Earlier this week at Parliament, Labour leader Chris Hipkins was applauded for saying that the response to the final report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care had to be “bigger than politics.” True, but the fine words, apologies and “we hear you” messages will soon ring pretty hollow if the state doesn’t treat its response as an overriding political priority.

Along the way, the government can’t credibly cry poverty and bewail the state of the economy when measuring its response. It has been obvious for years that the bill for adequate compensation could run into billions. Regardless, billions have been poured into other areas, such as reinstating a huge tax break for landlords. When the government dismisses something as unaffordable, this is usually a reflection of its own political preferences, in the wake of choices it has already made.

This week, the government appeared unprepared to provide even a timeline for when the compensation funds will be paid out, on what terms, and whether back-dating is on the cards. In addition, the cost of the structural changes that the Royal Commission has urged the government to embrace is also unknown.

To keep faith with the victims, the compensation payments - and funding for the systemic changes required in the Police, ACC, psychiatric care and disability facilities etc – will have to be treated as a political urgency. It will be costly, but the victims have already paid a terrible price in human terms. As the Royal Commission has also pointed out, the victims have also borne the lion’s share of the economic costs of their abuse:

Based on the estimated number of people abused and neglected in care between 1950 and 2019, the total cost is estimated to be between $96 billion and $217 billion. Of this the smallest proportion, up to $46.7 billion, is paid by the taxpayers of New Zealand. The largest cost, estimated at up to $172 billion, is borne by survivors.

That injustice has to be promptly addressed. Otherwise, as one skeptical survivor said last week, do the politicians even know what they’re apologising for?

The Australian precedent

In Australia, a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse was set up over a decade ago by Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard. It began work in 2013 and concluded in 2017 with the publication of a multi-volume series of findings and recommendations. A few months after that, Labour PM Jacinda Ardern launched our own Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in State Care.

Among a myriad of recommendations, the Australian inquiry strongly recommended that the Catholic Church should cease some of its practices that were held to be directly responsible for creating a toxic climate conducive to abuse, such as priestly celibacy. The Church should also be willing, it was argued, to automatically waive confessional box secrecy whenever child abuse has been confessed.

Here, our Royal Commission has recognised that “Religious beliefs were often used to justify the abuse and neglect, and to silence survivors.” While its recommendations in this area do not go as far as its Australian counterpart, the Royal Commission does extensively discuss the celibacy issue, and the “clericalism” that both encourages abuse and conceals its disclosure. ( See Chapter 8, para 656 and following.) For example, the Royal Commission says:

Research suggests that the requirement to agree to celibacy for Catholic priests, nuns, sisters and brothers may deprive them of romantic and physical intimacy, which when combined with unchecked power over children in care can lead to abuse.. Internationally, some men have admitted they entered the priesthood to curb pre-existing sexual problems, such as child sex offending, in the ‘sex-free’ zone of clerical life... Dr Thomas Doyle, former priest, canon lawyer, and addictions therapist, told the Inquiry that “mandatory celibacy has had a definite influence on the development of dysfunctional sexuality within the context of the closed clerical world.”

Moreover, as the Commission also indicates, Catholic authorities have routinely treated sexual abuse by its clerics not as a crime but as a sin - thereby opening the door to declarations of repentance by the perpetrators, who would commonly be shifted to other locations, free to lapse again. Moreover, once abuse had been classified as a sin qualifying for forgiveness, the report notes that some victims would be coerced into pardoning their abusers, under pain of sin if they refused.

As the Commission’s report makes clear, these double binds were prevalent within the Catholic Church, but were not uncommon in the caring institutions managed by other religious denominations. Throughout, the state failed to carry out its oversight duty of care to protect the victims, and often did not treat their complaints of abuse seriously.

The power dimension

The state failed in its oversight role not only within faith-based caring institutions. In state-run youth detention centres, disability work-shops, special schools and psychiatric care facilities, physical and sexual abuse was also rife – and not only carried out by staff and clinicians, but routinely condoned and encouraged between the inmates themselves. At Lake Alice psychiatric facility, electroshock treatments akin to torture were carried out experimentally, and were also used (and threatened) as punishments to enforce compliance.

