Patient abused by Leeks awarded $A55,000

29.08.2006
Wanganui Chronicle

A VICTORIAN County Court judge last week awarded a woman $A55,000 in damages after finding that psychiatrist Selwyn Leeks had taken advantage of her for his sexual gratification.

The woman was a psychiatric patient, The Melbourne Age reported.

Dr Leeks headed the Child and Adolescent Unit at Lake Alice Hospital, near Bulls, from 1972-77.

Australian judge Jim Duggan said the controversial doctor’s behaviour was reprehensible and a gross dereliction of duty.

The patient, whose history includes physical and sexual abuse and psychiatric illnesses, saw Dr Leeks about eight times in 1979 or 1980.

During the consultations, which became increasingly more sexual, he fondled her breasts and digitally penetrated her.

Dr Leeks claimed he had no recollection of the woman and denied any sexual impropriety.

But Judge Duggan said: “… this was a most serious series of assaults.

“The defendant grossly abused his position and took advantage of a particularly vulnerable patient.”

Dr Leeks, 77, recently undertook not to practise any more, avoiding an inquiry by the state’s medical board into allegations that he had used electric shock treatment to punish children and adolescents in New Zealand in the 1970s.

The board had been investigating the electric-shock allegations for seven years.

But after Dr Leeks promised to give up practising on the eve of a board hearing last month, the board wrote to 16 New Zealand complainants saying it had decided not to proceed with a formal hearing into his professional conduct.

RESEARCHER WELCOMES DECISION

Former Wanganui man Victor Boyd said the Australian finding against Dr Leeks was further evidence that what he was doing at Lake Alice Hospital in the 1970s was not medicine. Mr Boyd now lives in Auckland and is a researcher for the Citizens’ Commission on Human Rights, an organisation started by the Church of Scientology which investigates mental health treatments.

“The judge believed one of his former victims,” Mr Boyd said.

“What she said was taken seriously. It’s the first time that has happened.

“It’s a pity New Zealand authorities didn’t do a proper investigation in 1977. Instead he went off to Australia with a certificate of good standing from the Medical Council.”

New Zealand police were still interviewing some of Dr Leeks’ patients from the 1970s, and the cases of 34 of them are being reviewed. As a result, the psychiatrist may eventually be extradited to New Zealand to face charges. One former New Zealand patient has made allegations of sexual misconduct, but the bulk of New Zealand complaints are to do with physical abuses.

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