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The last child abuse charge facing
three women crèche workers was dropped yesterday but their other battles are
only just beginning. If Gaye Davidson, Marie
Keys and Janice Buckingham had gone to trial in the Christchurch High Court
on April 26 the charge they would have faced arose from what came to be
called "the circle incident". They were said to have
encouraged a co-worker to place naked children in a large circle formed by 20
adults, who indecently assaulted the children and made them kick and hit each
other. While this was happening
at the Civic Childcare Centre in It sounds fantastic, but
the charge, and three others dropped last month, were
real, and so is their legacy of shattered careers, bruised families and
debts. The three women, and
colleague Debbie Gillespie, who was earlier discharged on the one remaining
charge, are legally free, but practically they are prisoners: of their debts,
of the knowledge they will never be able to work again in careers they loved,
and of fear they may have further encounters with people who have abused and
threatened to kill them and damaged their properties.
Former supervisor Gaye
Davidson said they had been pushing for answers on behalf of staff who lost their jobs when the Christchurch City Council
abruptly dosed the crèche on September 3, 1992. (all 13 staff are now seeking
$2.8 million in compensation from the council) "We know the police
said it had been shut for the safety of the kids ... but we didn't know what
that meant and we had no idea we were being investigated." Though they elected not
to apply for name suppression so workmates would be free of suspicion, and were
well aware of intense news media interest in their unprecedented case, they
were still shocked by the speed with which some condemned them and the hate
that drove others to mail bullets with names scratched on them and to make or
mime death threats. The day they were committed
for trial some people in the packed court quietly chanted "guilty,
guilty, guilty" and when one young woman turned
to tell them "it's not for you to say" another woman turned on her
saying "F... up, bitch". Othes said
"hang, draw and quarter them" and "burn them at the stake". Mrs
Davidson, 39, said she and the othes had been
devastated emotionally .and ruined financially. So far they had received
$5000 in legal aid but they each faced bills of more than $25,000 after the
11-week depositions hearing and before their lawyer Gerald Nation started
work on five pre-trial applications. At first she said she felt
strongly that the .case should go to trial so the public could se e it thrown
out by a jury, and "not just dropped", but by last week she had had
enough and just wanted it to end. Once the initial shock of
her October 1 arrest had faded Ms Davidson said she expected to receive a
telephone call from the police. I kept thinking 'they
know they have made a mistake, they are going to ring up and apologise'. I
was like that for three or four days. "It's such a
devastating thing to be charged with such an emotive thing. Never in my
wildest dreams could I have imagined ... that people I knew as parents would believe
I could have done this." She said she was treated
fairly during the search of her house but had no idea it and the interviews
that followed were to end with her arrest. "The whole thing seemed
totally weird and stupid and I treated it like that because I thought 'these
people are crazy' ….so I wasn't really angry." Since then she has often
wondered why the police did not visit the crèche before it was closed and why
they did not use an undercover officer as she was told later that she and at
least three colleagues had been under suspicion for about six weeks before the
closure. "They decided we
were child abusers then let us operate for nearly two more months." Assistant supervisor
Marie Keys. 44, said the officers who searched her
house looked under the floor and in the ceiling and even opened every board
game to make sure there was nothing inside. "They didn't need to
raid my house like that ... my eldest daughter was still home…." Later, she remembered her
astonishment when a woman detective asked if she had ever been fingerprinted. "We were the subject
of a major investigation and they didn't know I'd never been arrested or
involved with the police in any way .... the only
time I had been to the police station was to report a stolen bicycle." While she was questioned
at the "I no longer trust
(the police] ... you read the court pages with different eyes." She said the (dismissed)
charge that Debbie Gillespie performed an indecent act in a public place by having
sexual intercourse with Ellis in the toilets in front of two children was
ridiculous: the toilets were easily accessible and the crèche had a steady stream
of visitors so anyone walking in would have seen them. A registered teacher and
qualified childcare worker, she said she still could not face taking her toddler
nephew to or from the local playcentre. "I am not ready to
go into a place like that ... it's sad, it's the playcentre our girls went to
and I'd love to go back and see it all again." After her arrest Mrs Keys said she was so angry and upset she would have
passed by an injured child without stopping to help. "I would still be extremely
careful ... I'd like there to be somebody else around, and if there was I'd
leave it to them. "I'd be the one who rang
for help rather than actually touch the child, which is against all my natural
instincts." Mrs Keys,
a member of the board of trustees at her daughters' high school, said they
had reported no problems with other children, though she had received one
obscene call. "We've have great
support from friends and neighbours and we have tried to keep life as normal
as possible." The women said they had
long since lost count of the sleepless nights, the time spent trying to find reasons
why they were charged, and the number of rumours they had heard. According to one, some
children had been counselled for the effect of "ritualistic abuse"
that involved snakes smuggled by air force personnel at Wigram, while others
said prominent people were involved and strings had been pulled. Though children told
Social Welfare interviewers of being videotaped during various abuses no
tapes were ever found, which the women say is not surprising because they
never existed, though video cameras were used to film children during crèche
activities and when a party of Japanese teachers visited. The four said they
survived because they knew they were all innocent and had a strong network of
family and friends who supported them from the beginning, ferrying them to
and from court and staying to make sure nothing happened, cooking meals, arranging
morale-maintaining weekly lunches and doing their best to make life bearable for
their children. Still being able to laugh
no matter how bad things looked also helped, and they said when someone was
down the others were able to help keep their spirits up. "We were all blessed
with a damn good sense of humour, you have to have one when you work wiyh young kids, so we had a slight advantage, I
suppose," Mrs Buckingham said. A part-time worker, she
said the crèche was the best place she ever worked and during her seven years
there she never saw anything that gave her the slightest cause for alarm or
noticed anything in the children's demeanour that worried her. Mrs
Buckingham, 44, said she got through the first day by being able to "mother"
Debbie Gillespie and taking her mind off what was happening. She said she told the.police she would tell them the truth but thought they
were not interested in hearing it. "What got me was the
feeling they were not conducting an investigation at all. They had made up
their minds that we were guilty. There was no objectivity." When she was arrested she
remembered thinking "I am a grandmother, for God's sake! and when they said 'Marie did this, Gay did this, Debbie
did that' ... I was thinking Marie? Gay?
Debbie? ….you have GOT to be kidding!" The times it had been
hardest to laugh, other than trying to find new recipes for mince or meet
mortgage payments,were
when children were affected, Mrs Buckingham said. Her youngest daughter had
been given a hard time by some schoolmates who told her they could not come
to her house because they would not be safe there. l think
that was probably just juvenile manipulation ....but my eldest daughter took three
abusive calls one night and someone used weedkiller
to paint "child molester" on
the grass in front of the house. "If it's directed at
you, you can cope, but if it's directed at your kids it's much worse. "One of the hardest
things is that I have always felt I was a 'respected member of the community'
and it's very hard to adjust to feeling like scum and being very careful
where you go." She said she had not realised how hard the case had been on her children till
the day the charges were reduced from four to one. "My eldest was
crying and my two great bulking sons were leaping round the kitchen hugging me
and dancing ...they were absolutely jubilant." Mrs
Buckingham said she worried the case would create unnecessary anxieties among
child care workers. We've heard that
toileting is inadequate at some and that kids are not getting cuddled as much
as they were." It could also have a negative
effect on males at a time when many fathers were becoming more active parents,
she said. "you
just need one idiot to point the finger. |
