North and South July 1989
1	The Spence Case A Public and Private Nightmare A special report by Rosemary McLeod Rosemary McLeod is North & South's senior writer Photography by Bruce Foster
	Cover Page
2	When Christchurch couple Jeff and Louise Spence told their story on television's Frontline in May, all hell broke loose. They claimed their five-year-old daughter Liselle had been scarred for life by her experiences in Ward 24 of Christchurch Hospital. An accusation of sexual abuse that originated there, devastated their family. The Spences might have joined burgeoning sexual abuse statistics if they had not asked two simple questions: Who are the experts on child sex abuse, and why should we believe them?
	Introduction
3	When Christchurch couple Jeff and Louise Spence told their story on Frontline, it was devastatingly effective television. The Spences hated being filmed and relied on a warm relationship with their interviewer, Amanda Miller, to make it bearable. They described how they had admitted daughter Liselle to Christchurch Hospital's Ward 24 for help with behavioural problems, only to be told weeks later that she had been sexually abused, and her father was suspected. Police carried charges against both of them to the secret forum of the Children and Young Person's Court, but instead of accepting their fate, the Spences questioned the way the ward had investigated Liselle's problem.
4	On Frontline, Jeff and Louise's doubts were echoed by British experts, who slated the work of therapists on the ward, claiming they had asked leading questions to manipulate the child's answers.
5	Television cameras recorded the Spences' relief when charges against them were dismissed. Jeff Spence's denials, and his distress, were achingly sincere. The next day, the outcry began.
6	The Spences went back to living the rest of their lives in working-class Christchurch. But what happened to them is seared across their marriage. Hard as a case of child sex abuse is to prove, proving innocence is impossible. Their family file, with its allegations against Jeff, follows them to every hospital in the city. For the rest of their lives, so will doubt. For a family already burdened with the tragedy of a disturbed child, it is almost too much to bear.
7	A society newly asked to accept a massive incidence of child sex abuse within its families, now had its own questions to ask: How could health professionals be threatening the survival of families such as this on such seemingly specious grounds? Who was to blame for the Spence story? How could professionals be guilty of questionable behaviour? To whom were those professionals answerable? And, most worrying of all, could any family with a problem child suddenly face charges like these?
8	In all the outcry that followed, one remarkable fact emerged: the Spences, armed against the inevitable worst that could happen, did not receive one offensive phone call or abusive letter.
9	Could this mean society has had enough?
	Ward 24, Christchurch Hospital
10	LISELLE SPENCE is nearly six. She is the dearly loved child of an extended family in which grandparents and aunts and uncles play an active part. She is blonde and attractive to look at, and her behaviour is at times beyond anyone's powers of endurance. Why that is so, has defied experts for most of her life.
11	Her mother remembers puzzling that she never felt the child move before she was born. Since her little brother Cory was born three years ago, Louise has had several miscarriages, and wonders now if this has been because she was carrying other daughters doomed to suffer from the disease that dominates Liselle's life, tubrous sclerosis. The disease will kill Liselle while she is still a young woman, and it means she must never bear a child, because it would be severely retarded and probably die.
12	Louise first noticed that Liselle had fits when she was nine months old and started crawling. By the time she was 14 months old, brain scans had revealed damage to the left frontal temporal lobe of the child's brain, and experts decided this was causing frequent epileptic fits.
13	WHEN SHE was four, the Spences took Liselle to Australia to seek more expert help. Benign tumours were discovered in her brain. They can grow or turn cancerous at any time. Just recently, she has suffered bad headaches and there was sudden panic that her condition was worsening, but the headaches passed.
14	One child in every 100,000 suffers from tubrous sclerosis. The Spences have read everything they can find in medical libraries about it and consulted everyone who can help. They know that Liselle is unlikely to live past 30, and that the disease will doubtless in time affect her kidneys, heart, lungs and eyes.
15	Parents of normal children will never know what it is to live with the strain of a child suffering from a fatal illness, whose behaviour varies from the frightening to the bizarre, yet who is loving, too.
16	Liselle's condition calls for endless vigilance. At 14 months, she had five serious seizures in one day. When she started to walk, she fell constantly because of epilepsy, and sometimes she is gripped by Todd's paralysis and can't walk at all. That can happen when she has had too many seizures. Despite constant medication, she still has about three seizures a day.
17	Jeff and Louise have become experts on more than 60 types of seizure, ranging from the innocuous to the alarming. Right now, Liselle's front teeth are missing because they smashed against concrete in the midst of an attack. Fragments had to be removed under anaesthetic.
18	The stress of this is constant and will not end. It is small wonder that Louise has shaken the child and screamed at her to stop in the middle of a seizure.
19	Since Liselle was two and a half years old, the Spences have received a handicapped child's allowance of $22 a week, which pays for her to attend an early intervention group for intellectually handicapped children. Every Thursday, Louise has a helper from the Intellectually Handicapped Children's Society for four hours. The family are longtime members of the local Epilepsy Society.
20	Epilepsy causes one set of symptoms and behaviours; tubrous sclerosis causes more. Liselle has the habit of repeating the last words other people say to her at times. At other times she will do something meaningless and repetitive — like slam a refrigerator door shut 20 times in succession until everyone around her is driven mad. She masturbates compulsively and without inhibition, and removes all her clothing at whim. She has tantrums of an epic scale which nobody can control.
21	With her three-year-old brother Cory she can be a demon. She cannot understand why she must not climb into bed at night with him and wake him up. Louise and Jeff have at times put her back in her own bed 30 times in one night. When Cory was a baby, she frequently bit him, and herself, and she is still sporadically violent. It is hard for Cory to sit and play alone and concentrate, because she gets involved in his play and monopolises his attention. Her own attention span is brief and erratic.
22	When she has her afternoon nap, and at night time, Liselle is still in disposable nappies because she lacks bladder and bowel control in her sleep. Liselle dearly wants to have her ears pierced and she's been promised that will happen when she has not wet herself for a month. Nobody knows how far away that will be.
23	It is almost incidental that Liselle is mentally retarded. She's been assessed at intellectually a year behind her peers, and her speech is poor, but improving. Her slurred, hesitant and rather monotonous diction is a delight to her parents because it gives them hope.
24	This is the child who was admitted to Ward 24 at Christchurch Hospital last year for behaviour management.
25	KNOWING LISELLE would soon start school, the Spences jumped at the chance to have her learn to be less of a burden on teachers and themselves. They packed a suitcase and sent her to live in at the ward, in a highly structured existence they were assured would profoundly modify her behaviour. Sixteen hours later, workers in Ward 24 had decided she was a suspect sexual abuse case. They did not tell her parents or prepare them for the possibility of interviews that would follow, endeavouring to find out for certain.
