The Christchurch Civic Crèche Case |
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A City Possessed: Lynley
Hood and A City Possessed To call Lynley Hood (or as she's known in the media
"Dunedin author Lynley Hood") grandmotherly would be misleading,
despite the fact that, at 59, she is actually a grandmother. What would be
more accurate would be to say that when I met her at her house in Kew, near
St. Clair, last week I was intimidated. It's not that Hood is overbearing or
dominating, it's just that her book about New Zealand's most notorious child
abuse controversy - A City Possessed
- is so meticulously researched, so compelling, so definitive that I expected
her answer to any question I could ask to be: "Read my book". Hood spent 8 years writing and finding a publisher for her
book, the full title of which is A City
Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Crèche Case - Child Abuse, Gender Politics
and the Law. As an examination of the arrest, trial, and conviction of
Peter Ellis, and the witch-hunt circumstances that precipitated it, the book
has been a lightening rod for controversy. No stranger to research, Hood had
previously written Sylvia!, a
biography of novelist and educational philosopher Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Who is Sylvia?, diaries from when she
was writing Sylvia!, and Minnie Dean,
an examination of the life and possible crimes of the notorious 'Winton baby
farmer'. Since its release A
City Possessed has barely been out of the spotlight - at the prestigious
Montana book awards earlier this year it scooped the Non-fiction and History
categories and comfortably won the Readers' Choice Award.
A City Possessed puts the Ellis case against a tumultuous
backdrop: Christchurch, a city infected by a witch-hunt fever; local police
officers obsessed with uncovering the (most probably mythical) Great
Christchurch Child Pornography Ring; and, a nationwide sexual abuse and
counseling industry hijacked by feminists of the "all men are
rapists" variety. To add to that, Hood chronicles the changes in sexual
abuse legislation during the 1980s that led to the elevation of child abuse
to the status of crimen exceptum - "a crime distinct from all
others". The background information, some of which readers will find
debatable - one Critic reader who came into the office last week called
Lynley Hood New Zealand's Camille Paglia - is a welcome contextual primer for
the evidence to come. And it's that evidence (much of which was presented
during the original court appearance of Ellis and the Crèche women), and the
accompanying analysis which makes A City Possessed so compelling. "Legal authorities nationwide have said, 'Lynley
Hood's got it right and the Government can't afford to ignore this
book'," said Hood. "There's been no serious legal criticism of my
analysis. The only negative response has been from [Val Sim, the Chief Legal
Counsel at the Ministry of Justice]. She wrote this report at the direction
of Phil Goff but it's such a crappy report - and it flies in the face of all
the other legal responses - that I have to conclude that she's wrong." According to Hood, Sim was given a brief to look for 'new
evidence' in A City Possessed, a brief that misses the point entirely. "The issue isn't new evidence, it's the evidence that
there was in the first place that's the problem," Hood explained. Broadly speaking, the book alleges widespread
contamination of evidence due to faulty interview techniques on the part of
the DSW interviewers attempting to elicit 'disclosures' from children and
further contamination because of the actions of parents (with varying degrees
of defensibility of motive). Furthermore, Hood's research paints a picture of
an unreasonably biased courtroom and a judiciary unwilling (or unable) to
correct its own mistakes.
The flamboyantly homosexual Peter Ellis worked at the
Christchurch Civic Child Care Centre (a.k.a. the Civic Crèche) between 1986
and 1991. On November 20, 1991, a mother complained to Crèche supervisor Gaye
Davidson that her four-year-old son (who had been attending the centre since
he was 18 months old) had said that he did not like "Peter's black
penis". The following day Ellis was suspended from work. A protracted
police investigation followed, resulting in Ellis being brought to court on
March 31, 1992, and then formally to trial (on 28 charges) on April 26 1993.
In June that year he was convicted on 16 counts of child abuse and sentenced
to a decade in jail. Between the time of his first court appearance and the
start of his trial, four female Civic Crèche workers - Gaye Davidson, Marie Keys,
Jan Buckingham, and Debbie Gillespie - were also charged and then discharged.
