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Critic
Otago University Students
Association
September 30, 2002
Peter’s Black Penis
by Patrick
Lynley Hood and A City Possessed
I
will not read that book by Hood
I will not, will not, say it's good
I will just say the courts are right
I do not want to see the light
I will not read about that case
I am so scared of losing face
I will not read it fast or slow
I want to keep the status quo
I will not read it, so I say
I wish that book would go away
I will not read that woman's book
I will not even take a look
I will not read it, not a bit
In case I have to act on it.
- ‘If Dr Seuss Were Minister Of Justice’ by David Hood.
To call Lynley Hood
(or as she’s known in the media “Dunedin
author Lynley Hood”) grandmotherly would be misleading, despite the fact
that, at 59, she is actually a grandmother. What would be more accurate would
be to say that when I met her at her house in Kew,
near St. Clair, last week I was intimidated. It’s not that Hood is
overbearing or dominating, it’s just that her book about New Zealand’s most
notorious child abuse controversy - A City Possessed - is so
meticulously researched, so compelling, so definitive that I expected her
answer to any question I could ask to be: “Read my book”.
Hood spent 8 years writing and finding a publisher for her book, the full
title of which is A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Crèche Case – Child
Abuse, Gender Politics and the Law. As an examination of the arrest,
trial, and conviction of Peter Ellis, and the witch-hunt circumstances that
precipitated it, the book has been a lightening rod for controversy. No
stranger to research, Hood had previously written Sylvia!, a biography
of novelist and educational philosopher Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Who is
Sylvia?, diaries from when she was writing Sylvia!, and Minnie
Dean, an examination of the life and possible crimes of the notorious
‘Winton baby farmer’.
Since its release A City Possessed has barely been out of the
spotlight - at the prestigious Montana
book awards earlier this year it scooped the Non-fiction and History
categories and comfortably won the Readers’ Choice Award.
An author possessed
A City Possessed puts the Ellis case against a tumultuous backdrop: Christchurch, a city
infected by a witch-hunt fever; local police officers obsessed with
uncovering the (most probably mythical) Great Christchurch Child Pornography
Ring; and, a nationwide sexual abuse and counseling industry hijacked by
feminists of the “all men are rapists” variety. To add to that, Hood
chronicles the changes in sexual abuse legislation during the 1980s that led
to the elevation of child abuse to the status of crimen exceptum – “a
crime distinct from all others”. The background information, some of which
readers will find debatable – one Critic reader who came into the office last
week called Lynley Hood New Zealand’s
Camille Paglia - is a welcome contextual primer for the evidence to come. And
it’s that evidence (much of which was presented during the original court
appearance of Ellis and the Crèche women), and the accompanying analysis
which makes A City Possessed so compelling.
“Legal authorities nationwide have said, ‘Lynley Hood’s got it right and the
Government can’t afford to ignore this book’,” said Hood. “There’s been no
serious legal criticism of my analysis. The only negative response has been
from [Val Sim, the Chief Legal Counsel at the Ministry of Justice]. She wrote
this report at the direction of Phil Goff but it’s such a crappy report - and
it flies in the face of all the other legal responses - that I have to
conclude that she’s wrong.”
According to Hood, Sim was given a brief to look for ‘new evidence’ in A
City Possessed, a brief that misses the point entirely.
“The issue isn’t new evidence, it’s the evidence that there was in the first
place that’s the problem,” Hood explained.
Broadly speaking, the book alleges widespread contamination of evidence due
to faulty interview techniques on the part of the DSW interviewers attempting
to elicit ‘disclosures’ from children and further contamination because of
the actions of parents (with varying degrees of defensibility of motive).
Furthermore, Hood’s research paints a picture of an unreasonably biased
courtroom and a judiciary unwilling (or unable) to correct its own mistakes.
Peter’s Black Penis
The flamboyantly homosexual Peter Ellis worked at the Christchurch Civic
Child Care Centre (a.k.a. the Civic Crèche) between 1986 and 1991. On
November 20, 1991, a mother complained to Crèche supervisor Gaye Davidson
that her four-year-old son (who had been attending the centre since he was 18
months old) had said that he did not like “Peter’s black penis”. The
following day Ellis was suspended from work. A protracted police
investigation followed, resulting in Ellis being brought to court on March 31, 1992, and then
formally to trial (on 28 charges) on April 26 1993. In June that year he was convicted on 16
counts of child abuse and sentenced to a decade in jail. Between the time of
his first court appearance and the start of his trial, four female Civic
Crèche workers – Gaye Davidson, Marie Keys, Jan Buckingham, and Debbie
Gillespie – were also charged and then discharged. Ellis’ first appeal was
mounted (and declined) in 1994. His second appeal was mounted (and declined)
in 1999. In both 1998 and 1999 he refused parole on the grounds that to
accept it would be to admit guilt. He was released in February 2000, having
served seven years of his ten-year sentence. He has always maintained his
innocence.
While for some time it was virtually taboo to doubt Ellis’ guilt, it now
seems that almost the reverse is true. A National Business Review-Compaq
poll found in May that 51% of New Zealanders now believe Ellis was innocent,
while only 25% consider him guilty.
The 13 counts that Ellis was convicted on referred to a total of seven
children. Of those seven children five had parents who worked in the sexual
abuse industry. To me, that seemed too unlikely to be coincidental.
