A Napier based psychic (opens new window) has been convicted of indecent assault (opens new window). Craig Wright, called the Spirit Whisperer (opens new window), has been offering his services in NZ for several years, and has even worked on a pilot for a TV show with Sue Nicholson. Now he's been found guilty of indecent assault of a teenager after performing a "ritual cleansing". Craig's defence was that he puts his finger in someone's belly button to find out if they are possessed by an entity. When he asserted that the victim had this problem, he took him to another room to rid him of the spiritual attachment and that is when the assault took place.

This is one of those cases where, at first, regulation seems like it would be a good idea. A professional organisation to ensure that psychics are above board might seem like the kind of solution that would be needed for this problem, but of course regulation implies endorsement and credibility, neither of which we should be giving psychics. We've seen the same in this country with alternative medicine practitioners, where a lack of any defined scope of practice, acceptable procedures or code of conduct allows people to attempt to defend anything they do as part of their normal working process.

It would be good to have some method of policing these fraudsters without in any way endorsing their duplicitous businesses.