For more than 30 years, Sister Frances Dominica was a constant presence at Helen House, the children’s hospice she founded in Oxford in 1982. To generations of ill children and their families, the slight, softly-spoken nun became a friend and a lifeline in the darkest of times, while the small centre built in the grounds of her convent inspired a growing network of similar refuges from Canada to South Africa to Japan. If the children’s hospice movement had a figurehead, it was the unimpeachable nun, who was awarded an OBE by the Queen, interviewed on Desert Island Discs and showered with honorary degrees and awards.
In 2013, however, her relationship with the hospice was abruptly severed. One July afternoon the charity’s chief executive contacted the Anglican sister, born Frances Ritchie, and said he had been told that two women had made allegations of historical sexual abuse against her. He told her she was immediately barred from having any contact with residents, family members or staff while the matter was investigated, and that she was not to set foot in Helen House or its sister hospice for young adults, Douglas House.
Sister Frances was never prosecuted over the allegations, which she wholly denies. In November 2013, four months after Oxfordshire county council first informed the hospice of the accusations, Thames Valley police interviewed her under caution and she was bailed. She heard nothing further, she says, until July 2014, a year after first coming under suspicion, when the Crown Prosecution Service informed her it would be taking no further action due to “insufficient evidence”.
“But if you don’t go to trial, you are never found innocent,” the 73-year-old now says. And so, after conducting a lengthy confidential risk assessment, the trustees of Helen and Douglas House announced in July 2015 they would be making her temporary ban from the hospices permanent. They said in a statement that though “no conclusions about the allegations could be made”, the safeguarding standards of their regulator, the Care Quality Commission, obliged them to continue to bar her permanently from the premises. “Our unswerving dedication to care and proper governance made any other course of action unthinkable,” the trustees said later.
Last December, Sister Frances reluctantly resigned as a trustee. The nun’s relationship with the hospices she founded is now conducted at a distance of several hundred metres, looking out across her convent’s carefully tended lawns at the centres she is officially deemed too risky to enter.
No one other than the nun and her accusers can be absolutely certain that she is telling the truth in insisting on her innocence, and the allegations do not relate to Helen and Douglas House or to children. Speaking to the Guardian in a small room in the clutch of modern buildings now occupied by the All Saints Sisters of the Poor, Sister Frances acknowledges that to some people her name will never be clear of the whiff of suspicion.
Her gender makes her case unusual, but she is far from alone in finding herself in a form of reputational limbo – publicly accused of serious crimes, but neither convicted of them by a jury nor able fully to clear her name.
The collapse last month of the Metropolitan police’s Operation Midland, investigating claims of a VIP paedophile ring made by a now adult man called “Nick”, means that the former MP Harvey Proctor has been added to the lengthening list of figures – including the DJ Paul Gambaccini, former armed forces chief Lord Bramall and TV personalities Jim Davidson, Freddie Starr and Jimmy Tarbuck – who have been investigated and publicly named over sexual abuse allegations, but seen their investigations dropped because of insufficient evidence.
“In this country you are supposed to be innocent until you are proved guilty,” Sister Frances says. “But in any kind of safeguarding issue, it feels as if you are guilty until proved innocent.”
That vexed issue is unlikely to be made any easier to resolve by the halting of Scotland Yard’s Operation Midland investigation. The force said in September that one of its senior officers was wrong to have said that he considered Nick’s claims to be “credible and true”. Three days before the Midland collapse, however, the College of Policing wrote to forces reiterating its guidance that complainants should be believed unless there was “credible” evidence to the contrary. A month earlier, writing in the Guardian, the chief constable of the Metropolitan police, Bernard Hogan-Howe, had said public confidence would only be restored if all alleged rape victims were not unconditionally believed by police.
Unlike many of her fellow accused, the investigation of Sister Frances was not immediately made public. Her name entered the public domain only when it was leaked to the Daily Telegraph in 2015, two years after she was first accused. She echoes Gambaccini and others in calling for the law to be changed to allow those accused of sexual abuse to have anonymity “until and if you are convicted. If you got through trial and are convicted then of course your name should be out there. Ninety percent of the time, though, I think we should have anonymity just as the alleged victims have anonymity.”
She says she agonises over questions of guilt and innocence in others. “You read reports, you hear people speak, and then you hear the very opposite from somebody else. All anyone can honestly know is their own involvement, either as victim or perpetrator. We will never know the truth about other people. It’s very, very complex.” Her own protestations of innocence, of course, fall into the same category. “I suppose I just have to carry on knowing in my heart that I am innocent and doing my best,” she says.
Born in Inverness to Church of Scotland parents, Sister Frances was working as a paediatric nurse at Great Ormond Street hospital when she experienced what she understood as a dramatic call from God to take holy orders. By the age of 35, she was mother superior of her convent. She founded Helen House after befriending the family of Helen Worswick, a very ill two-year-old who lived at home but required 24-hour care from her family. Douglas House followed in 2004.
Being separated from her work at the hospices has been immensely painful, she says, “because if you have journeyed with families through illness and death, and the funeral and the bereavement – and bereavement, as you can imagine, goes on for a long time after the child dies – you are very close to them.” Sebastian’s Action Trust, another charity of which the nun is a patron, offered her its full support after the investigation was dropped, saying it had found “absolutely no reason to exclude Sister Frances from our activities”.
In her own case, says the nun, the fact that her name is known in connection with the allegations is not her biggest concern. “I was nervous about it at the beginning, but I really don’t mind now that people know because I think it’s part of my role.”
That role, she says, is to become a voice for those in her position – particularly teachers, fellow carers or clergy – who find themselves similarly accused, often similarly excluded from their roles because of safeguarding concerns yet unable ever to prove their innocence.
“I think, without meaning to be arrogant, I think I want to be a voice for the voiceless. Because I have been … ” She trails off. “I was going to say I have been a victim.”
Is she uncomfortable with that word? “Yes, because I don’t feel it. But there are a lot of people in my situation who do feel they are victims, and feel very alone in it. And that’s where I am. I’d like to be alongside, in whatever way is appropriate.”
- This article was amended on 4 April 2016. The College of Policing wrote to forces to reiterate its guidance on how to treat complainants. It did not issue new guidance. This has been corrected.