Victims of abuse in care are, at last, receiving recognition, apologies and compensation, but Chris Trotter asks if the Royal Commission has given them a credible explanation of why their suffering was inflicted, and how it was able to go on for so long?

Reading the abuse in care reports, two questions requiring clear and compelling answers remain unanswered: Why? and How? Why were so many children and young people abused in such awful ways? How was it possible for so much and such appalling abuse to continue unchecked for so long? Without satisfactory responses to these two critical questions, the chances of history repeating itself must remain unacceptably high. For some reason, however, the Why and How of Abuse in Care were not made the prime focus of the Royal Commission’s investigations. Its reports tell us the Who, When, Where and What of this horror story, but, those two key questions, Why? and How?, are not adequately addressed.

This failure is, in part, explained by the time period under examination – 1950-1999. Narrowing the Inquiry’s scope to the second half of the twentieth century made it possible for the dominant ideologies relating to physical and mental disability, social deviance, and race, the ideologies that drove official and institutional policy-making for most of the 100 years between 1850 and 1950, to escape the Royal Commission’s scrutiny.

At the heart of the world view that gripped the imaginations of Western intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century was Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution – summarised as the ‘survival of the fittest’. In an unlikely alliance, not unfamiliar to those living in the twenty-first century, captains of industry and “progressive” social-reformers, alike, observed the condition of contemporary humanity and arrived at a strikingly similar conclusions. Evolution, it seemed, was in urgent need of a helping hand. It was Darwin’s half-cousin, Francis Galton, who founded what was very soon feted as “Eugenics” – the new “science” dedicated to systematically improving the human species.

Anti-democratic, elitist and profoundly authoritarian, Eugenics proceeded from the assumption that humanistic civilisation was, paradoxically, undermining itself by defying Darwin’s immutable law of the survival of the fittest and allowing the physically and morally “defective” to survive and procreate. Left unchecked, the survival of this inferior human stock would very quickly overwhelm and dilute the effectiveness of the superior human material upon which all successful civilisations depend. In short: by being kind to “unfit” human individuals, soft-hearted humanists were being cruel to the collective human species.

The ease with which social reformers, generally, and socialists, in particular, succumbed to the eugenicists’ argument that a kind future requires a cruel present is disconcerting. Preventing the reproduction of the “unfit” may seem harsh to us, but at the turn of the nineteenth century the old excuse about the end justifying the means came with a scientific seal of approval.

It is at this historical juncture that New Zealand enters the story. Since the election of the Liberal Government in 1890, this country had earned the reputation of being the “social laboratory of the world”. Reformers around the world thrilled to the spectacle of a society in which socialists and progressives seemed to be in charge. Entirely predictably, eugenic science was forcefully espoused by New Zealand institutions as diverse as Sir Truby King’s Plunket Society and the Women’s Division of the Farmers Union.

As Hilary Stace, writing for the New Zealand Catholic Bioethics Centre, puts it in her essay “Eugenics in New Zealand”:

“The ‘unfit’ encompassed a whole range of ‘other’ including the following groups described in the language of the time: alcoholics, imbeciles, illegitimate children (and their mothers), prostitutes, criminals, the feeble-minded, lunatics, epileptics, deaf-mutes, the unemployable, the tubercular, the immoral (e.g. homosexuals), anyone from another race, those with incurable diseases such as Syphilis or tuberculosis, and even ‘mouth-breathers’.”

In “God’s Own Country” these categories had very few defenders. Many hoped that the settlement of New Zealand would produce a race of “Better Britons”. In a new country, these settlers hoped to perfect a new kind of human-being. Sir Truby King introduced his celebrated child-rearing regimen by declaring that: “The destiny of the race is in the hands of the mothers.” He was not referring to people of colour!

Always, at the heart of every eugenics project, lay the call for a comprehensive winnowing-out of the species’ “unfit” breeding-stock. Debate raged about how this could best be accomplished. Mandatory sterilisation was favoured by many eugenicists, and widely practiced in the United States of the 1920s and 30s. The compulsory sterilisation of “unfit” New Zealanders was advanced forcefully in 1928, but Parliament balked at legislating it into existence. The politicians of social-democratic Sweden were not so squeamish. Their eugenics programme, launched in the 1930s, was only brought to a close in the 1970s.

Those who think that selective human breeding and the compulsory “euthanasia” of “useless mouths” were crimes against humanity committed exclusively by Germany’s National-Socialist regime during the 1930s and 40s, should think again. The Nazi’s drew much of their inspiration, and received much helpful advice, from the eugenicists of Britain and the United States. The extremity of the German “solutions” may have been unique, but the deadly implications of eugenics were conceived in English.

Though eugenics may have been implemented with varying degrees of severity across the globe, on one strategy all those concerned with the “social hygiene” of their respective nations were agreed: the unfit must be separated from the “healthy” population – hidden away in institutions from which release, let alone escape, was to be made as difficult as possible.

Although the famous words from Dante’s “Inferno” – “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” were not inscribed above the entrances to these terrible places, the findings of the Royal Commission indicate unequivocally that they should have been.

Significantly, it wasn’t just the state that found its institutions and resources given over to the high-minded advocates of eugenic perfectionism. Before there were secular progressives determined to populate a flawless paradise on earth, there were religious institutions determined to make Hell’s spawn fit for Heaven. State and Church, alike, believed their lofty goals were best pursued away from the prying eyes of those who struggled to grasp both the importance and the difficulty of their scientific/spiritual work.

It was this perceived need for secrecy that sealed the fate of so many (one in four) of the young New Zealanders who fell into these institutions’ clutches. There is a distressingly large number of predatory human-beings for whom the information that places exist in which abuse can be carried out without significant risk of retribution will always be an irresistible temptation.

Installed within New Zealand’s “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” mental hospitals, orphanages and boys’ homes, with their patterns of abuse well established, these predatory sadists were kept safe by the sheer enormity of their offending. The bureaucrats and medical staff ostensibly in charge of these institutions were in thrall to the idea that, when it comes to the “unfit”, the “fit” population would rather not to know what is happening behind the barbed-wire fences and inside the locked wards. Aware of how disturbing it would be for ordinary citizens to be confronted with the unceasing and unpunished abuse of vulnerable and friendless youngsters, the state said and did nothing – for decades.

This is the Why and the How of the abuse that took place under the auspices of administrators, psychiatrists, doctors, nurses, orderlies, priests and pastors. It is crushing to discover that the number of children and young people victimised between 1950 and 1999 is officially estimated at 200,000. God alone knows how many suffered between 1900 and 1949!

Yes, a fraction of those victims are now, at last, receiving recognition, apologies and compensation, but has the Royal Commission given them a credible explanation as to why their suffering was inflicted, and how it was able to go on for so long?

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.