26	From the Spence family point of view, the six weeks on Ward 24 were fraught with irritations and unexpected difficulties. Visiting relatives commented that Liselle stank: the ward claims she never needed nappies while she stayed there, but her family remembers the stink of stale urine and changing her clothes because of it. They can not believe claims from the ward that Liselle never suffered from an epileptic seizure while she was there, though this is what staff reported. The Spences don't believe staff were competent to assess the wide range of seizures they are used to, which can look as trifling as a minute's blank inattention.
27	Interestingly, Liselle did not exhibit any strange sexual behaviour during her time in the ward - neither removing her clothes, being sexually provocative, nor playing in an overtly sexual way - all signals that would normally attract suspicion. That behaviour took place only in private therapy sessions.
28	There were times of friction with Louise and the staff when she would arrive to visit Liselle without prior warning and be told this was not convenient. Louise was aware several times that Liselle was in a small, darkened room with a counsellor, but the significance of this was not explained to her until the six weeks had nearly ended.
29	As for Jeff Spence, he was working 14-hour days on a building site, which limited the time he had available to visit his daughter. The ward staff did not ask for an explanation of his infrequent visits and Louise believes they concluded he was avoiding Liselle.
30	Ward 24 is not talking about what happened to Liselle Spence. We do know that each child admitted there is appointed a primary therapist to work with. Liselle worked with Colleen Shaw and Karen Dennison. It fell to them to discover whether she had been sexually abused.
31	Karen Dennison was Liselle's primary therapist. She was described in court as a registered psychiatric and comprehensive nurse. This is likely to mean that she trained under the new polytechnic system that involves identical training for all nurses. It is less likely that she trained under the former system where general nursing and psychiatric nursing were separated, with psychiatric nursing being far more specialised. Nowadays, a nurse receives only about 12 weeks training in psychiatry in her three-year training; she is expected to get practical experience on the job.
32	Liselle's senior therapist was Colleen Shaw. It was she who took primary responsibility for the private sessions with the child which Dennison recorded. Shaw has a Bachelor of Science degree in occupational therapy from the University of Toronto and had primarily worked as a child occupational therapist.
33	Shaw had been with Ward 24 since it opened in March 1982, employed as a child therapist working in developmental and behavioural problems, sometimes with family groups. Like Dennison, she is unable to cite special qualifications in the area of sexual abuse counselling or indeed psychological therapy qualifications, which are by no means the same as occupational therapy ones.
34	Shaw had been involved previously with only three children who had been the victims of sexual abuse. From her position of seniority over Dennison, we can reasonably suppose Dennison had even less experience in disclosure interviewing, a complex and subtle skill that carries a heavy burden of responsibility for everyone involved.
35	Suspicions about Liselle were aroused in her first day on the ward when she made objects out of playdough which she called "diddles". The objects were round, and by the therapists' own admission did not resemble a penis, which is what they were construed to be. The child cut up, sucked and licked the "diddles". This aroused suspicion and steered her therapists towards their sexual abuse theory. We can assume that this theory dominated their concerns for the child, because the Spences report no behaviour change of the kind they expected when Liselle returned home.
36	Experts agree that a child should be subjected to two disclosure interviews at the most. Liselle was subjected to 18 private sessions of therapy (some lasting longer than two and a half hours), 15 of which were disclosure interviews aimed at uncovering her sexual abuse and its perpetrator.
37	Workers in the field all over the world disagree on the best methods of interviewing and diagnosing abuse. In Ward 24, Shaw and Dennison used anatomically correct dolls.
	Anatomically correct dolls similar to those used during Liselle's therapy sessions
38	THERE ARE many different kinds of anatomically correct dolls, but they all have in common white or brown cloth bodies with orifices such as mouth, vagina and anus that can be penetrated. Adult male dolls have penises and testicles. Some dolls have the sexual characteristics of children, and others look like naked adults, complete with wool pubic hair and hair in their armpits.
39	The idea is that children will enact with the dolls what they have seen or experienced. The only problem is that nobody knows what normal children do with anatomically correct dolls. Nobody has bothered to carry out research to tell us. Considering how graphically they vary from normal dolls, different play seems inevitable.
40	Anatomically correct dolls, and certain interviewing techniques associated with them, are used at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. Dr Bill Watkins, the child psychiatrist head of Ward 24, is at present studying there. Debate rages in Britain about this hospital's methods, which can be confrontational and even frightening for the child being questioned: the method has been likened to cracking a nut, the assumption being that children will bury what they choose to forget. Watkins has been critical of these methods in the past.
41	Critics say such confrontation can force a false answer from a child just as readily as a true one. Just as in cases of cross-examination of rape victims, they argue that the victim is twice abused, and they say children who have never been abused are exposed to information that violates their innocence.
42	It's a method you would expect to be used with caution, close supervision by superiors, and only in cases where there are substantial grounds for suspecting abuse, such as physical evidence or a clear declaration by a child.
43	Liselle never directly claimed she had been sexually abused, and it is clear that Dennison and Shaw were not closely supervised by either peers or superiors. After weeks of interviews, Ward 24 would find out that Liselle had no physical signs of abuse, such as a damaged hymen. The child screamed and resisted an internal examination, though her mother was in the room to support her. Talking about it still makes Louise tearful.
44	THERE ARE many pages of notes of the disclosure interviews with Liselle. We can assume there are deficiencies in these records, because tape recorders were not used and Dennison is not a stenographer. We know that the therapists read the child a book called I Was So Mad I Could Have Split, a book used to help children express anger against people they'd normally have difficulty challenging. There are lines in the book like "I hate daddy", which Liselle repeats.
45	Early on there was an important mistake. Liselle first met the anatomically correct dolls when they were completely undressed rather than fully clothed as they should have been. It is no surprise, then, that she concentrated on their sexual differences.
46	The therapists' suspicions were further aroused not by anything Liselle said, though she used the word "fuck" frequently, but by what she did in early interview sessions.
47	Liselle picked up the sexually mature male doll, said "that's a big diddle", then "don't bite the diddle", and chewed it. She positioned herself in a sexually explicit way with the doll and seemed to simulate intercourse. She talked about a fear of wild animals, which in court would be construed as a simile for a male abuser. She referred to bleeding bottoms - her grandfather had recently been operated on for piles. Liselle talked about diddles and secrets in the dark. She talked about where she played "diddle games" - at her own home and her grandparents'. She was asked who was best at playing "diddle games", and talked about both her father and grandfather.
