Kerre Woodham: How do you recover from abuse in care?

Take a look at your children, or your grandchildren if you have them, when they're at their most delicious – seven, eight, nine-year-olds, full of hopes and dreams, and starting to come into themselves properly. Their character’s forming, you see what they're good at, what they love doing, where their passions lie, supported and nurtured by families and communities who love them.  

Your kid's basic belief that life is good is informed by the love and the care that they've received from before they were even born. Before they were born, they were loved. While they were growing, they were loved. From the time they hit the outside world, they were wanted and loved. Their potential is limitless.  

Imagine those same 7-year-olds, but they grew up abused by the very people who should have been caring for them, or who were ripped from their families and put into the pastoral care of organisations that were supposed to act in loco parentis. Whose carers presented to the world as decent, good men and women who stood in front of their institutions, and they mouthed platitudes, and the community was grateful. Because these troubled children, these problem children are out of sight and out of mind and being given a good upbringing by the decent God-fearing and women who were doing God's work on earth.  

Hospitals and orphanages and schools and churches are the places that those who still have their innocence believe are places of comfort and of safety. For thousands of small, vulnerable Kiwi children, they were places of torture and abuse and places where their faith in humanity was broken. The children were broken. How the hell do you recover from that? Many don't, many haven't. Many survivors of abuse haven't lived long enough to hear the apology from the Government today.  

The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historical Abuse in State and Faith Care delivered its report to the Governor General back in July, 14 kilograms of paper and each piece held stories of the horrors that went on right within our communities – just about every community in the country. The apology is the first part of the official response, redress will be dealt with later. Some survivors have said an apology without compensation is worthless, and that successive governments have had plenty of time to work out a framework for compensation. And while a light has been shone into the dark corners where predators hide, and many of those predators have faced the glare of prosecution and conviction, have been held to account for some of the damage they've done, all survivors spoken to say the inquiry, the apology, the compensation are worthless if the abuse of society's most vulnerable is allowed to continue.  

Abuse survivor Jim Goodwin spoke to Early Edition and he's not confident that things will change: 

“How will they provide support for survivors and what will they do about preventing abuse in care in the future? That's what I'm worried about. Compensation is important, but it's only part of what survivors need. Survivors need to be able to access ongoing support, like counselling support, for their lives. That's quite difficult for a lot of survivors at the moment, so I hope that the government will change that, but compensation is only a part of it.” 

Absolutely. Jim's right: compensation is only a part of it. You hear of some exceptional individuals who are able to —I don't know how— find some purpose, find some meaning, find a lifeline, and make their way in the world. They can open up their hearts enough to trust one or two people, and they can find their way. So many cannot and have not. They're just too broken. Their parents have failed them, people in authority have failed them. People who said they could trust them, who knew how to groom small, vulnerable children desperate for love, desperate to belong, those predators knew what they were doing all right, they knew which ones to choose.  

So how on Earth do you recover from that? We've really got to ensure that where we can, the fundamental framework, where we can get in and see what's been done – we can't with families, we can't open the door of family homes and get in there, and put the torch on, and shine that light, and flush out those predators. We can in institutions and organisations. And we can't fail these children again because that's what they are. They might be adults now, but they are still the children that were broken by the very organisations that were meant to save them. 

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