Raped and tortured: A New Zealand childhood

2004-0306 - Manawatu Standard - Raped and tortured: A New Zealand childhood

The Manawatu Standard
March 6 2004

Raped and tortured: A New Zealand childhood 
by Lee Matthews

The demons of Lake Alice still haunt the people who lost their childhoods there. 

Lee Matthews talks to a survivor. 

"We were doomed people in Lake Alice because nobody helped us. We soon learned not to complain. We knew nobody would listen." 

Stephen McMahon * is a survivor. From age 13 to 16, he says he was raped and tortured. He was also injected with gut-wrenchingly painful paraldehyde and put through unmodified electroconvulsive treatment--shock treatment with no anaesthetic. 

Routinely. To punish him. To modify his behaviour, because he seemed to live in a world of his own. 

This happened not because Mr McMahon * needed psychiatric treatment but because he was a boy with no place to go when he was 13, back in 1973. For family reasons, he needed a place in a boys' home, but there was no place. He ended up a ward of the state at Lake Alice Hospital's open child and adolescent unit, villa 11. 

He's spent the past 30 years thinking about what happened to him and brothers-in-suffering at Lake Alice. He was part of the group that in 2001, after 15 years of trying to make people believe what happened, received a public apology and a share of $6.5 million in government compensation. 

Mr McMahon *, now 45, is tall and quietly spoken. Horror seeps into his eyes when he talks of Lake Alice. He has health problems: muscle cramps, migraines, night terrors, other damage to his body. Right now he's in acute pain, a side effect of withdrawing from the morphine prescribed by Australian doctors. He also has depression problems. 

"I know I need to do serious work to overcome what has happened to me. Coming back to Palmerston North is the first step," he said. "This is fresh-start time." 

The first time he went to Lake Alice was in March 1973. His affidavit for the class action court case records what happened. 

On his first day, he was taken to villa 11 and into a day room where there were about 15 boys, all his age or younger. They were crying. 

"I asked one of them why and he said, `You'll find out.' There was screaming coming from upstairs and I was confused. I didn't know what was going on." 

What was going on was unmodified electroconvulsive treatment. Mr McMahon * was called upstairs, told to lie on a bed and electrodes were slid onto his temples. 

A rubber gag was wedged into his mouth, then unit head psychiatrist Selwyn Leeks "played with the dial" on the ECT machine. 

"They told me I wouldn't feel anything. All of a sudden I got hit with a sensation like a sledge hammer. I can't put the pain into words. Absolutely nothing compares with its intensity. Dr Leeks turned the dial down low and then up high. 

"It was like having little sledge hammers and then big sledge hammers hitting my head." 

Mr McMahon * woke up in a warm bath. One of the other residents was playing with his genitals. 

A diary was kept at the unit. Anyone caught smoking, answering staff back or committing any other trivial transgression had their names put in the "blue book". Then, on Fridays, those transgressors got unmodified ECT. 

Sometimes the youngsters had to help set up the ECT equipment. When this happened, Mr McMahon * tried to convince himself he was just a helper and that he would not be shocked--but generally the helpers got ECT. 

"Normally the smoke doors were kept closed (between the day room and the shutter cell room in villa 11, where ECT took place), but when Dr Leeks performed his ECT sessions, the doors were left open. 

"This was so the boys downstairs could hear the screaming and muffled cries of pain from the boy being tortured upstairs. 

"We were all terrified for each other. We were controlled by this fear. We just sat in the day room and waited," Mr McMahon * says. 

The staff used that fear. 

"The words they used for it were to `ride the thunderbolt', `the national grid' and `the zappidy zap'." 

He was also given unmodified ECT in the left shoulder by Dr Leeks, who said it would help Mr McMahon’s * asthma. This made Mr McMahon * too frightened to get his inhaler and medication from the office. 

Shock treatment was also administered during the week by other staff to the boys' knees, buttocks and testicles. One boy was shocked as he lay in bathwater. These staff also gave paraldehyde injections as a punishment. 

Paraldehyde is a psychiatric drug used to subdue out-of-control patients. It hurts as it is administered, leaving a feeling like hot, burning acid. It has a foul smell and leaves a sickening taste in the mouth for several days. 

Sometimes staff would "harpoon" the boys, throwing paraldehyde syringes at the their naked buttocks from across the room. 

