Gentlemen, let's talk about vaginas (while that woman sits in silence...)

If that heading offends you or angers you; if you find it inappropriate or are immediately questioning the motives behind it, then we are on common ground.

This is not a flippant post and the subject which produced that heading was part of the package that ended my career.

No matter the twists and turns that brought me to a fitness to practise hearing, the unexpected appearance of the subject of vaginas took me very much by surprise.

So, for those of you about to enter the hearing arena, be prepared to find yourself equated to the most personal of medical detail, including all things gynaecological.

I can’t tell you if the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) likes to throw the vagina curved ball at everyone, or whether it was just me but, goodness me, I never expected it. Any subsequent challenges about it were dismissed as it was all down to “professional judgement”.

My pursuer devoted a lot of pages to the subject; chief executive Lorraine Gray gave vaginas her seal of approval; all the SSSC council members seemingly approve, and even Maree Todd MSP, Minister for Children and Young People, fully approves of a man, presenting three other men with detailed vaginal insights as a professional parallel to working for a children’s charity, mainly in an office where stirrups were never evident. It even gets the tacit approval of  Iona Colvin, the Scottish Government's chief social work adviser.

So, let me explain why vaginas can suddenly become an issue for consideration, though you may have no medical background or connections.

It’s down to what is called “precedent”. Now, having taken advice from the spheres of law and journalism, “precedent” is the citing of cases similar to yours.

However, that, according to the SSSC is not correct.

Chief executive Lorraine Gray says it is down to “professional judgement” so, although the case being cited may have nothing whatsoever to do with your line of work or your circumstances, if the SSSC wishes to use such a case, it can because it uses "professional judgement".

The purpose of the precedent, essentially, was to illustrate examples of professional misconduct, and although the SSSC has many cases involving social services, medicine appears to be the avenue of choice to explore.

So, if you are a care worker, or a social worker, you might, as I was, under “professional judgement” be equated with surgeons who killed children, doctors who killed children, or midwives who refused to perform vaginal examinations.

You might even find you name up there with one of the world’s most notorious mass murderers (I’ll get to that).

While this aspect at the conclusion of my hearing stunned me, that wasn’t the reaction of my husband. Gagged by the chair of the panel, an advocate and acting sheriff, he stopped me from reading the mass of medical precedent, awaiting the chair to seek an explanation for its relevance.

That never came. It ended up as the catalyst for my husband's stream of Freedom of Information requests which only resulted in them all being ruled vexatious. The SSSC stood by its actions as adhering to Scottish law, my husband still finds this incredible, as it means the law he was taught, examined on, and required to apply throughout his career in journalism was wrong.

So it became apparent that what we, as laymen, see as relevant differs vastly from those who possess “professional judgement”.

I was surprised at the first one, not just that it came from medicine, and 20 years ago, and occurred in England. It concerned the multiple deaths of children from heart surgery over a number of years. The panel was fine with that; we seemed to be the only ones puzzled by its relevance. Even as a 'layman', I grasped the example was being presented to provide a definition to the panel of professional misconduct, which one would have thought an example that was more relevant, recent, comparable and from the same profession would have been appropriate.

But then came the vaginas.

Another 25 pages of print-out, this time containing 118 points, mainly concerned with vaginal examinations – or, to be precise, a refusal by a midwife in England to perform three over a 20-month period. There was also passing reference to guidelines on sexual misconduct.

That's a lot of points, with the SSSC perfectly happy with the number and nature of  them.

Now, when you are sitting there and a male pursuer, completely unexpectedly, presents 25 pages of details on vaginal examinations to an all-male panel you might feel… intimidated, humiliated, embarrassed bullied or, like me, maybe all of them? However, in this wad of papers, there was also a correlation with Harold Shipman, responsible for approximately 250 murders.

Now, I have no idea how the midwife felt being compared to Shipman, but I’m reeling from the fact that in the space of a few hours the SSSC had gone from 18 months of wanting to impose conditions on my registration to presenting a detailed parallel on refusing to perform vaginal examinations and then on to the mass murders committed by probably one of the world's most notorious serial killers.

As for the vaginal examinations? Well I don’t know if the midwife appealed so I won’t name her, though the chief executive and the SSSC are good with that.

But did she deserve to be struck off by her governing body? Was her decision, her "professional judgement", right to seek obstetric assistance rather than conduct a vaginal examination herself after she noticed meconium staining?

I don’t know.

I also don’t know what this has to do with a service manager employed by a charity.

I don’t know why the male SSSC caseholder in his "professional judgement" thought this English gynaecological case relevant, and why these medical details were more relevant than any case in social services in Scotland, or England, Ireland and Wales?

I don’t know why the panel accepted this without question.

Given social services encompass the likes of advice and guidance, childcare, child protection, community work, day care, counselling, fostering and adoption, occupational therapy, probation, psychology, residential care, supporting independent living, therapies, youth and community work. etc, were any of these areas looked at before vaginal examinations?

There is also the fact that cases involving these and other sectors are on the SSSC website as well as the sister organisations in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Were they looked at?

So we asked the SSSC through the Freedom of Information process. The question was deemed vexatious.

Did the SSSC use this vaginal examination case regularly? Vexatious.

