Allegations of Abuse by NZ Police
	peterellis Home / police allegations / Rickards, Shipton, Schollum vs Jane Doe Page 7 - Further Reaction to Not Guilty Verdict
	The Dominion Post March 8 2007 Have you ever had group sex? Opinion by Rosemary McLeod It's often not the highly polished, prepared statement that stops you in your tracks so much as the spontaneous, off-the-cuff remark. So it was that as the police sex trial ended last week, the quip of a Queen's Counsel grabbed my attention. As Clint Rickards, suspended assistant commissioner and Auckland district commander, was asked if group sex was an appropriate activity for a serving police officer, his lawyer John Haigh QC butted in to say the question was irrelevant and, "half of New Zealand has done it". The question could not be more relevant, actually, and his claim that half the country has had group sex could hardly be more debatable. Who was he talking about? Himself? His wife? His in-laws? I don't think so. Or was he alluding to a different social class from the legal profession in which, as a QC, he's a luminary? Did he mean that lesser folks are at it in tag wrestling teams, up and down the shearing sheds and office blocks of the country? I am intrigued. Throughout my life, including the early 1980s, when this last sexual encounter was said to have occurred, I have known women who've been extremely candid about sex. Our discussions have been variously hysterical and forensic: promiscuous women, especially, are often clinical in their approach. There've been revelations of startling and ingenious activities, but I've only ever known one woman admit to having voluntarily had group sex. It wasn't that such an admission would have been so embarrassing that people would have lied, either. It's more that we seemed to tacitly agree that it was probably not worth the trouble, let alone the sheer embarrassment, and her field work confirmed this. She had felt, she reported, like a mere object. The men, she said, had loudly egged each other on, like barracking rugby fans, and she'd felt compelled to give them a lecture afterwards on what is, and isn't, pleasurable for women. Well, she was a feminist, you understand. I doubt the men were interested. Women are incidental to these male bonding rites. And unlike Mr Haigh, I don't believe group sex is so common it maybe doesn't matter all that much. What did he mean by his suggestion? I realise that trial lawyers are high on testosterone after a victory, especially one as significant as this, but Mr Haigh's comment seemed unusually crass in the circumstances. It opened up, though, what was really at stake in this trial and those preceding it. It's called standards, on which public confidence is based. What standards of conduct do we expect from police – or QCs or journalists, for that matter? What do we think of adult men in positions of public responsibility who have group sex with girls, whether they're willing, reluctant or otherwise. Are we comfortable with it? Do we believe that women lie about these things? Why would they? Would they really do it for obscurely racist reasons, as Mr Rickards' supporters have suggested? If the women regretted so bitterly what happened, so many years later, that they'd go to trial, what does that suggest about the incidents they described? Does it indicate they were what Mr Rickards described in another trial as a "happy occasion". "We laughed, we giggled. It was a normal sexual relationship"? So normal was it, apparently, that the woman who "giggled" and two others, in separate trials involving Mr Rickards' friends, were prepared to risk the humiliation of "not guilty" verdicts to tell their stories in open court. That doesn't sound so "normal" to me unless they are all mad, in which case the question of consent is even more of an issue. When I was a young journalist, I was reluctantly made police reporter of a newspaper. Furious, I made it clear that I would not attend police briefings and would not drink with the boys in the police bar, ever, to "make contacts". I was not smart about men; quite the reverse; but I knew what other female reporters had had to contend with, and I'd heard of what policewomen had to tolerate, too, to gain grudging acceptance in that world. Maybe that makes me more sympathetic to the complainants in these cases than I ought to be, but I make no apology for that. I also know two women who've been pack-raped. Last I heard, it had devastated their lives.