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The Christchurch Civic
Creche Case |
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News that the children caught up in the civic creche case Nearly 14 years ago, Peter Ellis
was convicted of abusing children at the Christchurch Civic
Childcare Centre, today, some of those children are adults who, according to
news reports, still believe that Ellis abused hem, and still suffer from
their ordeal. Should we be surprised? When they were just small
children, Christchurch's helping professionals fed them into the abuse
machine, where they have been tumbling around in its gears ever since. The abuse machine is not really my
phrase; noted science writer Carol Tavris coined a version of it some years
ago - the same year that Ellis was convicted - to describe one of the United
States's biggest growth industries: identifying, treating, compensating and
sometimes cultivating the sexually abused. Of course, here in New Zealand we
have an uncanny talent for identifying the methods and techniques that cause
mayhem in other countries and bringing them here so they can cause mayhem in
the New Zealand context. And so we built our own abuse machine. The helping
professionals helped by flying in various American experts in detecting
abuse, especially abuse among children and especially abuse caused by cults
or sex rings. We know these experts were experts because they said they were.
Also, they published books and used PowerPoint. Not to be outclassed by American
cults and American sex rings, our own local experts warned that New Zealand
had its very own cults and sex rings. As numerous careful analyses have
shown, the Ellis case was bound to happen, riddled as it was with bad
procedures, bad evidence, and bad experts talking about bad research. Some people say, well, 14 years
ago, research was telling us that children can't be misled about things that
happen to their own bodies; that we had to push children hard to talk about
their abuse or they wouldn't disclose it, that certain clusters of symptoms
point to underlying but hidden sexual abuse, often perpetrated by ritualistic
sex rings. Research is much better now, they
say, but we did the best we could based on the evidence at the time. Yet most of these claims have the
same kind of post-hoc spin the Bush Administration now uses to justify the
invasion of Iraq: our research at the time was bad. It told us weapons of
mass destruction were there, but it was wrong. Well, no: unless we define "research"
as the process of being untroubled by evidence. No decent piece of research
ever showed that there were WMDs. Likewise, no decent piece of research ever
showed that suggestive techniques work, or that children's reluctance to
disclose abuse really meant that they were afraid of speaking out against
their ritual abusers. Speaking of ritual abuse, not even
the FBI has been able to find any real evidence of it, and lest we think that
the FBI is somehow not up to the task, some 25 years ago they were able to
identify my friend who - along with a few hundred of her Greenpeace friends -
dressed up like Death, lit candles and held a terribly boring silent vigil
along the beach to protest plans to put a nuclear plant there. My friend has an FBI file now, a
series of photos from the vigil, in each photo a red ring around her head.
Now that's research. Fourteen years ago, scientists were
warning us about the malleability of memory, dangerous interviewing
techniques, and children's unintentionally (also reports. The same year Ellis
was on trial, two of the most highly respected psychological scientists in
the world published a 36-page paper in one of the most prestigious scientific
journals in the field. The title? "The suggestibility of children's recollections:
An historical review and synthesis." Freely available for anyone to
read, it presented plenty of evidence that could have - should have - made
some doctor, lawyer, police officer, social worker, or parent push the big
red emergency button to stop the abuse machine. But no. To do so would have
required both an understanding of and a respect for science, for logic, for
evidence. Better to accuse the scientists of being isolated geeks incapable
of making any useful contribution to real-life social issues. Today, our legal and social
institutions still fail to understand the relevant scientific research, so
they ignore it, misrepresent it, or explain it away. In doing so, they keep
the machine humming. For example, scientific research tells us that some of the
ideas advocated in the ACC Therapy Guidelines for Adult Survivors of Sexual
Abuse are simply unsupported by the scientific evidence, and at worst can
lead to the creation of false memories. The guidelines also ignore some
excellent science showing that when abused children grow up, many of them are
far more resilient and better adjusted than we have previously thought. The
compensation scheme is another worry: research in Canada and in Norway
suggests that compensating people for pain and suffering might actually
prolong their pain and suffering, and lessen the prognosis for recovery. Meanwhile, the Government ignores
the Ellis case in the hope that it will go away. But the case will not go
away because it is not over. Some of its grown children suffer daily: Kate
feels different, Laura hates Ellis's guts, David's had drug problems. Did
Ellis abuse them? As a scientist, I have to conclude that there is an
extraordinary amount of evidence to reject such a hypothesis, but, as one
prominent scientist said, only God and Ellis know the answer to that
question. And I also wonder why aren't we
asking a second and equally important question: if Ellis didn't victimise
these children, who did? The answer is too terrible to bear. Yet perhaps 14
years ago, Kate and Laura and David and others were swept up in a whirlwind
of accusations, panic and hysteria; and the adults - who should have helped
them "recover" - instead perpetuated their unhappiness to this day
by feeding them into the abuse machine. Lingering effects: the former
civic childcare centre premises in Cranmer Square, and one of its charges
from the days of the sex abuse scandal. |
