The Road to Hell: State Violence Against Children in Post-War New Zealand was published in 2016 by a Wellington criminology academic, Elizabeth Stanley. The book ‒ an investigation into the abuse of children in state care facilities ‒ was launched by then-opposition MP Jacinda Ardern, Labour’s spokesperson for children.
In her speech, Ardern pledged that a Labour government would undertake an official inquiry into the abuse of children in New Zealand’s state care facilities.
That Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care began in 2018. Its final report and recommendations were made public last month, exposing the systemic abuse of children on an enormous scale, perpetuated by the state’s core social systems: welfare, health, education and justice. Throughout the inquiry, Stanley, a professor of criminology at Victoria University, paid close attention to the statements and testimonies of the public servants appearing before the commission.
Defence strategy
In a co-authored paper published in May, she described the common tactics adopted by the agencies, noting that they used similar defences while walking a legal and reputational tightrope: acknowledging that abuse took place while minimising their institutions’ responsibility.
Stanley refers to this approach as “performing ignorance”. Firstly, officials repeatedly emphasised their lack of knowledge regarding any abuse and stressed the “gaps in data” regarding the ongoing rape and torture of children in their care.
The commission found that many records relating to the institutions where abuse occurred had been lost or destroyed, and that state agencies repeatedly refused to investigate credible allegations. If they did investigate, complainants were generally not interviewed: the four police investigations into the Lake Alice Hospital psychiatric facility (the first was in the 1970s), uncovered evidence of torture, electric shocks, rape, misuse of medications and seclusion. In one of those investigations, police interviewed one of 39 complainants; in another, they lost 15 out of 39 files.
State agencies are legally required to keep records of their activities – especially when caring for children or investigating serious crimes – but officials repeatedly told the royal commission that data was not collected, or they didn’t have time to review it, or they’d lost it, or couldn’t retrieve it because of lack of resources or recent restructures.
For Stanley, state agencies “know what not to know” and go to extraordinary lengths not to know it. When asked, senior officials can then sorrowfully tell investigators that they’d like to co-operate but have very limited information to draw on.
Stanley also describes officials blaming institutional abuse on the nature of the law, or the bureaucracy “as if the institutions are passive agents, with no agency over their settings and practices”. But before the royal commission of inquiry, state agencies also made extensive use of their legal resources – in-house legal teams, access to Crown Law – to “push victims back, wear them down and minimise complaints”.
Crown Law and the Ministry of Social Development were found to have actively operated to shut down legal cases, withholding evidence from police and claimants’ lawyers, destroying records, including staff files, and commissioning private investigators to follow complainants, seeking information to undermine their credibility.
Abuse of power
Survivor Leonie McInroe spent nine years fighting to have her case heard and described the legal and bureaucratic process as a “relentless, calculated, intentional abuse of power. For me, it has been wholly inadequate, degrading, dehumanising and completely deficient of justice.” Stanley argues that the outcome of this legalistic approach is the “naturalisation” of state crimes: the officials are really claiming that their institutions can set laws and procedures that allow violence towards children to occur with no consequence.
Alongside these arguments, officials insisted that the abuse was committed by “a few bad apples”, who somehow operated undetected across multiple agencies for many decades, and that their crimes were all in the past. The royal commission’s remit limited it to the second half of the 20th century. The agencies lobbied hard for this, insisting that they were reforming themselves, and opening their contemporary conduct up to scrutiny would interfere with this. As a consequence, they could categorise the commission’s findings as historical claims: failings that took place in former facilities that no longer exist, insisting that the abuse would not be acceptable today.
But there’s extensive evidence of ongoing abuse in state-run organisations: Oranga Tamariki’s 2024 Safety of Children in Care report established that 9% of all children in care had “findings of harm” (reported as physical, sexual, emotional abuse or neglect) over a 12-month period; in 2023, media reported fight clubs in youth residences, leading to 11 staff being stood down, alongside multiple allegations of sexual misconduct and assaults by staff. The coalition government has reintroduced boot camps for youth offenders, a policy solution that led to some of the worst instances of abuse in the commission’s findings. A 2023 Ombudsman’s report into Christchurch women’s prison condemned the use of “spit hoods” – a mask or hood used to prevent a person from spitting and considered a suffocation risk – on young and disabled prisoners, and troubling use of force, including pepper spraying prisoners without justification. “Harmful and abusive practices remain endemic to care, health and justice institutions,” Stanley writes.
But the agencies running these institutions have conducted elaborate marketing and public relations campaigns to create the illusion of transformational reform, assuring the commission that they have listened to the stories of survivors and reflected on their actions. They are partnering with survivors, embedding the voices of young people and empowering whānau, hapū and iwi.
And even though the abuse was allegedly in the distant past, reforms are under way and agencies are transforming into high-performing and trusted organisations. And they are upholding Te Tiriti o Waitangi, with commitments enshrined in “visions, principles, core values, objectives, calls to action, practice frameworks and organisational pillars”, implemented by “new offices, roles, working groups, strategies, action plans, programmes, research processes, policies, and tools”.
Agencies rebrand
Inevitably, there has been elaborate rebranding. “All of the youth justice and care and protection residences now have te reo Māori names.” But in practice, Stanley adds, “Māori remain those disproportionately targeted for incarceration, including across youth justice institutions, mental health units and prisons.”
The leaders of public sector organisations have extensive resources available to them on the premise that they use them to serve the public. Stanley believes their conduct during the royal commission of inquiry reveals these institutions acting explicitly against the interests of the public, serving only themselves.
In 1963, political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil” to describe the crimes conducted by German bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann in World War II. Eichmann and other bureaucrats were just ordinary people, Arendt claimed, who regarded themselves as decent and well meaning, but who dutifully carried out the malign goals of their institutions to further their careers.
“One of the things about modern institutions is that they’re fragmented, and people in them are working in deep silos,” says Stanley. “They’re only a small part of one thing and that can allow a kind of distancing.”
She is waiting for the response from the government, taking a keen interest in the issue of compensation, but also thinks the structure and incentives of state institutions need closer examination. “It’s a crucial question for our politicians and our state services commission – what are the purposes of our bureaucracies?”
