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The
Press
August 21, 2003
Campaign a form of abuse
by Rosemary McLeod
What began as a
protest against a supposed witch hunt has taken a turn for the worst. It's starting to look like a witch hunt
itself.
I wrote last week about the Peter Ellis campaign, before two of his victims
spoke out, compellingly, in defence of themselves.
This is a strange irony. Ellis stands convicted of serious sexual abuse of a
number of children, yet it is he who has become the focus of sympathetic
attention while they are branded as liars.
They must defend themselves against the powerful publicity machine working on
their abuser's behalf, despite having pursued their complaints, as little
children, through the court system.
Now they have strangers telling them their memories are lies.
Don Brash isn't comfortable with that word, although he helps to lead the
campaign to look into Ellis's case, but he can't have it both ways. He can't
claim a kind of neutral, intellectual high ground while his basic position
can only be based on an emotive belief that the Christchurch Civic Creche
child victims lied. A court, which dealt with the evidence, concluded otherwise.
He has no new evidence.
Interviewed on National Radio on Monday morning, Brash used a word that I am
beginning to think is a pivotal concept among Ellis's supporters. He talked
about the loss of Ellis's and his fellow creche workers' reputations.
The idea that your reputation, your good name, could be taken away is the
underlying anxiety beneath this campaign, the fear of a false accusation
sheeting home at your own doorstep. I suspect a good many people are
transferring their own ungrounded fears to this case.
Child-sex abuse is an assault on respectability, on reputation. Paedophiles
can't be dismissed as illiterate, Polynesian, underprivileged, or just plain
wicked as a result of being all these things, as so many people glibly
dismiss other criminals.
That makes a nasty crime uncomfortably close to anyone; people like you can
be accused of it, and all on the word of a child. That is a potent fear.
Brash is only superficially rational in his argument. Because Ellis did not
abuse all the children at the creche, does it fololow that he abused none?
Because children didn't blurt out what happened immediately, in coherent
sentences, did nothing happen at all? Because a woman has written a 600-page
book, is it definitive? Six hundred pages of advocacy may be comprehensive,
but it is still advocacy.
If author Lynley Hood dismisses some adults involved in this case as neurotic
personalities with beliefs she does not share, does that make them
manipulative liars?
How, exactly, does she believe that the parents of violated children ought to
behave?
I suspect that Hood, whose book galvanised this campaign, has begun something
that she cannot control.
I am being charitable. Her assault on the integrity of the child victims, now
adolescents, who spoke out last weekend shocked me, and shifted my view of
the case. She seemed furious that they would even have a point of view about
their own past experience, involving a matter only they and Ellis can ever
know the truth about.
I can make no sense of her angry claim that the "sex abuse
industry" is hiding behind them.
It is the children who made the accusations, not some amorphous, sinister
industry which may have nothing to hide from other than insinuations and
inferences.
Ellis's supporters have expressed a cavalier lack of concern or even real
recognition for the creche children. It now seems to surprise them that they
should be asked to consider whether they should be enabled to represent
themselves with legal counsel at a planned select committee hearing. In a
matter so personal to them, the children seem merely inconvenient.
What kind of totalitarian committee of strangers will ever be able to
convince anyone that their memories are lies?
The danger of discounting the word of small children is that it begins to
sound like paedophile talk. Children become more object like. Their word
can't be relied on, so we get away with whatever we like. They are
manipulated into making accusations, and, that being the case, smooth-talking
and charismatic abusers can slyly escape legal consequences.
Then it never happened, because no-one wants to believe that it did, least of
all the offender.
What we really need is a commission of inquiry into the people who drive
campaigns such as this one, an inquiry into what they think they're doing,
and what they expect to get out of it. The way things stand, the victims are
getting nothing out of it but more abuse, equally calculated and equally
callous. Where's the justice in that?
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