Kuva
The substantive story here was that no forensic testing had been possible. However, the way in which this news had been presented by the police evidently persuaded the Daily Mail’s sub editor to pen a headline which turned the story upside down: ‘Child skull found at Jersey care home “WAS put there while building was a children’s home”, forensic tests confirm.’
A similar story appeared on the same day in The Sun, where the claim that the skull fragment was ‘definitely put there while it [Haut de la Garenne] was a children’s home’ was specifically attributed to the police.
It is is difficult to imagine a more successful public relations coup than the one the police managed to achieve at this point. For they had effectively reversed the true import of the story by turning defeat into victory.
However, it can now be revealed that this coup had something in common with their original public relations triumph when they suggested that they had found the ‘remains of a child’. For, like their original claim, none of the three new pieces of information the police presented to the press at this point was true.
Jatkuu...
Seuraavassa melko hyvä ja uutisointiin kriittisesti suhtautuva kirjoitus. Laitan sen kokonaisuudessaan tähän, kun se kai tapana on. Tämä on niin pitkä että olen korostanut joitain kohtia, jotka osuivat itselleni ensimmäisellä kerralla silmään. Sinällään ei ole tarkoitus muokata kenenkään mielipidettä.
Alkuperäisessä on kuvia ja linkkejä täällä:
http://www.richardwebster.net/jersey-skull.htm
Tarkoitus ei tietenkään ole myöskään vähätellä pedofiilirenkaan tekosia,mutta olisi kiva jos uutisointi ei lähtisi liikaa Madeleine-tyyliselle sensaatiolinjalle ja lehdistökin tarkastelisi asiaa faktojen pohjalta.
"The Jersey skull fragment, the police, and the facts which turned out not to be true
Wednesday 23 April 2008; last revised 24 April 10.15am
The skull fragment found in the Haut de la Garenne children’s home has always been the most important piece of evidence in the investigation. But some of the facts given to the press about it by the police were untrue. RICHARD WEBSTER conducts his own inquiry during which he speaks to the scientist who carried out the carbon dating of the fragment.
AT 9.30 AM ON SATURDAY 23 February a team of police officers and forensic experts made a discovery which would transform an obscure police inquiry in a picturesque corner of Jersey into a global media frenzy.
The discovery took place inside the main building of the former Haut de la Garenne children’s home. It was reportedly made not by the officers themselves but by a trained sniffer dog which had previously taken part in the search for Madeleine McCann. Almost immediately the police issued a press release saying that they had found ‘what appears to be potential remains of a child’.
A press conference was held and the effect on journalists was electric. News of the discovery rapidly shot to the top of radio and television news bulletins. That evening the BBC website headlined its story ‘Child’s body found at care home’. It went on to say that ‘parts of a child’s body’ had been discovered and that the remains were thought to date ‘from the early 1980s.’ Deputy Chief Police Officer Lenny Harper was quoted as saying that detectives ‘think there is the possibility they may find more remains.’
Within 24 hours this gruesome story spread around the globe amidst talk of a possible paedophile ring. Journalists descended on Jersey from all over the world. Massive resources were poured into what has by now almost certainly become a multi-million pound inquiry, and teams of experts were brought in from all over the UK.
The only problem with the initial story as it had been relayed by the BBC is that practically every element in it was untrue. In fact, no child’s body had been discovered. Nor had the police found anything which could reasonably have been described as the ‘remains of a child’. All they had found was a small piece of bone which was later said to be a ‘skull fragment’. There was no evidence to suggest that this fragment belonged to ‘the early 1980s’ and nor is it clear that it has ever been reliably identified as belonging to a child.
The small piece of bone, however, became the most important piece of evidence in the entire inquiry. It was immediately placed in a polythene bag and sent to a laboratory in the UK for carbon dating. Although results were initially promised in two weeks, the wait proved to be much longer. During this wait some journalists appear to have become sceptical. On 3 March, after a full month had passed, Jersey Evening Post reporter Diane Simon even ventured to ask during a press conference whether the skull fragment might turn out to be a red herring.
More than a month later, on 8 April, her question was partly vindicated when the police announced that scientists had been unable to date the fragment at all.
It is perhaps a tribute to the Jersey Police’s adeptness in handling the media that what was, on any reasonable view, a dismal forensic failure, was either not reported in the press at all or, even more remarkably, was presented as an investigative triumph. This was largely because the police announced the failure to carbon date the fragment in the context of three pieces of information which were entirely new.
In the first place the police reported the on-site archaeologists as saying that the bone could not have been found in a much less favourable environment as ‘there was a large amount of lime present’. It was this, the police implied, which had destroyed the collagen in the bone (on whose presence carbon dating depends).
In the second place the police reported the archaeologists as saying that ‘from a study of the materials in the location where the find was made, the bone was placed at that location no earlier than the 1920s’. This, they pointed out, ‘was some seventy years after the home opened as an Industrial School for Boys.’
In the third place they said that, according to the archaeologists, the fragment might have been deposited more recently than the 1920s:
It could well have found its way there more recently than that, but no earlier. This leaves us with no knowledge of how, when, or indeed, where, the person died. All we can say is that the bone was placed where we found it in the 1920’s or more recently.
The effect of surrounding the news of the disappointing outcome of the carbon dating tests with these three new pieces of information was remarkable. This can best be illustrated by the story which appeared at the time in the Daily Mail: Kuva
The substantive story here was that no forensic testing had been possible. However, the way in which this news had been presented by the police evidently persuaded the Daily Mail’s sub editor to pen a headline which turned the story upside down: ‘Child skull found at Jersey care home “WAS put there while building was a children’s home”, forensic tests confirm.’
A similar story appeared on the same day in The Sun, where the claim that the skull fragment was ‘definitely put there while it [Haut de la Garenne] was a children’s home’ was specifically attributed to the police.
It is is difficult to imagine a more successful public relations coup than the one the police managed to achieve at this point. For they had effectively reversed the true import of the story by turning defeat into victory.
However, it can now be revealed that this coup had something in common with their original public relations triumph when they suggested that they had found the ‘remains of a child’. For, like their original claim, none of the three new pieces of information the police presented to the press at this point was true.
Jatkuu...
The reporter, the archaeologists and the police
IT IS THE JERSEY EVENING POST which should take the credit for making the first part of this discovery.
Now that most national newspapers have lost interest in the story and the throngs of journalists who once attended every press conference have left the island, it has been left to the local newspaper to get on with some real journalistic digging.
In the recent past the Post has been severely criticised for siding with the ‘establishment’. But even Senator Stuart Syvret, the paper’s most outspoken critic, has expressed grudging respect for its reporter Diane Simon.
On Friday 18 April, Diane Simon came up with an extremely important story, which quite inexcusably, has been completely ignored by the press on the mainland.
In a front page headline, the Jersey Evening Post announced that the murder inquiry relating to the skull fragment had been abandoned. The most fascinating feature of Diane Simon’s story, however, is that it flatly contradicts the claims about dating which were made by the police. It does so on the basis of exactly the same authority the police originally invoked – the archaeologists:
The fragment of a child’s skull definitely predates the abuse inquiry period and will not be the subject of a murder investigation.
And the layer of earth in which it was found means that the fragment could even have been placed there as long ago as the Victorian period, the forensic archaeologists who found it have said.
The particular layer in which the skull fragment was found contained Victorian brickwork and a Victorian penny bearing the date 1851. Perhaps more importantly still, it is said to have been sealed in by a layer of aggregate dating back to the 1940s. In other words, the bone which, as Simon notes, ‘ sparked a frenzy of interest from the world’s media’ has turned out to be exactly the kind of red herring she speculated it might be when, during a press conference held on 2 March, she posed the question which every other journalist seemed too timid to ask.
