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Erica Stanford is expected to make an announcement shortly about the next steps in supporting the survivors of torture at the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit . The Minister responsible for the Government’s response to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care will speak to media at about 10am. Earlier this year the Government formally acknowledged some children and young people at the psychiatric hospital experienced torture.
A Royal Commission report found that most of the 362 children who went through the unit between 1972 and 1978 had no mental illness. Throughout the 1970s, patients were given electric shocks without anaesthetic as well as painful and immobilising paraldehyde injections, the minister said at the time. “It is clear treatments were not administered for any medical reason.
They were used for punishment and emotional control through terror. It is beyond heartbreaking.” Stanford said in August that Cabinet had agreed to make a rapid payment of $20,000 available to a small group of terminally ill survivors.
The Government was also working at the time on a specific redress package for survivors to acknowledge the torture that took place. The Labour Government formally apologised to 95 former Lake Alice patients in 2001. There were two rounds of settlements subsequently, with more than 200 claims settled, averaging $70,000 each.
Following the publication of the Royal Commission report, the Government acknowledged for the first time that some children and young people at the unit had been tortured as defined in the United Nations Convention Against Torture. The Medical Council of New Zealand also apologised and said its regulator had failed in holding lead psychiatrist Dr Selwyn Leeks to account. “Survivors of Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit were failed by the Medical Council, and we are deeply and unreservedly sorry for this failure and the intergenerational consequences our actions have caused.
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