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Child sex
abuse hysteria and the Ellis case |
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The wisdom of
Gordon Waugh - Index |
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[Notes : Due to time
limitations, the actual presentation differed slightly from the script below. This script, or any
part of it may be reproduced, with the proviso that any quotations are
directly ascribed to the personal opinions of the author.]
Good afternoon Mr
President, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Gordon Waugh
and I'm here with my wife Colleen. We live in I want to set the scene
for you by telling you a little of our personal case, give you an insight
into the climate of sexual abuse hysteria in New Zealand, and then describe
how COSA fitted into that picture. 'll finish with a few suggestions drawn
from that experience. I don't propose to pull any punches, so I'll speak
candidly, and at times bluntly. Personal
Background Colleen and I have been
married for over 40 years. We had three daughters. The eldest one decided in March 1992, at
the age of 33, to go to a counsellor, who helped her to "recover her
memories" of sexual abuse. She
then took three significant actions, which really got my attention. First, she told Colleen
and me, and other people, about her allegations. They included incest, that I
had repeatedly raped her, that I had arranged for her to be raped by a close
friend, that Colleen knew of this rape and condoned it, and that other men
had also abused her - all between the ages of one-and-a-half and about 14. Secondly, with the
counsellor's help, she made a claim for lump-sum compensation on our Accident
Compensation Corporation [ACC]. She was paid thousands of taxpayer dollars
and the counsellor was paid to give her extensive treatment - for a condition
she did not have. In true "recovered memory" fashion, her
allegations began to change. We later found out that her compensation claim
wasn't based on childhood abuse at all.
She had accused her second husband, and other men, of abuse as an
adult in the mid-late 1980's. Thirdly, she made a
complaint to the Police. Her allegations were totally in conflict with her
earlier versions and her compensation claim. They were completely new
allegations, about me alone, and only about her childhood years. They didn't
mention rape or incest, or alleged abuse by her second husband and others
when she was an adult. The Police investigated, but no charges arose. There
is much more to the story, of course. My initial reactions
were numbness and total disbelief. Colleen was devastated. Then the anger started.
Anger that my daughter could be so damned stupid. Anger at being condemned as
a sexual abuser, by a counsellor who attacked our integrity, and by a
Government system which failed to examine the evidence. Anger at being
declared "Guilty" without a trial and without an opportunity to
defend ourselves. To those of you who
have also been accused in this manner, I understand precisely what you've
been through. I'm sure you went on the same emotional roller-coaster. When the anger abated
enough, it allowed me to put my thinking cap back on. Rather than waste
mental energy on corrosive anger, I decided to study the matter, find the
source of the problem, and attack it. I made complaints. I wrote to
Ministers, the Chief Ombudsman, ACC, and the Commissioners for Privacy, Human
Rights, and Health & Disability. That has taken seven
years. Although they gave me some valuable and crucial evidence, they don't
have the courage to act on a monumental blunder. So three months ago, I took
the bull by the horns and filed serious criminal charges against the
counsellor and the daughter. At this point, I don't know yet whether the
Police will take action. ACC It was a great surprise
to learn that our daughter, and the counsellor, had been paid by ACC, so we
began to investigate. Our Accident
Compensation scheme was first introduced on 1 April 1974. It's been re-cast on three occasions -
1982, 1992, and again this year. It provides compensation for all sorts of
accidents - work-related, motor vehicle, sports, domestic, medical
misadventure, and so on. An accident claimed for
under the 1974 and 1982 Acts had a time limitation of one year, but did not
specifically include sexual abuse. The 1992 Act made sexual abuse a special
category with no time limit. Abuse is deemed to have occurred on the day the
claimant first obtained treatment - even if it allegedly happened 100 years
ago. ACC's counsellors are
allowed a paid, two-hour assessment period, to determine whether a client was
sexually abused, and to recommend a treatment plan. They cannot be paid the
$56 per hour beyond this, unless they declare that the client was abused.
