It’s been a sombre and unsettling end to the week, with the release of the long-awaited report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care.
It showed, in stark detail, how horrendously treated so many of our families, friends and colleagues, who spent time in either state or faith-based institutional care, have been.
If the findings haven’t upset you, or even rattled you just a bit, then you should feel ashamed by that.
The six-year report has uncovered what it quite correctly labels a "national disgrace". There is no getting around the fact that New Zealand should be absolutely, totally ashamed at its efforts to look after its most vulnerable people.
The commission estimates that of the 655,000 children, young people and adults in care from 1950 to 2019, about 200,000 were abused. That is mind-boggling, and is roughly the entire population of Dunedin, Queenstown Lakes district, and Oamaru.
We talk about the toll on our people of the world wars, and the country’s biggest tragedies being the 1979 Erebus crash, the 2011 Christchurch earthquake and the 1953 Tangiwai disaster.
Arguably this eclipses all those and is our nation’s biggest shame. It beggars belief that so many people have been exposed to so much cruelty in our own communities.
The harm done is immense. Unfathomable. How can the state and churches ever make it up to the survivors of their evil? It is the most searing example in contemporary times of state violence.
The problem has been known about for years. Ignored and denied. And millions of dollars spent covering it up.
Those in positions of power have been found out. Not only did they ignore what was going on, but also they actively destroyed documents and evidence of criminal behaviours so it wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. Abuse survivors could often not find evidence because it had already been obliterated.
Those who destroyed evidence need to be prosecuted. That includes successive governments, as well as church and faith-based authorities.
And who were these hundreds, thousands, of caregivers and clinicians who, over those decades, bullied, tortured — as even the government now admits happened at Lake Alice — took out their petty spites, and got their cheap thrills from exercising their inadequacies and psychopathic tendencies on those unable to fight back?
Where are they today? Those who are still alive, what positions of power might they hold? Hopefully these people are wrestling with their consciences. They know who they are. Some may even be reading this.
They need to be prosecuted too. But how can all those vindictive individuals ever now be brought to justice?
For the survivors who travelled to Wellington this week for the release of the 16-volume, 2944-page report, there will be considerable comfort for finally having their experiences vindicated and for being heard.
The commission laid the blame on governments, their ministries and ministers, on churches, on the Gloriavale community on the West Coast, on police.
In Parliament, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon apologised for what happened at Lake Alice. A formal apology for all abuse will be made on November 12.
How does a government even begin to calculate the damage done and what can be done to try to recompense those abused? Even a rough figure of hundreds of billions of dollars could never right the wrongs and replace the lost potential to the country.
Evidence has been found of unmarked graves at former psychiatric institutions. That is unutterably abhorrent. How could that happen here, in a country which prides itself on charity and progressive thinking?
And how much of this behaviour is still going on?
New Zealand must hang its head in shame. The malign hands of racism and colonialism are all over this. This is what happens when people can act with impunity.
Those who mocked former prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s message to "be kind" during the worst days of the Covid-19 pandemic need to take stock and realise that this level of abuse is what happens when there is no kindness or tolerance.
Kind people do not do to others what these monsters have.
