NZ
SUNDAY STAR-TIMES
25 March 2001,
"Focus" Pages C3 and C4.
Touchy Subject
by Lynley Hood
Dunedin author Lynley Hood's long-awaited book on the Christchurch
creche abuse case will be published in October. But in an essay in a book out
next month she comments on the factors which may have led to Peter Ellis'
prosecution.
WHEN I began investigating the Christchurch Civic Child Care Centre case, the
question underpinning my research was this: to what extent were the staff of
the centre involved in child sexual abuse? I expected, sooner or later, to
uncover some real-life happenings on which, rightly or wrongly, the allegations
of criminality were based.
But, after years of dredging through the mire in which the story had foundered,
I found no evidence of illegality by anyone accused in this case. Instead, I
found convincing evidence that more than 100 Christchurch children had been
subjected to unpleasant and psychologically hazardous procedures for no good
reason, and that a group of capable and caring adults with no inclinations
towards sexual misconduct with children had had their lives ruined as a result.
This disquieting outcome drew my focus from the creche to the forces that had
brought about its downfall. Ultimately, the question was this: how on earth did
the complainant families, the child protection services, the police, the
justice system and the government get it so wrong?
The project that began as an investigation into a single criminal case,
escalated into an intensive study of the last 30 years of New Zealand social
history and of much more besides.
The story began in the 1970s, when a clamour of competing social movements,
each with its own agenda and each with its own moral entrepreneurs, vied for
public and political attention. Then, in the early '80s, three major social
streams "feminism, religious conservatism and the child protection
movement" joined forces under the banner of combating child sexual abuse.
The resulting coalition surged through the '80s and beyond, gathering size and
power along the way, sweeping over, around or away most of the obstacles in its
path.
Feminism
The primary goal of '70s feminism was to free women from male oppression (and
especially from the oppression of white, middle-class men).
Initially, women's liberation was for all women, and for men as well.
Broadsheet magazine, which first appeared in 1972, was always primarily by, for
and about women, but, during its first few years, articles by men appeared
regularly. "Don't put men down," wrote a correspondent "Ask them
to join the fight."
But, as the '70s progressed, women at the cutting edge of feminism became
increasingly disunited. A cornerstone of the radicalisation of the women's
movement was the feminist analysis of rape. In October 1975, Broadsheet readers
were told: "...rape is part of a normal pattern of male behaviour....Every
male is a potential rapist."
With the demonisation of men, the distinction made by women's liberationists
between "men we like" and "male chauvinist pigs" was
abolished. All men were predatory bastards.
By the end of the '70s, disillusioned heterosexuals were abandoning the women's
liberation movement in droves, leaving lesbian radicals (and a few heterosexual
radicals) in control of the feminist high ground.
At the time, rape statistics were a major source of frustration to feminism.
Despite a vigorous "believe the victim" campaign and the
establishment of rape crisis centres nationwide, rape continued to constitute
less than 0.5% of recorded crime in New Zealand. Also, despite all the rhetoric
about white, middle-class men being the chief perpetrators, those convicted of
rape were usually poor men from racial minorities. The theorists were faced
with a dilemma: they could admit their extravagant claims about the prevalence
of rape and the identity of the rapists were wrong, or they could redefine the
problem and repackage the statistics to produce the results they had wanted. In
the decade ahead, many enterprising feminists chose the latter option.
Religious Conservatism
In most respects the antithesis of '70s feminism was '70s religious
conservatism. Conservatives savoured a God-fearing society in which men ruled
the world and women knew their place. Expressions like "family
values", "community standards", "moral decline",
"common decency" and "bring back the birch" sprang readily
to their lips. All they appeared to have in common with radical feminists was an
intense interest in what people did in the privacy of their own bedrooms and a
tight-lipped disappointment with the Creator for making heterosexual
intercourse necessary for the continuation of the species.
Patricia Bartlett, ex-nun and indefatigable anti-pornography activist, founded
the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards. Another conservative
movement of the '70s, the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child
persuaded parliament to tighten the laws on legalised abortion. But, despite
this success, religious conservatism ended the decade still struggling to be
taken seriously in the face of ongoing criticism from civil libertarians over
issues of censorship, and ridicule from the general public for its busybody
prurience.
Child Protection Movement
The most spectacularly successful social force of the 1970s, the child
protection movement, began early in the previous decade.
In a 1962 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Denver
paediatrician Henry Kempe coined the term "the battered-child
syndrome" to remind doctors that not all injuries to young children were
accidental. Kempe claimed that this "recognised trauma" was "a
frequent cause of permanent injury or death", and "one of the most
serious concerns facing society."
By 1967, Kempe had persuaded all 50 states to pass child abuse reporting laws.
The following year, two articles in scholarly journals cast doubt on his
alarmist claims but failed to slow his momentum. Kempe expanded his frontiers
and renamed his territory "child abuse."
