Doctors failed to speak up over inhumane treatment of children

The horrific treatment of children meted out at Lake Alice hospital was justified under the guise of ‘medical treatment’. Aaron Smale explains why.

After traversing the history of psychiatry, CIA experiments, patients with paranoid delusions and how Lake Alice psychiatric hospital fitted into it all, I’d saved the trickiest question for last.

I was interviewing Emeritus Professor John Werry, who had been the head of psychiatry at Auckland University for years, in his Mt Eden villa. At 93, he was also a contemporary of Dr Selwyn Leeks when the latter was in charge of the adolescent unit at Lake Alice hospital in the 1970s. But unlike Leeks, Werry was willing and able to talk.

I posed a question to Werry that went to the nub of the issue – was what Leeks did at Lake Alice criminal, particularly using electric shocks to punish children under the guise of treatment?

Werry didn’t say yes or no at first, preferring to say what should have happened. He said the process should have been that a complaint was made to the Medical Council, and it should have made a finding on Leeks’ practice. If his methods were deemed outside accepted medical practice, from there it should have gone to the police, he said.

But that is actually what happened, at least in part. I explained to Werry that a former patient of Leeks, Kevin Banks, made a complaint to both the police and the Medical Council in 1977. The complaints were focused on an incident where Leeks made him and four other boys electrocute an older boy who had raped them.

Werry was aghast. ‘‘That’s a criminal offence, that’s assault. Right. So I don’t know what the police are doing.’’

However, neither the Medical Council nor the police saw it that way at the time. Although Banks was interviewed by police and the council after he made formal complaints to both, nothing happened.

During the interview by the Medical Council in 1978, Banks asked if Leeks was present in the building and was told he wasn’t. He noticed microphones hanging from the ceilings of the room he was being interviewed in. As he was leaving, he ran into Leeks in the foyer, flanked by two men in suits who looked like lawyers.

‘‘I s... myself practically, I was terrified. It was only very, very fresh from that time. I’d only been out for a very short period of time, not even a couple of years.’’

To this day, Kevin Banks hasn’t heard anything from either the police or the Medical Council about his complaints.

Asked to explain themselves at the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, the Medical Council could not offer any explanation about the complaints – and there was more than one – made against Leeks because there weren’t any records.

However, the Medical Council did apologise. Aleyna Hall, the deputy chief executive, made a statement to the royal commission:

‘‘To the survivors of the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit, the Medical Council is sorry. We want to acknowledge the pain and suffering of all survivors who experienced abuse while in state care, including those at Lake Alice Hospital.

‘‘The Medical Council acknowledges the hurt that you have experienced and apologises for any actions that the Medical Council of the time should have taken but did not.

‘‘Due to the length of time that has passed since the complaints about Dr Leeks were made, and the incompleteness of the records which are available, it is with regret that the current Medical Council is unable to provide reasons for the decisions that were made in the past in relation to complaints of abuse or in relation to Dr Leeks.’’

She also added later that there is no way Leeks would have been allowed to continue to practise today.

The Medical Council never took any disciplinary action against Leeks while he was practising in New Zealand. Instead, in 1978 the council gave Leeks a certificate of good standing, and he went on to practise in Australia. He lived and worked in Melbourne, and would eventually be found liable in civil court for sexual assault against one of his adult patients.

For nearly 50 years the fig leaf that Leeks has hidden behind – and which police have generally accepted – is that what he did in electrocuting children was legitimate medical treatment.

The medical profession, including the Medical Council, has never been in a hurry to investigate that assertion, perhaps fearing that what it would find would bring the medical fraternity into disrepute.

But this argument was subjected to harsh criticism at the royal commission by expert witness Dr Barry Parsonson. Although Leeks was using terminology for recognised treatment methods, such as ECT and aversion therapy, his actual practice was a complete departure from what was understood by those terms.

Parsonson stated that: ‘‘Aversion therapy may have been what Dr Leeks thought he was using – he wasn’t. And I think they were sort of umbrella terms to sort of hide the fact that these young people were being given shocks.’’

Parsonson was asked about whether shocks to the genitals using an ECT machine could qualify as the psychiatric treatment called aversion therapy, which uses unpleasant stimuli to deter undesirable behaviour:

Q. ‘‘If electrodes are placed on a person’s groin or genitals to deliver a painful electric shock, is that electrical aversion therapy?’’

A. ‘‘No’’.

Q. ‘‘What is that?’’

A. ‘‘It’s a form of torture.’’

Q. ‘‘To your knowledge has that ever been used as aversion therapy, have you seen any research on that?’’

A. ‘‘. . . when I was teaching in psychology I maintained an interest in the literature, there was never any publication that would have included that. I mean the only people who did that were state organs of terror, namely the Gestapo is a good example.’’

Q. ‘‘That would give someone electric shocks to their genitals?’’

A. ‘‘Yes. I’ve read of people who received that sort of treatment from the Gestapo.’’

The other example he could have mentioned was the police in apartheid-era South Africa.

Dr David Baron, a psychiatrist now based in Melbourne, who worked in Sunnyside hospital in New Zealand in the 1970s, also gave expert evidence at the Lake Alice hearing.

He too was unimpressed with the notion that what Leeks did at Lake Alice was medical treatment.

‘‘I would have been horrified if I had known one of my contemporaries was routinely using unmodified ECT on children or adolescents. I would question what the purpose of such treatment was,’’ he said.

‘‘I was not aware of any electrical aversion therapy being used in any of the hospitals I worked at in England, Australia or New Zealand. I believe most of my professional contemporaries would have been horrified if we knew this was happening with children or adolescent patients.’’

One of the issues that arose in the commission’s hearing was that, if Leeks were to be charged, any trial would have relied on expert witnesses from the medical profession giving evidence against him, something which doctors are reluctant to do.

Police in 1977 relied on a report from one psychiatrist, of which Baron said: ‘‘If I had read it back then I would have been infuriated, because it was kind of a whitewash.’’

When it was put to Baron that it ‘‘smacked of the medical profession closing ranks’’, he agreed.

Doctors working in mental health were also protected by the provision in the 1969 mental health legislation that, as long as staff were carrying out treatment in good faith, they were protected from criminal and civil liability.

Werry says this legal protection means doctors, theoretically at least, could do anything they liked without facing consequences. ‘‘Can you believe it? I could chop off your head and, as long as I had a good reason for it, I cannot be prosecuted.’’

Aversion therapy may have been what Dr Leeks thought he was using – he wasn’t.