48	Some of the sessions, which were not videotaped, involved Liselle being in the dark with the therapists under blankets.
49	You could spend hours reading the transcripts and not make much sense of them. You have to bear in mind that they involve work with a small child who is mentally retarded and who you cannot be sure understands the intellectual concepts she is dealing with. Though Liselle was tested when she was admitted to the ward, the test was considered by one expert to be quite unsuitable for a preschool child, and no other tests explored her intelligence and its limits before therapists began working with her.
50	There is further doubt over whether Shaw and Dennison were briefed in any depth over Liselle's physical problems. They are not recorded as having any knowledge of the behaviour that can be expected of a child with both epilepsy and tubrous sclerosis, specialist knowledge that would not be part of cither's training.
51	A week before Liselle was due to leave Ward 24, the therapists became concerned that they were not going to get conclusive evidence that she had been abused. They are on record as rewarding Liselle now for what they called "hard work" by giving her jellybeans. Only now that they believed she would name her father as her abuser did they tell Louise what they had been trying to elicit for so long. They told her they were certain Liselle had been sexually abused.
52	Louise remembers being stunned and shocked. She believed she was talking to experts who must know what they were doing, and logically enough assumed Jeff must be the perpetrator, since he was the only male with sufficient access to the child. Shaw and Dennison then made an extraordinary request. They asked her to return home for the next week with Jeff and not mention a word of these suspicions to him or anyone else. This was too much for Louise. She told her parents.
53	Louise was invited to watch the final sessions with the child, who the therapists said was ready to tell her mother about her abuse. Louise watched a method of therapy that she found shocking and revolting, therapy she would never have countenanced if she had been told about it. But she was prepared to consider it might be worth it if the truth was uncovered.
54	Louise saw Liselle pick up the daddy doll, say it was "the diddle man", and throw it out the door of the room, returning to sit on a therapist's knee and ask for a jellybean. The therapists felt they had the information they needed to act on.
55	The Spences and their supporters suggest Liselle showed the behaviour you'd expect from a child who'd been schooled to give the "right" answer and rewarded for it with sweets.
56	Jeff Spence now came to the hospital for an interview with the therapists. They told him they believed he had sexually abused his daughter and told him he could not go home that night. If he did not leave home immediately, the therapists said they would take steps to take Liselle away from her parents. A bewildered and deeply upset Jeff went to stay with his in-laws, and so began more than a year of spending nights away from his family while giving the world the impression he was still living at home.
57	Social Welfare was not convinced by the report from Dennison and Shaw that Liselle had been sexually abused, and refused to lay charges, but the police did. We have no way of knowing who pressed for those charges, because Dr Watkins, the ward's boss, only supported the assertions half-heartedly in court and plainly had doubts.
58	The Spences - both Jeff and Louise - faced a complaint under the Children and Young Persons' Act that Liselle was in need of care, protection or control in that a) her development was avoidably being prevented or neglected and b) she was being or likely to be neglected or ill-treated and c) she was exhibiting behaviour which was beyond the control of her parents and was of such a nature and degree as to cause concern for her wellbeing and her social adjustment.
59	The charges seem strange because nobody has ever criticised Louise Spence's affection for her child or her sense of responsibility for her. Apart from the sexual allegation, nobody has ever criticised Jeff, either.
60	The Spences, who live off Jeff's earnings as a builder's labourer and freezing worker, have twice paid their own way to Australia to seek expert help and advice for their daughter's condition. They have been actively involved with IHC, the Epilepsy Society, the early intervention group Liselle attends, an epilepsy support group and the Child and Family Guidance Centre.
61	What the charges really meant was that the police believed they had a case to say Liselle had been sexually abused, and that this in part explained her strange behaviour.
62	THE SPENCES have bitter memories of their case being delayed and remanded seemingly indefinitely, while they tried to face the fact that their family would be forced apart if the charges against Jeff were believed by the judge. If the charges against Jeff were sustained by Judge G.T. Mahon, he would certainly face proceedings under the Crimes Act., his marriage would be over, and his family another failure statistic.
63	That meant Jeff had to fight against the witnesses who accused him of sexually abusing his daughter, and challenge their evidence. The Spences chose to challenge the means by which Liselle's information was gathered, and its truthfulness if those means were dubious.
64	They hired local lawyer Paul McMenamin who had experience in defending child sex abuse cases in the criminal courts. This was the first he had defended in the Children and Young Persons' Court, and he was to have many misgivings about the system he now participated in. His bill would exceed $20,000 and no one is yet sure how that will be paid.
65	At the same time the Spences contacted Frontline producer Peter Weir who became interested in the story, and agreed to film the progress of their case and its aftermath. He also approached two British experts who read transcripts of Liselle's interviews and were outraged by them, a fact that gave the Spences some comfort. The two experts were known in Britain for their outspoken views against the techniques used on Ward 24.
66	In the final days of the case, the Spences hid Liselle with her grandparents miles from Christchurch, fearing that if they stayed together she'd be forcibly taken from them.
67	At the hearing the court heard Dr Watkins, the head of Ward 24, express reservations about the case against Jeff. Watkins didn't think the transcripts of the therapy session were conclusive enough, and he had doubts about how Dennison and Shaw questioned Liselle. He was pretty sure Liselle had some knowledge of sexual matters that was unusual, but could not be sure how she came by it. He talked about the symptoms of Liselle's disease, which included the very unsociable behaviour for which she'd been admitted to hospital.
68	Other workers on the ward disputed the symptoms the Spences lived with, and claimed not to have seen them during her six weeks on the ward. None was competent to dispute her diagnosis, however, as only Watkins and another expert called by the court, Dr Karen Zelas, had training as doctors as part of their psychiatry qualifications. Unlike Watkins, Zelas was firmly on the side of Dennison and Shaw, although she had only once met Liselle, in a 45-minute session with her whole family. Despite this she was firm in her beliefs and did not waver. When it came to arguing the toss, the strongest witness against Zelas was Patricia Champion, a psychologist who had had dealings with Liselle since she was 22 months old.
69	Champion's special area of expertise is language. She told the court Liselle's language was not up to three-year-old standard, which meant that it was wrong to expect a logical flow from her or to take it for granted that she was talking from experience. She said Liselle's mind drifted aimlessly about and didn't necessarily follow a logical train of thought, as the therapists might have assumed it did.
