Fight for law change over abuse accusation

A FORMER deputy leader of the SNP who was wrongfully accused of sexually abusing his daughter is fighting for a change in the law so he can sue the authorities over the trauma he and his family endured.

Jim Fairlie, 71, believes he should have legal redress against NHS Tayside and the former Perth and Kinross District Council after his daughter accused him of the abuse when she was undergoing controversial Recovered Memory Therapy.

He wants the duty of care that hospitals have for patients, or social workers have for children, to be extended to families. Although his daughter Katrina, now 41, settled her case for damages out of court four years ago, he believes families damaged by false accusations should also be able to sue.

He has written to justice secretary Kenny MacAskill calling for a change in the law. Fairlie, who was the SNP’s deputy leader between 1980 and 1984, says he is campaigning on behalf of thousands of families who have been affected by the now discredited Recovered Memory Therapy.

“It has destroyed many families,” he said. “That was one of the questions I put to MacAskill: how many families are you going to see destroyed? From the point of view of my family, it obviously had a major effect. Katrina feels enormously guilty. It does not matter how many times we tell her that it’s not her fault.”

His other children – Katrina was the youngest of five – also became involved. He added: “We were a very close family. What they feel guilty about is that they allowed themselves to be manipulated by the authorities, that they didn’t say right away that they knew they were wrong.”

The financial analyst from Crieff in Perthshire has fought for justice for 16 years, ever since being confronted by his family and learning he was being investigated by the police.

Katrina accused him of abusing her as a child, after undergoing a form of Recovered Memory Therapy, designed to uncover suppressed memories. The family insist she was wrongfully diagnosed and did not need psychiatric treatment at all. They say she was administered the controversial truth drug sodium amytal, which has been linked with coercing false memories.

Although she changed her story after coming off the medication, and said her father had not abused her – nor led a 17-strong paedophile ring, as she had also claimed – the family remain scarred by their ordeal. Fairlie spent a decade helping his daughter, with whom he is reconciled, to fight her case and later wrote a book about his experience called Unbreakable Bonds.

Their ordeal began when she went to hospital in 1994 suffering from severe abdominal pains, which did not go away despite operations to remove her appendix and her gall bladder. Doctors began to believe her problems were psychosomatic, and she was admitted to the Perth Royal’s psychiatric annexe. She blamed the treatment she received over the next 15 months from health and social workers for destroying her family’s lives.

She underwent Recovered Memory Therapy, a treatment which claimed to unlock memories so painful the patient had blocked them out from their conscious mind and which were only retrievable through dreams and hypnosis. The therapy was discredited by the Royal College of Psychiatrists in the late 1990s.

A police investigation was dropped when Katrina later withdrew the allegations. In 2007, NHS Tayside health board settled her medical negligence case out of court for a reported £20,000, but it did not accept liability.

Fairlie, who resigned from the SNP in 1990 over its “Independence in Europe” slogan and its support for the European Community, said his family wants its day in court with the health board and council.

“Social workers and health boards have a duty of care to families in the sense that they are looking after their kids and taking responsibility for their children,” he said.

“But if in the course of doing that they make mistakes, and their action harms a third party, there’s not a damn thing parents can do to get redress.

“This is why it is so important that the law is changed. Although Katrina received a settlement, I was also damaged. But I was not allowed to get them into court and make them accountable for what they had done.”

A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: “We acknowledge the great difficulty and pain caused to Mr Fairlie. There are no current plans to consider a change to legislation. However, we will keep matters under review.”

NHS Tayside declined to comment.