Otago Daily Times
'No evidence' of illegality at creche
by Kay Sinclair
Child abuse is a major folk tale
theme. In countless spine-chilling stories, children are eaten by animals,
murdered by stepmothers, cooked by witches and abandoned by uncaring parents
Dunedin author Lynley Hood spent more than seven years researching the
Christchurch Civic Child Care Centre case. Her conclusions on why Peter Ellis
and four female colleagues were charged with sexually abusing children at the
creche are the subject of a controversial new work, A City Possessed
. Reporter KAY SINCLAIR looks at a book likely to provoke strong
reaction.
Was Peter Ellis an abuser of children in his care at the Christchurch Civic
Child Care Centre or was he the victim of a witch hunt, of mass hysteria, of a
system which had been skewed by social and political events during the
preceding three decades? Lynley Hood's seven-year study of one of this
country's most high-profile criminal cases is presented in A City Possessed - The
Christchurch Civic Creche Case, Child Abuse, Gender Politics and the Law.
It is a meticulously researched account of her findings, not only concerning
the creche case itself but also the social climate which nurtured the case. She
backs her more than 600 pages of research with 55 pages of detailed references.
The author acknowledges the book will no doubt upset many of those involved
with aspects of the case, and she says the years of research and writing often
felt like "the literary equivalent of a solo crossing of
From the time of its inception until the present, the Christchurch creche case
was sustained by rumours - some true, some false, some a mixture of both, she
says in her introductory note to her study of the child abuse case which shook
conservative Christchurch to its core in the early 1990s.
We are reminded that while we might like to believe the forward march of
technology has been matched "with comparable advances in human wisdom,
unfortunately the history of human folly shows that life is not that
simple".
"Child abuse is a major folk tale theme. In countless spine-chilling
stories, children are eaten by animals, murdered by stepmothers, cooked by
witches and abandoned by uncaring parents."
Such folk tales "reinforce our stereotypes and validate our ideals and
institutions. They encourage us to be vigilant in the care of our children and
help us identify the people we should avoid and the people we should fear.
"In untroubled times, folk tales channel community fears and maintain
social cohesion, But in troubled times, when people are anxious and in need of
a scapegoat, a potent brew of folk tales - one that may have been simmering
away harmlessly for years - can boil over into a `moral panic'."
The great witch-hunts in
"In the popular imagination, the great witch-hunts are associated with the
Middle Ages . . . when ignorance, superstition and gullibility blanketed
It was later, during the Renaissance, that the witch-hunts grew and flourished
and through the 16th and 17th centuries, the witch-panic spread "in
episodic bursts" throughout the civilised world.
While most general and church histories fail to mention the witch-hunts, we
learn of the phenomenon from the work of specialist historians who also tell us
that the more learned a man was in the traditional scholarship of the time,
"the more likely he was to support the witch-hunters".
From the "baby farmer" panics of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, through the Lindy Chamberlain stories of
the 1980s and occasional stories about bizarre cases of sexual abuse in child
care centres around the world, A City Obsessed takes us to Christchurch in the
1990s when New Zealand's biggest sexual abuse case hit the headlines.
It was at that point, the author says, she began to wonder what on Earth was
going on.
"Has child abuse really reached epidemic proportions, or has Western
society been seized by another moral panic?"
The undisputed facts of the case were that on
This set in motion "one of the most extensive and expensive police
investigations in
The preliminary court hearing began on
The alleged indecencies included the insertion by Ellis of his fingers, his
penis, needles, sticks and food into the vaginas, mouths and anuses of children
in his care.
One of the women was alleged to have inserted fingers into a child's vagina and
to have engaged in sexual intercourse with Ellis in the creche toilets.
The three other women were accused of participating with Ellis in "the
circle incident" where, it was claimed, children had sticks inserted in their
anuses and were made to kick each other's genitals and perform other
indecencies. The offending was alleged to have occurred between May 1986 and
February 1992.
All five accused were committed for trial at the end of the preliminary hearing
on
Ellis was tried on 28 charges, involving 13 children. Half the offences were
alleged to have occurred at the creche, 10 at "an unknown address",
two at a child's home and the other two at a house where Ellis once lived and
in another part of the building where the creche was located.
Three of the charges were dismissed during the trial, but on
He was subsequently sentenced to 10 years imprisonment.
