‘A national disgrace’: Decades of abuse in care saw 200,000 scarred for life

Wednesday, 24 July 2024

Royal Commission into Abuse in Care estimates that 200,000 vulnerable people faced abuse and neglect, including torture, rape and medical experimentation, in facilities and homes.

The report calls on the Government and churches to provide redress and compensation.

It criticises police, senior church and Government officials, and Crown lawyers for failing to hold abusers to account

From 1950 to 2019, the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care estimates that 200,000 vulnerable people - children, students, patients and new mothers - faced abuse and neglect, including torture, rape and medical experimentation, in facilities and homes they were meant to be cared in.

The report, as it describes early on, details “a national disgrace” which has killed and scarred generations of New Zealanders. About one in three people in care faced abuse, which “almost always started from the first day a person was placed in care”.

Although some survivors, such as Keith Wiffin - who pushed for decades to have the Government recognise this abuse - say 200,000 is likely an undercount. “Many of us have died,” Wiffin says. They were never able to tell their story.

The report calls on the Government and churches to provide redress and compensation, and criticises police, senior church and Government officials, and Crown lawyers for failing to hold abusers to account.

While the report is extremely thorough, it reveals the exact toll of abuse in care may still be unknown. After hearing accounts of people going missing and concerns about lives being lost and forgotten, the commission is calling for an independent investigation into unmarked graves at former social welfare and psychiatric facilities.

The commission heard submissions from 2400 survivors of abuse in care.

Its report proves that abusers were able to act with impunity by targeting vulnerable people who have been ostracised from mainstream New Zealand society. Māori, children from poor families, deaf people, Pasifika children, and intellectually and physically disabled people, have for decades been preyed upon. And their complaints have almost always been ignored.

While the commission believes the abuse was most rampant in the 1970s, it raises concern that little was done to stop that abuse from continuing to today. “Most of the factors that led or contributed to abuse and neglect during the inquiry period continue to persist,” it said.

To provide justice to those survivors, and prevent history repeating, the commission made more than 130 recommendations. It found successive failures across the public service, Government, police, legal profession, and churches.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has already confirmed the Government will abide by the recommendation that survivors of abuse in care are owed a formal apology from the Crown. That will take place in November.

But the commission is also calling for the Pope and Archbishop of Canterbury, alongside leaders of many religious groups including the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gloriavale, Salvation Army, Presbyterian and Methodist churches, to apologise. State and non-state organisations, including IHC, Blind Low Vision NZ, the Medical Council and others, must also show accountability, the commission said.

The commission took six years to conclude its investigation, and presented a 3000-page report to Parliament on Wednesday afternoon. Dozens of survivors of abuse in care gathered to see their experiences recorded and noted at Parliament.

How the Government will respond

Luxon said the Government would urgently look to provide redress, and work with survivors of abuse to establish a system to provide redress.

He said there would be an update on that later this year, and the Government recognised that many survivors were unwell or elderly.

The commission also recommended establishing a Ministry for Care and a national monitoring agency to ensure abuse did not continue.

It recommended legislative change, which would make it easier to hold abusers to account and for survivors to seek compensation through the courts.

Luxon said the Government would need time to consider those, but it would provide an update next year.

He said he had not considered the cost of redress, but said the state had a duty to provide redress for the abuse it inflicted.

The torture of children

At boot camps, borstals and “training facilities”, the commission finds children were routinely physically, psychologically and sexually abused. Staff at the facilities encouraged fighting and abuse between the children, and inflicted it themselves as punishment or for their own enjoyment.

As punishment, children at facilities such as Kohitere Training Facility faced “severe corporal punishment, sometimes inflicted with weapons and to the genitals”.

Similar played out at Whakapakari, a Government-funded boot camp on Aotea that was targeted at young Māori. Those tamariki were threatened with death.

“Mock executions” were common, tamariki witnessed people being held under the water as punishment, and everyone who was sent there reported being forced to dig their own graves.

“Once, when we weren’t digging fast enough, he pointed the gun at us,” a survivor, who was just nine years old at the time, told the royal commission.

The abuse of deaf and disabled people

The abuse of disabled people was so widespread that observers noted a phenomenon they called “the Kimberley Cringe”.

The Kimberley Centre, in Levin, was New Zealand’s largest specialist facility for people with intellectual disabilities.

“The Kimberley Cringe” described when survivors “cower and protect their head if they were approached quickly”.

The commission found disabled people were more likely than non-disabled people to have faced abuse and neglect in care.

The commission also found that predators targeted deaf children in schools to sexually abuse them.

The Education Department neglected generations of deaf children, taking them into care and then failing to provide adequate education. As punishment, they were often put into a solitary confinement - an issue which arose across most of the facilities where abuse occurred.

The abuse of Māori and Pasifika whānau

Across every facility, the commission noted that Māori were over-represented in abuse.

The abuse of Māori and Pasifika started from before they entered these facilities.

Māori and Pasifika were targeted by police and social agencies, with officers moving - often with no clear reasoning - to take children from families and move them into state “care”.

“Once in care, Māori survivors experienced harsher treatment across many settings,” the commission found. They faced racism and were obstructed, sometimes by use of violence, from using te reo or connecting with their whakapapa.

The impacts of abuse in care on Māori and Pasifika have had intergenerational impacts.

About a third of abuse in care survivors went on to commit crime.

Taken from their whānau, their iwi and hapū, many Māori, Pasifika and others who were in abused in state care formed the gangs New Zealand sees today. This led to further prejudice and state surveillance, impacting the generations born to those who were abused by the state.

The torture of people with mental illness

Luxon, on Wednesday, said the Government formally accepted that what happened at Lake Alice, a psychiatric hospital, was “torture”.

Lake Alice Hospital was a psychiatric facility, tasked with caring for adults and children with mental illness. It closed in 1999.

At the facility, patients were forced into work houses

The commission found that patients were subject to “electric shocks and injections of paraldehyde as punishment”.

Medical abuse occurred across New Zealand.

The commission reported, “lobotomies, sterilisation, forced adoptions, invasive genital examinations, over medicating, and experimental psychiatric treatments” were imposed as punishments and without consent.

The abuse of mothers

Pregnant woman and new mothers faced abuse in state-run maternity homes and faith-based facilities for unwed mothers, involving medical neglect and forced adoptions.

Stanford, who has read the entire report, said she found the reports from survivors from maternity facilities was particularly heartbreaking.

Across the country, women reported similar stories of being verbally abused, dehumanised, and forced to do unpaid work. They were fed very little, and some reported vomiting due to being fed rancid food.

Christine Hamilton, who survived at St Vincent’s Home of Compassion, told the commission she was forced to take narcotics at the facility. They sedated her without her consent, and when she awoke her child was gone.

“They had drugged me to take my little boy. I had always blamed myself for been so weak and not fighting to keep him,” she said.

Stanford said those stories were deeply confronting. “As a mother, stories around young unwed mothers who were deliberately underfed … and then they drugged them up and took their babies,” she recounted.