Shock and shame
Some of the children who suffered horrific abuse in the Lake Alice psychiatric hospital tell their stories – decades later – in a podcast released on Stuff today. The journalist behind the series, Aaron Smale, explains why their stories are just one grim chapter of a shameful story.
‘Shock’’ is an overused term. In the case of Lake Alice psychiatric hospital it is also a hard-to-avoid pun.
But five years after starting to investigate the state’s appalling abuse of children in its custody, the institution continues to shock me. Quite literally.
Just when you think you’ve heard it all about Lake Alice, and the adolescent unit that operated there between 1972 and 1977, there’s always some new horror or outrage you encounter.
I was recently introduced to someone who had been through the adolescent unit run by Dr Selwyn Leeks and I spoke to this person over the phone. I’d heard stories about children being electrocuted on the genitals to the point that it no longer surprised me. But this particular individual had not only been electrocuted on the genitals. One of his testicles had been destroyed.
Whether through the politeness of a first conversation or because I was reeling with incomprehension, I failed to ask for details. But what in any other world would seem implausible was entirely possible, even par for the course, in the world of Lake Alice.
There are many such horrendous details of abuse, which are best told by the victims themselves. But there is another whole layer to the story of Lake Alice that is perhaps more outrageous – the institutional failure that not only allowed the abuse, but fostered it. Then there’s the subsequent failure over nearly five decades to investigate and hold people accountable. This was not a passive failure but an active one.
It’s easy to think of Lake Alice as ancient news, a blot on our history. Janet Frame’s literary and autobiographical accounts of the horrors of mental health institutions in 20th-century New
Zealand have almost romanticised our collective sins and barbarity and turned them into the beauty of art. Frame’s fiction allowed us the escape of viewing the past as a strange country of lurid weirdness.
But Lake Alice is not the past. Not for those who entered its gates and will carry the trauma they experienced there until their dying day. Nor for their children and even grandchildren who also live with the damage, whether it is spoken of or not.
What happened at Lake Alice has never been fully acknowledged by the entity that caused the harm. The state was the parent and the doctor who inflicted the abuse. It was the lawyer who defended them, and the policeman who dawdled and dallied.
I initially thought of Lake Alice as some outlier, an anomaly. The narrative of a rogue doctor running his own little fiefdom where he could inflict unimaginable cruelties is in one sense a comforting myth.
It contains the evil within one individual. By personalising it, the evil becomes somewhat comprehensible.
But as I have gone deeper into my research I’ve come to the view that Lake Alice is something far worse. It was completely enmeshed in a system of punishment that regarded children – particularly Mā ori children – as a certain kind of problem.
The ‘‘problem’’ of youth delinquency – a national obsession in the post-war period – coincided with the increased presence of urban Mā ori. This provided the psychiatry profession with its chance to flex its credentials in not just fixing criminal behaviour but attempting to prevent it.
There is, in my view, a deeply entrenched attitude among the profession that they know best. This belief is on full display in the way wards of the state in the welfare system – children, it must be remembered – were a convenient pool of guinea pigs for ‘‘treatments’’. These children were never diagnosed
with any mental illness.
Before Selwyn Leeks set up shop at Lake Alice, he was a roving consultant who would advise staff at welfare homes such as Hokio Beach School on drug regimes for children. These drugs were potent antipsychotics given to psychiatric patients in adult hospitals.
Most of the children who ended up at Lake Alice were victims of some kind of trauma before they arrived there. Some of this was inflicted by employees at other institutions. Some of those employees were paedophiles and were the perpetrators of chronic sexual abuse of hundreds of children in the state’s custody.
But there were also realities so mundane that survivors often don’t even think to mention them, such as solitary confinement in what were effectively prison cells 23 hours a day. I’ve seen the file of one individual who was in solitary confinement at Kohitere, in Levin, for close to five months when he was 14.
There is much evidence that solitary confinement destroys people physically and mentally, but those studies are based on adults. The damage to a child who has already suffered serious trauma is incalculable.
