A leading human rights advocate wants government agencies held to account, and senior officials named for what she says is their lack of adequate response to abuse in faith-based and state-based care.
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care has delivered its final report to the Governor General, who will give it to the Minister of Internal Affairs. The Minister must then table the report in Parliament to make it public, which is scheduled for later in July.
Rosslyn Noonan is the director of the New Zealand Centre for Human Rights Law, Policy, and Practice.
She said during her tenure as the Chief Human Rights Commissioner from 2001 to 2011, she became aware that there were people who had been “severely abused” as children in state care.
“We didn’t have the sort of money to do a full inquiry, as the Royal Commission has now done, but what we could do was monitor the state’s response.
“That was the beginning of, beginning to realise the extent to which government officials, first of all, sought to deny that there had been any significant abuse.
Noonan said many survivors were left damaged by the appalling treatment they received in childhood, “a lot of which is now accepted and mounted to actual torture”.
She said the state treated them like criminals and they tried to minimise any possible response from the state and keep redress at the lowest level possible.
“They required them to remember detailed dates, which when you’re a child and you’re being mistreated, well I don’t remember detailed dates from my childhood, I’ll have to confess.
‘Completely shocked by what I saw’
“I was completely shocked by what I saw and heard.
“We intervened to some extent and the processes became a little bit better as a result, but not substantially.”
Noonan said when children came into state care often they were put in solitary confinement for sometimes up to three weeks, and girls were often subjected to internal examination to check whether they had had sexual relations.
“What happened then is there was never any follow-up that who had abused them, young girls at this age, the assumption was that they were the sluts, excuse my language, but that’s what came through the whole process.
“I thought that even if a child wasn’t physically or sexually directly assaulted, they would have suffered psychological, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual abuse in those centres.”
Noonan pointed to representatives from the Ministry of Health who appeared before the Commission and were specifically asked about abuse at the Child and Adolescent Unit at Lake Alice, which had about 300 children and young people go through it.
“He was asked what had the Ministry of Health done to track down those 300 so that they could be aware of the Royal Commission, but also ideally so the Ministry of Health could have offered them some rehabilitation and support.
“And do you know what he said? He said, well, actually that would have been quite expensive, we would have had to get clerical staff, would have taken a bit of money, and we didn’t have it.
“So they had done nothing to follow up and that just symbolises the attitude of officials throughout this whole process.”
Noonan told 1News that she wants action taken against Government agencies and senior officials.
‘They have never been held accountable’
“They’ve never been held accountable for the actions they took that in a sense re-abused those claimants, those survivors, those victims, and I think they need to be named and held accountable because until they are, the government agencies won’t change.
“They’re still doing whatever they can to be able to continue, to maintain their control and to continue as they always did.”
She also wants the compensation process for survivors to be made a priority.
“The government needs to stop viewing this as the most important thing is the fiscal risk to the Crown and start to look at what we need to do to ensure that the myth of New Zealand being a good place to bring up children can be true again.
“And the third thing we need to do is to make sure that Māori and Pacifica communities are supported to be able to look after their tamariki, their rangatahi.”