As a mum and grandmother, I’m angry to hear that the people those children should have been able to trust, were betrayed by them. Those professionals, who should have shown compassion instead showed them, for the first time in their short lives, what cruelty was.
As tangata whenua, I want justice because most of the children put into these institutions were Māori.
As the kaiwhakahaere of NZNO, I want us to know that this happened, that we learn from it so we can make our professions as nurses, midwives and kaiāwhina better than those who came before us.
The stories told by the survivors in the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse Care are not made up.
“Nurses were involved in preparing children and adults for ECT (electro convulsive therapy), held down and would often administer the painful injections of paraldehyde on these children, some as young as eight.”
Nurses were involved in preparing children and adults for ECT (electro convulsive therapy), held down and would often administer the painful injections of paraldehyde on these children, some as young as eight. They also turned a blind eye to the children being sexually abused by both nurses and patients – at times held down and gang-raped! They were also used as slave labour. These experiences aren’t pulled from ‘once upon a time’ fairy tale books. They actually happened and we should be ashamed of them.
The scars left behind for the victims were “pervasive, lifelong, and intergenerational, affecting survivors and their families, communities, and society,” the commission wrote in its report.
Overall, successive Governments must take responsibility because it was under the umbrella of state-based institutions that the worst crimes against patients were enabled and perpetrated. At Lake Alice Hospital what was extraordinarily unfair, unjust and downright atrocious went largely unchallenged.
Yes, I’ve heard the remarks that the nurses were only doing their jobs, as employees of those institutions.
“While most of the public see our profession as trusting, we need to know there’s an element of society that don’t. And we must correct that.”
But the fact remains. They helped to cause great pain and suffering on the innocent. And there are many survivors who still don’t trust nurses today because of that.
While most of the public see our profession as trusting, we need to know there’s an element of society that don’t. And we must correct that.
One comment during the Royal Commission hearings, from Māori survivor Rexene Landy (Tahawai), that I will never forget, was: “We knew it was wrong to be Māori. You had made a terrible error and Jesus did not love you.”
Another comment from the late Dr Moana Jackson, who was a stalwart supporter of Te Rūnanga o Aotearoa NZNO, was: “Colonisation has always been genocidal, and the assumption of a power to take Māori children has been part of that destructive intent. The taking itself is an abuse.”
Moana reminded us that: “Colonisation is a process not a past event and the terrible abuse of our rangatahi and tamariki in these institutions echo the stolen generations of Australia where the goal is to destroy indigenous communities.”
One of the reasons NZNO has been pushing so hard for the Government to invest in training Māori nurses and culturally safe staffing ratios, is because we know this will reduce the systemic racism in the health system. The same sort of racism that saw generations of Māori children suffer in what was supposed to be a care system.
I want to acknowledge Nursing Council of New Zealand for their courageous apology, but the challenge we also face is what specific actions must we take now to ensure that abuse doesn’t happen again.
Koia ka puta ki te whaiao ki te ao Mārama – Emerging into the world of light, into the world of understanding (extract from a waiata written for the survivors).