The “astronomical” financial ramifications of abuse in state care is estimated to have cost New Zealand more than $200 billion since the 1950s, with the current system labelled a “monumental taxpayer-funded investment in failure”.
The comments, from a lawyer and survivors of abuse in care, come ahead of the release of the final report from the Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry.
A Martin Jenkins report into the economic cost of abuse in care previously calculated the cost to be an average of of $857,000 over each individual survivor’s lifetime.
“About $184,000 of this is financial costs to the economy from increased spending on healthcare, state costs responding to negative outcomes from abused children, deadweight losses from collecting taxes to fund state services, and productivity losses,” the report said.
“The remaining $673,000 [78%] is a non-financial cost reflecting the pain and suffering and premature death of the survivor of abuse.”
The figure also included the loss of potential earnings for survivors due to difficulties finding or holding on to employment.
From 1950 on, the cumulative cost could be as high as $217 billion when including costs to survivors, or up to about $47 billion just to the New Zealand economy.
For Warkworth woman Tanya Sammons, her parentification while in foster care impacted her education and has led to ongoing difficulties earning a meaningful wage.
Sammons went into care with her sisters at the age of 2.
From about intermediate age on Sammons had minimal schooling as she was forced to stay home and care for other children, as well as look after the house and have her foster father’s dinner ready, bath drawn and clothes laid out for him.
Each day was often a race between her and one of her other sisters to get out the door to school first, because whoever was second normally got pulled back to stay home and care for the children.
As an adult, Sammons has tried to take a pre-study course to be able to engage in tertiary education, but because she did not pass the course and could not afford to take it again, those hopes have fallen by the wayside.
She has struggled to enter a career, and despite gaining experience in a few industries she has not been able to break into a higher-paying job without qualifications.
Her reading and writing skills also suffered due to her lack of education, and made work more difficult.
“I actually wanted to be a veterinarian,” she said.
Sammons had been getting work experience at a vet clinic once a week, but was instead made to stay home by her foster mother.
She wanted to see education opportunities opened up for survivors, and thought for someone like her, more apprenticeship opportunities would be helpful.
“There’s a lot of us out there that would like to have better skills,” she said.
Sammons wanted Kiwis to be aware of historical abuse in care, and recognise it was still happening, “no matter what they say”.
“We need to all work together, whether a survivor or not. As a nation, we need to work together to fix our state care.”
Survivor and advocate Keith Wiffin, who suffered years of abuse in the state-owned Epuni Boys’ Home in Lower Hutt, said he has been “unable to earn and have a career like I otherwise would have, had I not been put into state care”.
“That’s largely around things like lack of education.”
He was unable to focus properly on his education and ended up dropping out of school by 14.
“I’m not exactly sure what I would have become or what I would have done, but I certainly would have done something different to ending up doing menial jobs for most of my life,” he said.
Wiffin said the financial cost to survivors of their abuse was “immeasurable” and the cost to the economy was “immense”.
“The thing about cost in terms of redress and bringing this to an end is it needs to be seen as an investment . . . the real cost has come in not doing anything,” he said.
“It does need to be fixed, but up to this point there has been a monumental taxpayer-funded investment in failure.”
He said the best way to stop abuse in care and “have a future for our young” was to stop putting them in state care in the first place. This meant more support, funding and resources for family to care for children.
“There has to be a fundamental new way of thinking if we are to turn this around. That can happen, this is not something that can’t be changed.”
Partner at Cooper Legal, Sam Benton, has interviewed many survivors for his work with the firm.
When looking at the average cost of abuse per survivor and considering there was an estimated 250,000 people affected, that caused the total cost to “skyrocket into astronomical numbers”, he said.
“I can’t think of any survivor I’ve spoken to that hasn’t described an economic impact.”
He said the lack of education was a large part, and there were multiple drivers behind this.
In some cases people developed “anti-authoritarian” attitudes due to being abused by people in positions of power. Others struggled to focus in school, particularly if the abuse occurred there. Many had chronic PTSD, depression, anxiety, claustrophobia and suffered panic attacks.
“Those sort of issues obviously have a flow-on effect for the rest of their lives . . . most of them are in prison or on the benefit.”
Benton said of the hundreds of survivors he had dealt with, he could count on his hands how many were in long-term employment.
Meanwhile about two-thirds of Cooper Legal’s clients have been to prison, he said, and at any one time 41 per cent of them were currently in jail.
The criminal records posed another barrier to employment, and years behind bars often left survivors with little understanding of how to function on the outside.
“A few clients say they have broken laws just so they can get back into prison, which is their safe place for them.
“There’s just so many reasons that these survivors are essentially set up to fail unless we can provide significant wrap-around support for them.”
Cooper Legal had also done its own research and believe the individual costs to survivors for lost earnings are significantly higher than the Martin Jenkins report calculated.
It engaged an actuary to assess three survivors of the same age and calculate what their earnings could have been based on employment they were likely to go into.
The loss of earnings, including future earnings across their working life, was calculated as ranging from $590,000 to $910,000.
“Our clients could have been lawyers, judges, accountants . . . and they’re not,” he said.
“All of our clients are tragedies.”
Benton spoke of one “wonderful” woman who had been physically and psychologically abused in a faith-based orphanage, who had later battled through abusive relationships and menial employment to eventually end up providing counselling services to others.
“You just wonder if she had been helped 60 years ago . . . she’s intelligent, she’s nurturing, she could have been pretty much anything.”
He urged Kiwis to look at any redress figure decided on after the release of the inquiry’s final report as an investment which could help break the cycle of abuse and save taxpayers and survivors alike in the long run.
Melissa Nightingale is a Wellington-based reporter who covers crime, justice and news in the capital. She joined the Herald in 2016 and has worked as a journalist for 10 years.
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