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Allegations of Abuse
in Institutions |
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Grant Cameron sums up his response
to my critique of the Lake Alice settlement (NZ Lawyer issue 28, 28 October
2005) in his closing comment (NZ Lawyer, issue 32, 27 January 2006):
“Overall, Ms(sic) Hood appears to have fallen into the superficial trap of
assuming that because the claimants’ allegations were bizarre and outrageous,
they simply didn’t happen.” Mr Cameron provides no evidence to support this
claim because there is none. There is no such assumption, implicit or
explicit, in my earlier article. Nonetheless, Mr Cameron’s comment
comes as no surprise. Anyone who questions the reliability of any evidence in
any child abuse case is bound to be accused, sooner or later, of “denying the
reality of child abuse”. Interestingly, those who question the reliability of
the evidence in murder cases are never accused of “denying the reality of
murder”. Of course murder happens. Of course child abuse happens.
So why are those who raise questions about child abuse investigations being
attacked in this way? Is the evidence in some cases too fragile to withstand
close scrutiny? Is accusing one’s questioner of being “in denial” an attempt
to shut down the debate? Mr Cameron writes: “the undisputed
facts are that the vast majority of the claimants in both the Part 1 and Part
2 processes were not resident of Lake Alice by reason of mental illness. They
were not committed under the Mental Health Act and were not there because of
any ‘medical’ reason. They were perfectly healthy children. The only reason
these children were residents in a facility that was being operated as a
mental asylum (mainly for the criminally insane) was that the vast majority
were wards of the state”. After consulting a range of
official sources and media reports I am bound to conclude that Mr Cameron’s
claims are grossly misleading. During its period of operation
(1972-78) the child and adolescent unit at Lake Alice Hospital was a
residential facility for the most disturbed and dangerous young people in the
nation. The fact that most of them were state wards is evidence of serious
problems in their early lives. Regardless of their diagnoses, and their legal
status at Lake Alice, their early problems - social and economic
disadvantage, family dysfunction, child abuse and neglect, educational
difficulties and problems relating to peers - put them at high risk of
becoming mentally ill, developing drug and alcohol addictions and indulging
in criminal offending in adolescence. The available evidence shows that the
Lake Alice claimants had more than their share of these problems when they
were admitted to the unit, and that these problems continued into adulthood.
This does not mean that the claimants were not abused at Lake Alice, but it
does mean that their allegations needed to be scrutinised with special care,
particularly in view of the fact that they were made in the context of a
compensation claim. I can find no basis in the
available records to support Mr Cameron’s claim that the government decision
to compensate the claimants was based on Crown Law Office advice. On the contrary,
Crown Law Office advice is reported to be that many of the claims were
contestable, and should be tested in court. Indeed, media reports make it
clear that the decision to compensate was not based on reliable evidence or
due process, but on a 1999 election promise by then Labour Health
spokesperson, Helen Clark. Following the election, Sir Rodney Gallen was
asked to determine how the $6.5 million allocated for the settlement should
be distributed. Sir Rodney Gallen is a jurist of
impeccable credentials and reputation. His mission was undoubtedly well
intentioned, and executed in the utmost good faith. He received allegations
of abuse that deserved to be investigated. But for Sir Rodney to report that
he believed the allegations to be true, when he had done no more than
interview some of the complainants and read all their files was, in my view,
no more acceptable than if he were to announce, part way through a criminal
trial, that he believed the accused to be guilty, even though he had not
heard all the evidence. The fundamental problem is that
Sir Rodney made findings of credibility when he was in no position to do so.
Indeed, with no input from the Crown or from any former Lake Alice staff, Sir
Rodney did not even know which claims were disputed, and which were
not. Sir Rodney acknowledges some of
these limitations in his report. Nonetheless, the fact that a jurist of his
stature had concluded that the claims were true gave rise to a presumption in
the media and among the general public that an objective, detailed
investigation had confirmed the existence of widespread, systemic abuse at
Lake Alice. Consequently, even though the
official apology from Prime Minister Helen Clark and Health Minister Annette
King was notable for its vagueness (“We are writing ... to apologise for the
treatment you received or may have witnessed in the child and adolescent unit
at Lake Alice”), whenever journalists have written about the Lake Alice claim
in the years since it was settled in 2001, they have filled the
gaps in their stories by reporting Sir Rodney’s untested findings as
established fact. The flow-on effects of the Lake
Alice settlement process reverberate to this day - in the upsurge of historic
allegations against youth institutions (many of them made by mentally ill
career criminals with drug and alcohol addictions), in the demands that these
allegations be accepted and compensated without question, and in the lasting
damage that these untested allegations are doing to the careers and
reputations of all the decent, good-hearted people nationwide who have
devoted their lives to the care of troubled and needy children. |
