New Zealand Abuse in Care Report Speaks of ‘National Catastrophe’
More than 200,000 people are estimated to have been abused by state and religious organizations in New Zealand that had been entrusted with their care, according to the final report from a landmark independent inquiry released on Wednesday.
The abuse included sexual assault, electric shocks, chemical restraints, medical experimentation, sterilization, starvation and beatings, said the report from the Royal Commission of Inquiry Into Abuse in Care. Many of the victims were children who had been removed from their families and placed in state, religious or foster care.
“For some people this meant years or even decades of frequent abuse and neglect,” the report said. “For some it was a lifetime; for others it led to an unmarked grave.”
In a statement accompanying the release, Coral Shaw, the inquiry’s chair, described the abuse as an “unthinkable national catastrophe.”
The results of the investigation were presented to New Zealand’s Parliament on Wednesday.
“I cannot take away your pain, but I can tell you this: Today you are heard and you are believed,” Prime Minister Christopher Luxon told survivors at a news conference. “The state was supposed to care for you, to protect you, but instead it subjected you to unimaginable physical, emotional, mental and sexual abuse.”
Mr. Luxon said New Zealand’s government would formally apologize to survivors in November and he committed to implementing a redress process. He did not answer questions on Wednesday about how much he expected it would cost to compensate victims, but the inquiry indicated that the total could reach billions of dollars.
The inquiry, established in 2018 by the New Zealand government, involved interviewing nearly 2,500 survivors as it examined orphanages, foster care systems, mental health facilities and other forms of care that were charged with supporting 655,000 people from 1950 through 2019. The inquiry’s leaders described it as the widest-ranging examination of its kind in the world.
The report noted that most children in care were Indigenous Maori, even though the group makes up a minority of the country’s overall population of five million people, and said that “Maori were often targeted because of their ethnicity.”
Beyond the 200,000 people estimated to have been abused, the report said countless others had suffered neglect. “The true number will never be fully known as records of the most vulnerable people in Aotearoa New Zealand were never created or were lost and, in some cases, destroyed,” the report said, referring to the country in Maori and English.
The inquiry found that even when abuses by government and religious leaders were discovered, the leaders “were rarely held to account for their actions or inactions, which emboldened them to perpetrate further abuse.”
Among the inquiry’s 138 recommendations were calls for public apologies from the pope, the archbishop of Canterbury, and New Zealand’s police commissioner and its top civil servant. It also urged the government to overhaul the country’s no-fault accident compensation program to provide tailored support for survivors of abuse.
The report prompted New Zealand’s Catholic, Methodist and Anglican churches to promise change. “We will ensure that action follows our review of the inquiry’s findings,” Steve Lowe, president of the New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference, said in a statement. “We owe it to survivors,” the Anglican Church said in another statement.
The report follows decades of complaints from survivors. “Survivors repeatedly called for justice but were unheard, disbelieved, and ignored,” according to the report. “Significant resources have been used to deny survivors their voice and to defend the indefensible. This must stop.”
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