|
|
The |
|
Beyond the Civic creche case On June 22, Justice Williamson
sent Peter Hugh McGregor Ellis to jail for 10 years with some harsh words
ringing in his ears: he told him he was a pervert; that he had no doubt the
jury was correct in its verdict and that Ellis could have assisted the child
victims of these crimes, and himself, if he had faced up to the truth about himself
and sought help at an early stage. That was two months ago at the end
of the longest, most expensive and most documented child sex abuse case in
New Zealand's legal history. But the bizarre thing is the court
case was nothing more than a sideshow: the real story rages on in the
seamiest smoggy The camps are bitterly and
irrevocably divided; where once they were united by their politics, now they
are divided by their children. IT HAD BEEN A GOOD DAY: four weeks
since Peter Ellis was sent to jail and finally a sense of normalcy was
returning to the household. At school this afternoon the teacher had waylaid
Anne to tell her that her seven-and-a-half-year-old son, Andy (not his real
name), had been noticeably happier since the verdict. Then, during dinner Andy had
become morose, his favourite food prodded and pushed around the plate and his
customary chatter stilled. A stomach ache? Sudden change in appetite? "No. It's just this meat
reminds me of Peter's penis." Peter's penis. It might have been
laughable if it wasn't coming from such a sad little face; if it wasn't
coming from a boy on antidepressants; a boy who six weeks earlier had dressed
himself up as a pirate, complete with sword and hat, to protect himself as he
gave evidence in Ellis's High Court trial. A boy who gave evidence of being
forced to perform oral sex with other children, being forced to drink Ellis's
urine out of a cup in the crθche toilets, of being made to line up in a room
with other children, take his clothes off and lie on a bed while strange men
touched his genitals. I find myself looking at this
small bright-eyed boy as if he were the survivor of some modern-day
holocaust; how can this have happened to him under his loving parents' eyes
and what can he say to me that will finally dispel the lingering doubts which
remain after months of research? When Justice Williamson confirmed
the jury's verdict in Ellis's trial, he said, "Unlike almost all of
those who have publicly feasted off this case by expressing their opinions,
the jury actually saw and heard each of the children." I had seen only some of the 13
child complainants (aged three and a half to nine) sitting framed by a video
monitor as they were cross-examined by Ellis's defence counsel, Robert
Harrison. I had watched the protracted evidential interviews where children
spoke of Ellis putting his penis in their mouths, forcing them to masturbate
him, defecating or urinating on their faces. I had sat for hours on end
reading transcripts of these interviews and came away revolted by the halting
revelations made by these children but also confused as to how anyone could
distil the fact from the obvious fiction interwoven in these disclosures. How
to account for the surprising lack of effect in some of the children as they
recounted these horrors while simultaneously moulding playdough, humming, or
playing with blocks. How to explain
the fact that these atrocities went on, from 1986 until November 1991, but
nobody noticed. And like Thomas, the doubting
apostle, I had come now to put my hand in the wound so to speak; to talk with
a mother whom I knew to have her head screwed on, a mother who wasn't talking
satanic ritual abuse, a mother who had been good friends with one of the
women accused, Debbie Gillespie; a mother who had none of the skeletons in
her closet which some have pointed to as alternative explanations for the
children's disturbed behaviour things like opiate dependency, broken
marriages, deaths, de factos, dodgy uncles or stepbrothers. This family
doesn't even have a television set to corrupt their children's young
imaginations. Here is a mother who had
everything to lose and nothing but heartache to gain from becoming caught up
in the Civic inquiry. She said I could talk to her son
about what had happened and in an instant I knew what it meant when the
expert child abuse interviewers refer to "distracting" and the
difficulties avoiding the use of "leading questions". HERE WE ARE IN THE HEART of
middle-class Christchurch suburbia, a sun-filled lounge lined with book shelves, memorabilia from world travels and
educational toys, inflatable globes, for the children in the midst of which
Andy, a fragile-looking boy, holding his after school quota of animal
biscuits in one hand and a Linus blanket in another. Somehow we're supposed to steer
the conversation child sex abuse. "Was it difficult to talk to
the judge?" "No, he was quite friendly.
It was only difficult the first time, I told. "Once, Mr Harrison [defence
counsel] asked me what Peter had done to me but actually he already knew
because he had seen the video when I told Sue [Sue Sidey the specialist child
interviewer]. So I told him he already knew what had had happened "What do you think about
Peter?" I think he was being very stupid
because he did mean things to us and he probably knew he'd go to jail." At which point he leaps up and
dashes from the room, yelling over his shoulder that he would like to
"roll Peter flat, starve him out in a dungeon with no door and no
window." Later, I try again: "Why
didn't you tell Mummy or Daddy about the mean things Peter did?" [A
leading question.] He walks to the window and puts
his thumb in his mouth. "Because it was too hard. It
was scary." Ellis had told Andy that he would
turn his mother and father into gherkins and eat them if he ever told. Sound
silly? Try it out on a four year-old who still believes in Father Christmas
and the tooth fairy. Earlier this afternoon his mother,
a social worker, described her intense guilt at having failed to diagnose in
her own son all the things she had been trained to spot in others. It was, by now, a familiar story,
told and retold during the 11 week deposition trial which preceded Ellis's
case: parents who had jollied their children along as they expressed explicit
dislike and in some cases real fear of Ellis; parents who had felt nothing
but exasperation when their children suddenly lost control after moving down
to the "big end of the creche" and would hold on (to the point
where some, like Andy, developed impacted bowels) until they could go to the
toilet at home, or would refuse to go at all unless accompanied by their
mother or father; parents whose children seemed unnaturally fearful or
obsessed with genitals; parents who raised concerns about random incidents
involving Ellis and rough housing or teasing or inappropriate behaviour and
assumed that something had been done to fix it. And in one instance, a parent
whose son, then aged four and a half actually told his mother on the way home
from creche one day that "Peter had done poos and wees on the
"children's faces" in the toilets. She told him not to be silly.
But at the same time she often
felt enormously grateful to Ellis because Andy lost bowel control once he
moved down the "big end" and often Ellis was the only one prepared
to clean him. By the time the first allegation
against Ellis surfaced in November 1991, Andy had been at school for nearly a
year; he still had toileting problems and had been on "Sneaky Poos"
programmes and received help from Child and Family Service. Like all the parents with children
who had attended the creche, Ann was given a list of open-ended questions to
put to Andy; general questions about likes and dislikes and children and
staff they might remember. When Anne and her husband got
round to the question about whether there was anyone Andy didn't like, the
response was heart stopping. The colour drained from his little
face and he immediately leapt over the back of the couch and hid from view.
