New Zealand Classifies Abuse In Institutions As ‘Shameful’

A New Zealand government commission today classified as a "national shame" the psychological, physical or sexual abuse perpetrated over five decades against more than 200,000 people, including children, in public or religious institutions in the country.

Created in 2018 by the New Zealand Government, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care today published its 3,000-page final report, which includes 138 recommendations, following testimonies from more than 2,400 survivors of abuse, including babies, children and adolescents, people from the Maori people (native people of New Zealand) and people with disabilities.

In the final report, the New Zealand state is urged to urgently address the "national shame" over the abuse of more than 30% of the 655,000 children, young people and adults who were in the care of public and religious institutions during the period investigated, from 1950 to 1999.

"This report on New Zealand's black history is disturbing and difficult to read, but we owe it to the survivors who so courageously shared their stories to confront what happened," said commission chair Coral Shaw on the occasion of the release of the report. document.

The commission called for public and religious institutions to be held accountable for "widespread" abuses and to correct errors through a public apology and greater access for survivors to the judicial system, among other measures.

"We will never know the real number", highlighted the document, which reports sexual, emotional, medical, physical and mental abuse, acts of serious exploitation and neglect, as well as racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic attitudes of the abusers, who occupied positions of power in relation to people who needed support.

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said today that parliament "accepts with deep sadness and regret" the final report of the Royal Commission.

"I can't take away your pain, but I can say this: You are heard and we believe in you", said Luxon, in a speech quoted on the Government's website.

In the same intervention, the government official thanked "the exceptional strength, incredible courage and honesty" of the survivors, some of whom were present at the document delivery ceremony.

Among the testimonies cited in the document is the story of PM, who was raped, along with a classmate, by a supervisor at the Whakapakari youth program, on Great Barrier Island, in the late 1980s, when he was just 12 years old.

In his report, PM says he was threatened by his supervisor with a gun and that the whole situation was "too painful".

"We had to stay there all night. What happened in that cabin was fetid," he reported.

Also cited in the document, Ann Thompson, another survivor whose mother gave her up in 1941, shortly after her birth, to an orphanage in Christchurch following a rape, recalled being beaten until she bled and insulted by the nuns, who repeated that she he was "born in a sewer".