"Following this week’s statement by the UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT), a new advocacy group, CLAN NZ, claims New Zealanders’ human rights have been violated yet again, by the State that violated their rights as children.
UNCAT, in their concluding observations of New Zealand’s recent 6th Periodic Review, called on the New Zealand Government to respect their obligations to the Convention Against Torture on the matter of failing to provide adequate redress to over a thousand people who were historically abused as children while in NZ State run institutions.
Between the years 1950 - 1990 approximately 200,000 (190,620) New Zealand children were in State care. Many of them were subjected to physical, psychological and/or sexual abuse. The legacy of this abuse has lasted throughout their lives.
Care Leavers Australasia Network NZ (CLAN NZ) is calling on the NZ Government to face up to its past and hold an independent, open and accountable inquiry (Royal Commission) into what went on in their institutions with regards to historic child abuse. A NZ Royal Commission would need to have full statutory powers to compel witnesses and demand evidence.
Spokesperson Netta Christian said CLAN recommends that the NZ Royal Commission would need to be all-encompassing, in that it should cover all people in New Zealand who were in institutional care or other forms of out-of-home residential care, as a state ward or as a child whose parents placed them into care, as a child or youth (or both). This would include all church homes; children’s homes; orphanages; group homes; detention centres; non-kinship or kinship foster care. CLAN also recommends that it cover all forms of abuse and neglect and unpaid labour.
“A Royal Commission would create a safe platform for many people to come forward and testify,” said Ms Christian. “With what we are currently seeing in Australia, what we have seen in Ireland and what is about to start in the UK (with our own New Zealand judge Lowell Goddard leading the UK sex abuse inquiry), it would be quite absurd to assume that New Zealand did not have the same problems, despite Prime Minister John Key and NZ Social Development Minister Paula Bennett stating that enough is already being done.”
CLAN considers the establishment of an adequate redress/compensation system for survivors or care leavers would have to be an essential part of the inquiry. “Survivors are entitled to redress for the loss of their childhoods, the loss of their families and the misery they have continued to endure throughout their lives,” Ms Christian explains. “Many survivors and victims of child sexual abuse are broken, some beyond repair. Many have taken their own lives. No amount of money can buy back what they have lost.”
Therefore redress should have two purposes – firstly to assist in providing funds for survivors and victims of abuse to seek out counsellors and psychologists of their own choosing to start their healing journey. “There should be no limits on counselling and psychological services for care leavers and their families. We know that the trauma has been passed on through the generations.”
The second purpose would be to provide an amount of money in compensation - financial redress. “Whatever the amount decided, redress payments should be available in instalments if that is what people choose,” says Ms Christian, and CLAN also believes those who have received compensation in the past should still be entitled to apply.
Many care leavers are older and have complex medical and psychological needs. Priority access to essential services such as legal, medical, dental and housing is also needed. Ms Christian suggests there should be additional financial assistance to help care leavers find their parents and siblings or the graves of their parents and siblings
Additionally, there needs to be major improvements to the way records are provided to care leavers. New Zealand still has private and government organisations that hold information but deny care leavers access to their own personal histories. “For people in their 70s, 80s and 90s, desperate to trace family members they never knew, this particular cruelty should not be allowed to continue.”
Many New Zealand organisations collectively failed in their duty of care to these children. People in authority often knew what was going on and did nothing. For example the police often caught children who ran away from the orphanages, refused to believe their stories of abuse, and returned them straight back to the homes from which they were trying to escape, no questions asked.
Ms Christian insists it is time for action - and justice - for the generations of New Zealand children who deserved so much better than the neglectful, cruel and abusive treatment they received living in the State welfare system. “We’ve got to stop pretending that it didn’t happen here.”
Netta Christian
CLAN NZ
(Care Leavers Australasia Network NZ)
CLAN NZ
(Care Leavers Australasia Network NZ)
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