Then a trembly voice spoke up with 'you mean Peter don't you'." They left it there; he didn't want
to talk about it and they were very conscious of the dangers of
contamination. Andy did not disclose sexual abuse
during his first interview with Sue Sidey. He talked a lot about his fear of
Ellis, about the "tickle bash up" games and the teasing and the
stealing of food from his lunch box. But instantly after the interview his
toileting problems stopped, just as if someone had thrown a switch. Eventually Anne was told by
another parent that her child had said Ellis had put his penis in Andy's
mouth. Questioned, an extraordinarily
fearful Andy said yes this had happened. From the time of this initial
disclosure in March 1991 to the time of the court case, Anne says she and her
husband would have had no more than six conversations with Andy about what
had happened. Once they decided to go to court they became acutely aware of
the dangers of contaminating their child's evidence. But naturally enough, once their
child had worked up the courage to unburden himself of these ghoulish
memories, it was to his parents he turned. Little were children like Andy to
know that this was a mistake; what they said in the privacy and safety of
their homes was worthless in court no, worse than that, it raised the
spectre of coaching or contamination. It wasn't enough that these children
turned their parents' guts with the fear in their eyes; they had to repeat
the performance for a stranger in a soundproof room in front of a video
camera before the allegations took on any value in court. It was almost as if the only part
of this ordeal that would ever receive credibility was the part that was
played out in public. While experts argued about
interviewing techniques and whether leading questions were asked by the
interviewers, the parents sat at home with six and seven-year-olds who were
describing sexual practices that few of their parents had even heard of. The jury found for Andy on one
count but not on another; a fact which Anne finds oddly reassuring: "At the end of the day I
don't know what to make of it all. I believe my son has been abused not
because someone has told me this is the thing to do, but because I know him.
I do think that some parents did question their children inappropriately
something that was fairly heavily scrutinised throughout depositions. And I
think the jury only made those convictions when they were absolutely certain.
Other charges, where there seemed to be quite a lot of evidence, didn't
stick, and I feel quite reassured by that in a way. "But as to what actually
happened at that creche, I just don't know. What I would prefer to believe,
but can't quite, is that Peter acted alone and somehow the other staff were
just oblivious or saw his inappropriate behaviour with the children and just
dismissed it as we all did for fear of being thought reactionary. "My next scenario is that
Peter had some sort of hold over the key members of the staff, an emotional
hold based perhaps on things he knew about them personally, and that they
knew about the offending but ignored it. "And the worst scenario is
that the women condoned the offending and that it was an organised and
systematic form of abuse which involved people outside the creche." And the reason she can't quite
believe Ellis acted alone is that her child has told her quite explicitly
that he told some of the women accused what was happening and they rescued
him from some of the abuse. ONE OF THE CRUELLEST IRONIES in
this story is the blind faith parents like Anne placed in the Civic and its
staff; this was the last place in the world they would suspect of sexual
abuse. By the time Gaye Davidson joined the staff in 1984, the Civic, under
former manager Dora Reinfeld, had become a showcase held up at Christchurch
Teachers' Seven years later, in November
1991, the same month in which the first allegation against Ellis would
surface, this view would be restated in a glowing report by the Education
Review Office, praising the staff and parents for creating an "accepting
environment where children's self-esteem and personal development is
nurtured." Like kindergartens and
playcentres, independent creches are licensed and inspected by the Ministry
of Education, but, unlike kindergartens, creches are able to cater for
children under two and provide all-day care. Parents placed their children's
names on the Civic waiting list at birth in the hope there would be a vacancy
by the time they were old enough to attend. The fact that the Civic became so
popular owed much to Reinfeld who had hauled the creche back from an anarchic
brink where it had teetered in the early 80s as parents encouraged their
children to "go bush" in an urban environment. In a bizarre forerunner to the
Ellis case, the Christchurch City Council, the creche's licensee, was asked
in 1984 to help sort out a situation where the children appeared to be
running the creche and staff were concerned about the amount of time children
spent masturbating. Reinfeld, a no-nonsense woman, was
brought in as supervisor in 1983, with a mandate to sort the Civic out. She
set about imposing a new structure on the creche. Children slept and ate at
given times, washed their hands after painting and before food, sang songs
and went on organised outings, listened to stories and played in sandpits.
Notice boards remained a forum through which politically correct parents
could keep up to date with the next protest, but there was a new emphasis on
learning. Ironically too, she was
responsible for designing and instructing staff in what must have been one of
the very first child sex abuse prevention programmes in day care. As part of
this, any men working with children were to be chaperoned by another worker
during nappy changing for their own protection. Ellis was employed as a reliever at
the creche in August 1986 and Reinfeld moved on to take up a teaching post at
Christchurch College of Education that December. She gave him his first
warning before she went for drinking. She says if the guidelines,
policies and administrative sys tems that were put in place during her time
at the Civic had survived under Davidson, the abuse would not have happened. As the 80s drew to a close, so the
Civic's parents moved from experimentation and free love into jobs and
mortgages; there would always remain a strong liberal core at the Civic but
by the late 80s the influx of professional and middle-class families meant
the creche began to reflect more conventional values. There remained a strong
emphasis on gender equity and biculturalism but many of the parents were
looking to the creche to provide their children with a politically correct
"head start". Civic kids got a reputation among the city's primary
schools as bright and well adjusted, eager to leam. By the early 90s a
growing number were headed for private schools. By 1989 the government's
educational reforms meant early childhood centres wishing to continue to
receive government subsidies had to adopt a charter stipulating the quality
of care and education to be provided. The Civic's 1991 charter lists among
its principles the goal of providing a "curriculum designed to provide
the children with a balanced programme to facilitate their intellectual,
physical, emotional, social and spiritual development." It lists among its special
features: "non-sexism, non-violent environment, taha Maori, use of
surrounding environment". The "surrounding
environment" meant, first and foremost, the Botanical Gardens, Physically, the site in Those who argue nothing ever
happened at the creche point to the physical layout of the rooms and say it
would have been impossible for Ellis to have been secreted away in the toilet
abusing children because there were too many people coming and going within
cooee. But Ellis himself conceded there
were times when he locked himself away in the toilets for an illicit smoke
and no one was any the wiser; certainly, standing in the middle of the large
play area there is no way in the world anyone could know what was happening
in the toilet at any given time. In court, Ellis's co- workers told the jury
it just was not physically possible for Ellis to have committed the abuse;
then Ellis came along and told them the very nature of the work meant there
must have been opportunities. The agreed staff ratios meant
there should always be a staff member for every four toddlers (under
two-year-olds) - one for every 10 preschoolers. Although owned by the Christchurch
City Council, the creche was run by a
management committee made up of parent representatives, the supervisor, staff
representatives and two council representatives. Before the Ellis investigation,
there were 72 children enrolled at the Civic some part time, some full
time. It had made an average annual profit of $30,000 for the past three
years. By the time the Ministry of
Education suspended the Civic licence and the doors were finally closed in
September 1992, the roll had dropped to 55 and the Civic was heavily in the
red. ONE OF THE MOST DAMNING THINGS to
emerge from the ashes of the Civic was a report which seemed to make fools of
everyone who worked there and most of the parents besides. It was
commissioned by the council and researched and written by Rosemary Smart, a
registered psychologist and director of Presbyterian Support Service's
