Girl locked in cell for months
A young girl put into state care 60 years ago after she complained of being abused at home was locked alone in a cell for months until she eventually ended up in a psychiatric hospital.
Maureen Taru, now 70, revealed the horrific abuse she suffered in state care during her teenage years as she testified before the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care in Auckland. Taru grew up in a dysfunctional household in Levin, where she was sexually abused by her much older half-brother. Her mother was aware of the abuse, but told her it was something ‘‘that happens in every household’’.
Taru told the inquiry about the appalling circumstances she grew up in, including living in filth and there never being enough food.
She was about 10 when she told law enforcement authorities about the abuse she and her siblings were suffering, but she was not believed. Instead, she was told she was a liar who could not be allowed to be in the community.
Taru said this became a common theme throughout her life. Whenever she spoke about the abuse, she was told she was a liar and punished.
Taru was taken to Marycrest, a Catholic girls’ rehabilitation home on the Ka¯ piti Coast. There, she was locked away in the infirmary 24 hours a day, not allowed contact with anyone, and was only given a Bible to read. In May 1965, Taru was taken to Margaret Street Girls’ Home under a police warrant for ‘‘not being under proper control’’.
Taru was seen by a doctor from Lake Alice Hospital after she complained of noises at the home.
The doctor said she exhibited difficult behaviour and prescribed her antipsychotic drugs. She was also heavily sedated and put on different tranquillisers and sleeping pills.
In January 1966 she was moved to Kingslea Girls’ Home in Christchurch. There she was put in the ‘‘clinic’’, which Taru described as looking like a jail.
‘‘There was just a big line of cells which needed big keys to open. Each cell had a window which comprised two plastic sheets that looked out to a courtyard with a brick wall around it.’’
As she spoke about her time in the ‘‘clinic’’, tears flowed down Taru’s face. She had to sleep on a rolled-up mattress on a springboard bolted to the floor, and never had an actual bed. Clothes were shared among girls and she was not allowed her own set.
Apart from eating meals from the cell floors, there was nothing else to do, Taru said, with no books or other activities.
When she wanted to go to the toilet, she had to bang on the cell door. If a staff member did not respond, she had to urinate in a corner. She was allowed just one five-minute bath a week.
Taru said she had an imaginary friend at Kingslea, the only way she could cope with the solitude.
‘‘Looking back now I think I must have been completely insane, because the friend was there. They were real to me.’’
She was not allowed to talk to any of the other girls at the clinic.
Taru never saw a social worker or psychiatrist while at Kingslea, and never received any schooling.
‘‘I had feelings of wanting to die all the time while I was at Kingslea. I didn’t do anything but if I could have, I would have,’’ she said. In September 1966 she was sent to the Ferguson Clinic at Christchurch’s Sunnyside Hospital, formerly known as Sunnyside Lunatic Asylum.
She said she thinks she was sent to Ferguson because they thought she was ‘‘nuts’’, talking to her imaginary friend. ‘‘I was at Ferguson for ages, I think at least a couple of Christmases. I spent a few years there drugged out and doing what I was told.’’
She was 17 when she was released from Ferguson and taken to Burwood Hospital, where she got a live-in job in the kitchen.
Taru went on to become a nurse, got married, became the mother of four children, and is now a grandmother.
About 15 years ago she finally came out as gay, something she had known since she was a child.