News & Events

Solitary confinement destroys people, but New Zealand continues to inflict it on our most vulnerable and damaged people, including children, as a matter of course. Aaron Smale reports on the practice that won’t go away and the people that are psychologically annihilated and physically disappeared in state institutions. Shane was locked in a concrete box…

The publication, Coming In From The Cold, includes the experiences of 26 male survivors, generously shared by Tautoko Tāne staff and clients with editor Bex De Prospo Carr and ably crafted by her pen. The history is summarised in four seasonal essays contributed by Tautoko Tāne Lead Educator, Fiona Clapham Howard, who is also a…

For me the most powerful words were virtually unintelligible. Gary Williams is severely disabled and in a wheelchair, but that did not limit the power of his words, which were flashed up on a screen behind him. He was the first survivor to speak at the event. He spoke directly to the Government and you…

Survivors of abuse in care arrived at Parliament today to hear the formal apology from the state which oversaw and inflicted harm on children. Public sector leaders from Oranga Tamariki, the Ministry of Health, New Zealand Police, and Ministry of Education also apologised, as did the public service commissioner and the solicitor-general, at an event preceding Prime Minister…

It “is a significant, sorrowful but important day” for the country, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has said in his formal apology to abuse victims at Parliament. Survivors around the country gathered and tuned in to proceedings at Parliament, where a ballot-selected group of abuse survivors are also in the public gallery. Here is the full text of…

As we drew closer to the date of the public apology, the response minister Erica Stanford began preparing abuse victims for disappointment. It’s clear that redress will not accompany the national apology tomorrow. There are a number of “extraordinarily complex decisions” yet to be made “which are still going through the Cabinet process”, she said last week. For those…

Luxon surprised a number of people, myself included, when the Royal Commission’s final report was tabled in July by acknowledging that the abuse suffered by hundreds of children at the Lake Alice adolescent unit in the 1970s was torture.  And he said sorry. For over 50 years successive governments have avoided facing up to the…

Richard Old had been dead for about three weeks before anyone found him. And it wasn’t because he had no friends to check on him. He did. But Old was a survivor of sexual abuse and would isolate himself. He didn’t always want to interact with others. So the fact that he wasn’t answering his…

On November 12, the Prime Minister, alongside his ministers and a selection of public service heads, will offer a national apology for the abuse and torture that tens of thousands of children suffered at the hands of the state But as so many survivors have said since the Government tabled the Royal Commission of Inquiry…

Attorney-General Judith Collins says she continues to have confidence in Solicitor-General Una Jagose, despite calls for the head of Crown Law to step down for how she has handled the claims of state abuse survivors. Key survivor advocates have called for Jagose to be removed from her position as Solicitor-General. They say Jagose is conflicted by years…

The bureaucrat appointed to head the agency responding to victims of state abuse presented a report to the UN in 2015 that failed to acknowledge the torture that occurred at the adolescent unit at Lake Alice hospital. On Tuesday the Government announced the appointment of Rajesh Chhana as chief executive of the Crown Response Unit,…

A man who survived torture as a teenager at the notorious Lake Alice psychiatric facility in the 1970s and had to go to the UN in his efforts to gain justice fears he will die before he sees appropriate financial compensation. Malcolm Richards has cancer and is waiting for hospital treatment after suffering a heart attack. But…