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The
Press
August 14, 2003
Guilty, or liberal scapegoat?
Rosemary McLeod
I may be the only
person who didn't leap to join the Peter Ellis campaign when they were asked.
It's not that I have an opinion on his guilt or innocence, and that's the
first reason why I didn't join up, it's that the issues that arose from the
Christchurch Civic Creche case seem to look different to me.
I feel sorry for Ellis. He seems to be an unusual person, and such people
often become the targets of social scorn. His being gay isn't so much the
issue that puts him at risk of that; it's the fact that he was flamboyantly
so.
You have to have a lot of courage to live your life conspicuously, because
you inevitably attract unsympathetic attention. But maybe it was his nature
to feel he had no choice.
If he's innocent, I feel even more sorry for Ellis, because a decade of his
life has been wasted behind bars. But I doubt whether we'll ever know his
guilt or innocence.
We won't be able to decide it by reading transcripts of interviews with small
children, even if they're published at length in newspapers.
That move by one campaigner worries me. Few New Zealanders are trained in
child psychology and disclosure interviewing, and we're ill-equipped to judge
the competence of the children's interviewers.
What this campaign amounts to at heart, I fear, is an attack on the integrity
of small children as witnesses. Many people are not prepared to believe the
children who accused Ellis of inappropriate sexual behaviour, because they
feel a lot of what children say is silly.
Because they can't take the rigour of adult analysis, because they can't
communicate in sophsticated concepts, adults respect and understand. We
believe children to be vulnerable to adult manipulation in disclosure
interviews, and we're invited to believe they're untrustworthy witnesses.
I'm not at all sure that this is a fair conclusion, and if we're to change
our view of child witnesses as a result of this case, the consequences for
insidious child sex offenders who don't leave forensic evidence will be
frightening.
Lynley Hood, in her book about the Ellis case, examines the climate of fear
about the sexual abuse of children that prevailed at the time of Ellis's
arrest.
It's true that such a climate of heightened awareness existed, all over the
English-speaking world. Men felt anxious about having physical contact with
children, even their own, for fear of a false accusation. We were
over-paranoid, but was there really great harm, long term, in becoming aware
of the prevalence of this behaviour?
We've been suspicious, since, of the many people who suddenly were able to
claim for sexual abuse in their childhood, in their thousands, and we
probably made it far too easy for some to get away with fraudulent claims.
That, too, was in the background of the Ellis case. Parents who accused Ellis
got financial compensation. But I do find it hard to believe that a financial
incentive would be enough for parents to charge Ellis with abuse, considering
the seriousness of that claim, let alone put their small children through the
trauma of pursuing their claims in court. If there was a conspiracy among
them, they would have to be astonishingly callous people, and their children
assiduous liars. Yet that is a possibility.
What really alarms me, in particular, about this case is the unexamined way a
flamboyant gay man with no training was able to be employed in the creche,
referred there by the courts, as I understand it, as a result of minor
offending.
He was bound to become a scapegoat if anything went wrong, however much
parents and crèche organisers relished the chic of having him work there as a
showpiece for their liberal tolerance.
It was cruel to employ him without making sure he was safe in that working
environment, and it was disrespectful of children to have a creche worker
with no training given responsibility for their care, without professional
supervision.
I'm unimpressed now to read Ellis's views on child care and child rearing. He
is, as things stand, a convicted child sex offender, and he'd be wiser to
keep them to himself. It would be nice if he were innocent, however, and I
hope he'll be proven so by more rigorous means than public opinion.
It would mean, though, that some children had been manipulated and abused by
their own parents and social workers, and that would be serious abuse of
another kind.
I'd like Ellis to be exonerated, but not as a result of an unbalanced
backlash. We may have been hysterical in the past about child sex abuse, but
terrible things did happen to many small children.
Some people did it, as things stand, and it's possible that he did too.
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