I've yet to see a case in which a counsellor declared a client had not been
sexually abused. Section 8(3) of that
Act extended coverage to claimants who suffer nervous or mental shock as an
outcome of a criminal sexual offence listed in the Crimes Act. The Minister
for ACC, Murray McCully, has finally acknowledged in a letter to me last
month, that claimants - and therefore counsellors - must provide genuine
evidence of a criminal sexual offence. But the Corporation
does not seek any such evidence. It prefers to rely on the opinions of its
counsellors. And it's a secret process. The accused man has no input, no
chance to defend his reputation, and no right of appeal. Claimants don't even have to identify an
alleged abuser. Some men accused in ACC claims are not even aware they've
been identified. The Corporation claims
to use a "Balance of Probability" to decide eligibility for sexual
abuse compensation. It is a practical impossibility to reach a "Balance
of Anything" without access to at least two sets of differing
information. By some magical process, they make decisions on just one set -
the counsellor's opinion. The reality is that in the absence of credible,
corroborated, external evidence, it is impossible for a counsellor to know
whether a client was sexually abused, and therefore impossible for ACC to
know. Those two systemic
impossibilities disregard sensible policy administration, and ignore the
fundamental need for EVIDENCE. They have had significant fiscal and social
effects. In 1988, ACC handled
just 221 claims for sexual abuse and had fewer than 200 counsellors. By 1992,
the number of claims had climbed to 2173. By 1993, they had about 1,000
counsellors, and claims skyrocketed to 13,500. Claim numbers held an average
of nearly 10,000 for the next several years, and have now declined to about
half that number. ACC was typically
handing out $10,000 for each incident of abuse claimed. Although the 1992 Act abolished the lump-sum
compensation scheme, Government allowed a transition period of several years.
ACC paid out close to $900 Million for more than 100,000 extra claims. Many
of those were for alleged sexual abuse. It pays the counsellors between $6
and $9 Million a year. Those facts certainly got our attention. The total number of
sexual abuse claims from 1988 to 1998 is about 70,000, or some eight times
greater than the total number of all convictions, for all sexual offences. If
the allegations made by those 70,000 claimants adversely affected a circle of
family, friends and relations of just 15 other people, then over one million
of our small 3.7 million population has been affected. And that doesn't
include any allegations made outside of the ACC process. To put that in
perspective, if those results were transposed into your 19 million
population, you would have some 400,000 similar cases, and have an affected
population approaching Six Million. Counselling How then, did counsellors
decide that thousands of their clients were sexually abused? I want to make it clear
that I don't think all counselling is bad. My comments and criticisms are
specifically directed at Sex Abuse Counsellors who believe in "Recovered
Memory Therapy" and similar constructs, but they are equally applicable
to some Social Workers, Psychotherapists and Psychologists, as well as Rape
Crisis, the medical practitioners called Doctors for Sexual Abuse Care
[DSAC], the Children's and Young Persons Agency, various training
institutions, and our Accident Compensation Corporation. In one camp, those
debating "Recovered Memory Therapy" and its derivatives, are
seasoned academics, researchers and practitioners with impeccable
professional qualifications and track records. They argue persuasively and
sensibly against it, from a base of reliable, impartial science and competent
practice. We have heard from two such erudite speakers today. The other camp consists
of much less skilled therapists of one variety or another, driven more by
ideology than science. They have done many retrospective surveys of allegedly
abused women and claim to see the phenomenon in their daily work. But they
choose to rely on untested, uncorroborated data, collected from disturbed
clients. They argue from a base of uncontrolled observation and fatally
flawed methodology. It is a passionate
debate over misinformation and the misuse of science. Absent from the debate
are the people most affected by it - the accused parents and families. They
provide a vast, but largely untapped, body of evidence to contradict the
beliefs of therapists. The only way to determine whether memories
are true or false, is to examine tangible, corroborated EVIDENCE, but our
facts, our evidence, and our decades of recorded parental and family history
- and our integrity - have been largely ignored. Either we did abuse our
daughters, or we did not. There is no Middle Ground, and that is a principal
reason why we are here today. Genuine sexual abuse is
a reprehensible crime endemic in many societies. Even one case is too many,
but when thousands of virtually identical allegations suddenly arise, from
the same source, in a very short period of time, there is cause to doubt
their credibility. Allegations in We categorised the
allegations as being made: ·
By adult daughters exposed to counselling, ·
By teenagers seeking revenge against strict fathers, ·
By women seeking to avoid responsibility for rash
behaviour, ·
By female partners in child custody and access disputes, ·
And for reasons of blackmail, extortion, or vindictive
retribution. Our Minister of
Education, Nick Smith, has - only last month - publicly acknowledged that one
of three major factors in male teachers leaving, or failing to join, the
teaching profession, is the risk of false allegations of sexual abuse made by
school children. The common denominator
was that most allegations are made after intervention by a counsellor. I said I would speak
frankly, so let's get down to bedrock.
