New Zealand report documents widespread abuse in state care institutions

July 24 (UPI) -- A report released Wednesday by an independent New Zealand commission said that many who received care in its state-run and faith-based institutions suffered "widespread" abuse at the hands of staff from the 1950s to 2019.

The New Zealand Royal Commission report, which was sparked by an earlier investigation of how institutional care abused children, sought to look at a wider range of victims. Officials called the report's findings a "national disgrace," involving the abuse of children, young adults and the elderly.

The report estimated that about 200,000 of the 655,000 children, young people and adults in state and faith-based care were abused over the time of the report and even more were neglected.

The commission said the true number will never be known because of lost and destroyed records and incidents where no records were created.

"These gross violations occurred at the same time as Aotearoa New Zealand was promoting itself, internationally and domestically, as a bastion of human rights and as a safe, fair country in which to grow up as a child in a loving family, " said the report, which has 16 volumes and 2,944 pages.

Some on the commission called for a "total system overall." Judge Coral Shaw, who chaired the investigation, said the abuses described in the report must never happen again.

"The people who were taken into care were babies, they were young children, they were young people and they were adults who needed care," Shaw said, according to The Guardian. "They were taken under the guise of being supported and protected but instead they were abused and harmed."

A formal national apology was part of some 95 redress recommendations and another 138 additional changes. Another recommendation was to create a Care Safe Agency to funnel reports of abuse.