"Community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows from the spiritual knowledge that we are alive not for ourselves but for one another"
- Henry Nouwen
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Falling victim to crime is a frightening event, with serious negative consequences for victims’ health, labour market participation, and human capital accumulation. Most existing studies on the impacts of victimisation focus on adult victims, but the group most likely to experience…
The Catholic Church has apologised again to survivors of abuse in its care, accepting most of the Royal Commission’s findings but not fully accepting several others. However, a survivor of abuse at a Catholic school has called the response “heart-breaking…
Te Ao Marama – developed over several years, these new best practice guidelines are judicial-led District Court initiative (applies to Family Court and Youth Justice, not High Court). It wants courts to be adopting solution-focused, therapeutic approaches through which participants…
Male child sexual abuse is over-represented in institutional settings. This realization has increasingly come into public focus in recent decades initially through lived experience, often with male survivors’ stories told in the media and subsequently through court cases and government…