The public has a right to expect that anyone dealing with the complex
and emotionally-charged topic of sexual abuse has been trained with
scientific, ethical and testable material, and will employ methods which are
safe and effective. There is no place in this difficult area for junk-science
or snake oil. We found Counsellors in
There was no public or
professional scrutiny of what counsellors were taught. They indulged in pseudo-science and
belief-systems. They fostered the dangerous theories and methods expressed in
"The Courage to Heal" and similar rubbish-bag books. For example : ·
Repressed memory ·
Dissociation and Multiple Personalities ·
Satanic Ritual Abuse ·
Guided Imagery ·
Journal writing ·
Age regressionnd so on. Counsellors were guilty
of using "advocacy research", and had free reign to indulge in an
orgy of false and misleading information.
They made outrageous claims : Thousands of cases of
father-daughter incest (Rape Crisis claimed over 400 cases in 1997, but
nationally, there were just five prosecutions and four convictions for
incest.) Hundreds of thousands
of And, "Most sexual
abuse is never reported". If such abuse is real but goes unreported, how
do they know about it? Perhaps they are clairvoyant as well. A particular claim was
that "Only one in ten rapes are reported, and of those, only one in ten
go to court, and only one in ten of them get convicted" We challenged those
claims. Our rape-capable male population is about 1.2 Million males. Taken
over the 12-year period from 1986 -1997, Ministry of Justice statistics show
that for the crime of rape, there were 2,912 prosecutions and 1,405
convictions (48%). [avg = 117.083 pa] The "One in Ten" claim means
in real terms that NZ men supposedly committed over 1.4 million rapes in that
period. A cornerstone of
counselling is a belief that sexually abused women and children exhibit
certain "indicators" as "proof of abuse." They've
identified over 900 of them. Of course, any one of these
"indicators" applies to almost every person on the planet. But the
fact is that no reliable scientific evidence has yet been presented to show a
causal link between sexual abuse and any specific psychiatric or
psychological condition. "It's not our job
to be Detectives", they say, and "Believe the client - women and
children don't lie about abuse." So the client's metaphors and
narratives are taken as historical fact. However, Gentlemen,
"Believe the client" also means "Disbelieve the accused
man." No investigation, no due process, no witness evidence, no medical
evidence, no documentary evidence. Instead, assumption and hearsay - belief
and opinion. And that leads very directly to contaminated conclusions. By deciding a father
did sexually abuse his daughter - a serious criminal offence - they placed
themselves above the Justice system, and assumed the mantle of prosecutor,
judge and jury. We asked ourselves what
constitutional instrument gave counsellors the right, privilege or authority
to make those decisions, to condemn people as sexual abusers, and to wield
unbridled power to destroy families. No-one gave it to them
- they simply took it. They misled
and damaged our children by creating false allegations through malpractice,
ignorance and misguided ideology. For money, of course! So there were the two
main causes. The first was the misuse of our Accident Compensation
legislation and the financial gravy-train it provided for counsellors and
claimants. The second was the unfettered use by counsellors of unproven
theories, misguided beliefs, and unethical methods. With a problem of this magnitude and
nature, the best approach is to marshal the incisive and devastating weapons
of science, facts, evidence, and social opinion. COSA So where does COSA fit
into all this ? Dr Felicity
Goodyear-Smith, a medical practitioner and former Police Doctor, is a highly
competent medical researcher and prolific author. She began to notice in the
late 1980's that an increasing number of allegations of sexual abuse were
being found to be false. The theories and beliefs surrounding "repressed
memory" and its derivatives, had begun to surface in By the early 1990's,
she had been contacted by a growing number of people who claimed their adult
daughters had been to counselling and had made false allegations. Colleen and
I met her more or less by accident in late 1993 and had a meeting with her.
