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Otago
Daily Times
August 23, 2003
More Civic Creche abuse allegations Ellis support `unwarranted'
NZPA
Christchurch: A
Christchurch child behavioural worker claims she noticed bizarre behaviour
trends in Christchurch Civic Creche children well before creche worker Peter
Ellis was arrested for abuse.
Judy Berger says she worked with 11 former creche children - none of whom
testified in the Ellis trial - once they reached school age.
She said all displayed symptoms of sexual abuse, including a fear of going to
the toilet and being scared of their birthdays because they claimed Ellis had
said their penises would burst into flames on their birthday "if they
told".
Ellis was convicted of child abuse at the creche and sentenced to 10 years'
jail in 1993.
He spent almost seven years in prison and was freed in 2000, and now has
political backing for a Commission of Inquiry into the case.
But Mrs Berger says that backing is unwarranted, and the children she dealt
with bore scars of abuse that "could not be made up".
"Most of them had a problem going to the toilet and also with eating. I
remember one little boy would only go into the toilets as far as the
hand-basin and would pee in that because he was too scared to go any further.
Most of them would put food in their mouths and just hold it there, not
swallowing.
"I was most puzzled by these kids because they all had nice parents, and
older siblings who weren't troubled. I was looking through the files and
realised the common denominator was they had all been through the creche."
Mrs Berger was one of three behaviour management workers in the Shirley
Guidance Unit based at Shirley Primary School between 1990 and late 1994.
The workers were contracted to cover all Christchurch schools and were called in
when a child was displaying "unusual or bizarre behaviour".
Each worker saw up to 100 children a year and Mrs Berger said she came across
the 11 separate cases of children with baffling behaviour before the
allegations of abuse at the Civic Creche were made public in December 1991.
Mrs Berger was so concerned she rang the police and told them of her finding.
The detective she spoke to said police were aware of "a case
brewing" but had not talked to all the parents and had not made the
issue public at that stage.
The 11 children, who were aged 5 and 6 at the time, never testified in the
court case because, Mrs Berger said, their parents "didn't want to go
through that court process".
Mrs Berger said she had not spoken publicly about the case until now because
she felt bound by confidentiality clauses in her past job.
"It's very hard for a [professional] person to speak out, and I'm sure
there are hundreds of people [involved] who can't speak out at all. But I
kept reading about all these people like Lynley Hood [author of A City Possessed , on the Ellis case]
and thought I had better speak out. I have a strong belief that these
children were abused."
Now working in a different field, Mrs Berger still has contact with some
creche parents and said some of the children affected still received
counselling.
In A City Possessed , Dunedin author Hood
argues that memories of abuse the children might genuinely believe to be true
had been induced by manipulative interviewing techniques. -
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