High costs of historical abuse
The numbers look staggering and appalling. It is also shocking that we will never know how exact they are. The interim report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care estimated that 655,000 people passed through different forms of care in New Zealand across the nearly seven decades from 1950 to 2019. Another estimate says that between 114,000 and
256,000 of that group, between 17 and 39 per cent, would have been abused.
It is far from an exact science. To complicate matters further, one person might pass through several types of institution, including churchbased and psychiatric, meaning they were counted more than once.
Such are the vast challenges of the inquiry that was launched in 2018 and will deliver its final report by the start of
2023. The inquiry has been holding hearings and listening to testimony, with around
1900 survivors and 350 witnesses registered. It has been a harrowing experience.
What began as an inquiry into abuse in state care was expanded to include faith-based care, a move welcomed by religious organisations which were aware of the independence and credibility that a royal commission would bring to historical stories of abuse.
Record keeping was poor in state care. Files were often destroyed. We have heard the heartbreaking accounts of adults who can find no historical trace of the institutions that housed them and where they remember suffering abuse. The data is especially poor when it comes to Ma¯ ori, Pacific and disabled people. It indicates an enormous historical carelessness or indifference towards the most vulnerable among us.
The estimate of a quarter of a million abused children is a catchy headline number that is likely to have been inflated, according to a statistics researcher who pointed out that a similar inquiry in Australia refused to try to put a number on the problem, such were the issues with the data. But the inquiry requires a number, and it is easy to see there is a point in having what is at least an approximate sense of the scale of abuse over decades.
As well as the numbers, there is an economic impact that royal commission chairperson Coral Shaw accurately describes as eye-watering. The average lifetime cost for someone abused in care has been calculated at $857,000. Of that sum, $184,000 is the cost to the economy from increased spending on healthcare and other costs to the state. The rest is a non-financial cost that is intended to reflect pain, suffering and premature death. The cost to society in total, if the numbers of those abused are really as high as estimated, would be a startling $214 billion.
The interim report also found that there were systemic failures in the handling of abuse claims, with survivors battling aggressive Crown lawyers and rules that disadvantaged them, making it hard for victims to be believed and therefore more likely that others have not come forward. The barriers have been ‘‘substantial and numerous’’, the report says, and abuse survivors have been retraumatised by the process.
When she gave evidence, Solicitor-General Una Jagose admitted the Crown had not been ‘‘sufficiently survivor-focused’’. The depressing heart of the matter is that decades of abuse were measured against ‘‘the need to be responsible with public money’’. It’s no surprise that Public Service Minister Chris Hipkins calls it one of the most sobering reports he’s ever read.