counselling services. Smart began compiling the report
in March 1992, after Ellis had been charged with the first of the 45
indecency charges he would eventually face and seven months before the four
women creche workers would be arrested. She handed the confidential report to
the council in July and a copy was passed immediately to the police. It would
go a long way towards convincing investigating officers of the women's guilt. Critics have pointed out that the
report reads as if the abuse had happened and Ellis had been convicted; they
are right. Although the word "alleged" crops up now and again, it
is soon lost in a maze of severely incriminating circumstantial evidence. Out of the mouths of every staff
member came information that would shock most parents even those closest
and most forgiving of Elliss excesses and would collectively compromise
Ellis's co-workers. As Smart put it: "On the one
hand, all but one staff member were struggling to believe Ellis had abused
anyone and frankly could not accept such abuse could have happened at the
Creche and yet individually each one carried information about his behaviour
that would send alarm bells screaming in the head of anyone with the
slightest clue about child sex abuse." Smart interviewed each staff
member individually and then summarised their comments according to the six
headings experts in sex abuse treatment use to help identify a potential
abuser: signs of emotional problems, substance abuse, criminal behaviour,
sexual difficulties, poor judgement and insensitivity and punitiveness
towards children. On the basis of information freely
volunteered by the staff, Ellis displayed all these attributes. Their individual comments
included: I was concerned for the children
he baby-sat for, I thought he was an alcoholic. He brought a child round to my
house one weekend when he had had a few. He talked about being sexually
abused as a child and that he liked it. It was fine because it was what he
wanted. He was abused by his uncle. He
said it was ok because he knew what he was doing. He was eight at the time. He said girls of 12 really wanted
it and knew what they were doing. I thought he was perverted. He
told me explicit details of the men and women he slept with. He like to
flaunt his sex life. He told one staff member a certain
child had "a nice arse", another had "nice tits" and
another had a "nice body". He made these statements within the
hearing of the children. He talked an unusual amount about
the size of the boys' penises. Games would start being fun but
often it seemed he didn't know when to stop. There was an incident in the last
six months when he pulled the girls' skirts down or the boys' pants down as
they ran through the door. He was spoken to by a staff member. Smart recorded that one staff
member said she couldn't recall seeing any child upset or anything that gave
her concern about Ellis, but then went on to say that one child had developed
a vaginal infection which made urinating painful one weekend after Ellis had
been baby-sitting for her, and when the child turned up at creche he had
"been particularly nasty and told her several times in a nasty voice that
she had 'wees disease'". Staff said it was common for
children not to like Ellis, but put it down to him being male and different.
Some kids loved him. One child refused to be toileted by him. Although the authors of these
comments were not identified in Smart's report, she confirmed that they
originated from all staff not one or two. In her report she concluded that
Ellis's likable personality, his bisexuality, his exhibitionism and his
creativity with the children all helped build up a base of tolerance and
support among staff. "Because he behaved and spoke
somewhat outrageously and possibly because he was bisexual, he was seen as
different. Therefore for both staff and parents the usual boundaries did not
seem to apply." And while she was strongly critical
of the staff for their almost total lack of training in sexual abuse
prevention and detection. Smart did not really apportion blame for what had
happened, noting instead that overseas studies of sex abuse in day care had
shown that traditional indicators of quality in day care are not also
indicators of low risk of sexual abuse. She did, however, conclude that
while the Civic had an excellent reputation in the past, "over the last
few years it has changed from a relaxed and informal atmosphere to a careless
milieu." TRACEY O'CONNOR, A 22-YEAR-OLD
kindergarten teacher who joined the creche staff eight months before Ellis's
suspension, has a couple of interesting things to say about Ellis and the
Civic. At depositions she was staunch in her support of Gaye Davidson and her
professionalism and told the court it was not possible for Debbie Gillespie
and Ellis to have had sex in the toilets (one of the two charges Gillespie
faced). She still thinks that, but since
Ellis's conviction she has offered a few gems of information about what it
was like to work at the Civic in its twilight days and the enigma that was
Ellis. O'Connor is different from the
rest of the Civic staff: more ordinary, certainly more naive. Ellis sniffed
that out in a jiffy and spent morning tea breaks spoon-feeding her outrageous
information about his personal life and sexual preferences. She was one of
the staff who told Smart about his comments about being abused as a child
(something he later denied in a 20/20 television interview) and liking it,
although other staff, including Davidson and Jan Buckingham, already knew
this. (Whether they believed it is another question). O'Connor knows Ellis was trying to
wind her up, but there was a darker side to it all as well. Fresh from
training college she saw things that made her skin crawl: pillow fights that
became so vicious that children were left knocked down and crying, emotional
manipulation of children, name calling, and the endless sexualised banter
directed at adults but all within hearing of the children. Under Reinfeld, staff used to
complain privately about how little time there was for interaction between
fellow workers; adults were there for the children, not to socialise. But
that policy seemed to have been reversed by the time O'Connor arrived. "The staff's personal lives,
their problems, sexual practices and partners were all up for discussion. "Debbie was having a
relationship with a man and then with a relieving staff member (a woman who
would later give evidence for the prosecution); Gaye had a nice boyfriend and
also an ex-husband who seemed to spend more time at the creche than her
boyfriend; and then Jan, well, when her marriage broke up her ex- husband
went to flat temporarily with Peter." O'Connor was having her own
personal problems and in hindsight agrees that staff relations had begun to
dominate the staff/child relationships. "Yes, I think so. Like for
me, I was going to work for the staff and not the kids. The attraction of
going to the creche was to be with adults who understood. Staff relationships
were very important but I think we took it to an extreme." A disarmingly honest admission
which seems to point to the heart of what went wrong at the Civic: a bunch of
emotionally needy adults who became increasingly dependent on one another and
desensitised to what was happening around them. Added to which there was Ellis,
the chameleon. "You see, this man who has
been sentenced on 16 counts of child abuse is the same man who went out one
lunch hour after my budgie died and presented me with a brown paper bag. "Inside was a new
budgie." ELLIS ARRIVED AT THE civic in
September 1986 as a result of an 80 hour community service sentence for
benefit fraud. He had no training in child care but seemed to have a natural
affinity with children that ability, which many adults lose, to engross
himself in a children's fantasy world. Ironically, by the time he was
dismissed he was one of the most highly qualified workers at the Civic more
qualified, technically, than his supervisor, Gaye Davidson. Ellis's training
with the New Zealand Child Care Association gave him the maximum 120 points,
deemed to give him equivalency with the new breed of early childhood
education workers who have three full years kindergarten training like
O'Connor. Davidson has a certificate in
child care obtained through the Christchurch Polytech which gave her 100
points. She was the longest-serving staff member. Her co-accused, Jan
Buckingham and Marie Keys, both aged 44, had both been at the creche for six
years and were qualified primary school teachers as was Debbie Gillespie
who joined the staff in 1988 after five years' teaching at They had worked together for a
long time and knew a great deal about each other, but they are not as
homogeneous a group as they would later appear. They socialised together six
times a year no, perhaps more often than that in the last year. Christmas
parties, pot luck teas and birthdays, that sort of thing. Davidson is divorced with two
teenage sons; Keys, a member of the Avonside Girls' High board of trustees,
is married with two daughters; Buckingham has four children of her own and
has fostered others, and Gillespie who describes herself as a lesbian (but
was in a heterosexual relationship at the time the charges against her were
dropped) is childless. Buckingham was perhaps the closest
to Ellis; Davidson the most distant.
