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NZ
Herald
August 14, 2003
The Ellis Case
Letter to the Editor
by Barbara Faithfull, (Glenfield)
In their criticism of Lynley Hood's book A City Possessed, Jeffrey Masson and
Emma Davies laboriously defend the credibility of the "one in four"
sex abuse figures which Hood discounts.
They were of course, used with great success in the scandalously misleading
publicity for the 1988 telethon. Yet regarding those "statistics"
Dr Hilary Haines (later Lapsley), then deputy director of the Mental Health
Foundation, who had supplied them to the advertising agency, was eventually
forced to admit: "Of course they are only guessing with these figures,
but in a sense it doesn't really matter. The main point is that they
shock."
Yet despite that brazen admission, certain people persist not only in giving
credence to those mythical figures, but even fiercely defending them. With
some it will be simply through ignorance, but with others this will not be
so, in which case we need to ask why.
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