Follow up to March Open Forum Event

Our March event was about concerns with the 2007 Amendment to the 1983 Mental Health Act Amendment, to which Paul Davies, AM, and Angela Burns, AM, were invited. People were angry and offended that an apparent connection was being drawn between paedophilia and mental health. It was agreed that child abusers should not be denied society’s help but our mental health community was not the appropriate place for this to be managed.

Concern was expressed that the public and media will tar with the same brush those with mental health problems and child abusers, and that twenty years of anti-stigma work is pushed backwards.

Child abuse is the root cause of mental health problems for many people, and the inclusion of perpetrator and victim under the same legislation is deeply offensive. Would abusers start to use mental health as a defence in court and thus encourage the media to make a connection?

Service users/carers found the medical model recognition (as described in ICD-10, and DSM-4) of paedophilia as a recognised disorder abhorrent.

Letters were sent out to raise awareness of this problem and we have had helpful responses from Angela Burns, AM, the Health Minister Edwina Hart, AM and Bill Walden-Jones from Hafal.

After raising awareness of the problem, the consensus of opinion is that there is little more we can do now except be vigilant as to how the courts respond to.