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The Dominion
April 13 1995
Interviews produce more questions than answers
by Phil Taylor
A
former policeman on the Christchurch child abuse unit has added his voice to
concerns about the way allegations are handled. Phil Taylor asks how much
stock should we place in what the children say
~~~~~~~~
Tony Greig left the police force under a considerable cloud. As a police
officer -- a sergeant -- he had taken the unusual step of approaching a
defence lawyer and giving evidence at a depositions hearing which effectively
sank the charges he had brought.
It wasn't a decision he took lightly. And today, more than a year later and
as a second-year law student, he stands by it.
It came from his belief that the 14-year-old female complainant was
unreliable and his concern at what he says was a lack of objectivity in the
way evidential interviews of the girl were conducted by the Children and
Young Persons Service.
Obvious discrepancies in the girl's story went unchallenged, or attempts were
made to explain them away as indications of her abuse, Mr Greig says.
The police and the service have an agreement under which the latter conducts
evidential interviews.
These are videotaped and monitored, usually by a police officer in another
room; if children are victims of abuse the service is likely to have a role
in their care, and it is felt that insensitive interrogation can cause
further harm.
However, Mr Greig believes that the philosophy of interviewers -- that the
child must be believed and that abuse must be assumed to have occurred -- can
make it difficult to get to the truth and increases the risk of innocent
people being charged and convicted.
He says he did not make his concerns public earlier -- the case he refers to
was dismissed a year ago -- because he did not want his comments to be seen
as supporting any parties in the Christchurch
creche case in which he had no involvement.
He decided to speak out only after recent comments by Queen's Counsel Nigel
Hampton, one of the defence lawyers representing former creche worker Peter
Ellis who is serving 10 years' jail on 16 charges of abusing children in his
care.
Mr Hampton had said the focus of the service's evidential interviewers seemed
to be on the collection of allegations rather than investigation.
"I couldn't agree more," Mr Greig says. "I think the case of
the 14-year-old illustrates that."
The police view is that Mr Greig was wrong in the way he handled that case. A
senior spokesman says the police had to apologise to the service, which had
complained about Mr Greig's handling of the case. A spokesman for the service
says Mr Greig's claims about the professionalism of the interviewing process
are greatly exaggerated.
But those making the criticisms of Mr Greig were not prepared to do so for
publication, or to specify where he went wrong, or to discuss the issues he
raises. Those issues are similar to those which have prompted defence lawyers
in the creche case -- Mr Hampton, Graham Panckhurst and Gerald Nation -- to
seek a public inquiry. They include the objectivity of interviewers and
question the appropriateness of interview techniques, of multiple interviews
and of recent law changes.
~~~~~~~~
Mr Greig’s case began with a telephone call from a Christchurch school. Mr Greig, who was one
of two supervisors on the child abuse unit, was told a 14-year-old girl had
alleged her father was having sexual intercourse with her.
"One of the first things you want to know is whether the victim has
repeated her allegation to anyone else because they can become a witness. (It
is) very, very important, it shows continuity of action and goes toward
credibility."
The school counsellor had said the girl had told her boyfriend.
"So I asked the girl who her boyfriend was. She went very red and said
he's not my boyfriend, it's nothing like that, he's just a friend." That
night the 27-year-old boyfriend admitted their relationship was sexual.
Mr Greig says he proceeded on the basis that her allegation was true,
arranging, along with social workers, to have her removed from her home. With
the parents' permission he searched her bedroom and interviewed her father, who
denied the allegation. It became clear to him there was a long-standing
dispute between the girl and her father over the boyfriend whom she wanted to
live with. The father disapproved of the boyfriend.
Mr Greig also considers she may have seen the prospect of Social Welfare
taking her from the home as an opportunity to get unlimited access to her
boyfriend.
But, in spite of the discrepancies, he says, it was still "very
possible" she was telling the truth about the abuse even though she had
lied about her relationship with her boyfriend and had a motive to lie about
her father. Mr Greig made a note for the service's evidential interviewer to
the effect that he had concerns about the complainant's truthfulness.
He says the interviewer did not ask him about the reasons for his concern but
complained to the other sergeant on the child abuse team.
She was "furious" that he doubted the girl's word, and that he had
spoken to her at all.
The evidential interview went ahead. The girl outlined a long history of
sexual abuse at the hands of her father and denied a sexual relationship with
her boyfriend. By this time Mr Greig had read her diary in which she had
written about having sex with her boyfriend, about her father being a tyrant,
and about her desperate desire to be with her boyfriend. But there was
nothing about abuse.
At a meeting of Mr Greig, the interviewer and a consultant psychologist,
these inconsistencies were discussed.
The psychologist was asked whether the inconsistencies could be consistent
with sexual abuse and what questions could be put to the girl in a second
interview which would help demonstrate that to a jury: "In other words,
did she lie because she was sexually abused? It was creating a very circular
argument. It was a manufacture, it really was."
Though he had doubts, Mr Greig says he felt the charges, which included rape,
were warranted after a doctor believed there was clear evidence of
pre-pubertal injury to the girl's vagina. The girl had alleged the abuse
began with finger penetration when she was aged about nine.
However, before the depositions hearing, where a judge or justice of the
peace decides whether there is sufficient evidence to warrant a trial, the
father brought in more material: diaries, school essays, things she had said
to neighbours about being sexually abused.
