Royal commission shows abuse on an industrial scale

Wednesday, 24 July 2024

The Royal Commission of Inquiry into abuse in state care, the most complex and long-running public inquiry in New Zealand’s history, has detailed a litany of pervasive and systemic abuse.

Luke Malpass is politics, business and economics editor for The Post.

OPINION: It was abuse on an industrial scale, either administered by or contracted out by the state across many governments, government departments and generations of clerical leadership.

According to Whanaketia, the final report of the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care, of the estimated 655,000 young people and adults in care between 1950 and 2019, an estimated 200,000 children were abused. That’s 30%.

“The state and leaders of faith-based institutions knew, or should have known, about the abuse and neglect that was happening. They failed not only in their duty to keep people in their care safe from harm, but they also failed to hold abusers to account,” the report says.

The Lake Alice institution, specifically identified by the Government as a place where survivors were tortured.

First, some quick sums. If every survivor of abuse over the period studied were still alive in 2019, they would make up 4% of the population. Most of the report covers the period 1950-1999. At that time, if most survivors were still alive they would have made up between 5% and 6% of the population. Many, tragically, are not.

Whatever the exact percentage, it is huge. And an indictment on a culture of secrecy, buck-passing and blind respect for authority and ignorance. A legacy of total shame.

Lead Coordination Minister for the Government’s Response to the Royal Commission’s Report into Historical Abuse in State Care and in the Care of Faith-based Institutions Erica Stanford and PM Christopher Luxon hold a press conference prior to the report being tabled.

The report paints a picture of a system of residential facilities, hospitals and foster homes where children were regularly beaten, sexually abused by carers, staff, foster parents or other students, sometimes at the behest of carers. At Lake Alice Psychiatric hospital, residents were tortured.

Māori children in particular were the subject of trenchant racism both personal and institutional. They were taken from whānau and sometimes literally had their culture beaten out of them. They were massively over-represented in the numbers.

Over the decades there have been many many carers in the system that opened their homes to children or worked in places where children and young people’s needs were put first and where they were loved, cared for and nurtured; that is true in both state-run and faith-based settings. But the Royal Commission is about the estimated 30% of children and young people for whom that was not the case.

A patient turns his hand to craftsmanship at Lake Alice workshops, November 21, 1971. Writes Luke Malpass, “The weak and defenceless with weak social bonds were preyed upon.”

For those unfortunate souls, the report paints a picture of a system that gave cover for a range of thugs, pederasts, chancers, sadists as well as garden variety bullies. In religious institutions, abusers used faith and good works as an outward cover, while inwardly using the fear of God to manipulate victims.

The common threads were a lack of control, supervision and oversight over those who ran and worked in the homes, or became foster carers. This, in part, reflected a society at the time in which people with disabilities, behavioural disabilities or who were neurodivergent were stigmatised, institutionalised and sometimes effectively abandoned.

As with institutional abuse around the world, the weak and defenseless with weak social bonds were preyed upon. In some cases it was deaf students who literally couldn’t speak.

One concerning case highlighted was that of a boot camp on Great Barrier Island. The Government has just reintroduced boot camps. While there are far more likely to be safeguards in this day and age, the argument that it'll be better because it's being done by different and better people misses the point of the Commission’s work.

This took six years to complete and is admirably thorough. It took testimony from more than 2400 people and produced detailed accounts from survivors and others. A crucial importance of the process was survivors being heard, listened to, believed and taken seriously.

Occupational therapy at Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital, Marton. October 01, 1967.

However, the report itself appeared to be written by committee and attempted to squeeze too many extraneous matters, jargony language, and relationship of events to The Treaty of Waitangi into the report.

The Commissioners were required to do this - it was part of the terms of reference and reflected the approach of the previous government - but it did little to improve the report. Overlaying a bunch of abstractions had the effect of bureaucratising the report, at times burying key facts beneath laboured and confusing prose.

And more's the pity. It had the effect of obscuring the evil deeds done by evil people in an institutional framework that on the most charitable reading ignorantly enabled what was going on.

Nevertheless, once that is waded through, what is detailed is shocking in its detail and thoroughness. There are a massive 138 recommendations for the Government to digest and to decide how to proceed.

This will involve legislative change, regulatory change, possibly a new ministry, and almost certainly compensation.

The report claims that, “based on the estimated number of people abused and neglected in care between 1950 and 2019, the total cost is estimated to be between $96 billion and $217 billion”.

A bird’s eye view of Lake Alice psychiatric hospital.

Some of the recommendations read like a horror story, such as recommendation 19 which suggests a group be set up to explore unmarked graves at former psychiatric and psychopaedic hospitals and social welfare systems.

Some will carry fiscal repercussions: it recommends harm payments to whānau who had to look after survivors, a special police unit to investigate all current and historical abuse claims. Minister responsible Erica Stanford said that getting a redress system up is a priority.

A new CareSafe agency and eventually ministry for the care system is proposed.

There are lots of recommendations around policies and processes including keeping records of neglect and abuse in a centralised register for 75 years.

The vast majority of the recommendations, appropriately, revolve around processes and policies within organisations charged with care.

Now it will be a slow burn to see how the Government responds. There will be an apology delivered in November.

But the real test, and this will be one that takes up this Government’s time and several others, will be how and how much victims are compensated.

After the comparable Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was released in 2017, a national redress scheme was created, which organisations were asked to be a part of and contribute to.

It has so far paid out over $A1.4 billion to more than 15,000 people; an average of about $A88,000. There is a $A150,000 cap. It isn’t much for having one’s life ruined. Some Australian survivors have done significantly better through the courts.

How the Government works through any comparable scheme in New Zealand will be fraught. As with all governments, it will need to balance justice and fairness with cost.

Overall, this Royal Commission’s findings should lead to the long and hard work of looking at all of New Zealand’s care system, both residential and foster homes.

This is a busy Government. But this is a case where the urgent cannot crowd out the important. The most vulnerable children in society end up in the care of the state, and this cannot be allowed to happen again.