Initially they had been asked to
get their heads around the fact that Ellis, a co-worker and a friend, had,
under their very noses, systematically abused upwards of 80 during his six
years at the creche. Then, on October 1 at In an instant the everyday chaos
of teenagers breakfasting and making school lunches was transformed into the
totally foreign and sinister chaos of police officers overturning beds and
gathering evidence - knocking walls to see if a baby's dead body could have
been disposed of in the cavity (Jan Buckingham says she was told this by one
searching police officer), seizing phone lists, books on the Middle Ages,
children's charm bracelets, soft toys, guitars and photographs, videos and
letters. In order to lift suspicion from
other staff the four decided not to apply for name suppression and as a
result quickly found themselves household names throughout Gillespie describes how the
allegations have tainted even the best friendships with the sourness of
distrust: "I was sitting at a good friend's table with my arms around
her four- year-old when I saw her mother glance down to the child's lap where
my hands lay. Immediately I froze. What was she thinking?" On television they were to make an
incongruous and awkward foursome: the youthful Gillespie in her flowing
dresses, Davidson with her uncompromising streaked hair and sharp features,
Buckingham towering in the background with her solid features and matronly
frame, and petite Keys, looking as reassuringly conservative and kindly as
parents remembered her. Over the 11 -week deposition
hearing they sat, looking alternatively dazed, bored and amused, as the whole
sordid tale spilt out, overwhelming everyone with the sheer volume of
evidence the 70-odd prosecution witnesses, the 40 hours of taped children's
evidence, the interminable examination and cross-exanimation by the women's
counsel, Gerald Nation, Ellis's counsel, Robert Harrison, and the prosecution
counsel, Chris Lange and Brent Stanaway all conducted at a stupefyingly
slow pace with frequent stops to allow the court stenographer to catch each word. The number of children involved
varies depending on who you're talking to, but the police version goes like
this: 116 children interviewed, somewhere between 60 and 80 disclosed some
form of abuse by Ellis - either physical or sexual; 33 disclosed abuse
clearly enough to go to court; 20 of those were actually prepared to go
through court; one was thrown out at depositions, two more withdrew (which
meant Gillespie was acquitted) and the Crown then hand-picked which of the
remaining complainants were strong enough to go through to the High Court
trial. The 13 who gave evidence in court were aged three and a half to nine. The child's ability to withstand
cross-examination played a key part in this selection process, together with
the strength of the initial evidential interview. During Ellis's trial, two of the
children were dismissed essentially because they could not deliver under
examination, which left Ellis facing 25 charges from 11 complainants, and he
was found guilty "beyond reasonable doubt" on 16 charges relating
to seven of the children. Another man, the relative of a
child, has also been charged with abusing one of the complainants, but he was
the only other offender not connected with the Civic positively identified by
a child. WHAT THE CHILDREN SAID takes your
breath away; much of it seems to have nothing at all to do with sex and
everything in the world to do with perversion and power play. Trying to
untangle the facts is a nightmare for adults; there were few physical clues
beyond two medical reports, one consistent with anal penetration and one
consistent with vaginal rupture. The strongest indicators were behavioural -
that multifarious list which seems to envelop everything a normal child
passes through before heading off to primary school: nightmares, regression,
fear of intruders, toileting problems, phobias about clothing. And then there was what the
children said: it included Ellis fondling and poking at vaginas and anuses,
urinating into children's mouths, defecating on them, bathing with them and
forcing them to masturbate him, putting needles, sticks and "little
burning papers" up their bottoms, hanging them in cages, locking them
down trap doors, forcing them to perform oral sex on one another and hit each
other. A number of the children,
including two who were key complainants in the High Court trial and for whom
the jury brought in guilty verdicts, went further, describing incidents
outside the crθche involving numerous other perpetrators. Two independently
and without parental note-swapping - named some of these characters as
Boulderhead, Spikehead and Yuckhead. One of these children, a
seven-year-old boy, specifically identified Keys, Buckingham and Davidson as
being present during the so-called "circle incident", where
children had been forced to strip naked and dance about and kick each other
in the genitals. A man had inserted a needle in the child's penis and Marie
and Gaye had "pretended to sex" in the middle of the circle. On April 6, seven months after
their arrest. Justice Williamson acquitted the three women on their charge of
being party to an indecent assault on a child. He gave three reasons: the
evidence was not strong enough - the other two children mentioned by the
complainant as being present did not identify the women, and the evidential
interview in which the women were named was the fourth or fifth, during which
time the child had been in therapy and had come under enormous pressure from
his mother to disclose. The Crown's expert witness, child
psychologist Karen Zelas, conceded that "nothing the boy had so far said
seemed to satisfy his parents" but that the interviewers were aware of
the extreme pressure he was under at home and had proceeded with caution. She
was satisfied his behaviour and disclosures were consistent with abuse. Conversely, the Australian
psychologist Keith Le Page, who gave evidence for Ellis and the women
accused, concluded that this child now genuinely believed and acted as if he
had been abused because "a possibly abused child had been treated as an
actually abused child." The judge read the voluminous
affidavits, supported by the very latest selection of research on when a
child can and can't be relied upon as a witness in child sex abuse, said it
was all very interesting but wasn't convinced either way: "Symptoms can be explained,
it is said, on the one hand, by reference to this particular small child
having been sexually abused in most strange and unusual circumstances and
then gradually revealing these experiences as his memories surface or as he
understands what has happened. "On the other hand it is said
they can be explained as having been produced by personal pressures, stimuli
from other sources such as children's books and television programmes, from
over-anxious parents, from persistent suggestive and direct questioning, or
from therapy. "An abused child of this age
can be expected to have problems. A manipulated or pressured child could also
be expected to have problems." In the end. Justice Williamson
seemed to wriggle out of this quandary by loading the scales with two other
technical reasons for discharging the women: the likelihood of prejudice as a
result of Ellis's trial and the unfairness of a protracted delay before the
trial, given that he had already granted severance, meaning Ellis would be
tried separately from the women. So they walked from the court,
their lives in tatters but technically innocent. And the real battle for the
nation's hearts and minds began. At the time, nobody except the journalists
and the defendants knew why they had been acquitted, but the clear
implication was, if the evidence against the women wasn't to be relied upon,
then why buy any of it? Conversely, the families of the
complainants and their supporters argued from the opposite direction: Ellis
was guilty and so his co-workers were at the very least guilty of negligence. What happened in court was only a
shadow of what the police actually believed had taken place and just a
fraction of what the children had disclosed to their parents. THERE ISN'T ANY POINT IN ASKING
Gaye Davidson why she didn't twig to what was going on in her creche the
Christchurch City Council's model child care centre. There isn't any point in
asking her whether she feels negligent as a manager, whether she, as a
mother, feels anguished for the 80 children who were allegedly abused during
the nine years at the Civic. No point, because she doesn't
believe it happened. For me as a journalist this was
one of the most mind-bending aspects of the case: to move each day from one
middle-class living room to the next, from one intelligent and articulate
character to another, each holding an utterly impregnable and opposing
explanation as to what had happened. It seemed there were enough facts
to fit everybody's theory; and those which contradicted your beliefs you
simply discarded or rearranged another way. But putting aside the question of
whether or not Ellis is guilty, there remain some very ugly facts which
Davidson must surely face facts which seem to indicate quite clearly that,
one, things were out of hand at the Civic, and two, Ellis should not have
been there. Much of the evidence for this is
contained in the Smart report which Davidson has now read. Weren't the comments
her own staff had made about Ellis damning in the extreme? "Yes, it does look damning
and horrific. Even though these incidents were spread over six years you
could still look at it like that, but those incidents never seemed as
horrific or placing a child at risk, or suggestive of sexual abuse. "It sounds more horrific
well it sounds bloody horrific because of what Peter's accused of hand in
hand with the fact that he worked with children. But if you want to take it
out of the context of child care, a lot of that sexual talk goes on in
offices, in respectable firms and factories." And in any case, Davidson says she
wasn't aware of much of it because it was part of Ellis's morning tea routine
in the staff room and she wasn't present. So she wasn't aware he spoke of
being sexually abused and liking it? "Yes, I was aware of that.