"The more you read it the more inconsistent her actions appeared to
be," Mr Greig says. "I came to the conclusion that she was not a
reliable witness. I didn't know whether she was telling the truth (about
being abused) or not.
"After playing the video interviews, going through the prosecution
evidence and material from the defence I became absolutely convinced that
what was happening was entirely wrong."
For the first time in his 18 years as a police officer he went to the defence
lawyer and told him of his misgivings. Mr Greig was consequently questioned
in court by the lawyer about these.
In discharging the 49-year-old father, Judge Eric Anderson said there were
serious inconsistencies between the first and second evidential interviews.
The girl had first accused her sisters of abuse, and her "imagination
and stories" were of grave concern. The court heard she had, at various
times in conversations, letters and diary entries, claimed she had been
blackmailed into leaving her bedroom and having sex with numerous different
males, had sex with a policeman after running away from home and being found
in a rural town, and had a miscarriage.
~~~~~~~~
The Children and Young Persons Service complained about Mr Greig's handling
of the case. The Police Complaints Authority is reviewing the police report
on that complaint.
Mr Greig says no one queried the interviewer's decision to complain, or her
failure to ask his reasons for doubting the girl: "They agreed that it
was completely unacceptable for the officer in charge of the case to query
truthfulness."
Mr Greig says his concern is that the natural anxiety to protect victims of
abuse may have resulted in the process of gathering evidence, and the law,
being slanted in favour of the accuser rather than the accused. He says he
has no regrets about going public and rejects any suggestion that he has done
it to soothe his conscience. The issue, he says, concerns justice. "I'm
concerned that truth may be being subverted by political correctness."
He says the service's evidential team functions well in most cases but
because there is an assumption that abuse has occurred and that a child tells
the truth, when one comes along who is not, there is a strong chance it won't
be picked up.
Had the girl been an adult she would have been asked to explain her
inconsistencies. "I think when you are dealing with a matter of that
seriousness a 14-year-old is quite capable of being subjected to the same
thing.
"The girl clearly was a victim of something. She had enormous problems
but by being allowed to present an unchallenged view, was she going to
receive the appropriate treatment? She was clearly saying things that were
not true but was being treated as though she was speaking only the truth. And
if she had subsequently recanted, no one was going to go to court and say so
because that would have been in confidence."
The Children and Young Persons Service says its role in evidential interviews
is to get information from the child which is passed on to the police. Christchurch manager
Janet Biswell says that though the children are believed as a starting point
interviewers attempt to "clarify" information. "Rather than
saying `Hey, that's not what you said before', you would ask it in a
different way."
Ms Biswell says it is unrealistic to expect young children to be able to tell
the whole story clearly and consistently but all of each interview is taped
which enables police, lawyers and juries to get an overall picture. Tapes of
all evidential interviews are passed on to police, but she says
"heaps" don't get to court. Cases can be knocked back by the
police, the prosecutor, or at depositions.
There is concern among defence lawyers that people are being charged when
there is insufficient evidence to warrant it and that they are then
vulnerable because recent law changes have significantly weakened safeguards
in sex abuse cases.
In 1985 an amendment to the Evidence Act abolished the requirement for judges
to warn juries that it was dangerous to convict on the uncorroborated word of
complainants. A 1989 amendment stopped the practice, in cases which depended
on the evidence of young children, of judges giving general warnings to
juries to carefully scrutinise the child's evidence before relying on it.
Canterbury University law professor Gerry Orchard
says judges would usually explain that in the experience of the court
children had a tendency to invent or distort. The changes made it easier for
the evidence of children to be accepted and changes to procedures -- such as
allowing evidence to be given behind screens or on videotape -- made it
easier for them to give evidence.
Mr Nation and Mr Panckhurst, both former prosecutors, say that, taken
together, these changes make for a "potent mix" which works against
the accused.
~~~~~~~~
Children in the Christchurch creche case were interviewed several times with
some who became key prosecution witnesses undergoing five or six sessions
despite overseas research showing the accuracy of information becomes less
reliable the more often children are interviewed. British guidelines, which
were overhauled in the wake of scandals in Cleveland, England, and the Orkney
Islands, Scotland, where hundreds of children were removed from their homes
after abuse was wrongly suspected, restrict the number of interviews to one
or, in special circumstances, two.
"If you applied those criteria here the creche case would not have got
off the ground," Mr Panckhurst says.
The New Zealand Children and Young Persons Service's own "draft"
guidelines say there should be only one evidential interview "unless
there are special circumstances".
The service's acting general manager, Mike Doolan, says the guidelines do not
preclude staff using professional judgment. Some of the interviews may have
been for the purpose of diagnosing whether abuse had occurred rather than for
gathering evidence.
Mr Doolan did not want to discuss the issue except to refer to the Court of
Appeal judgment which commended the professionalism and integrity of staff
and the process. That does not satisfy everyone. Mr Nation says children aged
five or six were questioned about events alleged to have happened one or two
years earlier and interviews were sometimes held over several months. In
interviews the child would be encouraged, coaxed, sometimes led to talk about
abuse on the assumption that it occurred.
Mr Nation says his experience of defending the four woman creche workers has
affected his confidence in the system. He, along with Mr Panckhurst, will
continue to seek an inquiry.
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