In a paragraph which suggests that discomfort may have been expressed by some of the archaeologists involved in the dig at the version of events given by the police, the Post story continues:
Forensic archaeologists with many years of experience have advised Mr Harper that although the skull fragment could not be dated, they have ‘very securely’ dated the context in which it was found.
It follows from the Evening Post story that the two crucial claims made by the police in their press release of 8 April – namely that the fragments could not have been deposited earlier that the 1920s, and that it might have been deposited recently, were both untrue.
Of course the fact we now know that an 1851 penny was found nearby does not in itself provide a secure date since, as the archaeologists note, such coins would be in circulation long after they were minted. But the presence of the coin raised the possibility that the depositing of the skull fragment had nothing whatsoever to do with Haut de la Garenne’s use as a children’s home, which only began when it opened as the Jersey Industrial School in 1867 – a full sixteen years after the penny was minted.
Carbon dating and the disappearing collagen
WHILE DIANE SIMON’S DISCOVERY will be known at least to those who read the Jersey Evening Post, the second discovery, which relates to carbon dating, is reported here for the first time.
This discovery concerns the third new piece of information which the police had used in what appears to have been an attempt to spin the bad news about the result of the carbon dating tests. This was the explanation they had given for the failure:
The protein ‘Collagen’ had been completely destroyed in the bone. Archaeologists state that the bone could not have been found in a much less favourable environment as there was a large amount of lime present.
The clear implication of these words is that the reason that the collagen in the skull fragment had been destroyed was because of the amount of lime present and that this is widely recognised as one of the worst environments for preserving bone. Yet, when I investigated this claim, it too turned out to be untrue – or at the very least highly questionable. Moreover there is evidence to suggest that the skull fragment may be many hundreds of years old – or even many thousands.
The reason for initially suspecting this is a common-sense one. Bones are relatively stable objects and bones which are 50,ooo years old can sometimes be carbon dated successfully. When, in their press release, the police revealed that the collagen in their bone sample had been ‘completely destroyed’, the obvious question to ask was whether this in itself might be significant, and might point in the direction of the probable age of the skull fragment.
A little research on the internet soon established that a group of carbon dating specialists in Germany, C. M. Hüls, P. M. Grootes, M-J. Nadeau, had, only three weeks previously, given a conference presentation in Zurich entitled ‘Dating bones without collagen’.
This seemed a potentially helpful lead but I decided that it might be wise to start a little nearer home. A telephone inquiry soon led to a conversation with Dr Fiona Brock, a chemist at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit Research Laboratory for Archaeology. She made it clear that she was not the expert on the questions I wanted to explore. The person who knew much more about these matters was the deputy director of the unit, Dr Tom Higham. He, however, was working in Spain that week at an archaeological site and she would be happy to take me through some of the basics.
She explained that bone is made up essentially of two substances – the mineral component which is calcium and the organic component which is collagen. Collagen is a long fibrous protein and is one of the main components of cartilage, skin, teeth and bone. Successful carbon dating depends on the presence of collagen which stores carbon in a stable form. Modern bones have something in the region of 22% in weight of collagen. Depending on the burial environment this can be removed from bone over time. But, provided that at least 1% of collagen remains, then samples can usually be dated successfully.
But, as this was not her special field, Fiona Brock was reluctant to commit herself on any of my more specific queries. Instead she pointed out that there were other carbon dating laboratories which sometimes undertook forensic work and that one of these was in the UK. This was the laboratory at Queen’s University, Belfast.
At Belfast I spoke to the director of the 14CHRONO Centre for Climate Environment & Chronology, Dr Paula Reimer. She is an expert on carbon dating in relation to climate change and carbon variation in the atmosphere.
The world of carbon dating is evidently a small one and it soon transpired that she had actually been present three weeks earlier in Zurich when Professor Pieter Grootes and his colleagues had given their paper on ‘Dating bones without collagen’ . Although she doubted the relevance of this technique to my immediate inquiry, she confirmed that Professor Grootes was one of the leading experts in the field.
When I explained to her that, according to the police press release, archaeologists had accounted for the absence of collagen in the Jersey bone fragment by saying that a large amount of lime was present in the burial environment of the skull fragment, she seemed surprised. She immediately qualified her reaction by making it clear that this was not her particular field of expertise. But she did observe that some bones recently discovered in caves in Ireland had been found in lime-rich conditions. Yet they had been successfully carbon dated and been shown to be 8000 years old.
At this point, however she suggested that I should really speak to somebody who did specialise in this area. In particular she pointed me towards the scientist who was, in her view, probably the world’s leading expert on the very questions which I was raising.
The experts’ view
THIS WAS DR TOM HIGHAM, the deputy director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit – the colleague of Fiona Brock who was working away from the laboratory that week. By this stage I had already discovered by accident that it was Dr Higham himself who had conducted the carbon dating tests on the Jersey fragment. It was therefore not surprising that, although he agreed to speak to me, he did so on the understanding that, while he was happy to answer questions about general principles, he could not discuss any specific case.
When, after an email exchange, I finally spoke to him on the telephone early one morning at his hotel in Spain, he scrupulously observed this condition. He confirmed that although bones are often preserved well, particularly in temperate climates, there are a variety of factors which can affect the level of collagen that is retained. Factors that are particularly important are the pH of the soil, the presence of moisture, microbial or bacterial activity and temperature. Hot climates were problematic when it came to collagen preservation but in temperate zones archaeologists generally encountered fewer problems.
What was particularly interesting is that Tom Higham endorsed the view of Paula Reimer that lime was far from being one of the worst burial environment from the point of view of carbon dating. On the crucial question of whether the absence of collagen from a bone sample gave any indication of its date, his answer was highly significant. He made it quite clear that no hard and fast conclusion could be drawn since everything depended on the bone’s state of preservation. But it would tend to point towards the bone being older rather than younger: ‘It would be surprising,’ he said, ‘if you were dealing with a sample which was supposed to come from after 1800 and it came out with no collagen. In such a case I would think that the sample would probably be old and probably not forensic.’ Such samples, he said, ‘would probably be older than 1800’.
He also expressed the view that ‘bones are very difficult to identify on the basis of a small sample’. It was sometimes very difficult, he said, to distinguish between human and other mammalian bones.
When, later that week, I spoke to Professor Pieter Grootes of the Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, he was more forthright. When I asked him what he would think if he had been presented with the Jersey skull fragment and had found it to contain no collagen, he immediately said: ‘I would wonder whether that was a modern piece of bone and had anything to do with child abuse.’
I explained that there had been a great deal of lime where the fragment was found but this did not change his view: ‘I would not expect lime to penetrate bone.’ He said he felt that a bone found on the Channel Islands with no collagen was likely to be old. When I pressed him on how old he said ‘a few thousand to few hundred thousand years.’
Jatkuu...
IT IS THE JERSEY EVENING POST which should take the credit for making the first part of this discovery.
Now that most national newspapers have lost interest in the story and the throngs of journalists who once attended every press conference have left the island, it has been left to the local newspaper to get on with some real journalistic digging.
In the recent past the Post has been severely criticised for siding with the ‘establishment’. But even Senator Stuart Syvret, the paper’s most outspoken critic, has expressed grudging respect for its reporter Diane Simon.
On Friday 18 April, Diane Simon came up with an extremely important story, which quite inexcusably, has been completely ignored by the press on the mainland.
In a front page headline, the Jersey Evening Post announced that the murder inquiry relating to the skull fragment had been abandoned. The most fascinating feature of Diane Simon’s story, however, is that it flatly contradicts the claims about dating which were made by the police. It does so on the basis of exactly the same authority the police originally invoked – the archaeologists:
The fragment of a child’s skull definitely predates the abuse inquiry period and will not be the subject of a murder investigation.
And the layer of earth in which it was found means that the fragment could even have been placed there as long ago as the Victorian period, the forensic archaeologists who found it have said.