I've talked to Peter's mother about that and she swears he has never been
sexually abused to my mind it was another example of Peter trying to
provoke people and get a rise. "It was just his sense of
humour Peter knew I hated cardboard boxes and sometimes I'd go out to my
car and find it crammed full of them... it was his way of having fun." Davidson argues that much of what
Ellis said was fabricated to shock, and that anyway it was all at an adult
level and no matter what he did in his private life, this didn't disqualify
him as a person who could work well with children. That seems patently untrue, but
putting sex aside for a moment, some of the most damning comments about Ellis
related not to his remarks about children's bodies but about what he did: his
drinking, his roughness, his ability to be downright mean. Davidson admits there were a
number of occasions when she had to take action not just pull him up but
formally complain; there was the time she sent him to the council's
recreation manager, Alistair Graham, after she caught him drinking in his
lunch hour; and the time before that when some parents went to the council
with concerns about lewd and suggestive comments he had made about creche
staff during a social function; and then in 1989 she went to Alistair Graham
again after an incident where Ellis had been in a foul mood and was taking it
out on a child. That resulted in a formal warning
from the council with references to Ellis's use of "blatant personal
threats, frightening children and using excessive force". Finally, a month before Ellis was
suspended, Davidson looked out of her office to see children clamouring
around Ellis as he hung them by their clothing from the crθche's picket
fence. "The children were all calling out for their turn, but I moved in
immediately because it was clear somebody could have been hurt." So at the end of the day does she
still believe her management of the situation was adequate, or that Ellis
should have been employed? "Looking at the Smart report
it is easy to say things could have been different; it could have been
tighter, there could have been more reports, tighter complaints procedures
and closer liaison between management and the council. "But it wouldn't have been
what the Civic was and it wouldn't have been as the parents wanted it. And
even if it had been, as Rosemary Smart herself points out, it wouldn't
necessarily have prevented abuse." DAVIDSON'S DISBELIEF AT the charges
brought against Ellis relates not only to her own experience but also to the
rich undergrowth of rumour and wild speculation that became part of the
mythology surrounding the case. At times the credibility of the
entire case seemed to be threatened by a small group of vocal parents who
seemed determined to implicate everyone who had crossed the creche's
threshold. The theories, fed by some of the children's references to being
placed in coffins and the killing of animals, grew to encompass satanic ritual
abuse, the making of child pornography and the involvement of Freemasons and
Japanese sex tours. Similarly, the knowledge that some
parents were meeting in support groups and that others had been given lists
of the things children had said Ellis had done, on the surface appeared to be
powerful evidence of contamination. Certainly there was clear evidence
that the original complainant, whose child opened the flood gates in November
1991 by telling his mother he "didn't like Peter's black penis",
had taken it upon herself to co-ordinate parents with concerns about their
child and possible abuse. The fact she herself had spent
much of her adult life in the sex abuse counselling area and was a founder
member of a sexual abuse therapy organisation, START, and the fact her son
would not disclose abuse during an evidential interview also added grist to
the mill. But all this was examined in
detail during both the depositions and subsequent High Court trial; the Crown
never claimed satanic ritual abuse played any part in what had happened and
both Judge Andersen, in the depositions hearings, and Justice Williamson,
during Ellis's trial, were satisfied that while some inappropriate questioning
of children had occurred, it did not constitute the gross contamination
claimed by the defence. FOR PARENTS READING THE DAILY
newspaper reports of what children alleged Ellis had done, one of the hardest
things to come to grips with was where the fantasy stopped and the facts
began. Surely nobody really believed that Ellis pulled off a young boy's
penis and tummy button with a pair of pliers, or that he had killed little
boys with axes and squashed children in doorways until they vomited? Those things demonstrably did not
happen, so how can anyone know what did? In court the Crown contended that
Ellis interwove fantasy tricks and theatrics into the abuse so children would
naturally recall the two together; certainly it was clear and compelling -
that many of the child complainants had enjoyed aspects of their games with
Ellis. And it also became clear that some
of the more bizarre incidents described by the children were not so bizarre
after all: "golden showers", where adults urinate over each other,
needles and sticks inserted in anuses, penises and vaginas, turned out to be
for real all practices Ellis himself claimed to staff and friends either to
have taken part in or to have seen. WHEN CHIEF INSPECTOR Brian Pearce,
the man with overall responsibility for the Civic case, looked Paul Holmes in
the eye on television on June 14 and told him that society was finally
reaping the fruits of its liberalism and that we had all mocked Patricia
Bartlett, John Banks and God for too long, he nearly caused a riot. Here at last was proof of the
police bias alleged by those lobbying for an inquiry into the Civic case: a
Salvation Army man, who thinks homosexuality is evil and pornography a drug,
is let loose on a case where two of the accused are bisexual and all are left
of centre. But like most of the conspiracy
theories that have grown up around the case, it doesn't quite fit. Pearce
says he wasn't talking about main line erotica but rather some of the 2000
videos - mostly unclassified that were seized from five different addresses
during the course of the inquiry, some of which dealt expressly with the sexual practices
described by the children: needles inserted in penises and vaginas, golden
showers, pliers applied to genitals and breasts. "When I was speaking to
Holmes I was aware of the specific allegations some of the children had made
in their interviews and I felt there was undeniable evidence these children
had either seen some of this pornography
themselves or they had been subjected to the activities of people who fed on
this stuff. There could be no other explanation." Evil is not a fashionable concept
nowadays, but when you see this material it seems to be the only apt
description, both of what is happening to the shorn female torsos on the
screen and the type of people who find some pleasure watching these videos.
