Lake Alice abuse group to take case to UN
KEN IRWIN/Sunday Age
SELWYN LEEKS: Disciplined over his practices and abuses in Australia.
Former patients who say they were abused while being treated at Lake Alice Hospital in the 1970s will take their case to the United Nations.
Police said today their investigation into treatment of patients at the hospital, near Marton in the Rangitkei, had come to a close with no criminal charges being laid against the man at the centre of complaints, Dr Selwyn Leeks.
Assistant Commissioner Malcolm Burgess said that, despite a lengthy investigation, police had decided there was insufficient evidence on which to mount a prosecution.
Dr Leeks headed the hospital's child and adolescent unit, which closed in the late 1970s, before heading to Australia to continue practising.
He was accused of punishing patients at Lake Alice with electric shocks (ECT) and painful drug injections.
The police inquiry was made more difficult by the delay in having these matters investigated, Mr Burgess said.
"These events happened over 30 years ago. Some witnesses have died, others were unable to accurately recall events to the level of detail required, some records and original files that may have assisted the inquiry have been lost or destroyed."
A former patient and founder of the group Survivors of Lake Alice, Paul Zentveld, told Radio New Zealand they could not take their case to the UN until the police had closed their investigation.
"So now we can move forward."
Mr Zentveld said he underwent 92 ECT over five years.
"And each session is not just once, there's like three sessions in each one."
He said he was also tortured for wetting the bed.
"The medical knowledge was just not there and we paid for it in the way of pain."
The group was taking their case to the UN because it was about "torture to children".
They wanted accountability and justice for those subjected to the abuse at the hospital, Mr Zentveld said.
Wellington lawyer John Edwards, who represented a large number of patients in the 1990s and is still involved in the issue, said it would have been difficult for the police to bring individual prosecutions.
"There's a number of very difficult aspects to bringing a prosecution - one being the availability of evidence over such a long time. You've got difficulties with the frailty of some of the patients and lack of documentation."
There was also a hurdle with the Mental Health Act 1969, which provided an immunity for anything that was treatment, Mr Edwards said.
"If Dr Leeks could raise a doubt that what he was doing was a form of treatment, there would not be a prosecution."
However, Mr Edwards said that by the standards of his contemporaries, Dr Leeks' practices were "way out of whack".
In 2001, the Government apologised and paid compensation to a group of former patients of Dr Leeks' unit.
It later extended this to a second group, bringing to $10.7 million the total paid to 183 people.
A special forum heard accounts of ill-treatment suffered by patients between 1940 and 1992.
Its report said 493 people came to the forum, most of them former patients with tales of the neglect and abuse they suffered, either at the hands of other patients or staff members.
The forum was set up after several former patients went public with accounts of their miserable lives in the hospitals.
The forum's report did not identify any of the former patients and did not publish individual accounts of life in any of the hospitals, but it did present the common themes it said had emerged.
These included:
* many had been afraid of other patients or staff, and had suffered or witnessed physical or sexual abuse;
* they said staff had been callous, threatening or abusive, and they were often told they would never recover, never get a job or have children;
* most felt they had little choice about the treatment they received, and said they were cajoled or bullied into agreeing to have electric shock treatment; and
* those who were in the hospitals as children or adolescents described their desolate lives. Many said they had not known why they were there.
- NZPA
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