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A young man who had suffered “extreme” psychological and physical abuse drove a car over a cliff, crashing head-on into a bank, in an attempt to kill himself.
No one at the New Zealand state children’s home she had escaped from cared or even acknowledged her call for help.
Instead, as punishment for the act, he was beaten and beaten with a strap, forced to do thousands of push-ups and run holding a 44-gallon drum.
The culture of violence within children’s homes and psychiatric institutions was transmitted by both staff and residents, making escape impossible.
The physical abuse generally included “welcome parties”; who saw the children beaten the first night, followed by regular and ongoing physical and sometimes sexual abuse.
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The staff would encourage the behavior and delegate authority to older children, which continued and allowed the practice to flourish.
Similar accounts have been heard from hundreds of the 1,900 survivors and 350 witnesses who have registered with the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Abuse in State Care.
Allegations of abuses in state and religious institutions have been described as “cruel, inhuman and degrading” by the commission.
The youths were forced to undergo electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) without anesthesia, faced prolonged and unjustified periods in solitary confinement, were trapped in physical restraints, and were subjected to sexual assault, rape, inappropriate vaginal and nude searches, verbal abuse and racism. abuse.
An openly homosexual woman told the commission that she was taken to a psychiatric institution in 1979, when she was 17 years old, for “treatment.”
KITCHEN / ROBERT THINGS
A survivor of abuse in state care, Keith Wiffin, said that serious systemic failures and failures led to the scale and magnitude of the abuse that he calls a tragedy.
There, she endured ECT until she was temporarily blind. Once his sight was restored, he was shocked again.
Within similar institutions, young people were forced to take tablets, pressured, and given injections and ECT without general anesthesia, all of which were also associated with physical and sexual abuse.
After regaining consciousness, the survivors woke up to find people sexually assaulting them.
Patients were regularly taken to male areas of an institution, where they were immobilized and / or drugged and raped by male staff. Sometimes male patients were also encouraged or forced to rape them.
Drug addiction and extensive use of ECT made it difficult for anyone to report the abuse because it left their minds “stunned” or “destroyed.”
Survivors distressed by seeing the abuse and who tried to intervene were punished.
“They gave you a quick kick in the butt and told you to sit down or to tie a piece of rope around your private parts and tie it to a chair so that you would not move,” said Brian, a survivor from a mental hospital. .
Since February 2018, survivors have shared their experiences with the commission.
In an interim report of the findings released yesterday, as part of the five-year investigation, more gruesome details were made public of the “wide and disturbing” range of abuse experienced by children in the care of the state, mainly between 1950 and 1999. .
LAWRENCE SMITH / Things
Judge Coral Shaw, president of the Royal Commission of Inquiry on abuse in care.
This included girls and boys homes, juvenile justice residences, foster homes, psychiatric and disability care, and different types of schools.
The report was published in two volumes, with the second looking at the experiences of 50 survivors who shared their accounts of abuse in private sessions with commissioners.
Keith Wiffin, now 60, was placed in a ward of the state at the age of 11. He was subjected to violence and sexual abuse while at the Epuni Children’s Home in the 1970s.
He said volume two, which was “totally dedicated to the voices of the survivors,” gave the report much more weight.
“It gives a strong indicator of the” scale and magnitude of the tragedy that has unfolded. “
He said “serious systemic failures and failures” led to the tragedy.
KITCHEN / ROBERT THINGS
Keith Wiffin became a ward of the state at age 11 and was subjected to violence and sexual abuse while at the Epuni Children’s Home in the 1970s.
“The authorities must take responsibility.”
Public Service Minister Chris Hipkins said the abuse was unforgivable and showed “New Zealand at its worst.”
“We must never underestimate how traumatic the experience will have been for the victims. And we must never underestimate the long legacy that abuse has left.
Physical and sexual abuse were the most common types of abuse reported to commissioners.
However, psychological and emotional abuse was also an important component, both in homes and institutions, which involved instilling fear in survivors and asserting power and control over them.
One survivor recounted an experience in a children’s home where staff took children to see the bodies of other residents who had committed suicide.
Public Service Minister Chris Hipkins said the findings of the interim report of the Royal Commission on Abuse in State Care were the worst conditions in New Zealand.
“Other children hanged or killed themselves and one of the other children found them. And then we would hear the echo of the scream and we knew what had happened and that’s just a scream that you will never forget … The staff used to take you and show you the body and tell you that this is what happens to the weak. “
Maori and Pacific survivors frequently described abuse due to their ethnicity or cultural identity.
Survivors reported that they had been physically abused because they could not speak English and attempts to “cleanse” them of their cultural identity, particularly in religious institutions or by religious caregivers, who told them they were of another ethnicity.
Some survivors gave numerical estimates of the number of incidents of abuse or the number of years during which it occurred, but many others did not, preferring to use terms such as “relentless”, “continuous” and “part of everyday life.”
THE DETAIL / RNZ
On this episode of The Detail podcast, RNZ talks to Aaron Smale, who has spent five years tracking and reporting state care abuse stories. (First published October 2020)
Key data in the report revealed that the peak of reported abuse occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, with the majority of survivors being abused between the ages of five and 17, although the range was nine months to 20 years. five to 10 years.
The impact on survivors was identified as wide-ranging, from drug and alcohol addiction to suicidal thoughts, crime, and sexual behavior.
Another report looking at the economic impact of abuse attempted to calculate an abused person’s average lifetime cost of care and came up with a figure of $ 673,000- $ 857,000 in pain and suffering and premature death and $ 184,000 in health care, state costs and productivity losses. .
A statistical report estimated that 655,000 children passed through state welfare, psychiatric and disability institutions, church schools and nursing homes between 1950 and 2019. It is likely that between 17 and 39% of them, up to a quarter of a million children, have been abused. .
