Blunderland:
Focus C5
“SUNDAY STAR-TIMES”
Sunday,
September 30, 2001.
Focus Page
C5-6.
A new book
on the Peter Ellis case concludes he was the innocent victim of a city in the
grip of mass hysteria. Donna Chisholm
reports.
ELLIS IN
BLUNDERLAND
OPEN Lynley Hood's latest book like
an onion and peel back layer after layer of injustice. Read it and weep.
Put the cops in the Peter Ellis case
on trial, along with the sex abuse industry, social welfare, and the judiciary
and return the verdicts. Guilty, guilty, guilty.
And Ellis? Convict him of having a
big mouth and long fingernails. But sexually abusing kids? No way.
Hood's A City Possessed on the Christchurch Civic Creche case of the early
1990s lobs the criminal justice system its biggest grenade since Arthur Allan
Thomas was pardoned.
She's heard families at the centre
of the case have been alerted to prepare for tomorrow's publication.
"Perhaps there will be a whole
new category of ACC claims - people traumatised by Lynley Hood's book,"
she says laconically.
Hood, 58, a meticulous former
medical researcher with books on Winton "baby farmer" Minnie Dean and
educationalist Sylvia Ashton-Warner behind her, says she went into the Ellis
case with an open mind. After all, her investigations found Dean guilty of
killing one of the babies she was hanged for murdering.
She was finishing the Dean book when
Ellis was jailed for 10 years in June 1993 on 16 counts of abusing children at
the creche (three charges were later overturned when a child retracted her
allegations).
The sort of moral panic and urban
myth which swept Dean to the gallows were fresh in her mind.
Her aim in the creche case "was
to get to the bottom of the story, to find out what did and didn't happen"
The extent of what she unearthed in
her seven year search for answers disturbed her.
"We were in the US when the
Watergate story was exposed. It started with one cop being puzzled by this door
he'd closed and he came back and found it taped open . . . that was kind of
like I went into it. Two things didn't add up, how do you explain it?
Take the growth of sexual abuse
claims in the 1980s - a field she researched in depth in the course of the
book.
"The question I asked myself
was how come all these untrained, unsupervised people are diagnosing sexual
abuse on extremely dubious grounds at the taxpayers' expense and I thought
there would be a simple explanation.
"But once you start digging
back you just uncover layer after layer of disquieting material that never
seems to have been properly assessed at the time, I guess because it's easier
at any given point to accept it rather than challenge it."
To those familiar with Hood, the
strength of her conviction that Ellis is innocent may be surprising.
"I am not one to take sides. I
have spent my life standing on the sidelines when the people waving placards
and chanting go by and I'm saying how can you be so sure you're right? It is
totally out of character for me to be saying wrong, wrong, wrong to the entire justice system."
She says by being so emphatic that
there was no injustice, Justice Minister Phil Goff and former chief justice Sir
Thomas Eichelbaum have highlighted the limitations of the legal system.
To keep denying the discrepancies
"when it is blindingly obvious that the rest of the world knows there are
holes you can drive a bus through, just makes the justice system look
ridiculous".
The Justice system, she says, is
incapable of admitting it makes mistakes. On top of that, the Ellis case judge,
the late Neil Williamson, was justifiably loved and highly respected, and it
was unthinkable to most that he could have given Ellis an unfair trial.
"But he just seemed to have
been swept along in the whole panic.”
"Williamson's rulings before
and during the trial meant Ellis' lawyer Rob Harrison was effectively hamstrung
- the jury did not get to hear the most bizarre of the children's allegations,
but did learn of the highly prejudicial but irrelevant conversations Ellis had
about unusual sexual practices between consenting adults.
Hood theorises the Doomsday clock
for Ellis began to tick in the mid 1970s with the hijacking of the feminist
movement by the all-men-are-rapists division.
Until about 1975, she, says, men and
women worked together for equality, the enemy sexism. After that, the enemy was
men. ."There is a whole generation of women brought up to believe that
this is the norm, that even the most decent of men is in part a dangerous
sexual predator."
The clock ticked closer to midnight in
1989 with changes to the Evidence Act which made it easier for prosecutors to
gain convictions in child sex abuse cases without reliable; evidence. Sex
abuse, against children became "crimen exceptum" - a crime distinct
from all others - and the normal safeguards which protected defendants from
wrongful conviction were sidelined.
"Judges weighed the requirement
[in the act] to minimise stress on the complainant against the requirement to
‘ensure a fair trial for the accused'. More often than not, they ruled in
favour of the complainant.”
By 1991, [when the first complaint
was made against Ellis]; effective control of the investigation and prosecution
of child sexual abuse had shifted from the justice system to the child
protection movement.
"After that - in New Zealand in
general and in Christchurch in particular - suspected child molesters were
prosecuted more vigorously and more often."