The particular layer in which the skull fragment was found contained Victorian brickwork and a Victorian penny bearing the date 1851. Perhaps more importantly still, it is said to have been sealed in by a layer of aggregate dating back to the 1940s. In other words, the bone which, as Simon notes, ‘ sparked a frenzy of interest from the world’s media’ has turned out to be exactly the kind of red herring she speculated it might be when, during a press conference held on 2 March, she posed the question which every other journalist seemed too timid to ask.
In a paragraph which suggests that discomfort may have been expressed by some of the archaeologists involved in the dig at the version of events given by the police, the Post story continues:
Forensic archaeologists with many years of experience have advised Mr Harper that although the skull fragment could not be dated, they have ‘very securely’ dated the context in which it was found.
It follows from the Evening Post story that the two crucial claims made by the police in their press release of 8 April – namely that the fragments could not have been deposited earlier that the 1920s, and that it might have been deposited recently, were both untrue.
Of course the fact we now know that an 1851 penny was found nearby does not in itself provide a secure date since, as the archaeologists note, such coins would be in circulation long after they were minted. But the presence of the coin raised the possibility that the depositing of the skull fragment had nothing whatsoever to do with Haut de la Garenne’s use as a children’s home, which only began when it opened as the Jersey Industrial School in 1867 – a full sixteen years after the penny was minted.
Carbon dating and the disappearing collagen
WHILE DIANE SIMON’S DISCOVERY will be known at least to those who read the Jersey Evening Post, the second discovery, which relates to carbon dating, is reported here for the first time.
This discovery concerns the third new piece of information which the police had used in what appears to have been an attempt to spin the bad news about the result of the carbon dating tests. This was the explanation they had given for the failure:
The protein ‘Collagen’ had been completely destroyed in the bone. Archaeologists state that the bone could not have been found in a much less favourable environment as there was a large amount of lime present.
The clear implication of these words is that the reason that the collagen in the skull fragment had been destroyed was because of the amount of lime present and that this is widely recognised as one of the worst environments for preserving bone. Yet, when I investigated this claim, it too turned out to be untrue – or at the very least highly questionable. Moreover there is evidence to suggest that the skull fragment may be many hundreds of years old – or even many thousands.
The reason for initially suspecting this is a common-sense one. Bones are relatively stable objects and bones which are 50,ooo years old can sometimes be carbon dated successfully. When, in their press release, the police revealed that the collagen in their bone sample had been ‘completely destroyed’, the obvious question to ask was whether this in itself might be significant, and might point in the direction of the probable age of the skull fragment.
A little research on the internet soon established that a group of carbon dating specialists in Germany, C. M. Hüls, P. M. Grootes, M-J. Nadeau, had, only three weeks previously, given a conference presentation in Zurich entitled ‘Dating bones without collagen’.
This seemed a potentially helpful lead but I decided that it might be wise to start a little nearer home. A telephone inquiry soon led to a conversation with Dr Fiona Brock, a chemist at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit Research Laboratory for Archaeology. She made it clear that she was not the expert on the questions I wanted to explore. The person who knew much more about these matters was the deputy director of the unit, Dr Tom Higham. He, however, was working in Spain that week at an archaeological site and she would be happy to take me through some of the basics.
She explained that bone is made up essentially of two substances – the mineral component which is calcium and the organic component which is collagen. Collagen is a long fibrous protein and is one of the main components of cartilage, skin, teeth and bone. Successful carbon dating depends on the presence of collagen which stores carbon in a stable form. Modern bones have something in the region of 22% in weight of collagen. Depending on the burial environment this can be removed from bone over time. But, provided that at least 1% of collagen remains, then samples can usually be dated successfully.
But, as this was not her special field, Fiona Brock was reluctant to commit herself on any of my more specific queries. Instead she pointed out that there were other carbon dating laboratories which sometimes undertook forensic work and that one of these was in the UK. This was the laboratory at Queen’s University, Belfast.
At Belfast I spoke to the director of the 14CHRONO Centre for Climate Environment & Chronology, Dr Paula Reimer. She is an expert on carbon dating in relation to climate change and carbon variation in the atmosphere.
The world of carbon dating is evidently a small one and it soon transpired that she had actually been present three weeks earlier in Zurich when Professor Pieter Grootes and his colleagues had given their paper on ‘Dating bones without collagen’ . Although she doubted the relevance of this technique to my immediate inquiry, she confirmed that Professor Grootes was one of the leading experts in the field.
When I explained to her that, according to the police press release, archaeologists had accounted for the absence of collagen in the Jersey bone fragment by saying that a large amount of lime was present in the burial environment of the skull fragment, she seemed surprised. She immediately qualified her reaction by making it clear that this was not her particular field of expertise. But she did observe that some bones recently discovered in caves in Ireland had been found in lime-rich conditions. Yet they had been successfully carbon dated and been shown to be 8000 years old.
At this point, however she suggested that I should really speak to somebody who did specialise in this area. In particular she pointed me towards the scientist who was, in her view, probably the world’s leading expert on the very questions which I was raising.
The experts’ view
THIS WAS DR TOM HIGHAM, the deputy director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit – the colleague of Fiona Brock who was working away from the laboratory that week. By this stage I had already discovered by accident that it was Dr Higham himself who had conducted the carbon dating tests on the Jersey fragment. It was therefore not surprising that, although he agreed to speak to me, he did so on the understanding that, while he was happy to answer questions about general principles, he could not discuss any specific case.
When, after an email exchange, I finally spoke to him on the telephone early one morning at his hotel in Spain, he scrupulously observed this condition. He confirmed that although bones are often preserved well, particularly in temperate climates, there are a variety of factors which can affect the level of collagen that is retained. Factors that are particularly important are the pH of the soil, the presence of moisture, microbial or bacterial activity and temperature. Hot climates were problematic when it came to collagen preservation but in temperate zones archaeologists generally encountered fewer problems.
What was particularly interesting is that Tom Higham endorsed the view of Paula Reimer that lime was far from being one of the worst burial environment from the point of view of carbon dating. On the crucial question of whether the absence of collagen from a bone sample gave any indication of its date, his answer was highly significant. He made it quite clear that no hard and fast conclusion could be drawn since everything depended on the bone’s state of preservation. But it would tend to point towards the bone being older rather than younger: ‘It would be surprising,’ he said, ‘if you were dealing with a sample which was supposed to come from after 1800 and it came out with no collagen. In such a case I would think that the sample would probably be old and probably not forensic.’ Such samples, he said, ‘would probably be older than 1800’.
He also expressed the view that ‘bones are very difficult to identify on the basis of a small sample’. It was sometimes very difficult, he said, to distinguish between human and other mammalian bones.
When, later that week, I spoke to Professor Pieter Grootes of the Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, he was more forthright. When I asked him what he would think if he had been presented with the Jersey skull fragment and had found it to contain no collagen, he immediately said: ‘I would wonder whether that was a modern piece of bone and had anything to do with child abuse.’
I explained that there had been a great deal of lime where the fragment was found but this did not change his view: ‘I would not expect lime to penetrate bone.’ He said he felt that a bone found on the Channel Islands with no collagen was likely to be old. When I pressed him on how old he said ‘a few thousand to few hundred thousand years.’
Jatkuu...
The neolithic burial place
SINCE THE FIGURE OF a few hundred thousand years would take us back into the early Neanderthal era, it was presumably intended as a notional one. It does seem necessary to note here, however, that the Haut de la Garenne building is some three or four hundred yards away from La Pouquelaye de Faldouët or the Faldouët Dolmen.
This neolithic passage grave was constructed some 6,000 years ago and has occasionally been mentioned in connection with the current investigation. On a BBC discussion board which was opened after the discovery of the skull fragment, a former Jersey resident wrote:
As a Jerseyman living in the UK I would be interested to see if the archaeologists on site at the boys home unearth any Late Neolithic/early Bronze Age human remains as the home is just a stones throw from the Dolmen du Faldouet . . . where I played as a child. Cist burials were very common around sites such as this and when the home was first built it would have been possible to have disturbed one or two and the remains discarded into the backfill. It may well be that the human remains found thus far could be far older than was first thought.
