The Lost Boys of Dilworth retells part of the story of what happened at an Auckland boarding school. Photo / TVNZ
“Brutal, isolated, authoritarian, loveless place where students lived in continual fear of older students, tutors, housemasters, teachers, and the whole school system”.
This is from a report after an independent inquiry into private Auckland boarding school, Dilworth.
It’s where more than 100 boys were abused by staff, tutors, housemasters, and other students for nearly 70 years.
Many of the boys were just eight or nine when the abuse began. Many ended up developing addictions to drugs, alcohol, and pornography. Some went on to commit crime, while others suffered from severe mental ill health. A new docudrama, The Lost Boys of Dilworth, aired on TVNZ 1 last night and retold part of the story of what happened at the school.
“Most of the men the inquiry met with who were abused are in various stages of rebuilding from shattered and broken periods in their adult lives,” said the inquiry’s co-leaders, Dame Silvia Cartwright and Frances Joychild, KC.
Open Justice editor Elizabeth Binning told The Front Page the abuse goes back decades.
“Police originally said there was abuse from the 1970s to the early 2000s. But I was quickly getting calls from men who said they were abused there in the 1960s. I was also contacted by a widow who believed that her late husband had been abused even earlier than that, in the 1950s,” she said.
An inquiry found abuse kept coming to the attention of the board, but it wasn’t reported to police.
“It was a really extensive inquiry. The findings were something like 500 pages long. It just found that the board didn’t investigate the complaints properly. It didn’t report most of the abuse to the police and it also left the abusers to just quietly leave the school, often with their careers intact,” Binning said.
“Some of them went on and had other jobs. In some cases they left with glowing references with no hint at all that there was anything suspicious in the person leaving.”
The Lost Boys of Dilworth delves into the lived experiences of some former pupils. Mark Staufer, the writer and main voice of the programme, was a victim himself.
Co-directors Mary Durham and Peter Burger told The Front Page the culture of secrecy contributed to the perpetuation of darkness.
“You can kind of see how something would start with that sort of ‘don’t tell, we’ll beat you up’ sort of thing and scale all the way up to this systemic sexual assault,” Burger said.
“Lost Boys, to me, implies that a lot of their life has been hideously affected by what happened to them. And unfortunately, some of them haven’t achieved perhaps what they might’ve achieved if these horrors hadn’t been inflicted on them,” Durham said.
The re-enactments that are shot from a child’s perspective were a conscious decision.
“I think hearing from the men as they edge towards and tip over the 60-year-old mark, you know, what they say is extraordinarily powerful,” Durham said.
“But, when you see these men represented by these young actors, as children, that’s what really hammers it home. You see how innocent and how lovely these children were and the obvious effects that have been wrought on them all these years later.”
The Lost Boys of Dilworth is available to watch on TVNZ+.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about the trials that uncovered the darkness at Dilworth and how the docudrama came to be.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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