Maggie Tuttle’s weekend event falls flat

According to attendees who contacted us following Margaret Tuttle’s ‘Children Screaming to Be Heard’ conference this past Saturday, the event was definitely underwhelming. Lower than expected attendance, combined with dull speakers spouting the usual drivel about ‘social workers selling babies’ and ‘Satanic ritual abuse yadda yadda yadda’, left audience members wondering why they’d wasted a perfectly fine Saturday.

Belinda McKenzie, Sabine McNeill, Neelu Berry, and of course Maggie Tuttle were all in attendance, and we understand that this blog came under fire for a number of offences, including having artificially lowered attendee numbers by creating 79 email personas, snapping up 80 tickets, and then failing to appear on site.

(Note to team: Next time, we really must try this! Brilliant idea. As long as the tickets are free…).

Only 45 of an expected 200 people showed up, so there was a distinctly hollow ring to the room.

However, distinguished ‘expert commentators’ such as Sue Reid of the Daily Mail, friend of John Hemming and Sabine, who has built a reputation for speaking on the topic of ‘baby-snatching’, kept participants entertained with interesting, if fanciful allegations:

Sue Reid coins a new term to bash social workers; Natasha Phillips is happy to regurgitate it.

Except, you know, there’s no such thing.

We understand that the Hampstead hoax was discussed at some length, though we’re still awaiting a full report on that. However, we hear that the topic of ‘Satanic ritual abuse’ received rapt attention, along with allegations that this blog is written by ‘the abusers’.

Those of us who’ve been at this a while are aware that Maggie Tuttle’s charity, ‘Children Screaming to Be Heard’ is no more; it ceased to exist on 3 December, 2015, after a 4-year run.

This doesn’t mean that Maggie T. cannot run events using the charity’s name, but it does mean that any monies collected in the ex-charity’s name must be declared by her as income. We’re sure she is well aware of this, but just in case, we’ve forwarded the info’ to HMRC.

As a courtesy, you know.

A more enlightening alternative

For those who prefer their child protection conferences served up with integrity, might we suggest the Second Child Protection Conference, to be held 3 June, 2016 in Birmingham?

As conference co-founder and trustee of the Transparency Project, Sarah Phillimore notes:

It’s easy to moan about something, it’s a bit harder to actually do something that might change it for the better.

I hope very much that the second Conference is going to plant the seeds of serious and positive change.  There have been discussions since June last year about what we could do and those discussions are crystalising into something quite exciting.

In contrast to Maggie Tuttle and the rest of the Hoaxtead pushers’ dangerous and divisive fear-mongering, CPConf2016 looks set to help families and professionals develop better ways of communicating and working together for the good of children and families.

What a refreshing idea.