“Those kids were trained from birth to scream blue murder if anyone touched
them inappropriately and they never said boo,” said Hood, when I raised the
topic with her. Hood also cast doubt on the credentials of the Department of
Social Welfare workers who interviewed many of the Crèche children. “The
other extraordinary coincidence was that two of the three [Department of Social
Welfare] interviewers were lesbian feminists … and the third one at some
stage was bonking [Detective] Colin Eade.”
In a letter to The Christchurch Press in late August former Christchurch detective
Colin Eade claimed that when he met Hood, just after the trial, she had
already decided that Ellis was innocent. “Hood went on to produce a book
where anything done by the victims and families were suspicious, while
everything done by Ellis could be easily explained,” he wrote.
Hood details her contact with Eade in the first chapter of A City
Possessed, but I put the allegation of bias to her again.
“I didn’t know what I was going to find. … I was still writing Minnie Dean
at the time and I was interested in the way the community got into an uproar
over concerns about maltreatment of children that could be so great that they
could unbalance the scales of justice. That was quite a separate issue from
the guilt or innocence of whoever was being accused. In Minnie’s case I
actually found that she had smothered one of the children that she was
accused of murdering. So I was prepared to find anything. But I was really
interested in looking close up at the community reaction to these things. …
With Minnie Dean it was a hundred years distant but here was this wonderful
opportunity to look at it close up.”
A substantial portion of the book was written before the angle became
apparent to her, said Hood.
“I’d written right up to the first allegation. I set out to try and make that
make sense from the point of view of the woman who made it and I thought, ‘I
can’t do this, It’d be intellectually dishonest of me to suggest that there’s
anything faintly sensible and reasonable from anybody’s point of view about
this allegation and the way it was blown up’.”
Criticism of the way in which the Christchurch
police, in particular Colin Eade, conducted the Civic Crèche investigation is
a consistent motif of A City Possessed. When asked if the police could
have had any more evidence, evidence that they might have held back on the
grounds that it was inadmissible, Hood was contemptuous.
“When you look at what they used and how flaky it was, if they had anything
faintly believable they would have used it. … They even tried to get in the
allegation where the boy said Peter Ellis had pulled off his willy with
pliers and stuck it back on with sellotape. So if that was the best they
could come up with, what did they have that didn’t get in?”
“They managed to get a conviction that Ellis was party to an offense
committed by an unknown man at an unknown place at an unknown time and date,”
Hood added. “If they could get that what else do you need?”
Hood’s view of the new allegations Christchurch
police raised against Ellis and former Crèche Supervisor Gaye Davidson in
July follows a similar line of thought.
“The answer has to be put up or shut up. It’s like the phantom new
allegation: it’s just what they’ve produced to try and make the case look
credible.”
From here to where?
If one follows Hood’s analysis – and many readers, even those of a different
ideological bent to Hood (a self-described “heterosexual, politically-liberal
atheist”), will - the systematic problems that led to the Civic Crèche case
still exist. In a speech to the Skeptics Conference in Christchurch earlier
this month (at which she was presented with a ‘Bravo Award’) Hood outlined
problems with ACC’s counseling guidelines, problems with assessing veracity
under current Children Youth and Family Service (CYFS) interviewing
techniques, problems with sexual abuse legislation, and problems with the
Court of Appeal’s complaints resolution mechanism. The same problems are all
explored in some depth, naturally enough, in the book.
Hood was also outspoken earlier in the year in calling for an end to the
“stereotyping, demonising and persecuting of Justice Fisher”, the judge
accused of accessing pornography from his office computer. Similarly, Hood –
who has never denied that sexual abuse exists but who is skeptical about its
prevalence – has an opinion on the recent wave of allegations against
Catholic priests.
“I think it’s the same sex abuse hysteria that’s driving it. That’s why the
Crèche case has to be confronted and dealt with - so we can see how to
control these things. I mean, you can’t stop people getting flaky ideas that
may or may not have any foundation in reality but they have to be handled in
a way that doesn’t set off a firestorm that rips apart the whole community
and damages lots of innocent people.”
Hood doesn’t pretend to know exactly how such hysteria should be dampened,
either in general terms or for the Civic Crèche case.
“Nonetheless, I think it’s important to challenge the pessimists who say:
‘Nothing will be done about the Crèche case because it’s too hard. The
ripples spread too wide. Too many influential people will have their careers
and reputations called into question’.”
Hood seems to have been quite vocal in her calls for a Royal Commission of
Inquiry to investigate the Civic Crèche case but she denies her interest
makes her an activist.
“I’m not campaigning for it, it’s just that reporters say to me, ‘Well, what
do you think should happen now?’, so I’m tossing up the idea as, ‘This is
what I think, let’s discuss it and find a way forward’.”
Hood cites the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an
appropriate model for a method of re-assessing the Ellis case without
assigning guilt. One thing she is adamant about is the need for any Royal
Commission to be headed by a “robust overseas judge”, someone not mired in personal
politics and someone who would not have to work in New Zealand afterwards.
“Someone was telling me in the Arthur Allan Thomas case there was a crusty
Australian judge [brought over for a Royal Commission]. At one stage he said
to the Crown lawyer, ‘Are you stupid?!’ The lawyer was so offended that he
marched off and said he wasn’t coming back until the judge apologised. And
the judge said, ‘Alright, I apologise, now get on with it!’ So that’s the
sort of thing we need.”
Alternatively, Hood has a more droll solution to the Ellis case, one that may
be more amenable to the Ministry of Justice.
“Of course the other option is Phil Goff could chuck Peter Ellis in the
village pond and see whether he sinks or floats.”
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