In 1972, researchers for the New Zealand Department of Social Welfare
investigated the problem in this country. They concluded: "...child abuse
is not a problem of major social importance in New Zealand." During the
survey year fewer than three children in every 10,000 in the 0-16 age group
came to the attention of the child welfare division for incidents in which
there was evidence of abuse. Even for the high risk (under one year old) group,
the incidence was only 4.5 per 10,000 children.
The bulk of incidents involved only relatively minor injuries, and of the 255
abused children only 44 were hospitalised as a consequence of abuse. By
comparison, in the same year 2401 children in the 0-14 age group were admitted
to hospital from road accidents and a further 2131 from accidental poisonings
in the home. This finding may have been good news for New Zealand children. But
scientific reality was that child abuse was an idea whose time had come.
Convergences
So there they were, approaching the end of the decade, three separate social
movements: feminism, religious conservatism and the child protection movement-
each seething with mutual hostility, frustrated ambitions and unrealised
potential, and each about to discover an exciting new cause: child sexual abuse.
The upsurge of interest in child sexual abuse had its origins in feminist
scholarship. When they re-examined the work of Sigmund Freud, feminist scholars
discovered that, between 1895 and 1897 the father of modem psychoanalysis
believed that sexual abuse in early childhood was the root cause of the mental
disorders he observed in his adult patients.
The bracketing of women and children as victims of male sexual violence brought
three great benefits to feminism. It helped silence the critics, it supplied
the rape crisis movement, which was initially concerned only with contemporary
rape cases, with a major new category of clients and it created a window of
opportunity through which the label "rapist" could be flung at all
the white middle-class men who had breezed through the '70s largely untouched
by feminist anger.
During the '80s retrospective cases came to dominate the rape crisis movement.
By 1993 90% of new contacts made by groups dealing with sexual assaults were
related to incidents which had occurred years earlier. Compared to contemporary
rape allegations, these historic allegations were more likely to involve white,
middle-class victims and white middle-class perpetrators. Also, because any
physical evidence would have long since disappeared, the alleged victims had to
be taken at their word.
These factors gave the modest contemporary rape statistics a great boost, and,
when added to previously unrecognised cases covered by the late '70s
redefinition of rape (which included wolf-whistles, sexual humour, underwear
advertisements and consensual sex) and when combined with extravagant estimates
of the levels of unreported rape, the resulting statistics made the claim
"all men are rapists" much easier to argue.
In 1979, lesbian-feminist psychologist Miriam Jackson brought the child sexual
abuse issue to the New Zealand public with a questionnaire in the New Zealand
Woman's Weekly headed, "Can you help? Your answers to this questionnaire
will aid research into a shocking social ill - the sexual abuse of
children." Of the 220,000 questionnaires distributed, only 315 were
returned. This represents a response rate of 0.14%. According to Otago School
of Medicine statistician Peter Herbison, community surveys using mailed
questionnaire are considered invalid if the response is less than 60%.
Jackson held strong views about the prevalence and effects of sexual abuse, and
it was the views that mattered. In fact, so keen was Jackson to publicise her
views that she burst into print four months before the results of her
questionnaire had been analysed. "IS SHE SAFE WITH HER FATHER? INCEST THE
LAST TABOO" screamed the cover of November 1979 Broadsheet. The article
began with one woman's harrowing account of childhood incest. Then, on the basis
of that story, Jackson went on to generalise and theorise.
The father in the article, whom most readers would have regarded as a
disgusting pervert, was to Jackson a normal man, engaging in normal male
behaviour: "Incest is the example of the extent to which male domination
in the patriarchal family can go.…While the fear of rape controls women, incest
is the method of social control that works in the home."
Four months later, using figures that purported to be accurate to the second
decimal place ("Nearly half - 44.77% - were victimised by relatives and
nearly a quarter of the women by fathers or stepfathers"), Jackson
presented her findings in the Woman's Weekly. She said her results showed that
"the incidence of child molestation and rape - particularly incest - is
more widespread than had been thought" and "small girls are most at
risk from friends [and] family".
In a follow-up article in Broadsheet she added that "The men were nearly
always white (90%) and usually married". She also endorsed the advice of a
respondent concerning "the need for parents to protect their children and
keep them away from adult males".
At that time, Jackson's findings had little impact on the prevailing view that
fathers were, on the whole, benign figures; protectors, providers and loving
dads who cuddled, bathed and toileted their children as an everyday part of
family life, but her toxic message of sexual anxiety and distrust towards men
was promoted vigorously throughout the '80s. By the end of the decade her
agonising question ("Is she safe with her father?") and her
misanthropic answer (that children should be kept away from adult males) had
soaked deep into the fabric of New Zealand society:
In 1981, The Sexual Abuse of Children - authored under Jackson's new name Miriam
Saphira - was published. The book's aim was "to break the silence and
dispel the myths surrounding sexual abuse."
