Allegations
of Abuse in Institutions |
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Some classmates of the
man who has helped launch hundreds of claims of abuse against an army cadet
school are unhappy with his stance. Les Marston, of
Hamilton, was in the same class as Ian Fraser, who this week claimed cadets
at the former army school in Waiouru were beaten and sexually assaulted. Te
Awamutu man Grant Bain was also shot and killed. Mr Fraser says 300
former cadets had contacted him to say they were assaulted. But Mr Marston said
that if anyone was likely to be subject to abuse it was him. "I was at the cadet
school from 1971 until August 1972 and while there I went AWOL (absent
without leave) twice, on the first occasion for 12 weeks. "If anyone was
going to get it then it would have been me. I had my own personal problems
and I bucked the system a lot." Mr Marston said he
cried on his first night at the school, but soon adapted to the environment. "It's important to
realise we are not talking about 2004 New Zealand," he said. "It
was a time when if you got in trouble with the coppers, you'd get a clip
around the ear and sent on your way." Mr Marston works as a
social scientist and disputes any suggestion of systematic abuse at the
school. "I never once saw
a beating or sexual attack," he said. "What you did have, like in
any other boarding school in New Zealand at the time, was a lot of peer
pressure." "You had the
normal clash of personalities you would encounter at a boarding school with
15 to 17-year-old boys, each testing their mettle against each other." Mr Marston said he, and
many cadets of that time, had a better life at the cadet school than at home.
"It would be fair
to say that my father was a strict disciplinarian," he said. "If I
stuffed up, I'd end up wearing his belt round my backside." New Zealand First MP
Ron Mark, also a classmate of Mr Fraser's, denied there was a culture of
abuse at the army school. "I recall nothing
different to what happened in boarding schools of the same era," Mr Mark
said. "Any suggestion of a culture of abuse at the school is simply
wrong." |