In the same press conference at which Jersey Evening Post reporter Diane Simon asked Lenny Harper whether the skull fragment might be a red herring, he was also asked whether it might have come from the Faldouët Dolmen. He replied at the time that there was no evidence to suggest this.
There is, of course, still no evidence which conclusively connects the bone fragment with the neolithic burial ground just across the road from Haut de la Garenne. But now that we know a little more about the views of the various archaeologists both on and off-site, we can say with some confidence that it is rather more likely that the fragment is neolithic than that it has anything at all to do with the building’s use as a children’s home.
Perhaps the most interesting question of all, however, which none of the carbon dating experts I spoke to was in a position to answer, is whether any of the opinions expressed to me were contained in the report which was made to the Jersey Police.
All we do know is that when the police issued a press release about the outcome of the carbon dating tests, the only part of it that that came from the laboratory which had performed the test was the conclusion that the collagen in the skull fragment had been ‘completely destroyed’. The other information in the press release purportedly came from the archaeologists who were on the site in Jersey. However, it is precisely the information attributed to them which has now turned out to be wrong.
Why was the carbon dating necessary at all?
THE COMBINED IMPACT OF THE revelation concerning the archaeologists and the new information about carbon dating is disturbing.
One of the questions which it inevitably prompts is why the skull fragment was ever submitted for carbon dating in the first place. For as soon as the archaeologists working on the site had ‘very securely’ dated the fragment to the 1940s or earlier then its irrelevance to any criminal investigation should have been apparent.
It is quite clear that, from the point of view of the police, the entire saga of the skull fragment and the protracted attempt to carbon date it, has been an extremely successful exercise in news management. In some respects it was even more than this; it was a great (if unintended) theatrical coup. It was certainly the discovery of this fragment, and its prompt promotion to the media by way of a press conference, which suddenly turned the Haut de la Garenne investigation from an obscure police inquiry into a global media phenomenon. This in turn has been used to justify expenditure on the investigation on a scale which is completely out of proportion to the evidence which has in fact been found.
What is most worrying is that the theatrical coup seems to have succeeded principally because the police launched it by making the untrue or misleading suggestion to the press that they had discovered the ‘remains of a child’. At the very point when the entire story was on the point of collapse, the police then apparently sought to mitigate a potential public relations disaster by supplying three more pieces of information, all of which have turned out to be untrue or misleading.
That it should now emerge, after two months of horrific and sensational publicity, that the skull fragment has been effectively eliminated from the investigation by the very archaeologists who helped to find it, and that it may in any case be thousands of years old, is sobering indeed. This development might be thought sufficient in itself to call into question the entire inquiry.
It might also have led some in authority to conclude that the quite massive amount of money which has so far been spent on the operation, has been obtained on a very unsound basis indeed.
This being the case, the fact that the most recent developments have effectively been hidden from the general public on the mainland by quiescent, slumbering or complicit journalists, may well have come as a relief to the police.
In this respect Diane Simon and the Jersey Evening Post deserve great credit for continuing to dig into the story when other journalists had either given up or – in most cases – not even begun.
More horror stories
THIS DOES NOT MEAN, of course, that the horror stories have now ceased. No sooner had the Jersey Evening Post made preparations to publish its story about the archaeologists than a fresh press release sent into circulation an entirely new story. On Wednesday 16 April, two days before the story about the difference of opinion with the archaeologists appeared in the paper, the police let it be known that two pits had been dug at the home during the late seventies or early eighties. Having been dug they had then almost immediately been filled in again. The police had already excavated one of these pits and had discovered that it contained nothing but a large amount of lime.
The enquiry team can think of no reason why this pit would have been created nor why it was filled with lime. We would emphasise that we have no evidence of any motive. We are currently excavating the second pit which is very close to what was the boys’ dormitory.
The language of the press release was restrained. But its effect was entirely predictable. On the following day most mainland newspapers carried the story. Some, including the Telegraph and the Guardian, immediately put their own gloss on it, pointing out that lime ‘can be used to disintegrate corpses’ (Telegraph) or ‘is often used to try to accelerate the decomposition of soft tissues in buried remains’ (Guardian).
What no mainland newspaper recorded was the report which appeared in the Jersey Evening Post on 16 April, that ‘the information about the pits came from a member of the public soon after police work had started at the site in February’. The question which this raises is why, if this information was so important, was the excavation of the pits left for more than a month? And why, since the police had already found nothing (except lime), in the first pit, did they not wait until they had finished digging up the second pit before giving the story to the media?
One answer to this question, of course, is that press releases which announce that excavations have been completed and no skeletons have been found do not make good horror stories. And it is on good horror stories that the ‘success’ of the investigation in prompting publicity and, through it, more allegations, has so far depended. From the police’s point of view a new horror story might be particularly welcome at a time when anything which distracted attention away from Diane Simon’s story about the archaeologists would, presumably, be helpful to them.
None of this, of course, should be taken to indicate that there is no substance at all in any of the allegations which have been made in relation to children’s homes on Jersey. Since the story of the lime pits was announced in the middle of last week, the police have broken two more stories.
Last week they claimed that they had found ‘blood-stained items’ the nature of which they declined to specify. It is interesting that on this occasion Harper was careful to add to the story the qualification that the items might have ‘an innocent explanation’.
This week the police attributed malign significance to two milk teeth they had found, linking them to some fragments of bone which have not as yet even been identified as human.
However, even if these latest horror stories lead nowhere, as seems most likely, it is almost certain to be the case that some of the allegations which have been made about care workers on Jersey are well-founded. Not all of these allegations, of course, involve Haut de la Garenne.
One of the most important of all the strands in the story concerns the claims which have been made about Grand Prix disciplinary system, a tough disciplinary regime used at the Greenfields secure unit on Jersey. It was this regime, which apparently involved punishing young inmates with solitary confinement, that the English social worker Simon Bellwood scrapped after his appointment as centre manager in August 2006. He was eventually dismissed in May 2007. This has generally been treated in the press as a story about a dissident manager who was sacked for whistleblowing.
Last month the case was settled at an employment tribunal. The joint statement which was issued as part of this settlement might appear to undermine the received view of the case. But too much weight should not be attached to any agreement which is based on a generous financial settlement, and it does indeed seem that Bellwood’s dismissal was directly related to his opposition to the Grand Prix system.
The joint statement also announced that there would be a full independent inquiry into all the circumstances surrounding his dismissal.
This is clearly to be welcomed. For on the face of things, the regime which Bellwood inherited was a draconian one. There are almost certainly complex reasons why this regime was adopted but reasons do not amount to a justification. The whole subject therefore needs, and should receive, the most careful and sensitive investigation.
The same is true in respect of any allegations which which have been made spontaneously about Haut de la Garenne, or indeed about any other children’s home on Jersey. Given that what is under consideration is a forty-year period at a large children’s home, it seems entirely possible that there is a small but significant number of genuine victims of physical or sexual abuse among those who were encouraged to make complaints at the outset of the inquiry.
Two sets of victims
THE PROBELM IS THAT THESE complaints have not been followed up by the kind of careful and sensitive police inquiry which is required. Instead they have been met with a high-profile, sensational investigation which has been conducted at times with quite extraordinary recklessness. The officer in charge of this investigation has, by his own admission (made in an interview with the Belfast Telegraph), deliberately sought maximum publicity, and has done so with the explicit purpose of generating more allegations against former care workers.
For the reasons which I have outlined in an earlier article, Flat Earth News and the Jersey child abuse scandal, this method of investigation is dangerous, not least because it will all but inevitably have had the effect of generating a large volume of false allegations.
