A New Zealand government commission on Wednesday called the psychological, physical, and sexual abuse perpetrated over five decades against more than 200,000 people, including minors, who were in the care of public or religious institutions in the country a “national shame.”
The Royal Commission into Care Abuse, set up in 2018, today published 138 recommendations in its 3,000-page final report, which includes testimony from more than 2,400 survivors, including babies, children, Māori, and people with disabilities.
One such story is that of PM, who was raped along with a fellow student by a supervisor at the Whakapakari youth program on Great Barrier Island in the late 1980s, when he was just 12. ‘He followed us with his gun and said, ‘Get on the fucking bed’. He put the gun on the counter and raped us both. It was too much pain for me, and I started screaming and freaking out, and he smashed my head into the fucking pillow. And I was in shock. We had to stay there all night. What happened in that hut was putrid,’ he said.
Ann Thompson, another survivor whose mother gave her up to an orphanage in Christchurch shortly after her birth in 1941 following rape, recalls being beaten until she was bleeding and insulted by nuns who repeatedly told her that she had been ‘born in a sewer’. She was also subjected to all kinds of abuse by her older sisters, according to her testimony, which was recorded in the Royal Commission’s final report.
‘This report on New Zealand’s dark history is disturbing and difficult to read, but we owe it to the survivors who so bravely shared their stories to confront what happened,’ said Commission Chair Coral Shaw as she launched the report.
The commission called in its final report on public and religious institutions to be held accountable for the “widespread” abuse of thousands of babies, children, and adults, including from the Maori ethnic minority, as well as people with disabilities, according to the summary of the document.
The Commission also called for righting past wrongs by publicly apologizing and giving survivors greater access to the legal system, among other measures.
You are heard and believed
The final report also calls on New Zealand to urgently address the “national shame” caused by the abuse of more than 30% of the 655,000 children, young people, and adults who were cared for by public and religious institutions during the period under investigation, which spans from 1950 to 1999.
‘We will never know the real number,’ said the report, which included sexual, emotional, medical, physical, and mental abuse, severe exploitation, and neglect, as well as racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic attitudes by perpetrators in positions of power towards people in need of support.
For his part, New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said today that the Wellington Parliament ‘accepts, with profound sadness and regret’, the final report of the Royal Commission, which is a body with special powers created by the government for serious matters of public interest.
“I cannot take away your pain, but I can say this: ‘You are heard and you are believed,'” Luxon said, according to a transcript of her speech posted on the government’s website, that she thanked survivors, some of whom were present at the ceremony to present the final report, “for their exceptional strength, their incredible courage, and their honesty” in reporting the abuse.
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