They make bondage and discipline sessions look like party games. Graeme Rowe, a His customer records encompass
people from all walks of life, including a couple of school caretakers. THE FACT THAT THIS PORNOGRAPHIC
material is freely available in The closest they got was Barry
Tronson, Ellis's one-time lover and the man who owned the Another self-confessed pornography
dealer, David Pascoe, turned out to be a former lover and continuing friend
of a mother whose child was at the Civic. The mother and her partner have
both been staunch supporters of Gaye Davidson. The police assumed they were
close friends. But a little digging discovers
they are not close friends at all: which is a good example of how careless
the police could be when piecing together a profile of the women as sex offenders;
and how dangerous it could be to take everything you were told at face value. As one of the journalists
permitted to trot along behind the investigators, it was impossible at times
for me to escape the conclusion that the police were deliberately feeding
evidence to incriminate the women - evidence which never came near the court
because it was founded more on conjecture, prejudice and speculation than on
fact. Exploring the myriad links which
existed between crθche staff, past and present, and the various accused, the
police hit upon an address in The pivotal figure was one Michael
Howard, a former Civic worker, radical and close friend of Gaye Davidson's
former husband, Robbie. Howard had strong ideas about gender-free child
raising and was an influential figure politically but committed suicide in
1984. The suggestion seemed to be that
this shadowy figure of the left, who shot himself and whose mother had also
worked at the creche, might have been a Peter Ellis, Mark 1. There wasn't a
skerrick of evidence to support this theory and it never went further than
journalists' eager ears. And while it might all seem
slightly sinister - and suggestive of prejudice - all this sifting of
connections and scrutinising of lovers was no more nor less than the police
doing what they do best: piecing together the social fabric of an alleged
crime, trying to find a motive, a rationale, just as they have done thousands
of times before. And at the end of the day very
little of this information ever made it into the courtroom because the rules
by which that forum operates are very different from the instinctive,
streetwise and, no doubt, highly prejudiced rules governing police
investigations. IN THE END, WHAT THE POLICE DID or
did not find mattered very little. What mattered was the credibility of the
13 children in the witness box and how the jury viewed their evidence. Ellis's six-week trial was in
"some ways an anticlimax after the protracted depositions trial; most of
the blood and gore (quite literally) had been expunged as the Crown
prosecutors tried to present only the most straightforward and easily
comprehended charges; sexual violation counts were changed to indecent
assault because of the difficulties of proving penetration. The nine women and three men who
made up the jury sat looking every bit as ordinary as they were: the foreman,
an Anglican minister, leading a team including housewives and a plumber. And
when all the experts had packed up their bags and left the courtroom, this
group remained to sift and weigh the evidence. After deliberating for 24 hours
they returned guilty verdicts on 16 of the 25 counts; they accepted as proved
beyond reasonable doubt the fact that Ellis had not only sexually abused
seven of the complainants but also that he had done so in the presence of
others, at places outside the creche, and that he had provided children for
abuse by others. IN THE HEAT WHICH FOLLOWED this
verdict few people noticed exactly what that meant. It meant that maybe the
mothers who were talking about organised abuse involving multiple abusers
weren't so far off the wall after all. It meant that there must be other
people in The police investigators first
became aware that children were naming outsiders as early as March 1992. But
at that point they were concentrating on Ellis. Detective Sergeant Colin
Eade, the officer from the child abuse team responsible for working with the
children going to court, views this as a major error: "I would say that was where I
made my biggest mistake in the inquiry. It wasn't that I didn't believe what
the child was saying her disclosure was perfectly clear it was more that
it moved things into an area beyond the norm." Eade's team-mate and the detective
in charge of the inquiry Bob Hardie, says by the time they began chasing the
various ambiguous leads into other offenders they were running out of time
and resources. Much of the children's evidence
suggested possible areas of inquiry but was never sufficiently concrete to
make an evidential link; the children
spoke of men called "Spikehead'and "Boulderhead" and the
police found connections between Ellis and some "boot boys"; Ellis
also had associates flatting at the back of the Masonic Lodge building at
some point perhaps that's where the Freemason connection had originated? Similarly the police pornography
raids were an attempt to locate any child pornography because some of the
children had talked of adults using videos and cameras. The discovery of old laundry
chutes and hidden cavities in Tronson's house in Hereford Street where Ellis
once flatted seemed to fit in with one child's description of being placed
down trap doors and in tunnels. | But in the end nothing concrete.
Nothing that could identify anyone to the standards required in court. So there the matter rests, unless,
as Hardie puts it, "Ellis ever rolls over." IT'S A MOST UNSATISFACTORY ending
to a most extraordinary story. A story full of delicious ironies
for anyone sufficiently distanced to enjoy them: like the fact that big burly
police officers like Eade and Hardie who escorted the Springboks around the
country in 1981 were now socialising with the protestors and receiving fan
mail from the city's left-wing offspring. And the fact that the so-called
feminist-inspired sexual abuse industry ended up turning on its own, accusing
four women of liberal views and, in one case, lesbian tendencies. As a journalist it was an
immensely frustrating story as the city's left wing divided into two
intractable camps. People would introduce themselves to me, po-faced, as a
"believing mother" or a "believing granny", others as a
"supporter of the women". Belief or disbelief replaced the usual
political handles which facilitated left-wing discourse, and with true
religious zeal both camps spat out anyone who was "lukewarm". Over the months I gathered
hundreds of pieces of information
which seemed capable of fitting into any number of opposing theories: the networking that had
undeniably taken place among some parents, the inappropriate questioning of
children, the fact that everyone involved in the investigation seemed to
assume Ellis's guilt long before he came to court; the conviction of some
parents that their children had been ritualistically abused; the fact that
now therapists were moving on to the next frontier of looking for women who
sexually abuse children. The fact that I had sat with
intelligent and caring parents whose children had been dragged into the
investigation, not because they showed any signs of being sexually abused and
not because they said they had been abused, but because someone else's child
had alleged they had been abused. These parents, like Mary and
Malcolm Cox, marvelled at the arrogance and intransigence of social workers
who insisted they were "in denial" just because they didn't think
their daughter had been abused. The circular thinking of the experts made
them tear their hair; it seemed "no" was never allowed to mean
"no", but rather "maybe, but I'm too scared to tell". Time and time again I wanted to
put these families of believers and disbelievers together in a room and ask
them to square their stories with each other; but it was too late for that,
the antagonism of these people who used to be friends is almost palpable. For me, the touchstone had to be
the children. Again and again I went back to the beginning, to the mothers
and fathers whom I knew to be well balanced, and asked if they would really
have invented all this. I went back to the couple who had
shifted out of Christchurch a year before the Civic inquiry and who had no
possible way of knowing what other children were saying about Ellis. A couple
whose six-year-old daughter spontaneously disclosed sexual abuse, including
the more bizarre allegations concerning sticks up bottoms, without having had
any contact with other complainants. A couple who never used leading
questions, a couple who didn't want to hear, let alone believe, what their
daughter was telling them. AND I WENT BACK TO DAVIDSON, a
month after Ellis was sent to jail, and asked her how she could remain so
implacable, so sure nothing had happened, when faced with these parents she
once knew as friends. Forget, for a moment, the parents
she believes have been manipulated by interviewers, social workers and a few
crazed women obsessed with sexual abuse; does she not concede that among
those 116 families there are some with their heads screwed on? "Yes. I have to say I
definitely accept that there are parents involved who don't fit into the
categories of people who would allow themselves to be wound up by therapists
and counsellors. "I can't explain it. At times
it's like a slap in the face and I think, yes, there is a seed of doubt in my
mind. "And if someone gave me a bit
of concrete evidence I would stand up and walk away from Peter. But I've seen
the evidence that put me down and it's the same evidence that put him down,
and it's wrong." In this statement Davidson is
clearly wrong. The evidence that "put Ellis down" came from 13
witnesses in court, and many more beyond that. The allegations against her
came from just one child.
