http://www.stuff.co.nz/inl/index/0,1008,955044a1936,FF.html
Christchurch, New Zealand.
Saturday, 29 September 2001
Pages 1-2, Weekend Section
FEATURES
LAST WORD
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? Martin Van Beynen reports.
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".
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 Zealand initiatives in the field of child sexual
abuse driven by this loose coalition, child sexual abuse became, like
witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries, "a crime distinct from all
others", Hood says.
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 New Zealand in 1993, these factors also made the
conviction of Peter Ellis possible," she says.
These days, Ellis lives with his mother Lesley at Leithfield
Beach and describes himself jokingly as a fully employed housekeeper.
"I go to Rangiora or Christchurch to shop, but while
things are happening with things like books it's not easy to say to a
prospective boss, `I'll be there 40 hours a week'," he says.
"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 New Zealand stop and
think my daughter, my son, my husband, my wife may end up in a courtroom and
this could happen to them," he says.
"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 America is that
children are no more reliable in a court of law than adults, and the bias
against an accused in a child-abuse case means the accused is already in a
strait jacket."
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 1/2 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.
Graphics: One of Lynley Hood, two of Peter Ellis.