Fourteen months later, a child described by the prosecution as "compelling
and believable" at the trial, retracted her allegations and said she had
lied about indecent touching and forced contact with Ellis' penis because she
thought that was "what her mother had wanted her to say".
The Court of Appeal quashed the three convictions relating to that child but
upheld the remaining 13 convictions. Ellis maintained his innocence.
The judgement did nothing to stem the doubts that had swirled around the case
since its inception, the author says. Those who investigated the case believed
that up to 300 children were abused by Ellis but, she asks, "how could
anyone have regularly abused even the seven children that Ellis was convicted
of abusing, over a five and a-quarter-year period without anyone
noticing?"
Given the creche rosters and the staff-children ratios - one to four for the
babies and toddlers and one to eight for the pre-schoolers - the unpredictable
coming and going of parents, the presence of student teachers, the author
questions how the abuse happened without any children complaining or any adult
reporting anything suspicious.
Why would the children say they had been abused if they had not and why would
their parents label them as sexually abused children and subject them to
investigations, therapy and criminal proceedings if they had not been abused,
she asks.
The author began contacting and meeting people involved in the case a few weeks
after Ellis' conviction. Most of them she describes as "sensible
level-headed folk".
But she found the senior investigating police officer's single-minded line of
argument about a child-sex ring comprising the creche staff and others, and the
conspiracy beliefs that underpinned it, "chillingly reminiscent of the
arguments and beliefs I had read about in demonology manuals of the 16th and
17th centuries".
As she continued gathering information about the case and the people involved,
she met Peter Ellis at Paparua Prison and found a man
she says who still matched the description in his pre-sentence report -
"an outgoing, uninhibited, unconventional person, given to putting plenty
of enthusiasm and energy into his work and social activities, sometimes to the
point of being risque and outrageous, thus opening
himself up to being compromised or being seen to exercise poor judgement."
By nature a disturber of the social order, Ellis was, like the
"cantankerous crones persecuted as witches in the 16th and 17th centuries,
the sort of person the community would make an example of when it wished to
delineate the boundaries of acceptable eccentricities."
She had made no secret of her interest in witchcraft and mass hysteria but had
emphasised that such issues were separate from the guilt or innocence of the
people involved, the author says. Also made clear was her wish to research both
sides of the story and write about it "as fairly and accurately and
sensitively as I could."
She respected the fact some complainant families wanted to "keep their
distance" but was not impressed, she says, by their insistence she had
made no effort to contact them.
An August 1995 End Ritual Abuse Newsletter accuses the author of taking Ellis'
side and of not intending to interview any complainant parents.
A similar accusation was levelled at her by Detective Colin Eade.
But the author says she "pursued every lead and tested every
hypothesis" in the course of her research and then set out to write a book
which "steered a steady course through the shoals and tempests of the
controversy, illuminating the context along the way and providing a balanced
picture of the apparently conflicting but presumably valid, points of
view."
When she realised she could not depend on the credibility of her informants to
lead her to the truth, she went on to study the evidence. At that point, she
had to reconsider her approach, she says.
"The problem was that the more closely I studied the case, the more the
evidence of wrongdoing [on the part of the accused] evaporated, and the more
the evidence of innocence [on the part of the accused] and prejudice and
delusion [on the part of the accusers] accumulated.
"Try as I might, I could not dismiss the suspicion that
justice had not been done in the creche case."
Because she believes authors cannot hide their views or convictions about a
subject behind research, she wanted to make her position clear from the outset.
As she saw it, this was not an "everyone's point of view is valid by their
own light sort of book. This was a story of right and wrong; and in this story
those who believe that terrible things happened at the creche are wrong."
When she began the project, the question underpinning her research was "to
what extent were the staff at the Christchurch Civic
Child Care Centre involved in child sexual abuse?"
She expected, eventually, to uncover some real-life happenings in which,
rightly or wrongly, the allegations of criminality were based.
But after years of "dredging through the mire in which this story has
foundered", she says she found no evidence of illegality by anyone accused
in the case.
Instead, she found convincing evidence that more than 100
The ultimate question then was "how on Earth did the complainant families,
the child protection services, the police, the justice system and the
government get it so wrong?"
And the project, which began as an investigation into a single criminal case,
escalated into an intensive study of the last 30 years of