The Press
September 29 2001
Creche view 10 years on
by Martin Van Beynen
A new book on the
Christchurch Civic Creche case has taken seven years of research by an award-
winning author. Will it do anything to dispel the murky shadow of doubt that
still lingers over events at the childcare centre?
Nearly 10 years after the allegation that set in train the Christchurch Civic
Creche case, Peter Ellis will be queuing up with everybody else to buy A City
Possessed.
The book, released for sale next week, will cover the case's tortured and
tortuous developments over a decade in author Lynley Hood's trademark
meticulously detailed and analytical style.
Seven years in the research and writing, the book has come too late to
influence the main official decisions about the case but, depending on its
contents, there are hopes in some quarters that it might still clear Ellis's
name.
When he goes into the bookshop to get his copy, Ellis will have no clear idea what
it will contain. Lynley Hood has promised a work which will show neither fear
nor favour, and not even Ellis has been favoured with a pre-release copy.
Although the launch of the book is caught in the inevitable tangle of media
deals and cloak-and-dagger secrecy, Hood has surprisingly, given the seven
years we have been kept in suspense, shown her hand.
Writing in Touchy Subject -- Teachers Touching Children, a collection of
articles on the shift in the relationship between teachers and young children
which was published in March, she said she had found no evidence of illegality
by anyone accused in the case.
After years of "dredging through the mire" she had, she said, instead
found convincing evidence that "more than 100 children had been subject to
unpleasant and psychologically hazardous procedures for no good reason, and
that a group of capable and caring adults with no inclinations towards sexual
conduct with children had had their lives ruined as a result".
Continued from previous page
Ultimately, the question of how the police, the child- protection services, and
the justice system had got it wrong, escalated her investigation into an
intensive study of the past 30 years of New Zealand's social history, she says.
The study had revealed a convergence of feminism, religious conservatism, and
the child-protection movement under the banner of combating child abuse.
With
New investigative techniques and special investigators had to be devised and
laws passed to suit the cause.
Law changes that "swept away the rights of suspects to a fair trial",
and the near-universal acceptance that the coerced evidence of child sexual
abuse was reliable, made the "late 20th-century sexual abuse panic"
possible.
"In
These days, Ellis lives with his mother Lesley at
"I go to Rangiora or
"In general, I still haven't had any nastiness anywhere. As far as saying
it's behind me ... any sort of anonymity I might have been slightly acquiring
is going to disappear again with this book. I've got to go through another six
months of either letting the thing fade away or dealing with things if it
doesn't disappear," he says.
He notes a comment by Lynley Hood that she has written the book without fear or
favour, and says he has nothing to fear because nothing happened at the creche.
"If she has done the research, as she is saying, then either she has
turned up something that says I was lying, or conversely she will have turned
up nothing about me.
"At the end of the day it was a worldwide phenomenon that New Zealand is
burying its head in the sand about and not dealing with ... It comes down to
having a close look at our judiciary."
While not expecting the book will make a huge difference, he hopes it will get
people thinking about the judicial system.
"It should make the public of
"If our judicial system is not working correctly, they ought to be jolly
well concerned and they ought to be writing to their politicians.
"They ought to be saying to Helen Clark that the Civic Creche case has
been limping along for 10 years on evidence that never ever supported that
there was any child abuse there," he says.
The evidence, he says, was that children were questioned by their parents, by
the police, by the therapists and counsellors far too much.
"The new research coming out of
Despite not having the finances to take the case any further, such as to the
Privy Council, he does not want to let the past 10 years go, he says.
"I made a big discovery in the last 10 years. Ten years ago, if there had
been a fire or an earthquake at the Civic, I wouldn't have known if I would
have been brave enough to go in and look for a missing child. Ten years down
the track I know I am. I would have gone back in and looked.
"I have stuck my neck out for the rights of the children at the civic.
I've said it didn't happen. The system got hold of it and I'm still a creche
worker because I'm saying, `Kids, it didn't happen'.
