Otago Daily Times
Disturbing insights in creche case
by Gavin McLean
Gavin McLean is a
A City Possessed
The Christchurch Civic Creche Case
Lynley Hood
Longacre Press, hbk, $59.95
Near the start of this disturbing book, Lynley Hood sets out her credentials
for writing it: heterosexual, grandmother, liberal, feminist, writer.
Nevertheless, she warns, this is not an
‘"everyone's-point-of-view-is-valid-by-their-own-lights sort of
book".
No, A City Possessed is a "story of right and wrong", with the
wrongdoers being those who believe that terrible things happened at the
Christchurch City Council's Civic Creche. Few of us will not have formed an
opinion on this long-running and highly publicised case and the book will anger
many people, shock others and comfort still more.
In a nutshell, Hood sees the Peter Ellis trial as a dual-purpose event: at one
level a formal determination of the accused's guilt; at another, "a
community purification ritual brought into being by years of city-wide anxiety
over allegations of rampant sexual abuse, clandestine pornography rings and Satanic cults".
She blames authoritarian feminist literature for perverting the sexual abuse
prevention industry in the 1980s with its dogma that "the job of the
feminist therapist is the subversion of patriarchy in the client, the therapist,
and the therapy process" and the insistence that the child must always be
believed.
This created three problems. First, dogma blinded the practitioners. Second,
they received little training in a new and rapidly growing profession so that
by the time the Civic Creche case erupted in 1991, most "were as poorly
trained and poorly supervised as they had always been". Third, old ACC
rules gave incentives to claim lump-sum payments.
Chillingly, at a 1989 ritual abuse conference, the audience was told that
‘"eccentric, alienated, unsocialised and paranoid personality types are
needed to ferret out allegations of child sex abuse in the face of lack of
evidence and conventional, well-socialised parents and professionals (who
reinforce denial for their own mutual belief)".
In other words, the sort of people that Hood describes: The crusading detective
(who nevertheless has affairs with some of the mothers of creche children) and
"Mrs Magnolia", the dysfunctional serial accuser who lays the charges
and whose subsequent interference leads to the "contamination of the
children's evidence caused by parental networking and parental questioning of
the children".
Contamination of the evidence by biased interrogators and hysterical parents
fanned the flames. "Finally, in late February 1992, after three months of
parental questioning about Peter Ellis, nudity, sex, breasts, vaginas, penises,
ejaculation, bottoms, scariness, naughtiness, soreness, secrets, yukky
touching, toileting, poos, wees and the creche, the kids started talking
dirty".
Hood argues that Peter Ellis, doubly vulnerable for being male and for being
gay, stood little chance once accused. The expert witnesses were too committed
to believing the children to be a resource available to the defence. Nor was
the law much good. In 1989 the Evidence, Crimes and Summary Proceedings Act and
associated regulations about videotaping required judges to balance the
requirement to "minimise stress on the complainant" against the
cornerstone of British justice, ensuring "a fair trial for the
accused".
From now on it was possible for juries to view "pre-recorded interviews
with child complainants conducted by interviewers trained in the beliefs and
methods of the child protection movement". In 1984 Newspeak, one manual
told practitioners to avoid phrases like "the examination was normal"
and to say instead that "this examination is consistent with the
allegation of sexual abuse".
The charges reflected the absurdity of the "believe the child"
ideology. We became familiar with the "Peter's black penis"
accusation, but it was just one of many nonsensical childish fantasies: grown
adults found themselves advocating for a child who insisted that the penis is
at the back of a person, the boy who claimed that another had been run down and
killed while out walking with Ellis, or another, physically unscarred child who
claimed that Ellis had wrenched his penis with pliers.
Nonsense, you say? Listen to the experts: "children who have been
intimidated into silence are unlikely to disclose voluntarily; and that, when
subject to expert analysis, apparently insubstantial and unbelievable
disclosures obtained through the use of persistent and leading questions can be
found to be reliable".
Perhaps the most interesting information is Hood's brief treatment of how
similar charges were handled at another
A City Possessed makes many demands on the reader. It's long (670 pages,
unillustrated) but fortunately Hood's prose style is simple and direct. In
general she does a good job of leading you through the legal, moral and medical
thickets. Like the lawyers she discusses, she is a skilful advocate.
I have some reservations. Much has been written about mass hysteria and the
comparison with witch-hunting is fair, but she lays it on too thickly for my
liking and despite the existence of "the Bible Lady", the Wizard and
other strange people and organisations, I am not sure that it is productive to
argue that Christchurch is such an unusual place. On page 141 she fails to follow
through with national comparisons of ACC-paid counselling sessions. I also felt
that the book could also have been trimmed of detail.
Nevertheless, this is an important, engrossing and, as I said at the start, a
highly disturbing book. Whether you believe Peter Ellis's innocence or not -
and I am inclined to - it is worth reading and discussing for the wider issues
that emerge. At a time when educators and parents are lamenting the poor
performance of boys in schools, any ideological and legal barriers to males
entering the caring and teaching professions should be examined closely.