Sandra Brown, OBE [1] (born 7 January 1949) is a Scottish campaigner and leading expert on child protection issues. She has also achieved wide recognition as a writer, broadcaster and actress.
The daughter of Mary and Alexander Gartshore, Brown was brought up in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, Scotland. [2]
Brown was educated at Coatbridge High School, Hamilton College and the Open University which awarded her an Honours degree in 1978 and a Masters in Education in 1996. She has worked as a primary school deputy headteacher and as a senior lecturer. She now runs her own business, Potential Plus, providing personnel training for companies and organisations. She has been married to her husband, Ronnie, for many years. They live in Edinburgh and have a son, a daughter and three grandchildren.
As well as campaigning against child sexual abuse, Brown has run a helpline for victims of workplace bullying in Scotland.
Brown has believed, for many years, that, in February 1957, her bus driver father, an alleged philanderer and paedophile, participated in the abduction and murder of a missing local schoolchild, Moira McCall Anderson. [3]
She campaigned to bring her father to justice, but her efforts were thwarted in 2006, when he died.
In memory of the missing child, she spearheaded in 2000 the founding of a charitable organisation, the Moira Anderson Foundation (MAF).
Since its inception the Foundation has assisted more than 500 families who have been afflicted by child sexual abuse, violence, bullying and related problems. [1] Despite research by Brown and others, Moira McCall Anderson's disappearance remains unsolved.
On 23 February 2007, the fiftieth anniversary of her disappearance, a memorial service was held for Moira at Airdrie Baptist Church, Lanarkshire. The service also commemorated other missing people and victims of child sexual abuse.
Now prominent as a spokesperson on child protection issues, Brown makes frequent appearances in the Scottish newspapers and in the UK media. Notable broadcasts on BBC Radio Four include The Choice (radio series) (interviewed by Michael Buerk) and Woman's Hour (interviewed by Martha Kearney).
The unsolved case of Moira McCall Anderson has been the subject of three television documentaries - Cutting Edge and Unsolved, and the Zone Reality Show Psychic Private Eyes.
Brown has written a theatre play, recounting her childhood and the unexplained disappearance of the schoolchild - One Of Our Ain. This one-woman show, presented by Brown herself, has been staged at the Soho Theatre, London, Oran Mor Theatre, Glasgow and during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2006.
Brown has written a best-selling book about her Lanarkshire childhood and the mystery of the schoolchild's disappearance - Where There Is Evil (Pan Macmillan Ltd, ISBN 0-330-44871-4). The book has sold over 100,000 copies internationally, and ensures that the missing child's memory remains vivid in the public imagination. It also highlights the need for on-going vigilance and wider awareness of child protection issues.
As of June 2013, Brown is co-writing a feature film screenplay adaptation of her life story & book, Where There Is Evil, with London screenwriter, Amanda Duke.
Airdrie is a town in North Lanarkshire, Scotland. It lies on a plateau 400 ft above sea level, 12 miles (19 km) east of Glasgow. As of 2012, it had a population of 37,130. Airdrie developed as a market town in the late 17th century following an Act of Parliament allowing it to hold a weekly market. It later grew in prominence as a centre for weaving and manufacturing, as well as being the settlement near several coalmines. In the mid 19th century, the town expanded greatly as a result of immigration and the development of iron works and railway links. This led to the town building the first public library in Scotland in 1853. During the 20th century, industrial decline took place in Airdrie, with heavy industry closing down across much of the town. In the 21st century, Airdrie has continued as a regional centre for services and retail, as well as being a commuter settlement within the Central Belt. Historically part of Lanarkshire, Airdrie forms a conurbation with its neighbour Coatbridge, in what was formerly the Monklands district, with a population of approximately 90,000.
Renee MacRae was a Scottish woman who disappeared on 12 November 1976, together with her 3-year-old son Andrew. Their case was the United Kingdom's longest-running missing persons case, and within Scotland is as notorious as Glasgow's Bible John murders. In September 2022, William (Bill) MacDowell was found guilty of the murder of MacRae and her son. Their bodies have never been found.
Unsolved is a British regional crime documentary television programme produced by Grampian Television that aired in Scotland. The programme aired from 8 January 2004 to 30 November 2006.
The 2009 Plymouth child abuse case was a child abuse and paedophile ring involving at least five adults from different parts of England. The case centred on photographs taken of up to 64 children by Vanessa George, a nursery worker in Plymouth. It highlighted the issue of child molestation by women, as all but one of the members of the ring were female.
