Comment: The final report of the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care is received into Parliamentary hands this week. Stretching over 2,000 pages, the 16 volumes meticulously expose the most serious offences we may ever imagine: torture, whipping, solitary confinement, rape, systemic neglect, and on and on. The charge sheets against state and faith workers would place them as the very worst of criminals.
Not that you’d know it. These offenders have been given official cover for years.
Abusers secured impunity through their official titles, white coats, cassocks, and suits. Besides, their institutional networks made violence appear so systemically normal and necessary, as if there were no other choice.
Much of the violence had been neutralised under professionalised language. Bleak grotty cells recast as spaces for protection. Electric shocks on the genitals as therapy. Beatings and sharp shocks renamed as forms of rehabilitation or even redemption. Narratives of state and faith goodness have given credence to the most egregious harms.
Authorities are so well placed to manage the representations of their victims and the responses to them too. Can you imagine any other offenders who have the capacity to blame their victims-survivors so effectively and to publicly pronounce them as deficit, dangerous, or damaged? Or who are able to draw on all the powers of the land—including law, public service, and government—to block allegations and tell claimants they are wrong and delusional?
In recent work on how state officials approached the commission, it became clear that, even during commission hearings, offending institutions claimed to have not known about their offences. They remarked that they didn’t actually ask about or look for the violence and sometimes they had evidence but they destroyed or ignored it. But what else could they do? After disparaging their victims as non-credible for decades, they just couldn’t bring themselves to believe them. It was easier to tell the world they were all liars.
These offenders also held all the controls over systems of complaint, redress, and justice. They could use every tactic in the book to shut down the "problems". And they took them: using intentional delays, withholding evidence, hiding disclosures, engaging legal technicalities, blaming "bad apples", disparaging claimants and their representatives, avoiding liability for paltry sums. They threw all the bureaucratic pressures on those brave enough to take them on.
Yet, victims-survivors persisted and the violent institutions were placed under the glare of commission lights. The onus now for government agencies was to turn the moment into a spotlight opportunity for reinventions. They pronounced themselves as benign, now recovered. They claimed: we’ve changed, all our violence is in the past, we’re going through reforms, we’re partnering with survivors, we’re honouring Te Tiriti, we’re on a journey. Have you seen all of our new roles, standards, visions, initiatives, frameworks, working groups, and strategies? Our abusive days are behind us!
It all sounded enticing as long as the rest of us didn’t look beyond the script: at the state’s continuing reliance on legal technicalities towards abuse claimants, the terribly low payments on offer for survivors, the gleeful political demands for sharper shocks, or the continuing physical, sexual, and psychological violence and neglectful treatments meted out to those in Oranga Tamariki residences, across Correctional sites, or other spaces of "care".
We now have all the damning evidence—thousands of pages filled with the enduring capacity of our institutions to harm, and the resulting trauma of children, vulnerable adults, families, whānau, and communities. Chapter after chapter shows us how violence within our state and faith systems became networked, systemic, and coldly normalised across generations. Every volume marks out the organised impunity.
Are our politicians, and state and faith institutions, ready to learn from this damning evidence against them and to implement the long list of recommendations? Will they demonstrate genuine remorse and apology? Will they finally action a fully independent, effective redress scheme, as proposed by the Royal Commission in 2021? And will they stop their violence and harms?
In the following days and weeks, there will be a need for much reading and reflection. But, after that, we need action. The commission’s final reports must surely propel us to fundamentally re-envision the ways we do "care", policing, justice, education, health. Our positive future as a country depends on it. We should never allow abuse to continue. There is no room for excuses.
In moments of reverie, I imagine the activities if the current political demands for dealing with "crime" were directed to state and faith offenders. What urgent and energetic action there would be in the pursuit of organised harmers. How many prevention strategies we would see. And how much would be done to protect victims-survivors, restore their spirit and mana, and provide a sense of justice. It is the least we should expect from these commission reports.
This article was originally published on Newsroom.
Elizabeth Stanley is a professor in Criminology at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. She wrote The Road to Hell: State Violence against Children in Postwar New Zealand (2016), which contributed to the establishment of the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care.