70	Zelas was recalled after Champion gave evidence, and reaffirmed everything she had said earlier, conceding nothing to the only other expert actively involved in the case. She stuck with her belief that there was overwhelming evidence that Liselle had been sexually abused.
71	In all of this, the judge was the final arbiter. He was critical of the number of interviews Liselle had been subjected to and their method. He found that Liselle's sexually oriented acts were clear evidence that she had been sexually abused, and that there was nearly enough proof to lay a criminal charge against a close family member, most likely her father, though there was not enough proof that Jeff, and not another family member, had abused her.
72	IN ESSENCE, Judge Mahon said he was satisfied Louise was now alerted to the fact that her daughter had been sexually abused and that she would ensure that no further harm would come to Liselle, and on that basis he dismissed the case. It was not what the Spences could call an outright victory, but at least the family could stay together.
73	Determined that nobody else should have to go through their experience, the Spences went ahead with the Frontline programme, rushed to air against the threat of suppression by the Crown Solicitor's Office. Public interest was so great that it was re-screened several days later and attracted an unprecedented flood of letters, overwhelmingly supporting the Spences.
74	You would not have known this from Christchurch newspapers. Despite having a major story break in their own back yard, Christchurch papers did no follow-up investigations of their own. When the superintendent of Sunnyside Hospital, psychiatrist Les Ding, was appointed by the Canterbury Hospital Board to look into what had happened in Ward 24 and present a report, local papers did not question how one employee of the board could reasonably be expected to comment on the activities of others impartially.
75	Christchurch Press reporter Cate Brett wrote a strongly worded feature criticising Frontline for entering the volatile arena of child sex abuse and its overworked and underqualified workers. She chided Frontline for not using the complete inferences of Judge Mahon's judgment in full. Like others who responded angrily to the programme, Brett implied that Judge Mahon's judgment raised serious doubts about Jeff Spence's innocence. While that was true, it is also true that the judgment shows serious doubts over the methods of the professionals who worked with Liselle.
76	IT WAS ALL too easy for the Spence case to be reduced to whether a father was guilty or not of abusing his daughter, a matter it was only for the court to decide. The questions raised by the Spence case in fact incorporate every contentious issue in the field of child sex abuse, and its repercussions are more complex than an individual child's sad story.
77	Those questions concern a crusade that strikes to the heart of the family, impressing on us that we are a society overrun with child sexual abuse that must be uncovered and punished. The origins of the crusade are in radical feminism, and its pioneer in New Zealand is Miriam Saphira (once known as Jackson). She provided us with statistics nobody has challenged.
78	Because Saphira's findings are so influential and are the platform for a new set of beliefs about ourselves, they deserve to be looked at again. They lead indirectly to Liselle Spence's front door, because they have been the foundation of the current intellectual climate regarding sexual abuse of children.
79	The truth is, it's a subject that even experts know very little about. Those experts are woefully thin on the ground, which doesn't stop people claiming expertise and making claims they can't substantiate.
80	Saphira is a former Justice Department psychologist with an interest in sexuality. She was formerly married, is a solo mother and is now a lesbian. Her adopted name is a derivation of the name of Sappho, the Greek woman poet from the island of Lesbos. Some fellow Justice Department workers were surprised that Saphira emphasised the importance of the young woman offenders under her care knowing how to masturbate: she continues to advocate the rights of young people to express their sexuality without censure from adults.
81	In 1980, Saphira set up her Sexual Abuse of Children Project. She arranged to enclose a questionnaire about sexual experience in every copy of one week's New Zealand Woman's Weekly. In all, she sent out 220,000 questionnaires and received 315 replies - a 0.14 per cent response - from women who described sexual abuse in their childhood.
82	The findings of that survey have become part of the entrenched "facts" of New Zealand's sex abuse. It is from Saphira and her followers that we have learned that one in three girls will be sexually molested before she turns 18; that 89 per cent of abused children are abused by somebody they know, 25 per cent of them by fathers and stepfathers; that fathers are responsible for 25 per cent of all full sexual intercourse with children; that one in five molesters is a father, stepfather or fosterfather; that half of these offences take place in a child's own home.
83	They have helped to establish a climate of suspicion, and contributed to fears that children are suffering because they cannot tell their story.
84	Every worker in the field fears that through their own lack of skill they may fail to help a suffering child: much-quoted statistics lead them to believe sex abuse is endemic. This fear may help create great stress in an already difficult and distressing job, and it may also cloud judgment.
	Left:: Former Justice Department psychologist, Miriam Saphira, provided us with child sex abuse statistics nobody has challenged Right: The Mental Health Foundation's Hilary Haines, another feminist who helped to disseminate sexual abuse data
85	THERE IS a political context for this as well. In this decade, feminists everywhere have been challenging the traditional behaviour of men and their abuse of power. High sexual abuse data backs that up. It was disseminated by other influential feminists like Hilary Haines of the Mental Health Foundation, another formerly married lesbian, who published her own views under the aegis of the foundation. She has cited Saphira's research frequently.
86	Saphira's findings are laid out in her book The Sexual Abuse Of Children published in 1985. A skilled communicator, Saphira makes an eloquent case for the prevalence of the problem and the harm it can cause to children. In footnotes, she refers back to her own work under her former name of Jackson, as well as under her present name, a detail that obscures how dominant her work is in the field.
87	Everyone working in this field cites a 1984 survey by Wellington Rape Crisis in 1984, as if it is very significant. This survey of 1100 high school students in Wellington found that 36 per cent of girls had been touched in a way they didn't want by males. The only trouble with this new statistic - which boosted the claim that one in three girls is molested before she turns 18 - was that it made no distinction between the touching being done by boys of their own age and other men, gestures as trivial as bottom pinching, and explicit sexual advances. That made the finding virtually meaningless. It certainly proved nothing about serious sexual abuse, though strangely it is still cited as hard data.
88	Haines' book Mental Health For Women acknowledges assistance from established feminists like Pat Rosier, editor of Broadsheet, and Margot Roth, a regular Broadsheet columnist. Broadsheet is this country's outlet for radical feminism and its writers have a common line. Though the Mental Health Foundation backed the book, it is more a record of a feminist view of mental health than an impartial document.
89	Haines makes depressing reading on the subject of heterosexual sex. She records nothing but problems and nowhere suggests that women have sex with men for pleasure. "The reality is that, for many women, a man could pound away till Christmas and all they would feel is sore and bored," she observes, without citing any research to substantiate the claim.
