Staff laughed as girls raped, hearing told

He was just a young boy when he was forced to watch adults rape a young disabled girl, then they tasked him with cleaning her up once they were done – horrific testimony from a former resident who lived at the Kimberley Centre for disabled children.

He says he can remember the staff laughing as the young girls screamed in agony.

Accounts of disabled children being raped in state institutions for money have been shared on the first day of the Abuse in Care – Royal Commission of Inquiry Disability, Deaf and Mental Health institutional care hearing.

It is the first time people with learning disabilities have had the opportunity to talk about what happened to them in institutional settings. Over the eight days of the hearing, 23 survivors and their wha¯nau will share stories of abuse in care.

A propaganda video from 1964 to promote such institutions was played and audio-described at the hearing. It depicted the Kimberley Centre as giving ‘‘the mentally retarded a full life and hopeful future’’. This could not be further from the truth.

In a statement from a witness referred to as Mr EI, he described moving around foster homes as a child before being placed in the ‘‘hell hole’’ of Kimberley in 1963, despite not being diagnosed with a mental or physical disability.

At 13 years old, he remembers being woken up late at night by ‘‘somebody that looked like a nurse’’ and being taken into a room of adults, ‘‘partly dressed’’ children and a naked girl laying on a hospital bed with restraints.

The boys were forced to watch girls being raped. Afterwards, the boys were made to ‘‘clean up the girls’’. On other occasions, the boys were forced to have sex with them. If the boys did not comply, Mr EI remembers having his genitals tied with string while he

was tied to a chair. As the girls, as young as 10, screamed and cried, and the staff laughed as it happened, Mr EI recalls one of the men making a comment along the lines of: ‘‘Well, this is what I’m paying you for.’’

He also remembers overhearing conversations between the men and the nurses, with comments such as: ‘‘Can you get someone else?’’ or ‘‘I’m not happy with that one’’ and even some men asking to ‘‘take a girl home for the weekend’’. He remembers the men coming to visit Kimberley more than 100 times but estimates they came more often because he would run away sometimes.

While at Kimberley, he also saw children having their teeth pulled out without any painnumbing injections and overhearing staff saying: ‘‘Don’t worry about it, they don’t feel pain.’’

In her opening statement at the hearing, assisting counsel Ruth Thomas said institutions ‘‘categorically failed’’ disabled people and ‘‘repeatedly and catastrophically’’ allowed systemic abuse to happen. She said that in the past, the Government ‘‘intentionally’’ put thousands of disabled people and children into institutions. Society structures enabled government legislation for disabled people to be segregated.

She said this created a significant impact on people’s attitudes towards disabled people and those experiencing mental distress as outside of society.

There was a eugenics movement at the time to ‘‘protect the moral character of society from the menace of feeble-minded’’ people and ‘‘prevent contamination of the gene pool by segregating disabled children out of mainstream schools’’, she said.

Royal commission co-chair Paul Gibson, who has lived experience of disability, said New Zealand needed to ‘‘hear, learn, listen and make changes to ensure it doesn’t happen again’’.

The hearing continues.

This is Public Interest Journalism funded by NZ on Air.