Letter: Katy Jones helped expose brutal pindown regime at children’s homes

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/may/12/katy-jones-obituary-letter

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Before her remarkable work on the Hillsborough tragedy, I worked with Katy Jones on Granada TV’s World in Action programme.

At a time when there was no culture or appetite for exposing child abuse, we made a groundbreaking programme about the pindown regime in Staffordshire children’s homes. Katy, who was one of the few female researchers on the World in Action team, was contacted by a young man called Michael Hurley, who had only recently come out of care. He alerted her to tales of systematic abuse in various homes.

These were unconfirmed stories from unreliable witnesses, so it was a daunting task to build them into a World in Action programme that would satisfy the lawyers. But Katy was never daunted. She was determined to find the quality of evidence that would enable us to publicly expose the extent of the pindown regime.

For several weeks she visited many addresses in Staffordshire, knocking on doors and following up leads. She sought out young people who had spent time in children’s homes and who had experienced the brutalising regime. Sometimes the leads were no more than a suggestion that a boy called Darren who lived near the bus stop had been in one of the homes. But with her easy, direct charm and big smile she won the trust of vulnerable young people. She took them seriously and listened carefully. As she won their trust, the same chilling details kept appearing. They told her how, on admission to the homes, they were locked in a room, usually stripped of their clothes, and kept in solitary confinement – sometimes for several days.

Related: Katy Jones obituary

Katy had a remarkable ability to get people to talk to her. We often met up in a cafe where she would brief me on her day’s work and cheerily greet an array of young people who had passed by. Within a week or so everyone in the area seemed to know her.

She had a passionate sense that the media had the power to make the world a better place, but she never let that campaigning desire cloud her sharp, forensic mind. With the support of the Granada lawyers and the World in Action editor, Nick Hayes, we got the programme on air within a couple of months.

The morning after transmission in June 1990, the Department of Health announced a full inquiry into pindown, which heard from 153 witnesses and in 1991 produced a 300-page report by Allan Levy and Barbara Kahan. That report, which credited the World in Action programme in its first paragraph, undoubtedly changed the culture of child protection in the UK. That was one of Katy’s many triumphs.

At Katy’s funeral service I met up again with Michael, the young man who first alerted her to the scale of the abuse. Katy had, typically, kept in touch with him over 25 years. She will be much missed.