90	Lesbian sex, however, is more hopeful. "Women understand each other's bodies well," Haines says, "because after all they have one of their own, and usually know how it works, so the sex is often better."
91	It was the Mental Health Foundation, where Haines worked, that sourced "statistics" to last year's Telethon in support of families and children at risk from violence and sexual abuse. Its data came from Saphira and its own publications.
92	On the basis of that variously sourced information, which an over- keen advertising agency conveniently blended together, New Zealand newspapers were flooded with dramatic award-winning advertisements: photographs of four little babies in nappies with the slogan "One of these children will be scarred for life", alleging erroneously that one in eight fathers molest their daughters; a little girl in bed with her teddy bear and the silhouette of her father in the doorway with the slogan "It's not the dark she's afraid of.
93	FATHERS WERE suddenly the pits. While mothers were rejoicing in a new interest and involvement of men with their young children, in part due to grassroots feminism among heterosexual women, New Zealanders were being asked to believe a lie: that one in eight of them sexually abused their children. Incredibly, no one challenged this. Loving fathers I met socially talked about their fear of cuddling their daughters, in case they were accused of perversion. Though an editorial in this magazine and a subsequent article in Metro exposed the false data, no serious attempt has been made to eradicate the impression the campaign made - and it has been subsequently quoted in other publications as fact.
94	Most people are not trained to understand statistics or the methodology of research. There are, however, universally accepted ways of conducting research that may lead to the truth. Those ways are expensive, cumbersome and scientific, but without using them, nobody has the right to make claims for the population at large.
95	Saphira's Woman's Weekly survey is a classic case. The response rate from the circulars she sent out is so low that it could be argued that only a little more than one in a thousand women experienced sexual abuse as a child, an assertion that would explode all her assertions.
96	We cannot know if the 315 people who replied to Saphira are anything like the 219,685 who did not, because they were not selected by truly random means. We cannot know to which social class they belong, whether they live in cities or the country, and what difference this might make. Everyone who did not read the Woman's Weekly was automatically excluded from the survey, so it already had a huge bias. New Zealand's Statistics Department would find this survey valueless.
97	To back up her findings, Saphira turned to the classic study of sexuality, the Kinsey Report. This work is almost half a century old, and its findings about sexuality have to be set up against the incalculably greater amounts of material on sex available for the general public to read and the changing sexual patterns of even the last 20 years. Kinsey predates homosexual law reform and the social acceptability of outspoken lesbians.
98	Most people writing and researching internationally in the field of child sexual abuse agree that about one in 10 children may be affected by it. Even that is a guess. Far fewer than one in 10 are abused by their own fathers, that is certain. What surveys mean by sexual abuse varies from one researcher to another. It's useless to pit one survey against another when the reference points don't match, but that's what "experts" have been doing.
99	Some feminists consider a verbal overture to be an abuse. A radical feminist I know considers it sexual abuse if a male has an erection in the presence of a female who has done nothing to encourage him sexually. It is doubtful whether the world at large would agree with her.
100	We have no way of knowing if the problem of child sex abuse is growing, because we still have no reliable statistics on how frequently it happens. We know that it has always been with us: that Victorian England knew child prostitution and sent tiny children to work in factories and mines, that childhood itself is a state only recently acknowledged, largely thanks to this century's studies on human development.
101	All we know for sure is that our awareness of child sex abuse is currently heightened in contrast with our awareness of child battering, the concern of a decade ago and still a far more frequent occurrence.
102	Some social workers are worried that all the emphasis on sexual abuse cases, which dominate Social Welfare services right now, is clogging the lines to help for children who are in life-threatening situations.
103	A recent South Australian report (by Geoffrey Partington) challenges all the information to date on who carries out sexual abuse on children. The breakdown attributes one per cent of cases to mothers and siblings, two per cent of cases to fathers, stepfathers and family friends, three per cent to other relatives, 20 per cent to strangers, and an amazing 70 per cent to professionals such as teachers and welfare workers.
104	Figures like these turn Saphira's work on its head. They suggest that the "stranger danger" we've been told is a lie, may be the truth after all. But swept away as we currently are on a tide of belief in the rottenness of the heterosexual family unit, the truth could be the last thing we want to hear.
105	HOW DID WE come to accept that so many New Zealand fathers were sexual abusers of their children? It may be useful to ask who has something at stake in believing it. Feminists have been justifiably angry at the exclusion of women from the power systems that have run the world for centuries. They refer to them as the patriarchy, another word for the rule of fathers. By finding that fathers wilfully pervert their own dependent young, the case against the patriarchy is complete.
106	Feminists argue that men beat and abuse women because they believe they are lesser human beings, and that they extend that behaviour to their children because they believe they own them. They say men have everything to gain from covering up their own unacceptable behaviour, so their denials and questionings of the new data count for nothing.
107	Feminists and workers in this field say the abuse occurs at every level in society, where you find men who believe in their inherent superiority and their right to impose their will on others. Incest, they argue, is a natural extension of patriarchal will.
108	All this does not explain why a male-dominated society has always had prohibitions against incest, or why the typical sex abuser of children is a weak man who doesn't rate highly in the world of male values - a failed patriarch rather than a confident and successful one. Nor does it explain why men are afraid to be found out.
109	Repellent though we find child sexual abuse to be, we know little about the harm it does, except in gross cases of physical violation, which are still the minority of cases. We do know that it is an abuse of power, and that prostitutes, drug addicts and criminals report high rates of abuse in their own pasts. However, in a cocktail of deprivations, we do not know which is the deciding factor.
110	Work in child sex abuse is depressing and sometimes horrific. It outrages the social code we live by and nobody approves of it. It is known to attract workers who have been victims of abuse themselves, and some voluntary organisations attract radical lesbian feminists. There is no reason why they should be less competent at this work than anyone else, but their detachment is questionable.
111	Ms Eileen Swan of Auckland's HELP, a sexual abuse counselling agency, is on record in 1984 as saying "the projected figures of one in four girls and one in 10 boys being victims are beginning to look conservative". She has no more grounds than any lay person to say so; no hard evidence backs her.
112	Speaking at a conference of the Child Abuse Prevention Society that year also, Sue Neal, a coordinator of the South Auckland Women's Refuge, said "some of these families are rotten to the core and should not be encouraged to stay together".
113	Again, this may be how things look at the front, but statements like these are worrying as a basis for looking at the problem. Swan's statistics might have been snatched from thin air for all the foundation they have in serious literature on the subject.
