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The Christchurch Civic Crèche Case |
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A City Possessed: Near the start of this disturbing book, Lynley Hood sets
out her credentials for writing it: heterosexual, grandmother, liberal,
feminist, writer. Nevertheless, she warns, this is not an
‘"everyone's-point-of-view-is-valid-by-their-own-lights sort of
book". No, A City Possessed is a "story of
right and wrong", with the wrongdoers being those who believe that
terrible things happened at the Christchurch City Council's Civic Creche. Few
of us will not have formed an opinion on this long-running and highly
publicised case and the book will anger many people, shock others and comfort
still more. In a nutshell, Hood
sees the Peter Ellis trial as a dual-purpose event: at one level a formal
determination of the accused's guilt; at another, "a community
purification ritual brought into being by years of city-wide anxiety over
allegations of rampant sexual abuse, clandestine pornography rings and
Satanic cults". She blames
authoritarian feminist literature for perverting the sexual abuse prevention
industry in the 1980s with its dogma that "the job of the feminist
therapist is the subversion of patriarchy in the client, the therapist, and
the therapy process" and the insistence that the child must always be
believed. This created three
problems. First, dogma blinded the practitioners. Second, they received
little training in a new and rapidly growing profession so that by the time
the Civic Creche case erupted in 1991, most "were as poorly trained and
poorly supervised as they had always been". Third, old ACC rules gave
incentives to claim lump-sum payments. Chillingly, at a
1989 ritual abuse conference, the audience was told that ‘"eccentric,
alienated, unsocialised and paranoid personality types are needed to ferret
out allegations of child sex abuse in the face of lack of evidence and
conventional, well-socialised parents and professionals (who reinforce denial
for their own mutual belief)". In other words, the
sort of people that Hood describes: The crusading detective (who nevertheless
has affairs with some of the mothers of creche children) and "Mrs
Magnolia", the dysfunctional serial accuser who lays the charges and
whose subsequent interference leads to the "contamination of the
children's evidence caused by parental networking and parental questioning of
the children". Contamination of
the evidence by biased interrogators and hysterical parents fanned the
flames. "Finally, in late February 1992, after three months of parental
questioning about Peter Ellis, nudity, sex, breasts, vaginas, penises,
ejaculation, bottoms, scariness, naughtiness, soreness, secrets, yukky
touching, toileting, poos, wees and the creche, the kids started talking
dirty". Hood argues that
Peter Ellis, doubly vulnerable for being male and for being gay, stood little
chance once accused. The expert witnesses were too committed to believing the
children to be a resource available to the defence. Nor was the law much
good. In 1989 the Evidence, Crimes and Summary Proceedings Act and associated
regulations about videotaping required judges to balance the requirement to
"minimise stress on the complainant" against the cornerstone of
British justice, ensuring "a fair trial for the accused". From now on it was
possible for juries to view "pre-recorded interviews with child
complainants conducted by interviewers trained in the beliefs and methods of
the child protection movement". In 1984 Newspeak, one manual told
practitioners to avoid phrases like "the examination was normal"
and to say instead that "this examination is consistent with the
allegation of sexual abuse". The charges
reflected the absurdity of the "believe the child" ideology. We
became familiar with the "Peter's black penis" accusation, but it
was just one of many nonsensical childish fantasies: grown adults found
themselves advocating for a child who insisted that the penis is at the back
of a person, the boy who claimed that another had been run down and killed
while out walking with Ellis, or another, physically unscarred child who
claimed that Ellis had wrenched his penis with pliers. Nonsense, you say?
Listen to the experts: "children who have been intimidated into silence
are unlikely to disclose voluntarily; and that, when subject to expert
analysis, apparently insubstantial and unbelievable disclosures obtained
through the use of persistent and leading questions can be found to be
reliable". Perhaps the most
interesting information is Hood's brief treatment of how similar charges were
handled at another A City Possessed makes many demands on
the reader. It's long (670 pages, unillustrated) but fortunately Hood's prose
style is simple and direct. In general she does a good job of leading you
through the legal, moral and medical thickets. Like the lawyers she
discusses, she is a skilful advocate. I have some
reservations. Much has been written about mass hysteria and the comparison
with witch-hunting is fair, but she lays it on too thickly for my liking and
despite the existence of "the Bible Lady", the Wizard and other
strange people and organisations, I am not sure that it is productive to
argue that Christchurch is such an unusual place. On page 141 she fails to
follow through with national comparisons of ACC-paid counselling sessions. I
also felt that the book could also have been trimmed of detail. Nevertheless, this is an important, engrossing and, as I said at the start, a highly disturbing book. Whether you believe Peter Ellis's innocence or not - and I am inclined to - it is worth reading and discussing for the wider issues that emerge. At a time when educators and parents are lamenting the poor performance of boys in schools, any ideological and legal barriers to males entering the caring and teaching professions should be examined closely. |
