The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care in NZ from 1950 to 2019 was released this month of July. The government issued a formal apology and made the usual promises to do things better.
The entire thing rings a little bit hollow when the government is currently in the next phase of irreversible child abuse in this country through sterilisation drugs and chopping genitalia off mentally ill adults. One day in the not-so-distant future some hapless Prime Minister will be making another empty apology for his predecessors. "We didn't know, we followed the science, we listened to the experts" and so on.
The report itself can also be criticised in part, such as the figures given being entirely made up with estimates between 114,000 and 256,000. The legacy media ran with headlines that 200,000 people were abused across those 70 years, which would be a third of all those who went through state care. As Robert MacCulloch wrote incredulously on his blog in response, "the report tells us a huge proportion of Kiwis were either abused or abusers and that we're pretty much a morally bankrupt society."
The rate of victims reporting abuse in state care was about 1% of all children, and even if you multiply that tenfold to account for under-reporting you still don't get the staggering numbers reported. I'm not downplaying the horror of what happened, and if anything ridiculous over-inflation of the figures do exactly that. One death a tragedy; one million deaths a statistic. The research done by MartinJenkins cited in the actual report puts the lower estimate at 36,000 abused and neglected.
In addition the report claims that the LGBTQWERTY were the worst neglected and abused, when it is obvious a rather different and politically incorrect conclusion ought to be drawn from that observation.
When it comes to punishment, the criminality almost gets worse.
Let's draw parallels to the atrocious sentences that are passed down to actual rapists and paedophiles by the judiciary. Just this week one got 10 months home detention! Judge Michael Crosbie even concocted a psychobabble explanation for why the paedophile did it:
“When one adds to that the effects of concussion and depression on the neurological and psychological functioning of a young man, one can understand what occasionally leads someone, who is much-loved, from a good home, and who has otherwise led a blameless life, to do something as serious and depraved as you have done. It does not excuse what you have done but both the law and science say that it provides a basis to understand why, of all people, you did this when you did it.”
With so many of our judges being devotees of The Science, no wonder we get such absurd rulings.
Judges in our long and rich common law tradition understood the reality of original sin. A return to the understanding of the depravity of man must be at the centre of any serious social reform. That's unfortunately not happening any time soon.