Those who may end up suffering because of such false allegations are not only the many innocent care workers who were employed at Haut de la Garenne over the years. They are also almost certain to include those who genuinely were abused. For one of the dangers of conducting investigations in a manner which unintentionally encourages false allegations is that these will ultimately undermine any true allegations which have also been made.
Unfortunately countless police forces in England and Wales have already conducted dangerous investigations of this kind. Partly because of the findings of the Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry in 2002, most police forces in the UK have wound down such investigations. It is also the case that ACPO, (the Association of Chief Police Officers) has issued guidelines for historic abuse inquiries which go some way to moderating their dangers. Jersey, however, (like Northern Ireland and Strathclyde where Lenny Harper has previously served) lies beyond the scope of these guidelines. It may be partly for this reason that he has been able to revive some of the most dangerous features of a police technique which has been discredited elsewhere. He is in this repect merely continuing what is, in effect, a modern witch-hunt directed against residential social workers.
As I wrote in my book The Secret of Bryn Estyn:
One of the factors … which makes this modern witch-hunt uniquely terrible is that it has claimed, and continues to claim, two sets of victims. For it is not only those who are falsely accused who suffer anguish and misery. Among the other victims are all those who genuinely have been abused. Because of the huge number of false allegations which have been made in the last thirty years, the veracity of almost all allegations of abuse may begin to be called into question. As a result many people who have made truthful complaints of having been abused in children’s homes, of rape, or of incest, may find that they are disbelieved or may fear that they might be. They may feel, in consequence, that they have been robbed of their own integrity and their own history. That, too, is a tragedy and we should not underestimate the distress which such disbelief can cause (p. 551).
It is because of the pain which scepticism of any kind about allegations of abuse can inflict on those who genuinely have suffered abuse, that many people, including police officers, social workers, lawyers and journalists are sometimes prepared to accept on trust any allegation. This attitude is dangerous for the simple reason that it tacitly encourages fantasy and fabrication.
To make a false allegation against an innocent person is itself a serious crime and tolerating such false allegations, or creating conditions in which they flourish, is unwise. Indeed it is just as dangerous to a democratic society as tolerating any serious crime would be.
The Haut de la Garenne investigation in Jersey, and the manner in which it has been conducted, has already, I believe, created conditions in which false allegations are being inadvertently encouraged. There should be no doubt at all about the sincerity of Deputy Chief Officer Lenny Harper and the nobility of his motives. But if the inquiry he leads continues on its present course then it is likely to cause immeasurable harm – and indeed has already begun to do so.
To those who wonder, as some inevitably will, why I have taken the time and trouble to research and write this article, one answer at least is simple.
Having spent more than ten years investigating the North Wales child abuse scandal and the nationwide trawling operation against residential care workers which followed, I have seen too many innocent people put in prison for crimes which neither they nor anybody else has committed. Of these care workers, who have been given sentences of up to fifteen years, some have been released, some have died in prison, and some are in prison still.
Because I am not a journalist, I decided some two years ago that I would attempt to leave the subject of police trawling operations behind me, in order to concentrate on my real interest – which is human nature and human nurture in the broadest sense of those terms.
If I have now taken up the subject again it is principally because it seems to me that not to do so would be both negligent and irresponsible.
I am under no illusions, however, that any intervention which does not enlist support across a broad spectrum of the media, is going to have any significant effect.
One of the purposes of this article is to attempt to enlist such support. Some of the difficulties which are likely to stand in the way of this attempt will be explored in the second part of Flat Earth News and the Jersey child abuse scandal.
___________________________
Richard Webster is the author of The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt (2005). The long-delayed paperback of this book, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing, will be published later this year.
The second part of Flat Earth News and the Jersey child abuse scandal will follow as soon as I am able to complete it, which may not be for a week or two.
The update list
If you would like to be notified when this site is updated, send me an email - [email protected] - with the subject line ‘updates’ and I will put you on the list. Otherwise any new additions to the site will be featured under the heading ‘RECENT’ at the top left of the home page.
© Richard Webster, 2008
www.richardwebster.net
SINCE THE FIGURE OF a few hundred thousand years would take us back into the early Neanderthal era, it was presumably intended as a notional one. It does seem necessary to note here, however, that the Haut de la Garenne building is some three or four hundred yards away from La Pouquelaye de Faldouët or the Faldouët Dolmen.
This neolithic passage grave was constructed some 6,000 years ago and has occasionally been mentioned in connection with the current investigation. On a BBC discussion board which was opened after the discovery of the skull fragment, a former Jersey resident wrote:
As a Jerseyman living in the UK I would be interested to see if the archaeologists on site at the boys home unearth any Late Neolithic/early Bronze Age human remains as the home is just a stones throw from the Dolmen du Faldouet . . . where I played as a child. Cist burials were very common around sites such as this and when the home was first built it would have been possible to have disturbed one or two and the remains discarded into the backfill. It may well be that the human remains found thus far could be far older than was first thought.
In the same press conference at which Jersey Evening Post reporter Diane Simon asked Lenny Harper whether the skull fragment might be a red herring, he was also asked whether it might have come from the Faldouët Dolmen. He replied at the time that there was no evidence to suggest this.
There is, of course, still no evidence which conclusively connects the bone fragment with the neolithic burial ground just across the road from Haut de la Garenne. But now that we know a little more about the views of the various archaeologists both on and off-site, we can say with some confidence that it is rather more likely that the fragment is neolithic than that it has anything at all to do with the building’s use as a children’s home.
Perhaps the most interesting question of all, however, which none of the carbon dating experts I spoke to was in a position to answer, is whether any of the opinions expressed to me were contained in the report which was made to the Jersey Police.
All we do know is that when the police issued a press release about the outcome of the carbon dating tests, the only part of it that that came from the laboratory which had performed the test was the conclusion that the collagen in the skull fragment had been ‘completely destroyed’. The other information in the press release purportedly came from the archaeologists who were on the site in Jersey. However, it is precisely the information attributed to them which has now turned out to be wrong.
Why was the carbon dating necessary at all?
THE COMBINED IMPACT OF THE revelation concerning the archaeologists and the new information about carbon dating is disturbing.
One of the questions which it inevitably prompts is why the skull fragment was ever submitted for carbon dating in the first place. For as soon as the archaeologists working on the site had ‘very securely’ dated the fragment to the 1940s or earlier then its irrelevance to any criminal investigation should have been apparent.
It is quite clear that, from the point of view of the police, the entire saga of the skull fragment and the protracted attempt to carbon date it, has been an extremely successful exercise in news management. In some respects it was even more than this; it was a great (if unintended) theatrical coup. It was certainly the discovery of this fragment, and its prompt promotion to the media by way of a press conference, which suddenly turned the Haut de la Garenne investigation from an obscure police inquiry into a global media phenomenon. This in turn has been used to justify expenditure on the investigation on a scale which is completely out of proportion to the evidence which has in fact been found.
What is most worrying is that the theatrical coup seems to have succeeded principally because the police launched it by making the untrue or misleading suggestion to the press that they had discovered the ‘remains of a child’. At the very point when the entire story was on the point of collapse, the police then apparently sought to mitigate a potential public relations disaster by supplying three more pieces of information, all of which have turned out to be untrue or misleading.
That it should now emerge, after two months of horrific and sensational publicity, that the skull fragment has been effectively eliminated from the investigation by the very archaeologists who helped to find it, and that it may in any case be thousands of years old, is sobering indeed. This development might be thought sufficient in itself to call into question the entire inquiry.
It might also have led some in authority to conclude that the quite massive amount of money which has so far been spent on the operation, has been obtained on a very unsound basis indeed.
This being the case, the fact that the most recent developments have effectively been hidden from the general public on the mainland by quiescent, slumbering or complicit journalists, may well have come as a relief to the police.