Fifteen hundred copies of Saphira's book were given to the Department of Social
Welfare, and the author embarked on a lecture tour of New Zealand. Her main
message was: "one out of four girls will be molested before she turns
18." As a result, within a few years Saphira's "one in four"
claim became widely accepted as a reliable estimate of the prevalence of sexual
abuse in New Zealand
The figure did not come from Jackson's research but from selective reading of
the work of Dr Alfred Kinsey, the first sex researcher to apply modern
statistical methods to the questions of who does what, when, and with whom.
Saphira took Kinsey's one-in-four figure for "sexual contacts" and
re-defined it as "sexual abuse".
But there was no way she could use Kinsey's findings regarding the males
involved to support her claim that "one in 16 girls will be molested by
her father or stepfather before her 16th birthday." Kinsey found that 52%
of the males were strangers, 32% friends or acquaintances, 9% uncles, 4%
fathers and 3% brothers
When Kinsey's figure for the number of women who experienced some form of
pre-adolescent sexual contact with their own fathers is presented as a
proportion of all the women in his sample, his results show that less than one
girl in 100 had any sort of sexual contact with her own father.
Also, since over half the pre-adolescent sexual experiences in Kinsey's sample
were visual or verbal, and 31% fell into the ambiguous category of
"non-genital fondling", Kinsey's findings indicate that fewer than one
girl in 300 experienced any sort of genital contact with her own father.
Kinsey's findings also failed to support Saphira's claims that most sexual
abuse victims suffered long-term damage.
Kinsey found that little physical harm was reported, but 80% of respondents
said they had been upset or frightened at the time. He noted :
"A small portion had been seriously disturbed; but in most instances the
reported fright was nearer the level that children will show when they see
insects, spiders or objects against which they have been adversely
conditioned."
In the early '80's, New Zealand initiatives in the field of child sexual abuse
were driven by a loose coalition of feminists, child protectionists and
anti-pornography activists of religious-conservative and feminist persuasions.
Both the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards and Women Against
Pornography were subjected to the same hostility and derision from the same
disrespectful sections of the community. But when the anti-pornography groups
turned their attention to child pornography, the hostility and derision
evaporated.
Not only was child pornography totally unacceptable to the general public, it
offered sexual abuse campaigners a welcome answer to some troubling questions:
why were so many men with no histories of mental illness or crime apparently
molesting their own and other people's children?
How were they getting away with it? Why was there so little physical evidence
when (if the flood of recovered memories was to be believed) child sexual abuse
was widespread and had been going on for years?
To these questions the anti-pornographer's ultimate fantasy (an ultra-secret,
international, multi-million-dollar, kid-porn conspiracy orchestrated by
Satan-worshippers) provided the answer. To everyone who believed that men were
black-hearted predators, and that child sexual abuse was rampant, it made
perfect sense.
With witchcraft, as with child sexual abuse, perpetrators and victims were
rarely obvious. To identify them, special investigative techniques had to be
devised and special investigators had to be trained in their use.
To secure convictions, special laws had to be passed. In the final analysis, it
was the law changes that swept away the rights of suspects to a fair trial, and
the near-universal acceptance that the coerced evidence of witchcraft and child
sexual abuse was reliable, that made the great witch-hunts, and the late-20th
century sexual abuse panic, possible. In New Zealand in 1993, these factors
also made the conviction of Peter Ellis possible.
Ellis was the only person on trial, but the nature of even the more believable
charges he faced meant there was no way he could have acted alone or unnoticed.
In his opening address, the prosecutor addressed this point : "It is the
crown's case that Ellis took children to houses where other adults were present
and engaged in sexual activity with the children." The identities of the
"other adults" and the locations of their "houses" were
never established, but the jury was undeterred. Among other things, they found
Ellis guilty on a charge that he "took the child to an unknown address
where an unknown man put his penis on her vagina."
In 1994, Graham Pankhurst QC demonstrated, through his careful analysis of the
children's evidence in the Ellis case, that the alleged experts, who had over
the previous decade staked their reputations on their ability to distinguish
between true and false allegations of child sexual abuse, could do nothing of
the sort.
But that was not a message the Court of Appeal wanted to hear. Of allegations
that Peter Ellis took children to an unknown address where groups of people
abused them with sticks, needles and burning paper while Ellis and his mother
took photographs, the court ruled that there was nothing in the defence
submissions that rendered the children's stories "inherently improbable or
unworthy of belief."
Interestingly, when the Ellis case was reconsidered by the Court of Appeal in
1999, its similarities to the Salem witch-hunts were noted. But, unfortunately
for Ellis, the witch-hunts had been known for 300 years, and the Court of
Appeal considered only new evidence when reviewing its earlier decisions. So,
to their honours, evidence that the Ellis case had the characteristics of an
old fashioned witch-hunt was reason to uphold, rather than overturn, the Ellis
verdict.
*An edited extract from Touchy Subject, edited by Alison Jones, Otago
University Press, to be published on April 12, $34.95.