New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon yesterday apologized and vowed reforms after a public inquiry found that about 200,000 children, young people and vulnerable adults were abused in state and religious care over the past 70 years.
Nearly one in three children and vulnerable adults in care from 1950 to 2019 experienced some form of abuse, the report found, a finding that could leave the government facing billions of dollars in fresh compensation claims.
“This is a dark and sorrowful day in New Zealand’s history as a society and as a state, we should have done better, and I am determined that we will do so,” Luxon told a news conference.
Photo: AP
An official apology is to follow on Nov. 12, he added.
Survivors and their supporters filled the public gallery of the country’s parliament as the report was debated, while still more watched from a separate room.
After Luxon spoke, likening the abuse against children to torture at one state care facilities, Lake Alice, many stood and sang an indigenous Maori song about love and unity.
The report by the Royal Commission of Inquiry spoke to more than 2,300 survivors of abuse in New Zealand, which has a population of 5.3 million. The inquiry detailed a litany of abuses in state and faith-based care, including rape, sterilization and electric shocks, which peaked in the 1970s.
Those from the Maori community were especially vulnerable to abuse, it found, as well as those with mental or physical disabilities.
Anna Thompson, a survivor, told the commission how she was physically and verbally abused at a faith-based orphanage.
“At night, the nuns would strip my clothes off, tie me to the bed face down, and thrash me with a belt with the buckle. It cut into my skin until I bled and I couldn’t sit down afterwards for weeks,” Thompson said in her testimony published in the report.
Jesse Kett spoke of how he was beaten and raped by staff in a residential school in Auckland when he was eight years old.
“Sometimes my abuser would be alone, but sometimes other staff members would watch,” he said in his testimony to the inquiry.
Civil and faith leaders fought to cover up abuse by moving abusers to other locations and denying culpability, with many victims dying before seeing justice, the report said.
“It is a national disgrace that hundreds of thousands of children, young people and adults were abused and neglected in the care of the State and faith-based institutions,” the report said.
It made 138 recommendations, including calling for public apologies from New Zealand’s government, as well as the pope and the archbishop of Canterbury, heads of the Catholic and Anglican churches respectively, who have previously condemned child abuse.
The report did not make clear the amount of compensation available for survivors.
Luxon said he believed the total compensation due to survivors could run into billions of dollars.
“We’re opening up the redress conversations and we’re going through that work with survivor groups,” he said.
Additional reporting by AFP
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