In this respect Diane Simon and the Jersey Evening Post deserve great credit for continuing to dig into the story when other journalists had either given up or – in most cases – not even begun.
More horror stories
THIS DOES NOT MEAN, of course, that the horror stories have now ceased. No sooner had the Jersey Evening Post made preparations to publish its story about the archaeologists than a fresh press release sent into circulation an entirely new story. On Wednesday 16 April, two days before the story about the difference of opinion with the archaeologists appeared in the paper, the police let it be known that two pits had been dug at the home during the late seventies or early eighties. Having been dug they had then almost immediately been filled in again. The police had already excavated one of these pits and had discovered that it contained nothing but a large amount of lime.
The enquiry team can think of no reason why this pit would have been created nor why it was filled with lime. We would emphasise that we have no evidence of any motive. We are currently excavating the second pit which is very close to what was the boys’ dormitory.
The language of the press release was restrained. But its effect was entirely predictable. On the following day most mainland newspapers carried the story. Some, including the Telegraph and the Guardian, immediately put their own gloss on it, pointing out that lime ‘can be used to disintegrate corpses’ (Telegraph) or ‘is often used to try to accelerate the decomposition of soft tissues in buried remains’ (Guardian).
What no mainland newspaper recorded was the report which appeared in the Jersey Evening Post on 16 April, that ‘the information about the pits came from a member of the public soon after police work had started at the site in February’. The question which this raises is why, if this information was so important, was the excavation of the pits left for more than a month? And why, since the police had already found nothing (except lime), in the first pit, did they not wait until they had finished digging up the second pit before giving the story to the media?
One answer to this question, of course, is that press releases which announce that excavations have been completed and no skeletons have been found do not make good horror stories. And it is on good horror stories that the ‘success’ of the investigation in prompting publicity and, through it, more allegations, has so far depended. From the police’s point of view a new horror story might be particularly welcome at a time when anything which distracted attention away from Diane Simon’s story about the archaeologists would, presumably, be helpful to them.
None of this, of course, should be taken to indicate that there is no substance at all in any of the allegations which have been made in relation to children’s homes on Jersey. Since the story of the lime pits was announced in the middle of last week, the police have broken two more stories.
Last week they claimed that they had found ‘blood-stained items’ the nature of which they declined to specify. It is interesting that on this occasion Harper was careful to add to the story the qualification that the items might have ‘an innocent explanation’.
This week the police attributed malign significance to two milk teeth they had found, linking them to some fragments of bone which have not as yet even been identified as human.
However, even if these latest horror stories lead nowhere, as seems most likely, it is almost certain to be the case that some of the allegations which have been made about care workers on Jersey are well-founded. Not all of these allegations, of course, involve Haut de la Garenne.
One of the most important of all the strands in the story concerns the claims which have been made about Grand Prix disciplinary system, a tough disciplinary regime used at the Greenfields secure unit on Jersey. It was this regime, which apparently involved punishing young inmates with solitary confinement, that the English social worker Simon Bellwood scrapped after his appointment as centre manager in August 2006. He was eventually dismissed in May 2007. This has generally been treated in the press as a story about a dissident manager who was sacked for whistleblowing.
Last month the case was settled at an employment tribunal. The joint statement which was issued as part of this settlement might appear to undermine the received view of the case. But too much weight should not be attached to any agreement which is based on a generous financial settlement, and it does indeed seem that Bellwood’s dismissal was directly related to his opposition to the Grand Prix system.
The joint statement also announced that there would be a full independent inquiry into all the circumstances surrounding his dismissal.
This is clearly to be welcomed. For on the face of things, the regime which Bellwood inherited was a draconian one. There are almost certainly complex reasons why this regime was adopted but reasons do not amount to a justification. The whole subject therefore needs, and should receive, the most careful and sensitive investigation.
The same is true in respect of any allegations which which have been made spontaneously about Haut de la Garenne, or indeed about any other children’s home on Jersey. Given that what is under consideration is a forty-year period at a large children’s home, it seems entirely possible that there is a small but significant number of genuine victims of physical or sexual abuse among those who were encouraged to make complaints at the outset of the inquiry.
Two sets of victims
THE PROBELM IS THAT THESE complaints have not been followed up by the kind of careful and sensitive police inquiry which is required. Instead they have been met with a high-profile, sensational investigation which has been conducted at times with quite extraordinary recklessness. The officer in charge of this investigation has, by his own admission (made in an interview with the Belfast Telegraph), deliberately sought maximum publicity, and has done so with the explicit purpose of generating more allegations against former care workers.
For the reasons which I have outlined in an earlier article, Flat Earth News and the Jersey child abuse scandal, this method of investigation is dangerous, not least because it will all but inevitably have had the effect of generating a large volume of false allegations.
Those who may end up suffering because of such false allegations are not only the many innocent care workers who were employed at Haut de la Garenne over the years. They are also almost certain to include those who genuinely were abused. For one of the dangers of conducting investigations in a manner which unintentionally encourages false allegations is that these will ultimately undermine any true allegations which have also been made.
Unfortunately countless police forces in England and Wales have already conducted dangerous investigations of this kind. Partly because of the findings of the Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry in 2002, most police forces in the UK have wound down such investigations. It is also the case that ACPO, (the Association of Chief Police Officers) has issued guidelines for historic abuse inquiries which go some way to moderating their dangers. Jersey, however, (like Northern Ireland and Strathclyde where Lenny Harper has previously served) lies beyond the scope of these guidelines. It may be partly for this reason that he has been able to revive some of the most dangerous features of a police technique which has been discredited elsewhere. He is in this repect merely continuing what is, in effect, a modern witch-hunt directed against residential social workers.
As I wrote in my book The Secret of Bryn Estyn:
One of the factors … which makes this modern witch-hunt uniquely terrible is that it has claimed, and continues to claim, two sets of victims. For it is not only those who are falsely accused who suffer anguish and misery. Among the other victims are all those who genuinely have been abused. Because of the huge number of false allegations which have been made in the last thirty years, the veracity of almost all allegations of abuse may begin to be called into question. As a result many people who have made truthful complaints of having been abused in children’s homes, of rape, or of incest, may find that they are disbelieved or may fear that they might be. They may feel, in consequence, that they have been robbed of their own integrity and their own history. That, too, is a tragedy and we should not underestimate the distress which such disbelief can cause (p. 551).
It is because of the pain which scepticism of any kind about allegations of abuse can inflict on those who genuinely have suffered abuse, that many people, including police officers, social workers, lawyers and journalists are sometimes prepared to accept on trust any allegation. This attitude is dangerous for the simple reason that it tacitly encourages fantasy and fabrication.
To make a false allegation against an innocent person is itself a serious crime and tolerating such false allegations, or creating conditions in which they flourish, is unwise. Indeed it is just as dangerous to a democratic society as tolerating any serious crime would be.
The Haut de la Garenne investigation in Jersey, and the manner in which it has been conducted, has already, I believe, created conditions in which false allegations are being inadvertently encouraged. There should be no doubt at all about the sincerity of Deputy Chief Officer Lenny Harper and the nobility of his motives. But if the inquiry he leads continues on its present course then it is likely to cause immeasurable harm – and indeed has already begun to do so.
To those who wonder, as some inevitably will, why I have taken the time and trouble to research and write this article, one answer at least is simple.
Having spent more than ten years investigating the North Wales child abuse scandal and the nationwide trawling operation against residential care workers which followed, I have seen too many innocent people put in prison for crimes which neither they nor anybody else has committed. Of these care workers, who have been given sentences of up to fifteen years, some have been released, some have died in prison, and some are in prison still.
Because I am not a journalist, I decided some two years ago that I would attempt to leave the subject of police trawling operations behind me, in order to concentrate on my real interest – which is human nature and human nurture in the broadest sense of those terms.
