MORE than a hundred former care workers and teachers convicted of abusing children could have their cases reviewed after the successful appeal by Anver Daud Sheikh.

Legal experts and social care professionals have become concerned that flawed police methods and the lure of compensation for abuse victims might have led to miscarriages of justice on a grand scale.

Their concerns centre on historical abuse, that is cases where the allegations were not made until many years, often decades, after the offence was supposed to have happened.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission said yesterday that it was looking at 28 such cases, while the Historical Abuse Appeal Panel, an organisation of solicitors who specialise in the issue, said it was looking at more than a hundred.

Claire Curtis-Thomas, the Labour MP for Crosby and chairwoman of the All-Party Group for Abuse Investigations, said there were concerns about the police method of trawling, where they search for accusations of abuse, usually by interviewing former care home residents, rather than react to reported crimes.

“Their conversations (with former residents) are never recorded or videotaped, so we can’t know for sure if the police are leading people into making allegations and we don’t know if they tell them they could get compensation if they make one,” she said.

She said that local authorities and their insurers were so ready to pay out-of-court settlements to people who complain of historical abuse without testing them in court that it was impossible to know whether people made false allegations for the money.

“There are megabucks available to people who make a statement alleging abuse. They don’t need to get a conviction to get compensation. All they need to do is to launch a class action and get a psychiatrist’s report to say they have been severely affected by the abuse,” she said.

Mark Barlow, counsel for Mr Sheikh and an adviser to the panel, said that many cases involved allegations of abuse which happened so long ago that documents that could prove defendants’ innocence had been destroyed or lost.

He said: “There is a perception that child abuse must have gone on and juries are horrified when it is mentioned. All the defendants can do is say, ‘No, I didn’t do it’, but juries convict them anyway.”

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