WELLINGTON, New Zealand — New Zealand’s independent inquiry into decades of abuse of children and vulnerable adults released a blistering final report Wednesday finding the country’s state agencies and churches failed to prevent, stop or admit to the mistreatment of those in their care.
The scale of abuse was “unimaginable” with an estimated 200,000 people abused over seven decades, many of them Maori, New Zealand’s Indigenous people, the report said.
In response to the findings, New Zealand’s government agreed for the first time that historical treatment of some children in a notorious state-run hospital amounted to torture, and pledged an apology to all those abused in state, foster and religious care since 1950.
But Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said it was too soon to say how much the government expected to pay in compensation — a bill the inquiry said would run to billions of dollars — or to promise that officials involved in denying and covering up the abuse would lose their jobs.
The prime minister said the government now heard and believed survivors, and that he was shocked by the findings. He said the government would formally apologize to survivors on Nov. 12.
“We always thought that we were exceptional and different, and the reality is we’re not,” he said, noting “a dark and sorrowful day” for the country.
The findings by the Royal Commission — the highest level of inquiry that can be undertaken in New Zealand — capped a six-year investigation that followed two decades of similar probes around the world, as nations struggle to reckon with authorities’ transgressions against children removed from their families and placed in care.
The results were a “national disgrace,” the inquiry’s report said. Of 650,000 children and vulnerable adults in state, foster, and church care between 1950 and 2019 — in a country that today has a population of 5 million — nearly a third endured physical, sexual, verbal or psychological abuse. Many more were exploited or neglected, the inquiry found.
The figures were likely higher. Complaints were disregarded and records were lost or destroyed.
“These gross violations occurred at the same time as Aotearoa New Zealand was promoting itself, internationally and domestically, as a bastion of human rights and as a safe, fair country in which to grow up as a child in a loving family,” the inquiry heads wrote, using the country’s Maori and English names.