If I have now taken up the subject again it is principally because it seems to me that not to do so would be both negligent and irresponsible.
I am under no illusions, however, that any intervention which does not enlist support across a broad spectrum of the media, is going to have any significant effect.
One of the purposes of this article is to attempt to enlist such support. Some of the difficulties which are likely to stand in the way of this attempt will be explored in the second part of Flat Earth News and the Jersey child abuse scandal.
___________________________
Richard Webster is the author of The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt (2005). The long-delayed paperback of this book, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing, will be published later this year.
The second part of Flat Earth News and the Jersey child abuse scandal will follow as soon as I am able to complete it, which may not be for a week or two.
The update list
If you would like to be notified when this site is updated, send me an email - [email protected] - with the subject line ‘updates’ and I will put you on the list. Otherwise any new additions to the site will be featured under the heading ‘RECENT’ at the top left of the home page.
© Richard Webster, 2008
www.richardwebster.net
-
Aizerbaidzan
- Angus MacGyver
- Viestit: 6831
- Liittynyt: Su Touko 13, 2007 12:22 pm
MTV3 Uutiset kirjoitti:http://www.mtv3.fi/uutiset/ulkomaat.sht ... /05/649022
"Kauhujen orpokoti": Poliisin löydökset viittaavat murhiin
22.05.2008 10:52
Englannin kanaalissa sijaitsevan Jerseyn saaren "kauhujen orpokotina" tunnetusta entisestä lastenkodista löytyneiden lapselle tai lapsille kuuluneiden luun- ja hampaankappaleiden tila viittaa rikostutkijoiden mukaan siihen, että Haut de la Garenne -nimellä tunnetussa talossa on murhattu ihmisiä.
Tutkintaa johtavan Lenny Harperin mukaan löydöksiä on tutkittava yhä edelleen, että saadaan tietoon henkirikosten tekoaika. Helmikuulta jatkuneiden tutkimusten aikana on löydetty jo yhteensä 30 luunkappaletta ja seitsemän maitohammasta. Löydökset on tehty kellareista, jotka sijaitsevat entisen orpokodin alueella.
– Lähetimme kuusi hammasta tutkittavaksi Englantiin, ja niistä viisi on irronnut leuasta luonnottomalla tavalla. Näissä viidessä hampaassa on jäljellä paljon juurta, josta voi päätellä niiden irronneen ennen kuolemaa ja ennen luonnollista maitohampaiden vaihtumista. Eksperttimme mukaan hampaat ovat useamman henkilön suusta, Harper selvitti.
Harperin mukaan osaa löydetyistä luista on leikattu ja monessa niistä näkyy merkkejä palamisesta.
Tutkimuksen aiemmissa vaiheissa orpokodin alueelta on löydetty neljä kellarikammiota ja niiden sisältä muun muassa kahleet, verijälkiä sisältänyt amme ja puiseen tolppaan kirjoitettu viesti "I've been bad 4 years and years", eli vapaasti suomennettuna "Olen ollut paha vuosia, ja vuosia".
"Kauhujen orpokodissa" asuneita mahdollisia hyväksikäytön uhreja on ilmoittautunut tähän mennessä 116 kappaletta. Poliisilla on kaikkiaan 70 epäiltyä.
Toistaiseksi kaksi ihmistä on saanut syytteitä. Ex-vartija Gordon Claude Wateridge, 76, istuu käräjille 9. kesäkuuta. Claude Donnellyn, 68, oikeudenkäynti alkoi 30. huhtikuuta. Miestä syytetään vuosien 1971 ja 1974 välillä tapahtuneista 12-vuotiaan tytön raiskaamisesta ja seksuaalisesta hyväksikäytöstä.
(MTV3 - The Guardian)
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Aizerbaidzan
- Angus MacGyver
- Viestit: 6831
- Liittynyt: Su Touko 13, 2007 12:22 pm
Iltalehti kirjoitti:http://www.iltalehti.fi/ulkomaat/200807 ... 1_ul.shtml
Jerseyn lastenkodissa murhattiin ja poltettiin lapsia
14.7.2008 11:24
Salainen poliisiraportti paljastaa lastenkodin vuosia jatkuneet kauhut.
Brittilehtien mukaan uudesta, erittäin salaisesta poliisiraportista käy ilmi järkyttäviä yksityiskohtia Jerseyn saaren Haut de la Garennen lastenkodin veriteoista.
Raportin mukaan lapsia raiskattiin, murhattiin ja poltettiin talon uuneissa rikosten salaamiseksi. Sen jälkeen lasten jäännökset ripoteltiin kidutuskammioina ja vankityrminä käytettyjen kellarihuoneiden lattioille.
- On aivan selvää, että lastenkodissa murhattiin lapsia. Rikoksista on olemassa todisteet, nimetön poliisilähde kertoi News of the World -lehdelle.
Tutkinta vaikeaa
Lisäksi raportista käy ilmi tapausta tutkineiden poliisien turhautuminen Jerseyn saaren viranomaisten yhteistyöhaluttomuuteen rikosten selvittämisessä.
Lastenkotia kuukausien ajan tutkineet viranomaiset ovat löytäneet 65 hammasta sekä sata palanutta luunpalaa, joiden uskotaan kuuluneen lastenkodissa murhatuille lapsille. Rikosten selvittämisen tekee kuitenkin erittäin vaikeaksi muun muassa se, että kaikki viralliset dokumentit lapsista, jotka ovat lastenkodissa asuneet, on hävitetty. Näin ollen viranomaisten on hankala yhdistää löytöjään kadonneisiin lapsiin.
- Lapsia lähetettiin Haut de la Garenneen eri puolilta Britanniaa, eikä useista kuultu mitään enää koskaan sen jälkeen, poliisilähde kertoi.
Pääepäiltynä laitoksen johtaja
Jo yli sata Haut de la Garennessa 1960- , 1970-, ja 1980-luvuilla asunutta lasta on kertonut viranomaisille, että heitä pahoinpideltiin ja käytettiin seksuaalisesti hyväksi lastenkodissa. Samanlaisia tapauksia epäillään tapahtuneen myös useissa muissa Jerseyn saaren lastenkodeissa.
Yksi jutun pääepäillyistä on lastenkotia pitkään johtanut Colin Tilbrook, joka menehtyi kuitenkin jo vuonna 1988 sydänkohtaukseen. Tilbrookin uskotaan aikoinaan hävittäneen uunin, jossa lasten ruumiita poltettiin.
Seuraavaksi viranomaiset aikovat kuulustella Britanniassa yhä asuvaa iäkästä henkilöä, joka oli aikanaan Tilbrookin läheisin avustaja. Monet lastenkodin entiset työntekijät ovat kertoneet Tilbrookin olleen vastuussa useista tapahtuneista hirveyksistä.
Toistaiseksi syytteitä on nostettu vasta yhtä lastenkodin entistä työntekijää vastaan.
JUHO RISSANEN
[email protected]
http://www.iltalehti.fi/ulkomaat/200807 ... 8_ul.shtml
Jerseyn lastenkodista löytynyt viiden ruumiin jäänteitä
31.7.2008 15:24
Lasten surmaajat voivat välttyä rangaistukselta.
Haut de la Garennen kellarit ovat paljastaneet hirvittäviä salaisuuksia.
Haut de la Garennen kellarit ovat paljastaneet hirvittäviä salaisuuksia. (JERSEYN POLIISI / EPA)
Jerseyn saarella sijaitsevan Haut de la Garennen entisen lastenkodin kellarista on löytynyt jäänteitä viiden lapsen ruumiista. Siitä huolimatta tappajat voivat välttyä murhasyytteiltä, sillä asiantuntijat eivät ole onnistuneet määrittelemään, milloin lapset tapettiin.