114	THE SYMPTOMS of child sexual abuse are a worry for any parent. One or other of them is displayed by normal children at least some of the time: regressive behaviour, eating, sleeping and elimination disturbances, excessive crying, excessive masturbatory behaviour in small children, excessive attempts to manipulate others' genitals, school problems, phobias, fears, lack of friends, secretive behaviour, stealing, lying, manipulative behaviour... the list is long. Failing physical evidence, when a child is too young to talk they're all case workers have to go on.
115	This is why we need experts in the field of child abuse. Experts can be expected to know a great deal about normal child development. They can be expected to be impartial and have profound knowledge of all the research and relevant information in their field, with the ability to assess its usefulness.
116	What we actually have in this country are 11 child psychiatrists, two child therapists graduating from Otago University each year, and some psychologists who have chosen to specialise in children. We have social workers who mostly train on the job: 14 per cent of the Department of Social Welfare's social workers have formal qualifications, the rest are unqualified apart from short courses run by their department.
117	All of these workers are responsible to a professional organisation of some kind, regardless of how minimal their qualifications are. The same does not apply to voluntary workers.
118	There are no nationally accepted, universal training systems for people working in child sex abuse. The closest we have is a part-time course at Canterbury University, which only started this year. To enter the course, no education qualifications are required, but you have to be working in the area. There is still a lot of talk about "gut instinct".
119	In this burgeoning field, which some people call a growth industry, hardly anyone can claim to be an expert, and those that do need close watching to ensure they stay balanced.
120	The recent scandal in Cleveland, England, is a case in point. Local doctor Marietta Higgs became convinced, with scant evidence, that anal dilation in children was proof of sexual abuse. She split up 121 families, tearing a whole community apart, on the basis of this diagnosis alone.
121	In fact, nobody knew how often anal dilation occurred in the population at large. It is a symptom of childhood constipation. Almost all of the children are now back home with their distraught parents.
122	Amazingly, the male establishment in this country stood by and watched while workers like Saphira produced their new data, and did not question it although they recognised it for what it was - severely flawed and inconclusive. Three of the highest child health and medical experts in this country confirmed this to me, though they will not go on record officially as saying so. They've said, that because they are men, they believe they will be shouted down. The fact that they are experts too is held against them.
123	Paranoia runs so high that several people warned me that I must expect serious physical attacks for asking questions against the prevalent feminist line.
124	THE PUBLIC may want experts, but not everybody in the field of sexual abuse does. Researching this story, two senior health professionals told me about problems inside HELP. I was told that workers there have argued against having heterosexual women with children working in child sex abuse, on the grounds that they must therefore have an interest in protecting abusive men. I was told about qualified women doctors being turned away when they offered their services, on the grounds that they were over-educated, which meant they must be part of the patriarchal system. I was also told about mothers being turned away with their abused children because they refused to report their husbands to the police.
125	Leah Andrews, a recently graduated child psychiatrist, was denied assistance from Auckland HELP for a much- needed study she is doing with another woman doctor on the effects of sexual abuse on children. Andrews reports that HELP workers were angry that the researchers received a financial grant, and told them they should give the grant money to Maori and Polynesian women for projects of their choice. Andrews found this behaviour hurtful and surprising; she considers herself a liberal feminist.
126	The reason HELP gave for not helping the doctors was that they were from a medical school and would therefore have a scientific approach. They were told that a lot of harm had been done to women and children in the name of science.
127	Andrews has some reservations about statistics on sex abuse incidence. Looking for subjects for her survey, she found that a number of children had been counted several times by a variety of agencies. One child was recorded a total of eight times, which would inevitably inflate statistics.
128	Fellow psychiatrist Jane Reeves has begun a private counselling group for rape victims in Auckland. Reeves started the group after assessing a number of women two years after their rape for Accident Compensation claims. She was puzzled that they were still deeply traumatised by the event despite attending counselling with voluntary agencies.
129	Reeves' view was that counselling should help women get over their rape rather than reiterate their sense of helplessness. She also felt that women should be helped to return to heterosexual sex if that was their preference, and wondered whether radical lesbian separatists she knew were counselling in the field were capable of that sort of help.
130	"I get quite angry at the anti-male flavour," Reeves says, "rather than looking at specific males. After all, they are half the human race and we have to function in society."
131	Similar criticism has been levelled at voluntary workers in child sex abuse, along with doubts that their agencies give adequate supervision to their workers. HELP has no national structure requiring national standards; each centre is autonomous.
132	Lack of training, suspicion of expertise, scant resources, feminist activism and a sudden flood of awareness of child sex abuse are the background to the Spence case. The worry is that there may be many other cases like it.
133	Feminists fought long and hard to get acknowledgment for the problem. Having won their ground, many behave as if the battle has to be fought still. Kingdoms have been made, where workers zealously claim their right to monopolise society's view of the problem. And everyone says they have the child's interests at heart.
134	Right now, our focus is on the men who sexually abuse children. In jail, we know they are beaten and despised. Society feels like that about them, too. It's not surprising that child sex offenders seldom confess, and will deny fervently that they are guilty. They have everything to lose.
135	We know that many of these men were themselves abused as children, which is another reason why we want to stop the chain of abuse by detecting cases now. But are we going the right way about it?
136	Police, newly sensitive to the needs of the community, have faced criticism in recent years for failing to prosecute wife beaters, or pursue rape cases with sufficient diligence. Their sexism has been under attack. Now, police are keenly aware of child sex abuse and actively involved in finding and dealing with perpetrators. They're going to set up their own sex abuse teams in the next year.
137	The courts in the meantime are clogged with sex abuse cases, which are proving increasingly costly. A Wellington man has paid out more than $60,000 to keep his two children and fight an abuse claim which ran for weeks in court. Having used up all his own money, he had to resort to legal aid. Money like this would go a long way towards educating his children. In another recent Auckland case, five expert witnesses were in the box for a costly 15 days. A child psychotherapist was cross-examined for five days in the course of the hearing. These cases were not even in the criminal court.
138	DAVID HOWMAN is a Wellington lawyer who trains other lawyers in how to deal with children. Through the Law Society, he runs regular courses around the country that are orientated towards sex abuse cases. "One of the faults we have in our system is the fact that the issues are supposed to be related to the child, but the emphasis is directed towards the perpetrator rather than the child," he says. "You've got not to put people off reporting abuse, but at the end of the day the priority should be to protect children and families."