Sexual abuse was also common, not only from staff but from some of the residents themselves. Some staff threatened that raped residents would get the thunderbolt if they complained. 

After residents complained about one resident, Dr Leeks set up a punishment session where the complainants were told to administer unmodified ECT to the abuser. 

Mr McMahon * was also beaten and kept in solitary confinement while at Lake Alice. On one occasion it was for refusing to scrub a floor with a toothbrush. 

Mr McMahon * left Lake Alice in 1975 and says his release and "rehabilitation" were typical. He was given his medication as usual that morning, then taken to Wellington, where a staff member booked him into a YMCA hostel and jacked up a labouring job at the old cigarette factory. Mr McMahon * was then given $100. 

End of rehabilitation. 

The job didn't last long. Co-workers taunted him about coming from the nuthouse. He was also cold-turkey withdrawing from medication and had no idea how to be responsible for himself. 

"One minute I was at Lake Alice, woken up in the morning with an air raid siren, being told what to do every minute of the day and being governed by fear, and now I found myself suddenly expected to fit into the workforce." 

He ended up jobless and homeless, sleeping in a Courtney Place bus shelter. A homosexual transvestite picked him up. Eventually, Mr McMahon * fled to Australia and to England. 

"To this day, I wake up crying, with nightmares about Dr Leeks and Lake Alice," he says. "The situation has not improved over time. It irritates me immensely that I just can't seem to get Lake Alice out of my life."n 

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Fear at first sight 

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The first sight of the old water tower rearing out of trees makes Stephen McMahon * shiver. 

"I hate the sight of that thing," he says. "It's so ugly. It used to be the first thing you'd see coming back after a weekend's leave. It meant you were going back there." 

Mr McMahon * was a ward of the state at Lake Alice Hospital's open child and adolescent unit from 1973 to 1975. He was 13 when he arrived. 

He went back last Friday for the first time in 30 years, to the place where he was tortured and raped while staff either participated or turned a blind eye. 

Driving there, he talked quietly of what has happened to him since Lake Alice, how the experiences there had shattered any chance of joy or a happy life. 

"I've got to go back there. I'm having a lot of difficulty dealing with this. I tell you, if it wasn't for my family, I would have taken my life over this," he says.

"I know the place is all closed down now. I know that, but I don't believe it. 

"I've got to go back there and make sure that those people aren't still torturing children in those rooms. 

"I've got to be able to walk through those rooms without feeling scared." 

The remains of Lake Alice Hospital sit a bare kilometre off the main road between Bulls and Wanganui. The hospital closed in 1986 and the national secure unit closed in 1999. Services shifted to Auckland. 

What's left now lurks behind locked gates and warning signs about guard dogs. Trees are overgrown and long grass invades the drive. Cows graze peacefully. 

Mr McMahon * goes to the caretaker's cottage. He quietly explains that he nearly died at Lake Alice as a child and he must see villa 11. His voice carries 30 years of conviction. 

The caretaker--who wouldn't let in the Manawatu Standard because it's more than his job's worth--warns that the place is wrecked. Vandals have got in. There's nothing left. 

This is what Mr McMahon * needs to hear. He also needs to see it. He goes with the caretaker. 

Half an hour later, Mr McMahon * comes walking back. He's carrying a cracked old wooden plaque-style sports trophy, recording the efforts of the Lake Alice bowling teams. 

"Look," he points out one of the little silver shields on the trophy. "S. McMahon *. 1974. That was me." 

There's a pause. He lights a cigarette, sits down. 

"I must have done something right while I was out here." 

His hands are shaking as he describes how good it felt to stand in villa 11, the place ruined and empty around him. Gutted. Reduced to a building nobody wants. 

"It's all covered in graffiti inside. Everything's broken. Even the toilets are broken. 

"It's a bit of a shock to the system, but I had to come here and see this, to be sure." 

The caretaker told him other survivors of his era have come back. It's not a pleasure trip for anyone. 

Mr McMahon * takes another look at the neglected grounds. 

"I've carried this place around the world with me, wherever I've been." 

He nods slowly. 

"That's all blown apart." 

But he says it has made him stronger to go back, to face the Goliath. 

"I will never understand why they did this to us." 

* Name changed on request