- Todisteet eivät ilmeisesti riitä murhaoikeudenkäyntiin, poliisipäällikkö Lenny Harper sanoi tänään BBC-radiokanavalle.
Poliisilla on Harperin mukaan todisteet siitä, että ruumiit on poltettu ja yritetty hävittää 1960-luvun lopussa ja 1970-luvun alussa. Tarkkaa ajankohtaa ei kuitenkaan ilmeisesti pystytä määrittelemään.
Tähän mennessä kauhujen talon kellarista on löytynyt 65 maitohammasta. Poliisin asiantuntijoiden mukaan hampaiden kunto kertoo, että ne ovat irronneet vasta uhrien kuoltua.
Tutkittiin aluksi salaa
Luun kappaleita on löytynyt yli sata, joista kaksi on tunnistettu. Toinen niistä on peräisin lapsen korvasta ja toinen jalasta. Iältään lapset ovat olleet 4-11-vuotiaita.
Yli sata lastenkodissa asuneista lapsista on kertonut siellä ennen vuotta 1986 tapahtuneista hirmuteoista. Epäiltyjä on yli sata, joista kolme on pidätettyinä.
Poliisi aloitti tutkimukset salaa kaksi vuotta sitten lastenkodin entisten asukkaiden ilmoitusten perusteella. Helmikuussa löytynyt luun kappale vahvisti uhrien kertomukset samoin kuin kellarista löytyneet allas ja kidutuskammiot.
Ennen poliisitutkimuksien aloittamista rakennuksessa toimi retkeilymaja.
SIRPA KULONEN
[email protected]
Jerseyn lastenkodista löytynyt viiden ruumiin jäänteitä
31.7.2008 15:24
Lasten surmaajat voivat välttyä rangaistukselta.
Haut de la Garennen kellarit ovat paljastaneet hirvittäviä salaisuuksia.
Haut de la Garennen kellarit ovat paljastaneet hirvittäviä salaisuuksia. (JERSEYN POLIISI / EPA)
Jerseyn saarella sijaitsevan Haut de la Garennen entisen lastenkodin kellarista on löytynyt jäänteitä viiden lapsen ruumiista. Siitä huolimatta tappajat voivat välttyä murhasyytteiltä, sillä asiantuntijat eivät ole onnistuneet määrittelemään, milloin lapset tapettiin.
- Todisteet eivät ilmeisesti riitä murhaoikeudenkäyntiin, poliisipäällikkö Lenny Harper sanoi tänään BBC-radiokanavalle.
Poliisilla on Harperin mukaan todisteet siitä, että ruumiit on poltettu ja yritetty hävittää 1960-luvun lopussa ja 1970-luvun alussa. Tarkkaa ajankohtaa ei kuitenkaan ilmeisesti pystytä määrittelemään.
Tähän mennessä kauhujen talon kellarista on löytynyt 65 maitohammasta. Poliisin asiantuntijoiden mukaan hampaiden kunto kertoo, että ne ovat irronneet vasta uhrien kuoltua.
Tutkittiin aluksi salaa
Luun kappaleita on löytynyt yli sata, joista kaksi on tunnistettu. Toinen niistä on peräisin lapsen korvasta ja toinen jalasta. Iältään lapset ovat olleet 4-11-vuotiaita.
Yli sata lastenkodissa asuneista lapsista on kertonut siellä ennen vuotta 1986 tapahtuneista hirmuteoista. Epäiltyjä on yli sata, joista kolme on pidätettyinä.
Poliisi aloitti tutkimukset salaa kaksi vuotta sitten lastenkodin entisten asukkaiden ilmoitusten perusteella. Helmikuussa löytynyt luun kappale vahvisti uhrien kertomukset samoin kuin kellarista löytyneet allas ja kidutuskammiot.
Ennen poliisitutkimuksien aloittamista rakennuksessa toimi retkeilymaja.
SIRPA KULONEN
[email protected]
Re: Jerseyn lastenkoti
Onkos tästä kuulunut mitään?
Pikasella googlauksella ainakin kaikki suomeksi olevat jutut ovat parin vuoden takaa...
Pikasella googlauksella ainakin kaikki suomeksi olevat jutut ovat parin vuoden takaa...
Re: Jerseyn lastenkoti
Tähän kalkkikeskusteluun vielä lisäten, olisiko ollut kyseessä sammuttamaton kalkki...?
Törmäsin tähän aineeseen ainakin yhdessä toisessa murhatapauksessa jossa ruumiita oli oletettavasti hävitetty tällä aineella...
Sen reagoidessa veden kanssa saadaan kalsiumhydroksidia, eli sammutettua kalkkia.
Noo, tiedä sitten...
Törmäsin tähän aineeseen ainakin yhdessä toisessa murhatapauksessa jossa ruumiita oli oletettavasti hävitetty tällä aineella...
Sen reagoidessa veden kanssa saadaan kalsiumhydroksidia, eli sammutettua kalkkia.
Noo, tiedä sitten...
"Tits are for fucking, not for breastfeeding" -Rose West-
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VoDKa
- Ainesta Watsoniksi
- Viestit: 4926
- Liittynyt: Ke Marras 07, 2007 4:17 am
- Paikkakunta: Better place.
Re: Jerseyn lastenkoti
^^Hieman pidemmällä googlauksella selviää, että valehtelu jatkuu edelleen, eikä kukaan suostu oikein myöntämään mitään. Sen sijaan eloon jääneitä asukkeja on tullut jossain määrin julkisuuteen kertomaan omista kokemuksistaan ja kärsimyksistään siellä.
Poliisitutkimukset päättyivät viime vuonna ja loppupäätelmä heillä oli, ettei mitään lasten tappoja ole koskaan tapahtunutkaan. Seksuaalista hyväksikäyttöä ja väkivaltaa kyllä oli ilmeisesti ollut, mutta varmoja lasten jäänteitä, jotka kertoisivat paikassa lapsia varsinaisesti tapetun, ei löytynyt. Eläinten luita löytyi, yksi kallonpaloista osoittautui kookospähkinän kuoren palaiseksi, yksi tuuman mittainen luunpala kuului ehkä ihmiselle, samoin löydetyt maitohampaat. Mutta ajoituksien perusteella luu/luunpalat olivat päätyneet paikalle ennen vuonna 1950 ja maitohampaatkin irronneet luonnollisesti.
Tästä johtunee hiljaisuus tällä rintamalla.
Edit: Lisätäänpä vielä pari kuvaa kyseisestä paikasta, kun ketjussa ei niitä näyttänyt pahemmin olevan ja ainakin itselle jäi vielä ennen kuvien näkemistä täysin auki, minkä näköisestä ja kokoisesta paikasta edes puhutaan.
Poliisitutkimukset päättyivät viime vuonna ja loppupäätelmä heillä oli, ettei mitään lasten tappoja ole koskaan tapahtunutkaan. Seksuaalista hyväksikäyttöä ja väkivaltaa kyllä oli ilmeisesti ollut, mutta varmoja lasten jäänteitä, jotka kertoisivat paikassa lapsia varsinaisesti tapetun, ei löytynyt. Eläinten luita löytyi, yksi kallonpaloista osoittautui kookospähkinän kuoren palaiseksi, yksi tuuman mittainen luunpala kuului ehkä ihmiselle, samoin löydetyt maitohampaat. Mutta ajoituksien perusteella luu/luunpalat olivat päätyneet paikalle ennen vuonna 1950 ja maitohampaatkin irronneet luonnollisesti.
Tästä johtunee hiljaisuus tällä rintamalla.
Edit: Lisätäänpä vielä pari kuvaa kyseisestä paikasta, kun ketjussa ei niitä näyttänyt pahemmin olevan ja ainakin itselle jäi vielä ennen kuvien näkemistä täysin auki, minkä näköisestä ja kokoisesta paikasta edes puhutaan.
One day I might just disappear and you will never find me. Nobody will ever find me.