Abuse in Care report: We were there and we looked away – Simon Wilson

Survivors and their whānau and supporters arriving at Parliament for the tabling of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. Photo / Mark Mitchell

• The report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care has been tabled in Parliament.
• It says of the roughly 655,000 children, young people and adults in care during 1950 to 2019, around 200,000 were abused and even more were neglected.
• The inquiry found evidence of abuse and failures of responsibility “everywhere we looked”, including welfare institutions, churches and other religious organisations, some schools, the police and in successive governments.
• It labelled this a “national disgrace” and the Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, has accepted in Parliament that in some cases the treatment amounted to torture.
• Luxon has established a task force to manage the report’s 138 recommendations.

OPINION

Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, urban issues and climate crisis. He joined the Herald in 2018.

When I was at primary school, in Wellington, one of the teachers was well known as a bully. Mean to all the kids, managing somehow to hurt those he rough-and-tumbled with on the playing field, and each year mercilessly sadistic to a chosen few. He never taught me, but he did terrorise my brother.

Let’s call him Mr Thuggy. Eventually, he was moved on to a place where his chosen way to treat children might find a more “appropriate” outlet.

He took a job at the Epuni Boys’ Home, a residential state care home in the Hutt Valley better known as a borstal.

Many of the men who gave witness to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care have told us how terrible their lives were in that place.

The 10-year-old in me still remembers thinking about how scary such a place must have been. The adult in me finds a few other ideas rolling around with that memory.

One is that, amid all the sunshine and sports and library visits in a routine suburban childhood, there was some nasty violence, and the best way to handle it was to hide it away. If the adults didn’t have to see it, they didn’t have to worry about it.

Violence was going to happen anyway, so the thing was to let it happen to someone else, somewhere else, so we didn’t have to know.

Keeping the nasty violence hidden was one of the great social mores of the time when I grew up. The impulse is still strong.

And yet, milder forms of violence were everywhere. Most kids got hit. I got smacked with a ruler on the back of my legs on my very first day at school. My mother got out the wooden spoon whenever her frustrations got too much. The woodwork teacher would line us up to be strapped, half a dozen at a time. It was a standing joke.

But the “mild” violence was on a continuum with all the rest. It would have been easy for Mr Thuggy to tell himself he was only doing what his colleagues did, even if he did it more often and more brutally than them.

True, most of them probably did it in frustration, like my Mum. He seemed to do it for pleasure. But they all did it because they thought it was the right thing to do.

Mr Thuggy wasn’t “a product of his time”. Although his behaviour made him an outlier then, as it would now, he was indulged. The culture supported violence and he knew it. He wasn’t really being transgressive. Basically, all adults were allowed to hit kids.

A compilation of photos taken at Epuni Boys' Home. Photo / RNZ

Also related: they were good people at my school. I remember the headmaster and most of the teachers as decent, open-hearted and kind.

But their decency didn’t make them do the right thing. They didn’t stop Mr Thuggy, they moved him on. The headmaster didn’t insist he be kept away from children. The Department of Education didn’t either.

They put him out of sight and mind, but society still had a place for him, complete with his unreconstructed bullying ways. In fact, the place he went to welcomed his bullying. It became his meal ticket. Go for it, mate, they told him. That’s why we got you here.

And every adult who knew about Mr Thuggy knew he had gone to a place like that.

The violence done to the children at Epuni and other abusive state-care institutions like it, the Royal Commission has told us, was vicious and unrestrained and the harm it did was life-long.

Which leads to another thing. At some level, the only way to square away the idea places like that exist is to tell yourself there are some children who deserve to be treated like that.

Even if some of them were there only because they were orphans. Or runaways from violence in their own homes. Traumatised, one way or another, well before they washed up in the official house of state trauma.

Or maybe they were just a bit naughty. Or even just a bit too cheeky. That wasn’t uncommon, the inquiry tells us. Maybe them especially.

And is it easier to think of Māori kids like that?

Now we’re going to do a lot of rigorous thinking and careful planning about the best way to deal with children whose lives have fallen apart. That’s so good. Bring it on.

It’s right that this work will be under the direction of the Minister of Education Erica Stanford, albeit in a new role, rather than the Minister for Children or Corrections or Social Development. Right too that Stanford is a senior minister.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon speaking in Parliament about the Abuse in Care report, with Erica Stanford seated next to him. Photo / Mark Mitchell

But her work must inform all the other ways in which we debate the care and education and punishment of young people.

And it should apply to us. Will be rigorous with ourselves?

It’s no longer legal to hit children. But will we keep accepting that children already traumatised by their circumstances can be abused all over again?

Will we keep thinking they might deserve it?

Reforming the institutions of care will not be enough. We need social reform too.

The inquiry has called abuse in care our “national shame” and made plain that it was not only historical. We were and still are the teachers and parents who watched the Education Department send Mr Thuggy to a place that would unleash his sadism. We were and still are the congregations of churches that have dealt with predators by sheltering them. This is us.

Will we keep telling ourselves it’s okay to look away?

This is our own society. It is what we make it.