PRIVATELY, I KNOW, some police are
not convinced the right women went to court. In the course of their interviews
the children named in court five other creche staff, a Jack, Robert, Carl,
Rodger, Joseph, Andrew, Boulderhead, Spikehead, Stupidhead, Yuckhead, and a
group of Asian men. The women were arrested because
they were clearly identified as participants in abuse by one child; but the
evidence was not strong enough to warrant a trial -just the destruction of
their lives. Although the child whose evidence
had led to the women's arrest went on to become a compelling witness during
Ellis's trial, the jury dismissed the one charge involving the
"circle" incident but returned guilty verdict on three other
counts. The fact nobody else stood trial
was partly due to the fact that identification was not strong enough and
partly because, by the Crown's own contention, young children are less
reliable when it comes to recalling accurately peripheral people and events like
who else was there and what else was happening. Certainly other children spoke
about other creche staff, both in the privacy of their homes and during
interviews, but it was never very clear whether the children saw the women as
rescuers and moderators of the abuse or as passive bystanders. Regardless, they are all tarred to
some extent by association. The 13 creche staff are now suing the
Christchurch City Council for $2.8 million in compensation for alleged
wrongful dismissal. And that may be just the beginning:
some parents are talking of suing the council for negligence as the creche's
licensee; others are demanding their creche fees back, claiming they were not
receiving the service they believed. The case has already cost the
council over $200,ooo in redundancy pay; salary and car for a social worker
it hired to support the families of abused children; facilitators to run support groups for the approximately 60
families requiring them, and meetings for fathers and mothers and extended
families of abused children, not to mention loss of revenue from the creche. The Accident Compensation
Corporation assisted with the counselling costs of some children but would
not disclose how many claims it had received or how much it had paid out in
connection with the Ellis case. But the true cost can never be
counted in dollars. How do you measure the pain of a child or the loss of his
or her innocence? And as a society, how do we
measure the damage this case has done to the everyday interchange between
adult and child? the rigid codes which now instruct teachers never to interview any child alone and kindergarten
teachers always to chaperone one another when toileting a child; and
therapists who now believe women may be the next breed of sex offenders. In April this year the Ministry of
Education published a Guideline For The Prevention Of Child Abuse for use in
early childhood centres; the 1990 regulations already required managers to
have sex abuse prevention and detection policies in place, but the Civic case
made managers very anxious not just to be safe but to be seen to be safe.
Hence now there must be mandatory telephone calls to parents if their child's
clothing needs changing and parental consent forms which must be signed
before a child goes for a walk around the block. Similarly, in June the office of
the commissioner for children issued every primary school in the country with
a document called Protecting Children From Abuse, which included a warning
against transporting a child alone in a car or interviewing them alone in an
office all this despite the fact that even the most extravagant statistics
suggest that a young child is at a significantly greater risk of being
sexually abused in their own home than at a daycare centre. (There are no Quite clearly, these new practices
have as much to do with fearful adults protecting themselves from false
allegations as they have to do with protecting children from abuse. That's
the sad epitaph of this tale. Getting
The Evidence FOR A BRIEF MOMENT it looks as if
Justice Williamson has gone completely gaga; he whips his wig off and looks
to be sharing a private joke with someone hidden behind the High Court bench;
"If I said I was wearing a green wig right now would that be true or a
lie?" The jury watches one of two large
television screens to see how the seven- year old girl sitting in front of a
video camera in the room next door will respond to the judge's avuncular
tomfoolery. She gives a nervous giggle and
tells Williamson he would be "lying of course". Of course. But demonstrating an understanding
between truth and lies and extracting a promise to tell the truth from the 13
children giving evidence in the Ellis trial was the easy part; assessing the
reliability of evidential interviews the children had recorded up to a year
earlier and then testing their credibility under live cross-examination was
far more difficult. And if there is a feeling abroad
that justice, if done at all, has certainly not been seen to be done, it is
due in no small measure to the fact that the evidence in chief from these
children was given in closed court. It was heard, verbatim, only by the
judge, jury, journalists (the few who remained) and the accused. Since the Evidence Amendment Act
became law in 1985, the courts have not required any corroboration of
children's evidence; just as a rape victim's word is all that is needed to
secure a conviction, so too a child's word is all that is needed in sex abuse
trials. --------- In 1991 there were 441 child abuse
convictions involving children under 12 but nearly twice that number of
complaints: a fact which some say points to the difficulties of getting a
conviction on the evidence of young children. "Beyond reasonable
doubt" is a tall yard stick for children who still believe in the tooth
fairy and Father Christmas. A yard stick which many feel
simply wasn't met in the Ellis case. But the growing distrust in the
processes used to obtain evidence from young suspected abuse victims did not
spring fresh from the Civic case; it is part of a much broader disquiet which
first stirred in Christchurch during 1988 when a Children and Young Persons
Court judge raised serious concerns about the reliability of evidence
obtained by untrained therapists working at Christchurch Hospital's Ward 24. The Spence family became a victim
of these untrained therapists when their six-year-old daughter who suffered a
rare brain disease was diagnosed as sexually abused. The judge, although
uncertain about whether or not abuse had occurred, was emphatic in his
rejection of the methods used to obtain evidence from the child. A second
case, involving Ward 24 and allegations of neglect and sexual abuse of a
six-year-old boy by his father was thrown out of court for the same reasons. The Spence/Ward 24 incident was
highlighted on Frontline, became a landmark case and gave credibility to the
increasingly vocal sector who believed sexual abuse was becoming an industry
driven by poorly trained and politically motivated feminists. The 1987 The police and Department of
Social Welfare were not blind to all this; one of the strongest critics of
the status quo came from the department's own regional psychologist John
Watson. He told his superiors there was no point in encouraging children to
speak up about sexual abuse if the police and social workers did not have the
expertise to obtain evidence acceptable to the courts. John Watson now oversees the
specialist evidential interviewing unit which was set up under his direction
as a joint DSW and police venture in the aftermath of the Ward 24 case. By
1989 the unit was operating with the latest in audio and video recording
equipment but was short on experienced staff. He recruited a young psychologist,
with an MA Honours degree and a passion for cognitive psychology and rock
climbing. Her name is Sue Sidey and she was to become a pivotal, if
unassuming, figure in the Civic inquiry. SUE SIDEY KNEW THE civic case
would become highly controversial and that inevitably she would find herself
answering for every word and gesture in the witness box. She is only 34 but
looks and sounds a very tired 34. She is braced for the inevitable
question about her sexual orientation but refuses to say whether she is a