...Abusers groomed children, young people and adults in care into trusting them. They also groomed other staff, volunteers and people in leadership positions into believing they were trustworthy, which meant that survivors who tried to disclose the abuse were not believed. Many survivors were sexually assaulted, raped and forced to perform sexual acts. Sexual abuse was used to punish and intimidate. In some cases, abusers organised the sexual abuse of survivors by trafficking them to members of the public.

Medical abuse and neglect occurred in many care settings. This included improper medical treatment and practices, misuse of medication or medical equipment and treatment without consent, including electric shocks. Chemical restraint, like sedation, was used to control behaviour and as a form of punishment in disability and mental health institutions and social welfare residences.

Women and girls were routinely tested for sexually transmitted infections and were often forced to have degrading internal vaginal examinations. Clinicians would sometimes use medical checks as an opportunity for sexual abuse.

Solitary confinement was commonly used to manage or control behaviour and as a form of punishment. In disability and mental health institutions, special schools and social welfare residences, some survivors were locked in areas with limited or no access to toilets and water....

How could this happen? Routinely, authority appears to breed contempt for those induced to submit to it. Once vulnerable people are deemed to be either mad or bad, the Royal Commission findings show how there can be no limits to how some individuals and organisations will mis-use the secular and spiritual powers vested in them.

In fact, reading the Royal Commission report brings home the extent to which power in these “caring” institutions was hierarchically organised, with no effective checks and balances on those at the top. Perhaps for that reason, many of the Royal Commission’s 138 recommendations are as much about trying to future-proof the systems of care against further abuse, as they are about redressing past wrongs, or setting up compensation procedures for the people still bearing the scars. Since those corrosive impacts can be intergenerational, the Royal Commission has acknowledged that compensation may need to go beyond the initial victims in the cycles of abuse, and include wider whanau.

Rapid Response

Given the advancing age of many of the estimated 200,000 victims, the need for urgency is obvious. While money isn’t everything, compensation will be one tangible test of the government’s sincerity about addressing the state’s past failings.

Talking about future proofing… in Parliament last week, some MPs alleged that the dangerous power imbalance in some modern institutions – such as military style boot camps – carries a similar potential for systemic abuse. Arrun Soma, one of the Royal Commissioners made a relevant point in this official summary of the report findings:

Many residences and institutions developed cultures and practices that were often reflective of society’s attitudes to be punitive or to segregate those perceived as ‘other’. These de-humanised people in care, and tolerated or encouraged abuse and neglect. People with military backgrounds were assumed to be appropriate to care for children, young people and adults in care, and many brought with them a culture of command and control, punishment, physical violence and verbal abuse. (My emphasis.)

Evidently, history is on the brink of repeating itself. As for faith-based organisations, the Royal Commission offered several ways in which religious leaders should be publicly accountable for the behaviour (and training) of the religious personnel to whom they assign spiritual powers over their flocks.

To that end, each leader of the eight denominations within the Commission’s terms of reference was urged to personally apologise to their victims, and to indicate a willingness to impose lifelong sanctions on any religious personnel found likely “on the balance of probabilities” to have abused their authority. Only by doing so, the Royal Commission indicated, can the cycle of treating physical and sexual abuse as a sin and not as a crime, be broken.

The report carries extensive discussion (again, see chapter 8) of the beliefs and practices at Gloriavale community that continue to be conducive to physical and sexual abuse, starting with the genderised division of roles, and the belief-based concentration of all effective authority solely in the hands of men. According to the Royal Commission, the state must ensure the “ongoing safety”of the inhabitants of the Gloriavale community but – unfortunately - the recommendations do not spell out what actions and interventions this would require.

Finally on the quest for a response “bigger than politics”... there are other grounds for petty political disputes over the Royal Commission’s findings. Parliament is about to debate the ACT Party’s Treaty Principles Bill that aims to remove any reference to “Treaty principles” from New Zealand legislation.

This puts the Bill on a direct collision course with the Royal Commission’s recommendation 14, which urges the government to ensure that its response to historical abuse in care is “designed and operated in a manner that gives effect to te Tiriti o Waitangi and its principles.” Such concerns seem to be anathema to at least two of the three political parties that comprise the current government.

Clearly, the Royal Commission’s excellent report is only a road map for what, in many respects, is still a work in progress.

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