139	Howman is concerned that five per cent of cases in the Children and Young Persons' Court are taking up 25 percent of the funding. High costs are inevitable when sexual abuses cases are being fought over days of hearings.
140	There are people working in the area who believe it would be better to bypass the legal system altogether. Experience overseas has shown that when children are interviewed expertly and recorded on video tape and the video tape is shown to their abuser, he will often confess. This saves not only money but the stress of putting children and their families through court hearings. However, it also involves totally professional interviewing from experts. In Christchurch, Social Welfare is developing a specialist team of interviewers, just as the police are doing.
141	At the Justice Department in Christchurch, psychologist David Riley is working towards establishing a national treatment prison for child sex offenders. It is due to open at Rolleston Prison next month and will hold 60 offenders.
142	The general idea is to offer child sex offenders a whip and a carrot at the same time - and to keep them away from the criminal population, with which they have little in common.
143	Resources in the justice system are woefully inadequate. Its psychological service has 32 workers in the field. They're expected to tackle more than 23,000 offenders with problems ranging from violent behaviour to chronic dishonesty and suicidal impulses. "You've got to establish priorities," Riley says. "Sex offending is a priority for our staff."
144	In the new jail, based on a successful American model, child sex offenders will spend half their previously unproductive jail time hopefully learning how to change. The Justice Department will keep records of how effective its programme is. It's optimistic.
145	THE SPENCE'S lawyer, Paul McMenamin, is a member of a family firm in Christchurch. He's given to slow speech, long reflective pauses and deep thought, and he's thought a lot about shortcomings in the present system. He is concerned that although the consequences of being found guilty in the Children and Young Persons' Court are grave for the offender, rules of evidence are not the same as they are in criminal cases.
146	"The question of evidence is largely misunderstood by the lay public as technical jargon to obfuscate issues, but in fact the rules of evidence are created to arrive at the truth rather than a fallacy," he says.
147	"In these cases, what's before the court are records of interviews with little children, taken under very peculiar circumstances. The children are not in any usual or familiar environment. They're being interviewed by people in some position of authority to them. Frequently comments are obtained by inducement of one sort or another, and children I think have a great desire to please.
148	"Frequently people will say a child talks of things in a manner that's fearful or distressed. There's no way a court can test that without videos. But even videos may not finish the problem. The English experience indicates an enormous amount of difficulty arises from enthusiasts who are frequently quite well qualified.
149	"If an expert is very convinced that a child has been sexually abused, in the absence of substantial physical evidence, too often the case relies on a psychiatric or psychological appraisal of the child. All sorts of symptoms and antisocial behaviour have been accepted as primary indicators, which you could find in any child. Paper on paper has been written on this and they tend to be flavoured by the view of the researcher."
150	McMenamin is critical of experts who construe children's statements, such as fear of wild animals, as something deeper and more meaningful. "Like evidence-gathering," he says, "you can't resort to a code that only you know."
151	McMenamin says we are relying on the good sense of judges, who are probably giving responsible and sensible verdicts. However, in cases where experts are pitted against each other, usually we have a jury as our safeguard.
152	He says the secrecy of these court proceedings is a worry. Though it is considered vital to keep a child's identity secret, at the moment we cannot also find information like how many child abuse cases are being heard, or observe the manner in which investigations are being carried out.
153	"I personally can't see how 20 sessions of so-called therapy in semi- darkened rooms with anatomical dolls, repetitive questions about sex, swearing and shouting 'I hate daddy', can't be very dangerous for a child. I wouldn't under any circumstances allow my four-year-old, or three-year-old or two-year-old to go through that..
154	"I simply cannot see how that child can't be left with an enduring aftermath. Is this an abuse of power?
155	"It seems to me that the parents should have been advised at the very outset. I can't see why or under what authority they deal with your child in a manner contrary to the reason why it's in hospital. The point is, what right do (hospital staff) have to do anything other than under your express direction?
156	"Where does an occupational therapist in a hospital obtain the right to involve a child in what may be quite unusual sessions of conduct, which most people would think abnormal and probably abhorrent, without obtaining the authority of the parents?
157	"Where else but in a hospital could this happen?
158	"If this problem is as pervasive as people say and as enthusiasts would have us believe, then people should be encouraged to admit it. We should remove the criminal sanction and they should be treated. I've acted in criminal court for people who've done this. They are invariably sad cases. And does jail deter anyone?"
	Professionals like Karen Zelas, now president of the Australasian Society of Psychiatrists, have great power as professional witnesses in a small society
159	I WAS UNABLE to visit Ward 24 or talk with anyone there about its methods and philosophy. The hospital hierarchy forbade it. However, I spoke to counsellor Sue Dick at its outpatient arm, the Child and Family Guidance Centre. Twelve per cent of the referrals here are because of child sex abuse.
160	The clinic's head, Dr Yvonne Barton, sat with her. Dick had chosen to speak to me because she said she believes in the accountability of workers in her field. She insisted the interview be tape recorded, as an insurance against being misinterpreted and criticism from her fellow workers.
161	Dick is a former primary school teacher with a university degree, and is now a trained child psychotherapist. She's a member of the New Zealand Association of Child Psychotherapists. She told me the staff of the clinic is made up of two child psychiatrists, three psychologists, three child psychotherapists and eight social workers.
162	Unlike most workers in this field, Dick's training has involved personal therapy, intended to help her self- knowledge and to help separate her own problems from those of her clients.
163	Dick backs the need for recognised training in the field of child sex abuse counselling, and says most health professionals in this country did their training before sex abuse was isolated as a serious problem, so they have had to train themselves. This raises the problem of who are the specialists or experts.
164	It also raises the problem of what kind of safeguards clinics like this can have so families get the best possible service and professionals are also accountable to someone.
165	Dick said the clinic has a system whereby fellow workers watch therapy sessions from behind one-way glass, so they can monitor how each other works and help each other reach rational conclusions. Disclosure interviews are video-taped, and before sexual abuse is suspected, therapists explore every other logical avenue.
166	"Children's own relationship to the alleged offender varies enormously, from the child who still loves them and wishes to keep a relationship, to children who are damaged, angry, and hate the offender. Children can love and be attached to the person who has abused them. The work you do has to preserve permission for them to love that person.
167	"We feel very caught by the current status of legislation in terms of what it does to families. We know that children want to be safe and have their families intact - not one to the exclusion of the other. What we would like is for children to be winners on both counts.