lesbian, saying she lives in a "blended family" that includes
children. She has now left her job with DSW to return to full-time university
study. Sidey has done over 400 evidential
interviews with young children more than anyone else in the country and
before the Civic trial had been involved in five criminal and eight Family
Court cases. Four of the criminal cases resulted in convictions. She is
quietly confident in the quality of her work and can take some reassurance
from the fact that Justice Williamson went out of his way to endorse her
professionalism during one of his 17 meticulous judgements delivered before
and during the Ellis trial. He also pointed to the fact that
the interviewers' work had been scrutinised by Dr Karen Zelas former
president of the Australasian Society of Psychiatrists and one of Zelas acted as an expert witness
for the Crown at the Ellis trial giving evidence on reliability of child
witnesses, their cognitive, linguistic and developmental capacity and the
extent to which their behaviour was consistent with sexually abused children. As one of just a handful of
psychiatrists qualified to act as an expert witness in this field, Zeias has
frequently been wheeled out for the prosecution in child abuse cases and
played a pivotal role in the bungled Spence case. Her critics say she seems
incapable of considering she may ever be wrong. The problem of course is that
interviewing young child witnesses is not an empirical science; it is a new
and largely unexplored area involving complex issues to do with the effects
of time and trauma on the accuracy of young memories and the best ways in
which to retrieve reliable information from barely verbal children. Research shows that children are
able to give reliable information concerning the central detail of events
which have happened to them when they are as young as three or four. As with
adult memories, the child may need some prompting before the memories are
retrieved particularly if they are associated with trauma or fear. It is also accepted that children
cannot generally create, de novo, credible accounts of sexual abuse unless
they have had some experience of the events in their own lives. But the research also shows that
children are capable of invention and may even adopt false beliefs if they
feel under sufficient pressure to comply and please adults who are using
leading questions and suggestion. Evidential interviews are designed
to retrieve information in a controlled environment, using specific
techniques designed to minimise the risk of inaccuracies or false information
and maximise the detail the child can recall. They are video and audio taped,
monitored by a supervisor and specifically designed to enable young children
to give evidence that is admissible in court. In the Civic inquiry only those
children who were able to make clear disclosures of abuse during evidential
interviews were able to go forward to court; it didn't matter what a
trembling child stammered to a parent in the privacy of their home. If it was
to be used in evidence it had to come out in an evidential. A lack of
resources often meant these interviews often took place weeks after the child
spoke to their parents. The defence case hinged on
attempting to demolish the children's evidence by showing that it had been
obtained in an entirely unprofessional and evidentially unreliable way; that
parents had used leading and suggestive questions, that children had come
under intolerable pressure, that therapists had muddied the water with their
own preconceptions, that interviewers had pushed on and on until the children
finally provided a story to satisfy the adults. But most of all, that the
investigators had gone about their business convinced of Ellis's guilt and
determined to extract the evidence to prove it. Specific criticisms of the
interviews included their length 45 minutes to an hour, the fact the
interviewer was already armed with information given by the parents as to
what the child had alleged, the apparent lack of effect in some of the
children as they described gross abuse while simultaneously humming a tune or
drawing, and the refusal to take "nothing else happened" as an
answer. Sidey says the first part of this
criticism is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about the processes
involved: evidential interviews are based on the premise that abuse has taken
place they only occur once a child has made a clear verbal statement. And
naturally enough that initial disclosure is often made in a totally
uncontrolled setting to a totally untrained person usually a parent, and
often at bed time or in the bath. Parents involved in the creche
inquiry were warned not to question their children directly because of the
risk of suggestion and contamination. Many ignored this instruction and Sidey
says one of her objectives in talking to the parents before the interview was
to find out what questions the parents had asked and in what context. She and Detective Sergeant Colin
Eade, who worked closely with the Civic children, both utterly reject defence
witness Dr Keith Le Page's accusation that nobody bothered to look for
alternative explanations for many of the children's disturbed behaviours. In
interviews with parents before each evidential Sidey says she asked questions
about divorce, deaths, siblings schooling problems and significant others in
the child's life. In the interview she says her aim
was to try to validate what the child had said with questions like "How
do you know that?" "How did that feel?", "Why do you
think that?". Frequently she would specifically ask the child if they
knew something "because it had happened to them" or because they
had talked about it with their mother. If a child could not convince her
of the truth of their statements in the comparative security of an interview
room, then she and Eade knew there was no way they would stand up under
cross-examination in court. This was a point cleverly
illustrated by the Crown prosecutor Brent Stanaway during the examination of
the children in Ellis's trial: Stanaway would frequently stop and ask the
child whether they were sure that had happened or only thought it might have;
whether they could have been mistaken about this point or been told about
that by another child. Sidey says in many cases she was
able to tell parents she did not believe their child had been abused: "I
certainly did not say to parents, 'Put your child in therapy anyway, they
must have been abused but just can't tell me about it.'" Sidey says in many cases the
children were giving strong signals of trauma but they were missed: clusters
of behavioural signals like toileting problems and nightmares. Ellis had used
powerful threats against the children and as a consequence they disclosed
slowly, often saying more to their parents after an interview, necessitating
another evidential if the child was going to court. Parents who have spent long nights
trying to comfort terrified children
and who were only convinced of the truth of what their child had said because
of their evident fear have been appalled by comments about their children's
demeanour during the evidentials. What critics described as
"boredom", Sidey says is classic "distracting" - the
child trying to change the subject or engross themselves in play rather than
discuss the abuse. All this was debated ad nauseum in
court and specifically addressed by Justice Williamson when Ellis's counsel
applied for a pretrial discharge on the grounds that the evidence had been
obtained unfairly. After a lengthy and detailed examination of the arguments,
Williamson dismissed the application., He did
not say the interviewing process or the behaviour of all parents had been
perfect; indeed, he said there was clear evidence in some of the interviews
of leading questions and hearsay evidence. But his overall conclusion was
that: "... the interviewers were qualified, mature and trained women.
... and while there might be some legitimate criticism of some aspects of
these interviews... I am not satisfied that there has been improper
conduct... or that there are circumstances of unfairness raised by the
conduct of these evidential interviews." |
