Le Page said that none of the behaviours described by Zelas were specific to sexual abuse. Le Page said that in his experience, children and adults who had been abused usually expressed distress when recounting their experiences of abuse. The complainants showed little or no distress when describing acts of abuse during their interviews and when later testifying in court. Le Page also testified that children couldn't remember events experienced at a very young age when there was a long delay between the event and the attempt to recall it. Children couldn't remember events, even traumatic events, that had occurred at two or three years of age when there was a long delay, he claimed. The alleged abuse at the creche had occurred when children were at these ages. Conviction In June 1993, Ellis was convicted of 16 counts of sexual offences involving seven children. The charges on which he was found guilty were that he had urinated on two children, made one masturbate him, put his penis in the mouths of three of them, engaged in indecent touching of three, and put his penis or an unknown associate's penis against the vagina or anus of three. The following year he was acquitted of three charges involving the oldest complainant, who retracted her allegations and said her original statement was what her mother told her to say. Treatment in prison Corrections officers who sat through the trial with Ellis did not think he was guilty and let that be known at Paparua prison. As a result, Ellis was not subject to any ill-treatment by staff or inmates in prison. Ellis refused to attend parole board hearings while in prison because he would have to confess to the crimes in order to argue for early release. Reliability concerns Moral panic In the years preceding the first allegation of abuse against Ellis, there had been a number of high profile child abuse cases in Christchurch involving "highly suspect interviews of children", "mistaken mass diagnosis of children" and other "highly questionable claims". The case has also been linked with the day-care sex-abuse hysteria, a moral panic about alleged sexual abuse and Satanic ritual abuse that originated out of California in 1982 and that existed throughout the 1980s. It has also been cited as a major cause in the decline in the number of male teachers in New Zealand schools. From September 1991 (two