She had so many similar cases from all over the country, that we formed the
embryo idea of setting up an organisation to help such people. COSA was established in
May 1994. We began with about 20 Members.
Only a few months later, we had grown to over 100, and then doubled
and trebled. We were fielding calls from all around the country at the rate
of a least one new call every day. This cauldron of emotive and irrational
hysteria was being stirred by the counsellors. We set out to quell the fire with
reasoned argument and informed public and professional debate. Sanity and balance were needed. Our strategy was
firstly to give immediate and ongoing help to our members. We decided to produce a Newsletter and began
sending them out to members, politicians, lawyers, etc, and the news
media. We mailed hundreds every
month. A key task was to
educate the public, because they would become members of juries. We talked on
radio, did TV documentaries, gave interviews and presentations. We wrote
articles, Letters to Editors of newspapers and magazines, letters to
Ministers and many others. We mailed COSA Leaflets out to every GP, every
main Library, to criminal lawyers, and to every Citizen's Advice Bureau in
the country. We did research.
Felicity and her professional colleagues had papers published in some of the
most prestigious international professional Journals. She made a submission
on "recovered memories" to the Police, and attended local, national
and international conferences on medical, psychological and legal topics. Such was our workload,
that in November 1996, we registered two Branches, one in Once in a while, we'd
get a breakthrough. For example, the taxpayer-funded Mental Health Training
Service was conducting training courses for Sex Abuse Counsellors under an
approval from our NZ Qualifications Authority. A student became
alarmed by the nonsense being taught and loaned COSA the course material and
personal notebooks. They contained some of the worst rubbish I've ever
seen. Repressed memories. Multiple Personality Disorder. Dissociation. Radical feminist claptrap. Satanic Ritual Abuse - young girls
ritually impregnated and the babies born and murdered, their blood being
drunk, and so on. COSA Members began a
letter-writing campaign to the Unit Manager, and sent copies to the Ministers
of Education, Justice, Health and ACC. I got together with Dr Greg Newbold, a
Sociologist from Of course, similar
problems exist in other training facilities, and we are still tackling those.
However, students now have access to a wide range of credible literature, as
a counterbalance to the junk-science of previous years. Our Qualifications
Authority set up a panel of impartial professionals to review, monitor and
adjust the content of their training. I think it's fair to
say that counsellors in The
Message Although our work in NZ
isn't over yet, we have made significant progress, so I'd like to close by
leaving you with a few constructive suggestions, drawn from our COSA
experience. They are: ·
First - Publicly challenge unproven theories and beliefs,
flawed methods, and deficient public administration. ·
Second - Educate the lawyers, the doctors, the news media,
and the politicians. And educate the public. ·
Third - Target the training, examination and regulation of
counsellors by insisting on the transparency provided by public and
professional scrutiny. They must
be trained with scientific, ethical and testable material. They must pass
rigorous national examinations. They must operate under a regulated,
revokable, Licence to Practice. And they can only be allowed to use those
methods which are proven to be ethical, safe and effective. ·
Lastly - Counsellors confuse narrative and metaphor with
fact and reality. They are not
diviners of historical truth, nor are they clairvoyant. Demand that those who
make allegations produce tangible, credible EVIDENCE. In the vernacular,
ladies and gentlemen, it's a clear case of saying to the counsellors,
"Put up, or shut up." Closure President Mike and
Gail, and all of you present, thank you for your hospitality, and for
allowing me to give this presentation. In particular, we thank Boz & Connie
for their generosity in opening their home to us, helping with our travel,
and for making us feel so welcome - you are truly wonderful hosts. |
