'Justice remains to be done' over Lake Alice
"Lake Alice Hospital is cleared, but valuable doctor lost" read the headline in January 1978. If psychiatrist Selwyn Leeks thought that was the last word on abuse claims in the adolescent unit he had headed, he was wrong.
Not just wrong then, but wrong now, because 32 years later those who accuse him show no sign of backing down on their claims.
In 1977, police investigated a complaint that three years earlier staff had given two boys, then aged 12 and 13, electric shocks on the legs using the same equipment used for electro-convulsive therapy, or ECT.
It was claimed the painful shocks were used as a form of punishment.
Police spent seven months looking at allegations of mistreatment at the hospital before issuing a brief statement saying they had found no evidence of criminal misconduct.
Last week police again dismissed complaints, this time from 40 people who wanted criminal charges laid for acts committed at the unit, and not just by Dr Leeks. The complaints had stacked up over many years. Some were dismissed in 2005 only to be revived when more surfaced, but the result was the same. A complaint to the United Nations is now planned.
Dr Leeks, now aged about 80, left New Zealand a week before the result of the 1977-78 police inquiry was made public. It was reported that he had gone to Melbourne to work as a child psychiatrist.
At the time Mason Durie, then director of the Palmerston North Hospital psychiatric unit, said it was a "major loss" and that Dr Leeks had borne the brunt of a lot of bad publicity and "snide innuendo".
"He was surprised and disappointed at the publicity. It certainly did play a part in his decision to leave," Dr Durie was quoted as saying.
Dr Leeks had been working for the Palmerston North Hospital Board since January 1971 when he had returned from studying overseas.
Kevin Banks, now 51, was sent to Lake Alice Hospital as a 12-year-old for bad behaviour, and because there was nowhere else for children like him. He spent nearly three years at Lake Alice under Dr Leeks' care.
"A lot of people have called him a sadist and I believe that could be true." At first he saw Dr Leeks as a quietly spoken father-figure. "But then you would realise what a prick he was."
Dr Leeks lived in the hospital grounds near the adolescent unit and the children would see him coming and going. He made a regular Friday visit to the unit but also came at other times to get his "shock box" to administer ECT in other units or to children.
Mr Banks said Dr Leeks taught unqualified staff to use ECT and it was they who would use it on the children's legs and genitals.
"He was around enough to know what was happening," Mr Banks said.
Dr Leeks gave it only on the head, sometimes using a muscle relaxant. "He has given me a lot of nightmares. My head is not where it should be."
Mr Banks complained in the 1970s. He gave evidence to an inquiry and thought he was believed. The unit closed after Dr Leeks left in 1978, but nothing else was done.
In Parliament in May 1977 an MP presented the statement of a professional person who had direct contact with staff and patients at the unit for three years. The witness said that at the end of each week the psychiatrist responsible for the unit visited, met staff and discussed the behaviour of the children.
"Children whose conduct had been difficult or unacceptable were on this basis selected for ECT treatment as an aversive form of punishment, and so perceived by the children concerned."
But Dr Leeks said the allegation was "arrant rubbish". He thought the terms treatment and punishment became "awfully mixed up at times".
His public statements about the claims made against him have been infrequent. On legal advice he refused to be interviewed for the latest police inquiry.
In 2001-02 the government paid out more than $10 million and apologised to 180 former patients of the adolescent unit after a private inquiry into the patients' claims.
In 2001, Dr Leeks told The Dominion the unit had done the best it could with the staff it had. Any further inquiry would be "more of the same", based on what happened in 1977.
"I guess being the one in charge I'm the obvious one to hunt down.
"But of the four or five hundred children that came into the unit ... some were very discontented with what happened and there is a lot that's been said that's not true."
In 2002, he told a reporter he was not bothered that complaints were laid with police. "I'm not worried. This has all been dealt with before. And I'm still practising." At the time he was running a private psychiatric practice in Melbourne.
But pressure from the College of Psychiatrists was mounting. The college called on anyone adversely affected to complain to the professional disciplinary bodies for psychiatrists in either New Zealand or Victoria.
"The prime minister and the health minister in New Zealand have seen fit to apologise and to compensate the former `patients' of the service operated by Dr Leeks," the college's executive director, Craig Glenroy Patterson, said.
"And yet despite everything they have been through and all the allegations being made publicly about their experiences, no investigation into the role played by this doctor in the alleged practices has been successfully completed."
ON the eve of the long-awaited hearing into his professional conduct in 2006, Dr Leeks stopped all forms of medical practice and undertook not to start again, anywhere. On that basis the Victoria Medical Practitioners Board did not proceed with the hearing.
In 2008 he lost an appeal against a $55,000 award to a woman a court accepted he had sexually assaulted in 1979-80. He was photographed outside court but has since gone to ground and could not be contacted for this article.
Steve Greene, executive director of Citizens Commission on Human Rights, said that at least nine complainants had not been interviewed by police as part of their latest inquiry.
The commission had also sent "screeds" of evidence to police, but had been told it was not wanted, Mr Greene said. It would now refer victims' statements to the United Nations. "The key thing about this is justice is not being seen to be done."
- The Dominion Post
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