Ellis' first appeal was mounted (and declined) in 1994. His second appeal was
mounted (and declined) in 1999. In both 1998 and 1999 he refused parole on
the grounds that to accept it would be to admit guilt. He was released in
February 2000, having served seven years of his ten-year sentence. He has
always maintained his innocence. While for some time it was virtually taboo to doubt Ellis'
guilt, it now seems that almost the reverse is true. A National Business
Review-Compaq poll found in May that 51% of New Zealanders now believe Ellis
was innocent, while only 25% consider him guilty. The 13 counts that Ellis was convicted on referred to a
total of seven children. Of those seven children five had parents who worked
in the sexual abuse industry. To me, that seemed too unlikely to be
coincidental. "Those kids were trained from birth to scream blue
murder if anyone touched them inappropriately and they never said boo,"
said Hood, when I raised the topic with her. Hood also cast doubt on the
credentials of the Department of Social Welfare workers who interviewed many
of the Crèche children. "The other extraordinary coincidence was that
two of the three [Department of Social Welfare] interviewers were lesbian
feminists ... and the third one at some stage was bonking [Detective] Colin
Eade." In a letter to The Christchurch Press in late August
former Christchurch detective Colin Eade claimed that when he met Hood, just
after the trial, she had already decided that Ellis was innocent. "Hood
went on to produce a book where anything done by the victims and families
were suspicious, while everything done by Ellis could be easily
explained," he wrote. Hood details her contact with Eade in the first chapter of
A City Possessed, but I put the allegation of bias to her again. "I didn't know what I was going to find. ... I was
still writing Minnie Dean at the time and I was interested in the way the
community got into an uproar over concerns about maltreatment of children
that could be so great that they could unbalance the scales of justice. That
was quite a separate issue from the guilt or innocence of whoever was being
accused. In Minnie's case I actually found that she had smothered one of the
children that she was accused of murdering. So I was prepared to find
anything. But I was really interested in looking close up at the community
reaction to these things. ... With Minnie Dean it was a hundred years distant
but here was this wonderful opportunity to look at it close up." A substantial portion of the book was written before the
angle became apparent to her, said Hood. "I'd written right up to the first allegation. I set
out to try and make that make sense from the point of view of the woman who
made it and I thought, 'I can't do this, It'd be intellectually dishonest of
me to suggest that there's anything faintly sensible and reasonable from
anybody's point of view about this allegation and the way it was blown up'."
Criticism of the way in which the Christchurch police, in
particular Colin Eade, conducted the Civic Crèche investigation is a
consistent motif of A City Possessed. When asked if the police could have had
any more evidence, evidence that they might have held back on the grounds
that it was inadmissible, Hood was contemptuous. "When you look at what they used and how flaky it
was, if they had anything faintly believable they would have used it. ...
They even tried to get in the allegation where the boy said Peter Ellis had
pulled off his willy with pliers and stuck it back on with sellotape. So if
that was the best they could come up with, what did they have that didn't get
in?" "They managed to get a conviction that Ellis was
party to an offense committed by an unknown man at an unknown place at an
unknown time and date," Hood added. "If they could get that what
else do you need?" Hood's view of the new allegations Christchurch police
raised against Ellis and former Crèche Supervisor Gaye Davidson in July
follows a similar line of thought. "The answer has to be put up or shut up. It's like
the phantom new allegation: it's just what they've produced to try and make
the case look credible."
If one follows Hood's analysis - and many readers, even
those of a different ideological bent to Hood (a self-described
"heterosexual, politically-liberal atheist"), will - the systematic
problems that led to the Civic Crèche case still exist. In a speech to the
Skeptics Conference in Christchurch earlier this month (at which she was
presented with a 'Bravo Award') Hood outlined problems with ACC's counseling
guidelines, problems with assessing veracity under current Children Youth and
Family Service (CYFS) interviewing techniques, problems with sexual abuse
legislation, and problems with the Court of Appeal's complaints resolution
mechanism. The same problems are all explored in some depth, naturally
enough, in the book. Hood was also outspoken earlier in the year in calling for
an end to the "stereotyping, demonising and persecuting of Justice
Fisher", the judge accused of accessing pornography from his office
computer. Similarly, Hood - who has never denied that sexual abuse exists but
who is skeptical about its prevalence - has an opinion on the recent wave of
allegations against Catholic priests. "I think it's the same sex abuse hysteria that's
driving it. That's why the Crèche case has to be confronted and dealt with -
so we can see how to control these things. I mean, you can't stop people getting
flaky ideas that may or may not have any foundation in reality but they have
to be handled in a way that doesn't set off a firestorm that rips apart the
whole community and damages lots of innocent people." Hood doesn't pretend to know exactly how such hysteria
should be dampened, either in general terms or for the Civic Crèche case. "Nonetheless, I think it's important to challenge the
pessimists who say: 'Nothing will be done about the Crèche case because it's
too hard. The ripples spread too wide. Too many influential people will have
their careers and reputations called into question'." Hood seems to have been quite vocal in her calls for a
Royal Commission of Inquiry to investigate the Civic Crèche case but she
denies her interest makes her an activist. "I'm not campaigning for it, it's just that reporters
say to me, 'Well, what do you think should happen now?', so I'm tossing up
the idea as, 'This is what I think, let's discuss it and find a way
forward'." Hood cites the South African Truth and Reconciliation
Commission as an appropriate model for a method of re-assessing the Ellis
case without assigning guilt. One thing she is adamant about is the need for
any Royal Commission to be headed by a "robust overseas judge",
someone not mired in personal politics and someone who would not have to work
in New Zealand afterwards. "Someone was telling me in the Arthur Allan Thomas
case there was a crusty Australian judge [brought over for a Royal
Commission]. At one stage he said to the Crown lawyer, 'Are you stupid?!' The
lawyer was so offended that he marched off and said he wasn't coming back
until the judge apologised. And the judge said, 'Alright, I apologise, now
get on with it!' So that's the sort of thing we need." Alternatively, Hood has a more droll solution to the Ellis
case, one that may be more amenable to the Ministry of Justice. "Of course the other option is Phil Goff could chuck
Peter Ellis in the village pond and see whether he sinks or floats." |