168	"At the moment, children are the losers, because if abuse is to stop they may risk shattering their family. The best option would be for society to make it possible for offenders to confess more readily.
169	"We don't want to get better at this [disclosure interviewing] only to enable children to send their fathers to prison. What does it do for boys and girls that for them to be safe their families are sentenced as well?"
170	Dick supports the idea of some child sex offenders - though not hardened pedophiles - receiving suspended sentences on condition that they undergo therapy.
171	She told me that in Christchurch, workers in child sex abuse feel cynical about the press's concern. Local papers ignored a recent statement from the Minister of Justice about a child pornography ring in the city, run by local businessmen. They feel resentful that their work is scrutinised by reporters while reports like these aren't followed up.
172	Dick acknowledges a great debt to Karen Zelas, the local psychiatrist who set up the clinic and also gave evidence so forcefully at the Spence trial.
173	Zelas, now president of the Australasian Society of Psychiatrists, would not talk to Frontline but was prepared to give Christchurch newspapers an angry response to the television item.
174	Everyone says Zelas is a convincing and articulate witness, and she has considerable experience in child sex abuse. Her critics say she is unable to consider that she may be wrong, but fellow professionals also consider her to be sound and very capable. She was one of the panel responsible for the national report on child sex abuse whose short title is A Public And Private Nightmare. Interestingly, it endorses the use of anatomical dolls.
175	Ultimately, professionals like Zelas have great power as professional witnesses in a small society. There are only two psychiatrists in Christchurch, so they are regularly giving evidence. This means that if they have an axe to grind, it may have greater influence than it would in a larger culture. Zelas is certainly a believer in the prevalence of child sex abuse. Like other workers in the field, she quoted Saphira's work and the Rape Crisis survey to me to back up her belief.
176	Like Dick, Zelas told me she believed the courts were the ultimate organisation she was accountable to and that she regarded the justice system as an important safeguard. Like Dick, she is concerned to keep families together and to find alternatives to jail for offenders. She believes the courts should have the muscle to force men to enter therapy programmes and stay in them. She also thinks men should have to pay for therapy for all members of the victim's family that need it, and to do this they should stay in the community and face up to their responsibilities. "Usually they don't like what they're doing," she says.
177	Zelas says a 60 per cent confession rate among offenders in Colorado who are backed up by a good therapy programme, demonstrates how often allegations have substance. She is not happy that this country is becoming more hard line on child sex offenders.
178	"It's becoming more adversarial. You're starting to feel that you're sitting in a criminal court. Lawyers most commonly in the criminal court are starting to be engaged to help parents. The whole climate is changing. I don't think it's desirable for civil matters involving children to start to become criminal cases.
179	"Standing up even behind a screen in court is not exactly an environment likely to help a child talk about something very private and personal, especially involving a person they feel they must be loyal to."
180	In her own experience, Zelas says articulate middle-class offenders are much less likely to go to court and less likely to be found guilty than men like Jeff Spence, who know less about how to fight the system. "In social settings, people will talk with me about feeling more uncomfortable about what they do with their children than ever before. People say isn't that a terrible thing. I think that is part of a pendulum swinging; it's not an end point.
181	"I don't think people should stop doing ordinary affectionate things with children, because there's a very small risk of being accused of sexual abuse.
182	"Those of us who do investigative interviews with children do have to be accountable, and the courts need to determine what they consider to be acceptable techniques. It's an issue that has to be resolved in some way."
183	NOBODY WOULD be quicker to agree with Zelas than the Spences, who feel bitter animosity towards her for the evidence she gave in their court case.
184	They now have a child with all the problems they are familiar with, but also a new preoccupation with sexual matters. They believe she has been mentally damaged for life on Ward 24. Nobody from the ward has contacted them since Liselle was discharged last May. Her family lives with the aftermath, and now the only treatment Liselle receives is from a private psychologist they pay for themselves - at $60 an hour, another burden to add to the as yet unpaid $20,000 legal fees.
185	Life will never be the same and the Spences live in fear of further repercussions: "I get worried sick that she might hurt herself. Say if she had a seizure and busted her front teeth now - the slightest thing could get us back in the courtroom," says Louise. Jeff worries that he may be the only adult around to help a crying child, and end up accused of molestation.
186	In hospital recently, Louise met a nurse who had read the entire file on the family and commented on it. The Spences say that when they took Liselle for a brain scan in December, staff were rude and abrupt with them. They find it humiliating that so many strangers have access to intensely personal information about them, and say they would do anything to avoid going to Christchurch Hospital now.
187	They are furious that Cate Brett asked them if they had been paid to appear on Frontline, a question they found insulting. They were not.
188	Most of all, they are bitterly upset at changes they see in Liselle. "She came out and she couldn't talk," Louise says. "Some of the things she comes out with now - her sexual knowledge is unbelievable."
189	Louise is tense. She is the kind of person who might well sound angry when she is feeling very sad. She does most of the talking, while Jeff defers to her. From time to time he relaxes, though stress is apparent in him, too.
190	In their immaculate back yard, an enormous ginger cat whisks his tail and parades in front of the family's aviary where two multicoloured parrots perch. He looks for all the world like a small lion. "Perhaps he's one of the wild animals Liselle's afraid of," Jeff Spence says, in his slow, quiet way.
191	It's meant to be a joke.

Appendix

Name	Paragraph References
Andrews, Leah………………...….	125,127
Barton, Yvonne……………………	160
Brett, Cate…………………………	75,187
Champion, Patricia……………….	68,69,70
Dennison, Karen…………...……..	30,31,33,34,37,43,44,50,52,57,67
Dick, Sue………………...………..	159,160-172,176
Ding, Les…………………...…..…	74
Haines, Hilary……………….……	85,88,89,90,91
Higgs, Marietta…………….……..	120
Howman, David…………………..	138,139
Mahon, Judge G T……………….	62,71,72,75
McMenamin, Paul………………...	64,145-158
Miller, Amanda……………………	3
Neal, Sue………………………….	112
Partington, Geoffrey……………..	103
Reeves, Jane……………………..	128,129,130
Riley, David……………………….	141,143
Rosier, Pat………………………..	88
Roth, Margot………………………	88
Saphira (Jackson), Miriam………	77-86,91,95-97,104,122,175
Shaw, Colleen…………………….	30,32,33,34,37,43,50,52,57,67
Swan, Eileen……………………...	111,113
Watkins, Dr Bill…………………...	40,57,67,68
Weir,Peter..……………………….	65
Zelas, Karen………………………	68,70,173-183