"To turn around now and say you weren't worth fighting for anymore is a
slap in the face to everyone, including all the people who have supported me
and to the children.
"They had a good creche and they actually had some very, very good times,
and there weren't bad times."
It would be nice to think A City Possessed will be the last word on the
Christchurch Civic Childcare Centre Case, but it seems unlikely.
Ten years of challenges have failed to overturn the jury verdict finding Peter
Ellis guilty of abusing seven children by urinating on them, putting his penis
in their mouths and against their private parts, and by touching them
indecently.
The complainant children are now teenagers, Ellis has served his 6<>
years in jail, police officers in charge of the case have moved on to other
careers, but still the controversy goes on.
The case might continue to evoke a sense of unease, but after several Court of
Appeal decisions and a ministerial inquiry, which pronounced the guilty
verdicts against Ellis safe in March this year, it's hard to argue Ellis' plea
of innocence has not been fully canvassed.
With the prominence given to the debate about whether Peter Ellis is guilty or
not, it is easy to forget that four women creche workers -- supervisor Gaye
Davidson, and support workers Marie Keys, Janice Buckingham (now deceased), and
Deborah Gillespie -- were also charged with abuse of children at the creche.
One of my enduring memories of the case is the daughter of Marie Keys, still in
her school uniform, convulsed in sobs as she heard Christchurch District Court
Judge Eric Anderson refuse to drop the charge against her mother after a
preliminary hearing in 1992.
Although all charges against the women were dropped before trial, they will
also be hoping the book will turn a final page on the creche to show they were
clearly wrongly accused.
It gives me no great pleasure to say that Lynley Hood will probably agree with
me.
Reporting for The Press, I sat through many of the preliminary hearings on the
case and was the only journalist to cover the whole six-week trial of Peter
Ellis.
I was convinced at the time (and still am) that the women had been done a great
wrong.
So when Ellis went on trial in May 1993, I went in with a feeling the trial
would, by the sheer strength of the police case and the horror of the crimes,
show why innocents had been dragged in.
But I saw or heard nothing over the next six weeks which convinced me that
anything more than a bit of sloppy bookkeeping had occurred at the creche.
Lynley Hood, I suspect, has made much the same conclusion, but unless she has
built up an overwhelming case showing where everyone went wrong, her book will
most likely be regarded as yet another view, albeit a well-researched one.
It might take the debate a bit further along the road but the destination of a
final, clear answer to the question of whether sexual and physical child abuse
occurred at the Civic Creche will probably always remain elusive.
Ms Hood has researched the case exhaustively to reach her conclusion.
Mine involved no great deduction. After watching the numerous videotapes of
interviews conducted by Social Welfare interviewers with the complainant
children, it simply struck me that the inconsistencies, contradictions, and
fantasies elicited from them made their testimony very questionable.
Did they tell lies? Maybe. It seemed to me that they
were not so much lying, as telling stories as they went from interview to
interview with narratives clearly influenced by questioning from their
families, their interviewers, and interaction with other creche children.
Given the climate of the time, in which talk of organised child-abuse rings
operating with the co-operation of people at all levels of society was given
serious attention, it was not surprising the children should give the accounts
they did.
In my view there is no escaping from the conclusion the kids made it up.
That is not to say children cannot give extremely accurate accounts of events
or that they should automatically be regarded with grave scepticism when
complaining of sexual abuse.
After hearing the evidence, I just thought it was pretty clear they were making
it up. The jury disagreed and some very fine legal minds have sided with them.
I have to accept my conclusion might be wrong.
Like Ellis's release from Paparua Prison nearly two years ago, the release of A
City Possessed will no doubt rekindle the passionate and often rancorous debate
about the case.
The arguments, tired though they might be, will probably emerge again just as
fiercely as in the early days of the case.
Although both camps will be hoping the book will settle past scores, that
might, at this late stage, be expecting too much.