The so-called experts of psychiatry couldn’t see what was right in front of them – children who were traumatised by the institutions and people supposed to be protecting and caring for them. Instead, the children were portrayed as the problem.
There were children who reacted so badly to these regimes of abuse that they were escalated through the ranks and ended up in Lake Alice. They were put under the authority of Leeks, who believed electrocution under the guise of treatment would deter whatever behaviour was considered undesirable.
The Lake Alice story is far bigger than Lake Alice, although that’s big enough. Lake Alice is about how the state should be held responsible for crimes it commits against its own citizens.
Who or what holds the state accountable when it inflicts torture and abuse against its own? There is a direct conflict of interest when the criminal is also supposed to be the cop.
The counter-argument is that there is a separation of the state’s various powers into institutions with different roles. But in my view the balance of power between those institutions is completely tilted towards those inclined to protect the Crown’s interests over the rights of those who have been abused.
I have come to the conclusion that, aside from Leeks himself, the worst culprit is Crown Law, which has gone out of its way to get the Crown off the hook.
Which is why questions about Lake Alice go all the way to the ninth floor of the Beehive. The 2001 out-of-court settlement with victims, engineered by Helen Clark, was supposed to look magnanimous at the time. But on closer examination it looks like a way of avoiding the scrutiny of the courts or an independent inquiry.
Individual perpetrators of child abuse have a consistent habit of silencing their victims. At every stage of the 50-year saga that is Lake Alice, the state has chosen to do the same – or at least quieten them down. This started from day one. I have seen files written by paedophile staff, branding the children they were abusing as liars. When that child tells the police, they are ignored and returned to the hands of the perpetrators.
When one of the Lake Alice children, Leoni McInroe, became an adult and took legal action against the state, she was put through a nine-year ordeal of obfuscation, delays, bullying and intimidation by Crown Law. The police received 35 complaints, but lost 15 of them.
The state is not the only entity silencing victims. When I first started investigating state abuse, I interviewed Elizabeth Stanley, author of the book The Road to
Hell. Her publicist had tried to get interest from different media and was met with complete indifference.
There have been journalists over the past five decades who have done great work on the subject – Peter Trickett at the NZ
Herald in the 1970s, and Simon Collins, also of the Herald, in the 2000s. The problem is not individual journalists but their bosses who don’t see the value in getting to the bottom of what happened. The only reason I’ve been following this story for five years is because I’m a freelancer and don’t have an editor telling me to move on to something else.
The coverage is still uneven. During the Lake Alice hearing, evidence was given that a child had died while being electrocuted by Leeks. I was travelling at the time but in the following 24 hours I kept looking for media reports about it, and I couldn’t find any. Not prominently anyway. I would have thought a child being killed by a doctor using a practice that had no legitimacy as a medical treatment would have led every front page and bulletin. Apparently not.
So when does the Lake Alice story end? At what point can there be some kind of closure for victims?
In a sense, there isn’t any end point. As survivor Tyrone Marks puts it, the trauma of Lake Alice is tattooed through his body and mind. He can’t get over it, he’s just had to learn to live with it.
Another survivor we talk to in the podcast is Rangi Wickliffe. He goes so far as to say that he doesn’t like the word survivor. The trauma is so ongoing that he is still a victim.
Even in a best-case scenario this doesn’t change. The possibility of some last-minute justice has faded long ago.
Any small victory will come with caveats. If the police charge Leeks and/or others, that will be a hollow victory, given he is 93 and has failing health and mental capacity. Charging him now would also raise questions – why didn’t the previous two investigations in the 1970s and 2000s find the same evidence when it was even more available?
If the government decides to acknowledge the facts, apologise, take responsibility and pay out proper compensation, for many survivors it will simply mean something to pass on to their children. Many haven’t got a lot of time on the clock themselves. Far too many are already gone.
And if they are offered some kind of support for the trauma they have suffered, who is going to deliver it? The professions that not only put them in Lake Alice but failed to hold one of their own accountable?
This podcast can’t rectify the wrongs of the past 50 years either. But it is a small attempt to break the silence and give survivors the dignity of being heard. Please listen.