In November 2014, Russian mother, Ella Draper, called me in a desperate fix. She had found my contact details on the website of the Association of McKenzie Friends that I publish, and she needed help: her two children had been forcibly taken from her two months before, and her solicitors weren’t acting in her best interests. I immediately said I would help, but it was to be the beginning of a very shocking awakening process.
Later on I coined the term ‘whistleblower kids‘ to refer to her children, Gabriel and Alisa, due to the huge ring of satanic ritual abuse their candid testimonies had uncovered.
As McKenzie Friends, we are lay legal advisors. Not funded, not organised into a hierarchy. But the co-founder of the association, who happens to be called Belinda McKenzie, has been an ardent campaigner and supporter of human rights for decades.
Belinda’s experiences and linguistic skills are invaluable, especially as she is the spokesperson for the Hollie Greig case. Hollie is a young woman with Downs Syndrome who has a very acute memory and could name all of her abusers – starting with her father and brother.
Hollie’s case is similar to Ella’s: the victim isn’t believed, and the cover-up includes the co-ordinated, systematic victimisation of those trying to help, by those in power. This, while the elite abusers commit ever-more convoluted criminal manipulations of the legal system to cover-up the original crimes and the victimisation.
Belinda warned me that ‘shills’ come with the territory. Shills are people who pretend to help whilst secretly trying to disrupt your activities. Hence I published
Together, the McKenzie Friends are a network of free-standing individuals who share similar goals, experiences and values:
- we assist litigants in person, i.e. people who have no legal representation in court
- after having come across many victims of white collar crimes in general, and financial and professional institutions in particular, we focus on victims of the family courts, as we consider child snatching to be the most heinous of all institutionalised white collar crimes
- in family courts, we specialise in public proceedings rather than on individual custody battles between parents. These usually involve local councils.
As amateurs, we are learning by doing. But we have amassed much experience through our involvement in numerous cases, and have come to see patterns emerge that aren’t generally known about. This invisibility is because family courts were made secret after the Daily Mail exposed the Cleveland child abuse scandal.
Ian Josephs is a veteran McKenzie Friend with a law degree from Oxford, and he has been helping parents for over 50 years. Living in Monaco, he gets between 6 and 10 calls a day and publishes Forced Adoption as a website and book. I turned it into No Punishment without Crime as a blog.
My approach of publishing cases as stories began when I organised the Forum for Stable Currencies at the House of Lord and Commons. Lord Sudeley, with whom I had started these events in 1998, had said “we must group cases to change the law”. And so I moved from blog to blog:
- EDM 1297 on the Enforcement of the Bank of England Act 1694 with Cases as Stories
- Committee Room 14 – a Foundation for Change
- Victims Unite – my most popular website.
After that I began to specialise in blogs for individual cases as the parents’ experiences were so harrowing:
- Vicky Haigh – the first institutional-child-snatch victim to be named in Parliament by John Hemming, the only MP who consistently tried to make a difference in this area
- Gloria Musa – the Nigerian Bishop whose five children were taken by Haringey Council; the parents were imprisoned for seven years after a malicious, staged trial. The sixth child was taken and returned to deliberately incriminate the parents. The seventh child was taken from her at birth in prison
- Laila Brice – the Latvian mother fighting to get her daughter back from Merton Council
- The Pedro Family – the Portuguese family whose five children were taken by Lincolnshire Council
- Phil Thompson and family – the great-grandfather who died before seeing his great-grandchildren again – he was challenging Walsall Council
- Melissa Laird – the US mother whose 4-year-old son was taken from her in Spain, while she was imprisoned and eventually deported without him by Barnet Council, also responsible for the ill-fate of the whistleblower kids;
- National Inquiry into Organised, Orchestrated and Historic Abuse – triggered by the story of abuse survivor, whistleblower of paedophilia in Lambeth Council and victim of three Police forces Brian Pead aka William Freeman
- and, finally, the worst of all cases: the Whistleblower Kids whose Russian mother took them to Barnet Police station to report the crimes they had experienced at the hands of their UK father, the leader of a Satanic cult, whose 70+ members were abusing 18 other children in 8 schools and a church.
This book is intended to draw attention to these and similar cases, in the light of the following international treaties:
- the European Convention on Human Rights – in force since 1953
- the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – in force since 1990
- the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union – in force since 2009
- the specific EU Directive on combating the sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children and child pornography.
The UK was issued an Infringement Notice, about having violated the last Directive, in January 2014.
The rest is history in the making.