Why Christchurch? Eccentrics and
fanatics in most places, says Hood, are more often than not patted on the head
and told to keep taking the pills. In Christchurch, a hotbed of fundamentalist
extremes, they gather a following, attract influential patrons and go on to
change the world.
Christchurch in the late 1980s also
spawned the great child pornography ring of which police spent countless hours
in vain pursuit. Hood is convinced it never existed.
It was also home to Christchurch
Hospital's ward 24, the child psychiatry unit at the centre of a raft of
complaints from families destroyed by false allegations of sex abuse after
their children had been treated there.
Ellis worked at the creche for five
years before the first complaint against him. But he was probably at risk from
the day he started, says Hood. At the end of his trial, the guilty verdicts
involved seven children - five of their parents worked in the sexual abuse
field.
These were hypervigilant parents
when it came to inappropriate touching - any man who worked there would have
been vulnerable, says Hood.
But Hood believes the parents should
not shoulder the blame.
"The world is full of people
who believe they've been abducted by flying saucers, but the difference is
police, social welfare and other agencies don't take them seriously."
The law changes which allowed sex
abuse charges to be prosecuted more readily was fed by the myth that "in
the bad old days", child abuse was ignored, she says.
"I was browsing through an 1871
newspaper looking for something else and came across the case of a 10-yearold
who had been raped and not told her parents straight away - normally that's
seen as a reason for doubting the complainant. But she gave her evidence and
told her story in open court and was believed, and you couldn't have got a more
patriarchal society than in 1871."
The Evidence Act was changed by a
political agenda, rather than need, she says, and needs to be changed back.
It allowed counsellors spouting
opinions with no scientific basis to back a child's story of abuse.
"What's the point of having a law
which says you can say something is consistent with the child having been
abused when nothing is inconsistent with abuse?"
But Hood says there are no easy
answers when it comes to improving the system to protect those whose complaints
are genuine.
"One of the lessons of my book
is to beware of people who claim they have got the answers. Muddling on in
doubt and confusion is probably the best way to go."
But what of the "children don't
lie" theory?
"Maybe they don't lie but they
can be easily manipulated into saying what they think the person talking to
them wants them to say and they can easily invent things or become confused.
There are any number of reasons for children saying what they say, it doesn't
necessarily mean it is the objective truth."
Hood says the course of her creche
investigation became "shock after shock after shock".
She was amazed at how the case
snowballed so effectively with so little to bind it.
"At every level I thought what
would be grounds for taking this action and then I thought that's it? That's IT? They called a meeting on the basis of this?
They arrested him on the basis of that?"
Hood says she was open to finding
evidence against Ellis right to the end but found nothing. She accepts she did
not interview any of the complainant children but rejects the notion that she
might not have got the full story as a result.
"They have been grilled to
within an inch of their lives for years, so I certainly wasn't going to add to
that. I find it very hard to believe that they would have any idea what was
real and what was put into their heads in the course of interrogation."
She spoke to "a couple" of
the complainant parents and made repeated attempts to contact the rest, without
success.
She interviewed Ellis in prison - he
was released last year - and found not ti hint of self pity; his sense of
humour intact. "I asked him for biographical information," says Hood.
He raised an eyebrow and replied "How graphical do you want it to
be?"
That he has emerged from seven
years' jail, his spirit undaunted, points to a character with more steel than
many imagined, she says.
"Obviously he would rather not
have been in prison but I think he found it a huge adventure."
Apart from the lack of evidence against
him, says Hood, there are other pointers to Ellis' innocence - when his council
employers twice came to him during the police investigation and offered him
$10,000 to go quietly, he refused, saying he wanted his job back. "You
would think if he was a pedophile who had almost been caught, he would have
taken the money and run."
Another pointer, says Hood, was that
he hated toileting children and would do anything to get out of it. Not the
behaviour of a pedophile who would see it as an opportunity.
"Then there was the fact that
he was looking after all these kids brought up from birth to scream blue murder
if anyone touched them inappropriately and during his time there up until that
allegation for five years all these children of sex abuse workers were
perfectly happy and never said boo . . .."
And of course no inmate laid a
finger on him in prison.
Publication of A City Possessed was delayed more than a year by a dispute between
Hood and her former publisher, Canterbury University Press, which wanted to
heavily edit the 230,000-word manuscript.
"At the lowest moment I thought
what does it matter if this book isn't published for another 50 years? And then
I thought no, the people who don't want it published will have won and it will
let down those who have done so much to make it happen."
Hood hopes at the least her book
will lead to a pardon for Ellis; at best a commission of inquiry into the
criminal justice system. "But maybe all that will happen is that I will be
able to live with myself in my old age."
• A City Possessed - The Christchurch Civic Creche Case, Lynley Hood,
Longacre Press, published tomorrow, $59.95