New Zealand offers national apology to people abused in care

New Zealand offered a historic national apology on Tuesday to victims and families of hundreds of thousands of young people and vulnerable adults who were subjected to physical and sexual abuse in institutions over the last 70 years.

The apology follows a report by a public inquiry in July that found some 200,000 children and vulnerable adults in state and faith-based care experienced some form of abuse from 1950 to 2019.

“It was horrific. It was heartbreaking. It was wrong. And it should never have happened,” Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said with around 200 abuse survivors and families watching on from the public gallery at Parliament in the capital, Wellington.

“Today, I am apologizing on behalf of the government to everyone who suffered abuse, harm and neglect while in care. I make this apology to all survivors on behalf of my own and previous governments.”

The government had completed or started work on 28 recommendations from the inquiry, the prime minister said, and will provide its full response early next year.

Luxon said a National Remembrance Day would take place on Nov. 12 next year, and that work will begin to remove memorials such as street names, public amenities and other public honors of proven perpetrators. Instead, the country will honor the victims, many of whom were buried in unmarked graves at psychiatric and other sites that were places of care in New Zealand.

A bill to include a range of measures to improve safety in state care was to have its first reading in Parliament on Tuesday.

The Royal Commission of Inquiry was the longest and most complex inquiry undertaken by New Zealand. The inquiry spoke to more than 2,300 survivors of abuse in the country of 5.3 million.

The inquiry detailed a litany of abuses in state and faith-based care, including rape, sterilization and the use of electric shocks, which peaked in the 1970s.

Those from the Indigenous Maori community were especially vulnerable to abuse, the report found, as well as those with mental or physical disabilities.

The final report outlined 138 recommendations, including calling for public apologies from New Zealand’s government, as well as the pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury, heads of the Catholic and Anglican churches, respectively, who have condemned child abuse.

It also called for new legislation, including mandatory reporting of suspected abuse, including admissions made during religious confession.

The report estimated that the average lifetime cost to an abuse survivor was about 857,000 New Zealand dollars ($510,000) per person as of 2020, although it did not make a clear recommendation on how much survivors should be compensated.