Sidney Charles Cooke is an English convicted child molester, murderer and suspected serial killer and serial rapist serving two life sentences. He was the leader of a paedophile ring suspected of up to twenty child murders of young boys in the 1970s and 1980s. Cooke and other members of the ring were convicted of three killings in total, although he was only convicted of one himself.
Robert Black was a Scottish serial killer and paedophile who was convicted of the kidnap, rape and murder of four girls aged between 5 and 11 in a series of crimes committed between 1981 and 1986 in the United Kingdom.
Peter Britton Tobin was a Scottish convicted serial killer and sex offender who served a whole life order at HM Prison Edinburgh for three murders committed between 1991 and 2006. Police also investigated Tobin over the deaths and disappearances of other young women and girls.
The Babes in the Wood murders are the murders of two children which occurred in a copse in Sewardstone, Essex on 31 March 1970. The victims, Susan Muriel Blatchford and Gary John Hanlon, were lured from an unknown location close to their north London homes into a copse on the outskirts of Epping Forest, where they were raped and murdered by known paedophile Ronald Jebson. Their bodies were discovered on 17 June, 78 days after the two were reported missing by their parents.
Lee Darren Boxell was a British schoolboy who disappeared from the London Borough of Sutton in England on 10 September 1988, aged 15. He was last seen in Sutton High Street before saying he might go to watch a football match at Selhurst Park in Croydon. At the time of his disappearance, Boxell was described as 5 ft 7 in (1.70 m), of slim build with light brown hair; he was wearing black jeans, a white Flintstones T-shirt and brown suede shoes.
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Mark Alan Williams-Thomas is an English investigative journalist, sexual abuse victim advocate, and former police officer. He is a regular reporter on This Morning and Channel 4 News, as well as the ITV series Exposure and the ITV and Netflix crime series The Investigator: A British Crime Story.
A dossier on paedophiles allegedly associated with the British government was assembled by the British Member of Parliament Geoffrey Dickens, who handed it to the then-Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, in 1984. The whereabouts of the dossier is unknown, along with other files on organised child abuse that had been held by the Home Office.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in England and Wales was an inquiry examining how the country's institutions handled their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse. It was announced by the British Home Secretary, Theresa May, on 7 July 2014. It published its 19th and final report on 20 October 2022.
Alexandrina Henderson Farmer Jay, CBE is a British academic. She is visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde and the independent chair of the Centre for Excellence for Children's Care and Protection (CELCIS).
Operation Midland was a criminal investigation which the London Metropolitan Police carried out between November 2014 and March 2016 in response to false allegations of historic child abuse made by Carl Beech.
Mark Anthony Tildesley was a seven-year-old English child who disappeared on 1 June 1984 whilst visiting a funfair in Wokingham, Berkshire. A widespread search of the Wokingham area, involving both police officers and British Army soldiers, did not locate him. Thames Valley Police initially suspected that his body was buried near Wellington Road in Wokingham, near the funfair from which he was abducted, but they now believe that he was probably buried in a shallow grave on abandoned farmland.
The murder of Anne Noblett is an unsolved British murder case from 1957. On Monday, 30 December 1957, 17-year-old Anne Noblett disappeared whilst travelling to her home in Marshalls Heath, Hertfordshire. A month later, on 31 January 1958, her fully clothed body was found in woodland near Whitwell. Her remains showed signs of having been refrigerated and the case was dubbed the "Deep Freeze Murder" by the press. Two thousand people were interviewed, and refrigeration units within a 30-mile (48 km) radius were investigated, but no one to date has been arrested for the murder.
Vishal Mehrotra was an eight-year-old boy who was abducted from Putney, London, England, on 29 July 1981. The child's partial remains were discovered on 25 February 1982 on an isolated farm in Sussex. The killers were never identified and no one has ever been charged with the murder.
The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry was established in October 2015 to inquire into cases of abuse of children in care in Scotland. It was to report and make recommendations within four years by 2019. But this deadline was later changed to "as soon as reasonably practicable". Concerns have been raised about mounting costs and delays in the inquiry. Six years after the start of the on-going inquiry and long after the original deadline, Anne Smith released a report which was critical of the previous Scottish government for the 'woeful and avoidable' delay in setting up the inquiry.
Ian Campbell Dunn was a Scottish gay rights and pro-paedophilia campaigner. He was founder of The Scottish Minorities Group, one of the first British gay rights organisations, and helped establish Britain's first gay newspaper, Gay News. Dunn also worked as the editor of Gay Scotland magazine and co-founded the Paedophile Information Exchange.