.JPG) |
| Please Explain: Victims of abuse in care are now, at last, receiving recognition, apologies and compensation, but have they been given a credible explanation as to 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 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 the 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 leave us appalled, 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 irresistible.
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 have they been given a credible explanation as to why their suffering was inflicted, and how it was able to go on for so long?
In the end, it took a generational changing of the guard to finally bury the eugenicist impulses of the New Zealand officials who, even after the horrors of Nazism’s social and racial “hygiene” were made known in 1945, continued to oversee their closed world of incarcerating and coercive pseudo-medicine.
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 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 the 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 leave us appalled, 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 irresistible.
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 have they been given a credible explanation as to why their suffering was inflicted, and how it was able to go on for so long?
In the end, it took a generational changing of the guard to finally bury the eugenicist impulses of the New Zealand officials who, even after the horrors of Nazism’s social and racial “hygiene” were made known in 1945, continued to oversee their closed world of incarcerating and coercive pseudo-medicine.
The idea that difference equals danger is embedded deep in the human brain, and the differences that make human-beings feel uncomfortable, even fearful, are all-too-easily transformed into suitable cases for treatment. Perhaps only those who had made a fetish out of their own differences with the generations that had come before them were sufficiently deprogrammed, ideologically, to see the “unfit” as people like themselves – imperfect but still precious vessels deserving of freedom and respect.
Sadly, and in spite of the Royal Commission’s best efforts, there is no happy ending to this story. Though the mental hospitals and boys’ homes are now derelict and empty of all but the ghosts of the unrecorded dead, New Zealanders are still unwilling to embrace the “other” as a fellow person and citizen. Those whom the eugenicists once condemned as “unfit” are now dismissed as “undeserving”. With a Social Darwinist sangfroid that would put last century’s eugenicists to shame, New Zealanders have learned to look through and walk around the homeless and jobless, the hopeless and friendless.
This country no longer needs to hide what it has taught itself not to see.
A version of this essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 29 July 2024.
5 comments:
The New Zealand legislation was heavily influenced by the British Royal commission on the care and control of the feebleminded, which had a four year existence and went in to the whole thing very thoroughly. And it's heart was in the right place, given that – in theory at least – people were supposed to be classified and treated with the latest scientific methods. In fact clauses 45 to 63 were all concerned with the licensing of facilities.
Attention was in fact given to trying to protect the so-called feebleminded from predatory behaviour. Particularly trying to protect females from being preyed on by men. Of course some of this was not so much due to any desire to protect the innocent so much as the desire to curb the reproductive urges of the incarcerated. But still, it was considered. I suspect that the reason that males were not considered vulnerable was a certain reticence about homosexuality at the time. It was the attorney general JG Findlay who said something about these people being remarkably prolific. "Carnal knowledge" of incarcerated females therefore became a crime.
So it's not as if we went into this in a particularly Nazi frame of mind, because these people were supposed to be in care rather than simply disposed of. There was cross-party cooperation on this also, and a number of prominent MPs were either members of the eugenic society or sympathetic to its aims.
Sterilisation was considered and rejected, which probably shows we weren't looking to the US for examples of how to work this. But they still believe that "feeblemindedness" was hereditary and were all for nipping it in the bud.
If you look at the parliamentary reports and the New Zealand commission, much of which has been lost I think, it's interesting who was for and who was against this sort of thing. The advice from biologists was that it wouldn't work. It was psychologists who were pushing it for whatever reason. And farmer MPs, who thought that as they been breeding stock for years they knew everything about human beings as well.
Continued. What caused/causes – well pretty much anyone is the fact that people who want to do this sort of thing deliberately seek out jobs which give them the access and the authority to do it and to get away with it. It's egregious that – in the Catholic Church for instance – it was covered up. I think the first references to this sort of thing in the church come from about A.D. 400 or 500.
I had some experience of this when I reported a colleague who I thought was behaving inappropriately. I was young and callow at the time and hadn't really got a clue. I was assured that it would be taken care of. No idea what happened and was to inexperienced to ask. You tended to take your superiors at their word in those days. The guy later got 14 years for raping young men.
Was it a lack of vetting? Pretty sure this guy had been vetted as had I. Why was it not reported? The scandal I suspect would have reflected on the head honcho and put their career at risk. That's pure speculation it would be interesting to do some proper research and find out why the hell it was covered up. Maybe the report has already done it. I hope so.
I accept the premise that eugenics played its part in the institutions, attitudes and dehumanization. It motivated Truby King in his setting up of Plunket, it motivated him in his torture of those deemed mentally ill (many were women who had 'melancholy' - probably depression or ME, alcoholism. lesbian traits or venereal disease disease passed on by their husband). There was the colonial eugenic view of Maori and immigrants. The intellectual left Fabian's (the Webbs, GBS etc) patronizing views of the actual working class. But eugenics in NZ changed and evolved, it was the forces of repression and control that complimented our view of national conformity. To assert our race relations myth, was to hide those that showed the lies. The vulnerable and unempowered. When you make them socially invisible, personally and politically irrelevant you have a recipe for exploitation and abuse.
So, Chris, where is the rest of the analysis? How do we have a current government rushing through legislation that runs contrary to the report? That is likely to replicate many of the problems into the next generations. Boot Camps is a direct inheritor of the separation and control identified in the report. The repeal of Section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act is to negate the few gains made by the victims and their advocates, and the gang legislation is to appeal to the Remuara retiree, the accountant and business operator who has never talked to a gang member in their life. Rather than seek solutions from the communities the gangs come from, and who are overwhelming the victims of gangs, we have slogan legislation with the main emphasis on further stigmatization of the survivors of state and church care.
The inheritors of the eugenic system described by Chris, are those in government. They may have new justifications of their view of superiority and control over others, but it is the same people. their tamariki and mokopuna being told they are voiceless, that they will be told what to do, and it matters not if it succeeds of not. There will be measures that prevent scrutiny and spin doctors to glorify the harm.
The introduction of eugenics Into this discussion is something of a red herring. Some of the people, from Truby King onwards, who were responsible for putting children into state or "faith-based" institutions may have been influences by eugenic doctrines, but this was not the driving force behind the setting up of such institutions, or of what happened in them. Likewise the desire to Europeanise "native" children, was not the decisive factor, although it may have played a part in creating "stolen generations", especially in countries like Australia or Canada.
The real cause of the problem is capitalism itself. Karl Marx called it "the general law of capitalist accumulation": the workings of the system produce, indeed need, a "reserve army of labour", or a "surplus population", "surplus" not in any absolute sense, but relative to the needs of capitalist accumulation. Among at least a part of this population, the pressures of dealing with unemployment and impoverishment lead to fractured families, to children not getting the care every child needs. So the capitalist system creates the problem in the first place, and then proffers its own solution — the institutions such as the ones the Royal Commission has been examining, which inevitably end up being run by individuals with a Work and Incomes-type punitive approach at best, and by outright sadists at worst.
The secrecy is my memory. It was the times. Adults know best. Children speak when spoken to. My Grandfather was in Porirua mental hospital and I met him once as a seven year old. A kind old man it seemed to me. He wasn’t talked about much and when I did hear him being discussed it was always in quiet tones. These were uncomfortable places for those who thought themselves normal. As an adult I can understand they were perfect establishments for abuse. No questions asked. Very sad it took so long to change things. Surprisingly I believe that with today’s knowledge there is still a place for some sort of residential care on a larger scale to what we have now. Today’s society with all its flaws is far more open to accountability.
Post a Comment