Disability activist tells commission of horrors
AUCKLAND: A man who has become an international disability rights activist was treated ‘‘like a slave’’ in care and learned he was ‘‘nobody’’, he told a Royal Commission hearing yesterday.
Robert Martin is the first person with a learning disability to be elected to a UN Committee for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
He was born in 1957 and was braindamaged at birth by a doctor using forceps.
He was put into care at the age of 18 months. In the years to follow, he was in and out of institutional care.
All he wanted as a child was to picked up, cuddled and loved, but it never happened, he told inquiry into abuse in state and faithbased care in Auckland yesterday.
Mr Martin said he, like many other children, was locked away from the community, when all he wanted was to be with his family.
‘‘As a toddler in Kimberly, I was fed and changed and taken care of but I do not remember being picked up, loved or cuddled because there were so many of us and we were just a number.’’
He said he did not experience what other children did.
‘‘I didn’t go to birthday parties, feed the ducks or visit the zoo. We were locked away from the community. It was lonely.
‘‘There were hundreds of people around me but as a little boy I didn’t know another human being . . . not properly anyway.’’
He first returned home at the age of 7, but things did not work out, he said.
‘‘I was told I was mentally handicapped, dumb, thick as a plank of wood and would always need other people to do things for me. That hurt.’’
He was eventually made a ward of the state and went back into institutional care. In foster care he was treated like a slave and punished many times.
‘‘I would get the jug cord. At night, I was wetting the bed, and to punish me they made me kneel on a wood pile for hours. That was torture.’’
He said he ran away but Social Welfare just brought him back.
Mr Martin said when he was in the Kimberley Centre in Levin, the children with disabilities were not treated as real people.
‘‘You were not given your own clothes — we had to share a pool of clothes and grab what we could get. We never had our own underwear.’’
Mr Martin said he was sexually abused from a young age and often beaten and witnessed it happening to others.
He said people were denied their human rights and basically denied a proper life.
‘‘I personally had nothing and noone. I learnt that I was nobody and my life didn’t really matter.
Mr Martin said abuse in care had a lifelong impact. — RNZ