Were these examples simply randomly pulled from an online database with no consideration given to their relevance? I accessed one used by the SSSC and found results relevant to Scotland, to social services, and even the SSSC. It obviously takes considerable lateral thinking to abandon these obvious choices and type “vaginas” into the search box.

So we asked the SSSC was this just a random trawl? Vexatious.

So, that was put in a formal complaint to the SSSC and chief executive Lorraine Gray defended the citing of the midwife’s refusal to perform those vaginal examinations, stating: “The SSSC may present case law it considers relevant to the Panel’s determination. This involves the exercise of professional judgement of those who present cases.”

So, “professional judgement” on what I was told was the second source of legal rules in Scots Law was that vaginal examinations were more relevant than social work practice.

As mentioned above, this baffled my husband but all his Freedom of Information requests were deemed vexatious by the SSSC. With Ms Gray telling her council members this was because of the “number and nature” of them.

Bearing in mind the SSSC presented 118 points alone on vaginal examinations, I wasn’t aware there was a limit to the number of questions you can ask. Lawyers, the police, politicians and reporters have no such limits imposed on their duties. Yet the public, directing questions to a public authority, has a limit, albeit unspecified.

And then there’s the “nature” issue, and that word carries a serious negative connotation. Now Ms Gray and her council members have agreed on that but I’m still not sure what’s wrong with the “nature” of our questions, given that they all referred to the nature (and number) of the SSSC’s own submissions.

So there you have it. According to the “professional judgement” of the Scottish Social Services Council, being signed off by your GP and not completing the tasks within a timescale you should have done as a service manager equates to a nine-year-old medical case concerning vaginal examinations.

If that explanation does not satisfy, then the SSSC recommends taking it to a higher court.

But let’s continue with the vaginal examination issue for the next point of how appropriate it is for a male pursuer to choose this subject to present to an all male panel, in a room, with the exception of an admin’ worker and me, that was all male.

The social services sector in Scotland employs 200,650 people, according to SSSC figures, and 85 per cent of these workers are female.

So you would assume that when a worker appears before a panel there would be a requirement for a gender balance. If you are going to have a male ‘prosecutor’ choosing to present detailed gynaecological precedent on vaginal examinations to an all-male panel while a silent, unsuspecting female sits in bewilderment, one would assume that balance would be particularly critical, and an ethical issue..

FOI requests to determine the composition of panels at hearings over the past 10 years, five years, 12 months and six months, were all deemed vexatious by the SSSC, a ruling apparently accepted unanimously by its council members.

Given the high female representation in the social services sector, I thought it worth raising the issue with the Scottish Government. The directorate for children and families noted the query but pointed out that the SSSC was an independent professional regulator, and recommended I deal with... the SSSC,

Chief executive Lorraine Gray, when later challenged, and having that "vexatious" ruling endorsed by the SSSC council did, on December 6, 2018, respond with: “It is not a requirement for people applying to sit on our Fitness to Practise Committee to specify their gender before they are appointed. We do not therefore hold the information requested in a manner which can be released as part of a Freedom of Information request.”

The relevance and appropriateness of the vaginal examination issue was raised in a complaint which Ms Gray said was a “challenge to the objectivity of the decision makers”...and suggested, if unhappy, to take the matter to a higher court.

It is astonishing that the chief executive and council do not see gender balance on career-defining/ending panels as a crucial issue. They are the governing body for 200,000-plus people (nearly eight per cent of Scotland’s workforce), 170,500 of whom are female, and the sector contributes £3.5bn to the economy.

However, through our MSP, we raised the matter again, this time it going to the relevant Minister, Maree Todd who, citing all the factors the SSSC takes into account when selecting a panel, concluded: "The SSSC will have considered all factors before selecting the members."

So, from the very seat of our government, the SSSC did, indeed, feel that its male pursuer, selecting 25 pages on vaginal examinations to three male panel members was appropriate and, no doubt, down to professional judgement.

And these 25 pages were selected as the "most similar" to my case from all civil and professional governing bodies' cases from Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Wales in the last 20 years.

So that’s where this particular part of the journey has taken me, while delivering another successful prosecution for the SSSC.

You could argue the SSSC is the unfettered watchdog for social services in Scotland, employing processes that are neither checked nor monitored, and can only be challenged by legal representation. You will need a considerable financial reservoir if you want to prove that though.

While justice is free and without favour, access to it can carry a heavy price tag. And that allows the SSSC to cling to, and hide behind the skirts of the legal system. Instead of directing complainants to a higher authority, I really believe that higher authority should be looking at its offspring’s behaviour.

My advice to anyone working in the social services sector is to make sure you have someone legally sharp at your side. Every registrant is in the bizarre situation of paying in to fund his or her own freeform prosecution if the situation arises; it makes sense to ensure your defence is in place as well. Just be aware that could mean having a barrister on retainer for two years.

A brief initial consultation cost us £300. The process and the post-decision challenges over the process have now taken nearly three years. On a barrister's timesheet we would easily have broken a six-figure bill. How many people in the social services field could countenance that?

This was not written to sway anyone to my beliefs or outlook, in fact I need it explained to me why I am so wrong. I will happily respond to any questions: I cannot say the Scottish Social Services Council would do the same.

Picture: Ernie Stephens