|
|
Allegations
of Abuse in Institutions |
|
|
|
|
Cruel abuse of army
cadets by their fellow trainee soldiers seems to have been an accepted
practice. Victims of bullying are now coming forward to tell their stories.
Hank Schouten reports. -------------------- BULLYING and abuse seem
to have been widely accepted features of most cadets' army life. Perhaps the
biggest surprise is that those who suffered kept it to themselves for so
long. Even today, some of the victims feel so humiliated and bewildered that
they still fear the consequences of telling their stories. The ill-treatment they
endured was called "bastardisation", and there are repeated
references to it in a book published six years ago to mark the 50th
anniversary of the Regular Force Cadet School at Waiouru, where, from 1948 to
1991, about 4000 teenage cadets were inducted and trained to be soldiers. It
was the army's equivalent of a boarding school, and many cadets were just 15
when they went in. The book was called A
Favoured Few, an indication of the school's status as the army's most
important training establishment. It took teenage boys and trained and
educated them to become soldiers, military technicians and officers. Author Richard Taylor,
a major serving at Defence headquarters, declined yesterday to discuss the
latest controversy over bullying because an inquiry is looming, but, in his
book, Taylor describes bullying as the "single black mark on the entire
cadet school experience". The death of
17-year-old Cadet Grant Bain is mentioned briefly. Taylor describes it as an
appalling waste of a young life and the blackest moment in the history of the
school. But from his research
-- questionnaires returned by former cadets and interviews with key figures
-- he says "bastardisation" took many forms. He describes some, such
as being made to run around the barracks naked, as relatively harmless. Cadets considered
"not up to scratch in their personal hygiene" were cleaned with
long-handled scrubbers. But Taylor's history
also includes more dangerous incidents. He quotes an anonymous recollection
of one incident in which a cadet was "sat down in the middle of our
barrack room section and forced, purely out of fear, he wasn't manhandled,
but made without mercy to drink copious volumes of water to the extent that
he finally collapsed". The incident came to an end when the commanding
officer came into the barrack room unexpectedly and ordered the
"dangerously ill" cadet be taken to the camp hospital. His book includes an
account of "barrelling", or organised beatings. An anonymous former
cadet recalled: "I admit to participating in these events from time to
time, both as the beater and the beatee. The strongest ruled, and if you
decided to administer barrack room justice to some cadet and thought he might
fight back, then you just organised some back-up -- three or four of your
mates, just to ensure the cadet stayed in line and did not offer any
resistance." The cadet said time and
place of the barrelling would be spread among the cadets, and the staff would
disappear. "I never saw a
staff member stop one of these events." In the article that
prompted the Government to agree to investigate the claims of abuse, former
army sergeant Ian Fraser says a culture of abuse permeated the cadet school
throughout its history. A cadet of the early
1980s, Mike, describes a "lesser barrelling", which involved being
tied to a bed, taken outside and leaned up against a wall. Shaving cream,
toothpaste, nugget and even excrement were rubbed on the victim, who was then
hosed off. Fraser says some senior
staff made some efforts to stamp out the violence, and some cadets who had
beaten up others were literally drummed out of the army. "On another
occasion, during my years at the school, there was a decision to remove all
wardrobe doors from the barracks. The reason for this was that beaten cadets
were repeatedly being left in the wardrobes, bleeding, unconscious and
unattended to." However, the main
attitude of the army hierarchy was one of neglect, he writes in an article
first published last weekend on the Scoop website. "It was as if the
culture of violence and abuse was tacitly accepted as part of making tough
men." A cadet who had left as
a result of serious bullying went to Truth, which published a series of
articles in the mid-1970s, but though the cadets involved were severely
disciplined, the practice continued. One cadet describes
how, though the regular force staff ran the course by day, the cadet
non-commissioned officers were in control at night. "The entire 10 or 12
weeks of basic (training) ended up being an exercise in control by force and
terror. I, like thousands before me and many to come, came to rue the day
that I signed up, and wished that it would all be over soon." Taylor says in his
history that the practice did not stop till the course was reduced to one
year in 1983. "This was primarily because, there being no senior class,
there was no cohort of cadets to perpetuate the the excesses they had endured
the previous year." Another factor was the
appointment of a new commanding officer, Major Raymond Seymour, who had been
a cadet himself, who took a firm line on bastardisation and bullying. Taylor quotes Major
Seymour as saying that it had to stop. Major Seymour's decision was
questioned. "Bombardier . . . thought he had misheard me when I said
there was to be no striking of any cadet. `Do you mean we can no longer take
these little (expletives) behind the shed and knock some sense into them?'
" FRASER, who now lives
in Perth, says that, "between 1948 and 1991, when it closed, an average
of over 5000 young New Zealand boys vied for entry into the army's elite RF
Cadet School, or "the Club", as it was colloquially known. "Less than 3 per
cent of them made the grade. Generally from white middle-class backgrounds,
the army accepted them as young as 15 into its ranks with promises of
continued education, trade training and apprenticeships. "Most would go on
to become the backbone of the army -- its senior non-commissioned officers
(NCOs). A few would earn commissions as officers. Almost all would either
suffer or witness levels of abuse not tolerated in a modern society." It was having a rank
structure which paralleled the regular army structure that established and entrenched
the abusive culture, Fraser says. He says the
"boyish inquisitiveness" of the cadets led to them developing
cavalier attitudes to lethal army ordinance, and they became adept at
acquiring anything from rifle ammunition to rifle-launched grenades. Some cadets lost their
lives as a result. An army cadet on
exercise at Waiouru in June, 1982, was killed and two members of his radio
detachment seriously injured after he "meddled" with unexploded
ammunition he had gathered from a live-firing impact area in Waiouru. An army
court of inquiry found that Bryce E Gawler, 17, had deliberately ignored
ammunition safety procedures. On November 2, 1992,
another cadet collapsed and died nine kilometres into a 12-kilometre
"battle efficiency test" around Waiouru, during which soldiers were
required to carry 25 kilograms of equipment. A coroner later found that Lee
James Martin, 18, of Glen Eden, Auckland, died of heat stroke despite being a
"fit, healthy young man". Mr Martin was thought to have been
suffering from the flu and had drunk most of a large bottle of patent cough
medicine the night before. In Fraser's article, he
says sexual abuse occurred. There were cases of cadets being held down and sodomised
by other cadets, or sexually assaulted with broom handles, but no victim had
wanted to go on the record about those incidents. -------------------- CAPTION: Training ground: At the
army's Regular Force Cadet School, `it was as if the culture of violence and
abuse was tacitly accepted as part of making tough men'. |
