Over 250,000 minors, adults abused in New Zealand’s state, faith-based care

WELLINGTON, New Zealand: Up to a quarter of a million children, young people and vulnerable adults were physically and sexually abused in New Zealand’s faith-based and state care institutions in the past several decades, a public inquiry revealed on Wednesday.

An interim report by the Royal Commission of Inquiry into historical abuse of children in state care estimated that up to 256,000 people were abused between 1950 and 2019.

This accounts for almost 40% of the 655,000 people in care during that period.

“The hurt and anguish that has been caused in New Zealand’s history is inexcusable,” said Minister for the Public Service Chris Hipkins, who described the report as a “difficult read”.

“All children in the care of the state should be safe from harm, but as the testimony sets out all too often the opposite was true.”

 No one spared

The report said most abuse survivors were aged between five and 17, but some were as young as nine months and as old as 20. Most were abused over a five to 10 years period.

The abuse included physical assault and sexual abuse, with staff in some psychiatric institutions forcing male patients to rape female patients. It also included the improper use of medical procedures including electric shocks on genitals and legs, improper strip searches and vaginal examinations, and verbal abuse and racial slurs.

“Sometimes I’d have shock treatment twice a day,” said Anne, who at 17 was placed in a psychiatric institution in 1979.

“The records (said) I went blind, then they gave me shock treatment again that night,” she told the inquiry.

Dark Chapter

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the Royal Commission in 2018, saying the country needed to confront “a dark chapter” in its history, and later expanded it to include churches and other faith-based institutions.

The report said the likelihood of children and young people abused in faith-based or religious homes ranges from 21 to 42%.

“On any assessment, this is a serious and long-standing social problem that needs to be addressed,” the report said, adding there was evidence that abuse continued today.

The report comes after private and public redress hearings where survivors bravely narrated harrowing accounts of physical and sexual abuse.

One Maori survivor, Peter, told the inquiry he drove a car off a cliff in an attempt to suicide to escape the abuse.

“I didn’t wanna live anymore. I went over a cliff and smashed head-on into a bank. Again, if anybody just stopped and looked at why, they would have figured something out, but they didn’t,” he said.

The Catholic Church in Aotearoa New Zealand said it would study the report to learn how to deal with complaints and prevent abuse.

Related story: Witnesses testify before New Zealand child abuse commission

The interim report comes after private and public redress hearings where survivors bravely narrated harrowing accounts of abuse, while experts, lawyers and state officials described their experiences.

Keith Wiffin, a survivor who was sent to state care when he was 10 years old, told a newspaper that the number of abused cited by the report was “a truly mind-boggling figure, especially when you consider for much of that period the country’s population wasn’t much more than three million”.

“I’m shocked by it and I think the nation will be as well,” Wiffin said.

Indigenous Maori children suffered the most

The report acknowledged that Indigenous Maori children probably suffered the most, as 81% of children abused in care are Maori, while 69% of the children in care are Maori.

It said some faith-based institutions sought to “cleanse”, through sexual and physical abuse, the cultural identity from Maori people in care.

Read more: Largest child abuse scandal in German history: Two convicted as police ‘failures’ probed

Thousands of Maori people protested across New Zealand last year, calling for an end to the practice of taking at-risk children away from families and placing them in state care.

Critics of the practice have said the process is racially skewed against the Maori and is a legacy of colonisation.

Neighbouring Australia delivered a national apology in 2017, after a five-year inquiry into child sexual abuse revealed thousands of cases of sexual misconduct largely committed at religious and state-run institutions.