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The Christchurch Civic
Creche Case |
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Side-bar: It said parents and carers were allowing their children to be
abused, and even murdered, to rid them of evil spirits in brutal exorcism
sessions.
The story, which would have found
its way into most major world newspapers, was about a study done for the
London police by a social worker and lawyer into the beliefs of immigrant
African and Asian communities in ritualistic abuse. The report, which of course was
leaked to the media, contained enough sensational claims to fill many
tabloids several times over. It said children were being smuggled into
Britain to be sacrificed in witchcraft ceremonies. It said the trafficked
children were also being used as prostitutes and sex slaves for HIV-positive men
who believed they would be cleansed by having sex with a child. It said
parents and carers were allowing their children to be abused, and even
murdered, to rid them of evil spirits in brutal exorcism sessions. This horrifying report seems all
the more credible because of a background of events that suggest unspeakable
abuse of children is being perpetrated in Britain's African community. In
February, 2000 eight-year-old Victoria Climbie was tortured and beaten by her
aunt and the aunt's boyfriend, apparently because they believed she was
possessed by the devil. She was tied up and kept in a rubbish bag and had 128
separate injuries on her body when she succumbed to hypothermia. Then in 2001, the torso of an
African boy, dubbed Adam, was found in the Thames. Police are still
investigating and have announced that 300 African boys went missing in London
over a three-month period in 2001; although (they added, reassuringly,
"there is no reason to assume they have all been murdered". This month three asylum seekers
from Angola and Congo, living to in Hackney, London, were convicted in the
Old Bailey for torturing a little girl, known as Child B, who they thought
was a witch. The latest report about children
being smuggled and murdered, however, ratchets up the climate of fear another
notch. Instead of a primitive belief causing unforgivable abuse in some
African families, many of whom also subscribe to fundamentalist Christian
doctrines, the new evil being identified is structured, murky and
consequently much more sinister. The claims reek of organised rings of
malevolent men motivated by God knows what, conducting wicked deeds under a
stifling cloak of secrecy. So you start looking for the
evidence on which the claims are made. Then you find the more sensational claims
were made by anonymous people at a workshop attended by the report's authors.
Predictably the informants could not give any more details because they
thought they would be "dead meat" if they revealed more. Of course, they had no problems
attending the workshop to make the bizarre allegations in the first place and
were presumably happy to let little children suffer horrible fates to protect
their own hides. On these brave souls, it turns
out, the allegations are based. I'm sensitive to this sort of stuff
because I wrote one of these sorts of articles in 1991, during a sad period
in Christchurch's history when a mist of unreasoning belief in sadistic and
organised child kidnapping and abuse seemed to descend on the city. Covering the Family Violence Conference
in September of that year, I interviewed specialists in the field of ritual
abuse in New Zealand. Two Wellington counsellors, Jocelyn Frances and
Ann-Marie Stapp, talked of having interviewed three people who had survived
horrific satanic rituals undergone from an early age. "They claimed
about 20 more were seeking help and said the floodgates were about to open on
the practice. Their credibility was bolstered by
the supportive presence of Senior Sergeant Laurie Gabites, of the NZ police,
who had been on a study trip to the United States to study the slowly
spreading evil. Chillingly, he reported seeing pornography in the US that
could be traced back to New Zealand. He never said what became of the police
investigation into the pornography. I obligingly recycled all their
claims in a story for this publication, which author of A City Possessed,
Lynley Hood, kindly credits as having an influence on the subsequent satanic
panic in Christchurch and the Christchurch civic creche case that started the
same year. Ritual abuse by an organized ring
became an underlying theme in the prosecution of civic crèche worker Peter
Ellis, who was convicted in 1993 of abusing children at the creche. Although ritual abuse played
little part in Ellis's trial, some of the creche parents were convinced, and
probably remain convinced, that their children had been removed from the
creche for ritual abuse sessions at city addresses. A ritual-abuse expert visited
Christchurch after Ellis's trial for a workshop attended by Social Welfare
staff, and several children were counselled on the basis that they were
ritually abused. Later, of course, it turned out
all the ritual abuse claims at the family conference I covered in 1991 were
nonsense and based mainly on recovered memories of long-distant pasts by
deranged women seeking attention. No-one was subsequently arrested
and the alleged middle-class conspiracy of complicit lawyers, judges and
police officers was never supported by a shred of evidence. Jocelyn Frances
turned out to be a benefit fraudster and the career of Laurie Gabites seems
not to have gone very far afterwards. It also later turned out that an FBI
agent, reviewing all the bureau's investigations into ritual abuse rings in
the US, found not a single case had actually been substantiated. So forgive me for being a little
sceptical about the latest allegations in London. And if I was an African
parent living in London with nothing to hide, I would be very afraid. |
